Zimbabwe’s clandestine cross-border trade economy puts women traders in harm’s way

Harare—Matilda is 43, widowed, and pregnant.

On a windy Tuesday evening in January of this year, Matilda was crossing the border between Mozambique and Zimbabwe when she was ambushed by four men wearing black masks, who then raped her and robbed her of her goods. Matilda, a cross-border trader, was returning home to Zimbabwe after a three-day trip to Mozambique, where she had gone to purchase secondhand clothes for resale. Hoping to sidestep immigration checkpoints, she crossed through the forests near Nyamapanda border post in northern Zimbabwe with three courier boys, popularly known as omalayitsha, as her escorts. When the men attacked, they scattered, leaving her behind. “I’m not sure if the omalayitsha were part of the gang,” Matilda told Women Under Siege.

Thanks to the current economic crisis, many Zimbabweans can no longer afford to buy new clothing items from major retailers. The secondhand clothes, known as mabhero, are often purchased outside of the country and brought in, but cross-border trading is often risky business, especially for many Zimbabwean women, who may fall victim to physical and sexual assault and robbery by men who waylay them in the bush.

“I was afraid to report my case because I had no passport and thought I would be arrested,” Matilda said. Zimbabwean passports cost ZW$53 and can take up to six months to process, but with a reported shortage of special paper and ink used to make the passports, the Registrar’s Office is currently contending with an ever-growing backlog for travel documents, and applicants are reportedly being told to return in 2022 to submit their applications. Emergency passports go for ZW$253 and take three days to process, while the 24-hour passport turnovers cost ZW$318. Instead, many pay bribes to registration officials to obtain passports.

If imprisoned, there would be no one to look after her children, and she would not be able to repay the loan she secured from a friend, who loaned her the money to travel to Mozambique.

Almost nine months later, Matilda looks to the skies as if to summon divine strength. Her pregnancy, which resulted from the rape, is almost due now. Her husband died a year ago, and to make ends meet, Matilda became a cross-border trader. In Zimbabwean culture, it is taboo—kupisa guva, loosely translated to desecrating her husband’s grave—for a woman to have sexual relations within a year of her husband’s death. Matilda’s in-laws, shocked by the pregnancy, stripped her of the property left to her by her husband following his death and chased her away. She and her children now live in a one-room apartment in Epworth, a peri-urban area located 14km from the center of Harare, which they share with Matilda’s childhood friend.

Although the Zimbabwean government relaxed regulations on secondhand clothes imports into the country, cross-border traders have risked their lives passing through thick forests in an attempt to escape high-duty tariffs, or from having their wares confiscated by immigration officials. What’s more, traders must also contend with having to evade police who chase them from the Central Business District (CBD), where they sell once they make it to Harare, or they part with huge sums to bribe the municipal police, regardless of whether they’re already licensed and selling at a designated selling point.

As Zimbabwe remains in the throes of economic meltdown due to low productivity, high-level corruption and incompetence, and sanctions imposed by the U.S. and EU over the country’s bloodied human rights record, jobs have become hard to come by. Matilda, like scores of other women, was forced to cross the border to raise money to take care of her family after her husband’s death.

Mario Malanca, the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Head of Mission in Zimbabwe, told Women Under Siege that limited access to travel documents against the growing need to migrate to neighboring countries and beyond was likely to exacerbate sexualized violence against women, since they often used unofficial routes to cross borders.

Israel Mabhoo of the Alternative Business Alliance: Cross Border Trade (ABA), a small enterprise development organization that has monitored the development and formalization of cross-border trading, also told Women Under Siege that women with semi-documentation, such as expired passports or emergency travel documents, or those with none at all, are most vulnerable. “Here, we refer to truck and bus drivers and some border officials who are engaged in transporting ... They have a tendency to sexually abuse these women in order to facilitate a smooth passage.” Mabhoo said sometimes travelers with documents also chose to violate immigration or customs regulations through “negotiating” with officials. “This has engendered a general perception [that] women cross-border traders are of loose moral behavior,” he said.

According to Mabhoo, African governments have yet to come up with any clear-cut mechanisms to address policy deficiencies when it comes to female cross-border traders, who are not recognized as business persons but rather as holidaymakers with a 90-day travel permit per year. Cross-border traders typically travel on a weekly or monthly basis as they restock their wares.    

“This explains why some have more than one passport,” said Mabhoo. “How are they managing to make several trips a month? Obviously, it’s through smuggling and corruption, which is making them susceptible to sexual abuse.” According to both IOM and ABA, a number of these cases have remained unreported for reasons including fear of victimization or stigma, divorce, threats by perpetrators, and lack of knowledge. 

Economic Justice for Women Project (EJWP) Director Margaret Mutsamvi told Women Under Siege that the painstaking process of seeking justice has also deterred victims from reporting. “We have spoken to survivors who have passed through corrupt officials who easily dismiss cases if reported,” she said. “These cases will actually increase now as passports are not coming out, but still, [they need] to make a living. This will make women more vulnerable.”

 “It should [also] be noted that even those who are traveling through regular means are also susceptible to sexual exploitation, considering the different challenges faced during the migration process: delays in facilitation of entry or exit at ports of entry, or high transportation costs, among others,” Malanca of IOM said.

What’s more, in Zimbabwe, while a number of laws address violence against women, such as sexualized violence, marital rape, deliberate transmission of HIV, domestic violence, and sex trafficking, none directly address the needs of women in transit; no existing law offers protections for a woman working in an informal setup, like Matilda.

EJWP is now developing a service provider directory for survivors to access such services as counseling, legal representation, and medical treatment in order to encourage more documentation of cases.

Matilda met a social worker through EJWP, who taught her that there was no law in Zimbabwe that protected her attackers. “When I opened up, I have received mental health counseling and legal help. The police are now assisting in trying to identify the culprits, starting with the courier boys, whose names I heard as they were calling out each other while we were in transit. I have also received capital to start another suitable business from various people and organizations. I’m now in the business of making handbags, which I am selling at a shop in [Harare]. I’m willing to educate other women like me who are not strong enough to open up. I can’t say I am strong; it’s been hard, but I survived it.”

Matilda told us that, although there progress on her case has been slow, the fact that something is being done gives her hope that she will see justice someday.