Jumping over histories: transborder migration from colonial Mozambique to colonial Zimbabwe ca 1945–1975

Drawing on over 200 interviews and archival sources, this article examines clandestine African cross-border labour migration from colonial Mozambique to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from the 1940s to 1975. At the height of the labour migrations, 1945–1960, as many as sixty thousand migrants per year left Mozambique for Southern Rhodesia. While existing scholarship on cross-border migration has opened up important ways of conceptualizing such migrations, we extend the study by highlighting three overlooked but pertinent issues. First, we contend that the migrations had historical antecedents: men and women had crossed borders for socio-economic and political opportunities. Second, we argue that the colonial labour migrations were built on Indigenous cartographic knowledge and mobility practices, and long-standing Indigenous geographical knowledge continued to guide them, as in the past. Third, we underline the actual challenges that thousands of migrants faced in walking long distances from Mozambique to Southern Rhodesia.