‘This place is a bus stop’: Temporalities of Zimbabwean migrant men waiting at a Zimbabwe-South Africa border transit shelter

Abstract

This article explores how temporal disruptions at international borders shape immobile bodies’ experiences and modes of waiting by focusing on irregular Zimbabwean migrant men at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border who have arrived in South Africa but are restricted in moving further into the interior. It argues that waiting is a component of both governing these migrants as well as them seeking agency through the relationship between time, space and humanitarianism in this border regime. This shows how immobilities at ‘carceral junctions’ can be conceptualised as in time as much as in space. The article is based upon four months of ethnographic field research at the ‘I Believe in Jesus Church’ men's shelter in the border town of Musina. The intersections of immobility and temporal agency in this article contribute to a growing body of work that shows that the relationship between resistance and domination in waiting is ambivalent. This article also troubles assumptions about immobility as an experience that leads the inhabitants of humanitarian camps as well as carceral time-spaces to realise the status of ‘bare life’. While imposed forces make assumptions about the future precarious, the precariousness of the future also creates multiple and new possibilities.

Introduction

Just after six o’clock one September morning in 2019, close to 60 Zimbabwean migrants staying at the I Believe in Jesus Church men's shelter (IBJC) gathered at what they called the ‘robot’ to market themselves to piece job recruiters. The transit shelter sits a few kilometres outside the Zimbabwe-South Africa border town of Musina in a location known to locals as Matswale. Musina is the northernmost city in the Limpopo province of South Africa near the Limpopo River border with Zimbabwe. It is located approximately 520 km from Johannesburg which is a popular destination for internal and foreign migrants alike (Mahati, 2015). Musina is a first stop for Zimbabweans who cross into South Africa (Chinyakata and Raselekoane, 2016). Many use the town as a stop off point before proceeding to Johannesburg while others find employment on farms to make a living in order to take money back to relatives across the border (Leong, 2009).

The IBJC is a shelter for men aged over 18 that is managed by the church pastor known to them as Bishop and relies on donations. It has a capacity of 350 people, but, each night, its population generally exceeds that as stranded Zimbabwean migrants plus asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi arrive on an ad hoc basis. This has led to crowded and unsanitary conditions, particularly as the men stay for prolonged periods due to the uncertainties of waiting.

These men now used the term robot – a typically Southern African term to describe traffic lights – to describe an open space that was adjacent a four-way junction about 50 m outside the shelter where they would wait hoping to find long-term employment. There was no actual traffic light, but the term was a mobility metaphor symbolic of waiting one's turn to be picked. On this occasion, there was a truck parked, and the owner was a contractor hiring only five workers to work as dhaka boys ¹ on a small building project in the location of Matswale. The men were all competing for a few piece jobs. This was their opportunity to earn money for food and soap, and in the long run raise money for transport to go to Polokwane, Johannesburg or Cape Town. There was chaotic jostling around the truck. Gogwe, one of the senior men who had stayed long enough to consolidate considerable influence and authority at the IBJC, came out of the yard and instructed the men to maintain order. He entered the car and began cordially chatting to the truck owner, displaying a great deal of entitlement. In no time, Gogwe had managed to select four other men for the job and they jumped into the back of the truck. This was all oblivious to the queue in which many others dutifully waited. In the informal order of the yard and its immediate vicinities, patronage and the length of time spent waiting at the shelter trumped concerns like honouring queuing time.

In this article, I argue that this scenario reveals waiting at borders as a component of both governing Zimbabwean migrants as well as them seeking agency. The Zimbabwe-South Africa border can then be interpreted as an ambivalent time-space that simultaneously facilitates care and control. This leads Zimbabwean migrants to experience temporal suspension as well as to cope by developing a tolerance for contradictions and ambiguities as well as temporal strategies of sustaining them. Examining the Zimbabwe-South Africa border regime through a time-space lens of waiting or immobility reveals how categories of ‘victim’ or ‘victor’ do not adequately capture everyday experiences as the realities of this border regime reveal a more complex scenario. Navigating this border often requires ambivalent responses and may lead to ambiguous and sometimes contradictory outcomes (see Kihato, 2009).

I interpret humanitarian actors that hold migrants as an extension of the management and governance of migrants and keeping them in waiting, forced dependence and social isolation under infantilising and degrading conditions (see Canning, 2020: 214). This governance applies to Zimbabwean migrants whose immobility is characterised by challenges that make it undesirable to return to Zimbabwe and difficult to move forward in South Africa, or invest in any kind of future elsewhere. Yet, Zimbabwean migrant men staying at the IBJC are able to use waiting as a tactic to turn their immobility into a resource for action. They creatively use the institution of religion and its beliefs and practices to (re) organise and (re) shape what remains of their migration process. Their temporal migration strategies create order out of the unknown and allow them to mitigate risk, discover new opportunities and make plans in conditions of great uncertainty and little degree of time sovereignty (see Cojocaru, 2016: 15; Elchardus, 1994). They also allow the men to recalibrate their migration plans and extract capital they would otherwise not have had in Zimbabwe. This shows that the lives of waiting populations like refugees and excised migrants are not ‘bare lives’ or reducible to the times and spaces of the present tense (Ramadan, 2013; Ramsay, 2017). The intersections of immobility and temporal agency also illustrate that the relationship between resistance and domination in waiting is an ambivalent one.

Conceptualising Zimbabwean migrant men's immobility and carceral junctions through an optic of waiting

If incarceration refers to ‘the denial of mobility and access to space’ (Moran, 2012: 308) it also follows that different modes of waiting could be thought of in terms of carceral junctures. These are convergent time-spaces of confinement that are ‘state-sanctioned, quasi-legal, ad-hoc, illicit, spatially fixed, mobile, embodied or imagined’ and characterised by the deployment of carceral techniques and infrastructures (Moran et al., 2018: 668). For people on the move, carceral time-spaces can be interpreted using an optic of waiting as it connotes a liminal experience, a transitory and transformative space which lies between life stages, statuses and material contexts (Sutton et al., 2011). In the social sciences, waiting is now sufficiently mapped and well documented (see Auyero, 2011; Bayart, 2007; Jefferson et al., 2019; Oldfield and Greyling, 2015 for example). Waiting comes from the French meaning ‘to watch’ and the German ‘to guard,’ suggesting a sense of ‘anticipatory preparedness – a lying-in-wait-for’ (Bissell, 2007: 282). This meaning suggests that the ‘subject’ is anticipating an event to come (Gray, 2011). This understanding is close to Bergson's notion of waiting as ‘bearing witness to the possibility of change’ (Bissell, 2007: 287). With modernity, time has indeed been institutionalised and people measure their lives and activities in relation to abstract units of time such as days, weeks, months, years and decades (Jeffrey, 2008). Linear time operates at different social and spatial scales; exerting a symbolic violence as those that wait become ‘waiting populations’ who society often labels as failures or left behind (Jeffrey, 2008). The interpretation of waiting as victimisation is not new. It originates from an understanding of subjectivity as a state that can be inferred from the relative physical speed of the subject (Bissell, 2007; Geißler, 2002; Parkins, 2004).

There is an array of literature linking humanitarian space and attendant immobility with constraining the agency of migrants. This perspective interprets waiting as a ‘deadened rhythm’ and the refugee camp as coming close to Erving Goffman’s (1962) ‘ideal type of the “total institution”‘ that offers, by ‘commission or by omission, a “total life” from which there is no escape’ (Bauman, 2002: 347). This literature suggests that the humanitarian camp is a closed world or ‘lonely world stranded in a desert’ that has ‘power over life’ (see Agier, 2010). This conception implies that humanitarianism often reduces the people it seeks to help to ‘mere’ victims or ‘bare lives’ (Agamben, 1998; Bauman, 2002) – objects of compassion restricted in their capacity to act as full subjects in their own right (Feldman, 2012). This conception defines the lives of these people by their rootedness in the immediacy of the present (Ramsay, 2017) as ‘ultimate biopolitical subjects’ governed through a ‘permanent state of exception’ (Andersson, 2014).

But in fact, refugee camps are not like this at all; neither are carceral spaces (see de Dardel, 2013; Martin, 2013; McWatters, 2013). There is no denying that, for migrants who are confined to camps, waiting defines their experience and time itself appears suspended (Barber and Lem, 2018). Yet, still, the interplay of subordination with agency does not suggest that waiting is a totalising experience; migrants may turn their immobility into a temporal strategy to get what they want in life.

Methodology

This article draws on four months (August–November 2019) of ethnographic field research in Musina; the geographic centre of humanitarian aid and services at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border. The research explores Zimbabwean migrants’ subjective experiences, relations and interactions with the border through a temporal framework of waiting. In total, I conducted 80 interviews: 55 with Zimbabwean migrant men, 15 with Zimbabwean migrant women and 10 with humanitarian actors. I also assumed the role of a participant observer advocating for the betterment of living conditions at the transit shelters for men, women and children.

The above methods were complemented with diaries recorded by migrants using pen and paper, allowing the study to capture data on the temporal patterns of irregular Zimbabwean migrants and their trajectories – simple descriptions of trends over time (Iida et al., 2012). This method allowed me to interact with those who were either not forthcoming for interviews or unavailable during the day owing to commitments of looking for work. What came out of this organic exercise were stories that resembled ‘prison letters’ addressed to the ‘outside world’ – to whoever could have been reading and was willing to help. These rich accounts captured daily experiences in participants’ own, natural environment, generating narratives that were temporally close to lived experiences (Iida et al., 2012). Ethics approval for this study was granted by the University of the Witwatersrand Ethics Committee for Non-Medical Research on Human Subjects (H/18/10/31).

Bureaucratising crisis, immobilities and transit spaces at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border

This section gives some background to the establishment of humanitarian spaces in Musina and the relative speed with which they have transformed the border. The nadir of the Zimbabwean economic and political situation gave rise to an influx of numerous humanitarian actors to assist immobile Zimbabwean migrants as the bureaucratic state lacked the capacity to do so. Musina was ill equipped to deal with the growing migrant population given its relatively small population and distance from major urban centres (Elphick and Amit, 2012). The dramatic increase in Zimbabwean migrants ‘overburdened’ the municipality's resources, as Musina Mayor Caroline Mahasela admitted in 2008 (Fritsch et al., 2009: 628; IOL News, 2008). Many local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and faith-based organisations (FBOs) formed or extended their services in that area to meet the needs of cross-border migrants (Elphick and Amit, 2012; Jinnah, 2012). A number of international non-governmental organisations (IGOs) also established their presence by opening local offices and building capacity. For example, The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) opened a field office in 2008.

There was no Department of Home Affairs (DHA) office in Musina before the Zimbabwean crisis. In 2008–2009, Zimbabwean migrants in Musina were dying, sleeping in the bush and women were experiencing sexual violence. The South African state began to put in place a few ad hoc structures to regulate the Zimbabwean migrant population in response to pressure from several humanitarian organisations. DHA first opened a small local office at a local hotel (Limpopo River Lodge) in the town of Musina. DHA then moved and established a Refugee Reception Office (RRO) in a mobile vehicle within the Showgrounds compound in July 2008 to process applications for asylum and migrants with or without asylum permits. They often converged here and the surrounding area, with many camping in the surrounding bush (IOM, 2009; Médecins Sans Frontières, 2009; Rutherford, 2011). The newly established RRO began to process asylum claims. Thousands of Zimbabweans who had previously been in hiding began to ‘flock’ to seek asylum (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2009). With Musina remaining untouched by the infamous scourge of xenophobic violence that ravaged South Africa, migrants started staying in Musina for longer periods while they waited for their asylum documentation to be processed without risk of arrest as a result (Elphick and Amit, 2012; Rutherford, 2011). Some were discouraged from moving for fear of encountering xenophobic attacks further South. This gave rise to needs and challenges; particularly related to food, sanitation and shelter because many Zimbabwean migrants did not have anywhere to go. The government did not assist these migrants, and so IGOs began to provide minimal humanitarian services. The migrants would bath in the surrounding bush area of the Showground camp where an informal ablution area had been built around an existing public tap (IOM, 2009). The majority slept outside and the area fast turned into an informal settlement where activities such as preparing food, collecting water, seeking shelter and ablution facilities took place; often in very close proximity to places where people used the ‘bush system’ (IOM, 2009: 24). This became a risk for cholera contamination and other health concerns. The situation eventually became so serious that in November 2008, Save the Children-United Kingdom (SCUK) declared Musina an emergency zone (Fritsch et al., 2010: 632).

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) (2009) reports that in March of 2009, South African authorities forcibly expelled thousands of Zimbabweans from Musina Showground. DHA ordered the Showgrounds to close and disassembled all semi-permanent structures (Fritsch et al., 2010). DHA abruptly shut down the RRO in response to the ‘intense media attention’ on the living conditions and abuse of those waiting for permits (Rutherford, 2011). The government declared that those already in possession of documents would have 14 days to travel to the RRO in Johannesburg to renew their temporary asylum permit or they would face deportation (Fritsch et al., 2010: 632). These migrants often lacked the resources to travel to Johannesburg. Those without asylum documents were to return to Zimbabwe to apply for asylum but it was futile for them to return to Zimbabwe, as one cannot apply for asylum from one's home country (Fritsch et al., 2010). Thousands of Zimbabweans began to flee from Musina to Johannesburg, with the majority headed to the Central Methodist Church with the help of humanitarian organisations. In March 2009 alone close to 2000 individuals moved to the church (Beremauro, 2013; Hammerstad, 2012) as the xenophobic violence took a hiatus in response to regional and global public condemnation. Others remained in Musina or would simply return upon deportation with even more pressing or basic needs that the state was unable to fulfil in what some have called the ‘revolving door’ of the deportation system (Fritsch et al., 2010; Hammerstad, 2012; Rutherford, 2008).

This meant that the need for shelter persisted. So with the help of the UNHCR and International Organisation for Migration (IOM), FBOs established transit shelters to accommodate children, men and women who were ‘stuck’ in Musina. Those that would remain found refuge in two ‘transit shelters’ for men and women, namely the IBJC men's shelter and the Roman Catholic Women's Shelter (RCWS). Two shelters providing services to unaccompanied minors, the Uniting Reform Church (URC) and the Concerned Zimbabwe Citizens Campbell Shelter began accommodating children.

Living between care and control: The inner workings of minimal biopolitics at the IBJC men's shelter

These events span across a just over decade ago but they are important because they marked the creation of a bureaucratic regime for managing migrants according to gendered political subjectivities at the border. Humanitarian crisis and immobilities have thus become somewhat bureaucratised at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border since 2008; the height of post-colonial Zimbabwean migration. I contend that the humanitarian response to the presence of Zimbabwean migrants at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border has effectively organised them into a regime of waiting, forced dependence and social isolation or minimal biopolitical controls that gives a minimalist value and meaning to their lives by degrading their dignity and reducing their autonomy. This subjectivity is unlike what Lemke (2005) called purely productive biopolitical modes of governance.

The transit shelters were initially set up to hold irregular Zimbabwean migrants for no more than 72 h (later extended to two weeks) and offer them protection as they waited for their asylum papers. At the beginning, the men at the IBJC were allowed to stay for 72 h, but the shelter has relaxed these rules because of changes at the RROs that restricted applications to certain days based on nationality (Elphick and Amit, 2012). Unlike Burundian and Congolese asylum seekers who the bureaucratic state perceived as more likely to be ‘genuine’ asylum applicants, Zimbabwean migrants did not receive state or UNHCR refugee protection owing to the perception that they are considered ‘economic migrants’. In 2019–2020, the IBJC had transformed itself into a space that allowed Zimbabwean migrants to stay indefinitely while raising enough money for transport to travel further south. These men would have run out of money from paying local ‘border jumping’ brokers’ known as impisi; or robbed along the border crossing by notorious local thieves known as omaguma guma. Such migrants could not be arrested so long as they were within the yard of the shelter, owing to an informal agreement between the local humanitarian cluster with local enforcers and the Musina municipality. However, staying in a context where they did not receive any meals or transport subsidies to facilitate transit placed them in an ambivalent position that forced them to risk arrest and deportation by looking for work at the robot outside the shelter and, often times, beyond it. This they had to do while being governed by a 6 pm curfew, which enacted ‘time-discipline’ used, on the one hand, to structure the operational needs of the shelter, and, on the other hand, as a form of disciplining anyone found to be out of sync with (in this case) ‘shelter time’ (see Wahidin, 2006).

One of the Zimbabwean migrants residing at the IBJC made the following diary entry to show how difficult the living conditions were, ‘Right now we are just staying at the church which is not the hope I had. I am dying of hunger here my people. There are many of us staying here and when we sleep we get bitten by lice as if were staying in prison. This will cause a lot of diseases’. ² The UNHCR and IOM did not concern themselves with the issue of water at the IBJC. In doing so, they ignored how water and other forms of basic relief they rarely provided were inseparable from life. Bureaucratic politics and infrastructures of water are the politics of life as water holds a key to a life free from the risk of contracting deadly communicable diseases such as Cholera, Typhoid and COVID-19 (see Chigudu, 2020). The Sphere Minimum Standards for water supply, sanitation and hygiene promotion (WASH) are a practical expression of the right to access water and sanitation in humanitarian contexts that reflect on this importance. The tap at the IBJC had not been switched off, but the men lived in an environment they were conscious of the need to use water sparingly and observe basic hygiene in sharing the few available toilets. They rarely washed their pots properly; they could bathe only once a day and incidences of some men not flushing toilets were frequent (leading to all sorts of conflict). Water scarcity and sharing toilets stripped away the dignity and autonomy the IBJC residents had over the most basic of resources most of them had grown up with even in the most rural environments. Individual sanitation facilities within carceral settings not only instil feelings of pride and ownership but reinforce ‘messages of care and respect for the individual as part of a wider philosophy towards decent and humane living considerations’ (Turner and Moran, 2019: 210). Humanitarian neglect over concerns related to water and sharing toilets violated the men's right to a decent life, their sense of security and autonomy; generating a temporal disjuncture between their expectations and reality by containing them in hazardous, difficult to endure living conditions.

Zimbabwean migrant men also had to endure the prolonged uncertainty that their immobility came with. With waiting also came a kind of insecurity, which Giddens (1990; 1984) describes as leading to anxiety that is a response to the disruption of one's life trajectory. Such radical and protracted uncertainties affect individuals’ future aspirations and their projects of life and place-making (Cojocaru, 2016). Words such as, ‘Today I did not find even a piece job so I don't even have anything to eat. Things are getting tough for me and I don't know what I’m going to do if the situation remains the way it is now. What is going to happen to my life?’ ³ encapsulate these experiences. This insecurity was also reflected in the words of one Zimbabwean migrant man who said, ‘We spent three days without eating or drinking anything. So this life is now difficult. If only it was possible to get help in this place we are staying’ ⁴ ; expressing a longing for physical mobility because he could not bear the humanitarian neglect he was experiencing. Moments where the lines between life and death became blurred pervaded these moments of waiting. The following diary entry from a Zimbabwean migrant men waiting at the IBJC shelter during the same period is poignant with references to death and prison metaphors:

In this present moment I am living like a prisoner and there is no work to do. I do not have the papers required to feel free to work even if there is a job I am qualified to do. My family is now suffering even more which means that I am not any different from a dead person. ⁵

These kinds of stories highlight how waiting to raise enough transport money while residing at the IBJC implicated life itself; disallowing it to the point of death without necessarily being ‘drastic’ enough to take away life. One of the Zimbabwean migrant men (Melusi) who rarely found work at the robot had even resigned to the simple relief of being in South Africa as there was a possibility to find leftovers in the bin. This, he stressed, would not have been possible for him in Zimbabwe. Clad in his unwashed clothes, he barely groomed himself any longer and was constantly scratching himself during our interview because he had not washed for several days due to a lack of soap. He said to me in a casual tone of resignation:

Huh here life is better. The suffering here is better because if you get hit by hunger and go search in the bin you can find something like bread and eat that. Go to Zimbabwe where do you think you will find bread to eat [chuckling]? Who throws away bread in the bin in Zimbabwe? So here life is better. ⁶

The idea that eating from the bin was a viable option and the tenacity to chuckle at that very thought expresses how Zimbabwean migrant men waiting at the IBJC overall experienced a ‘minimalist humanity’ caught between disciplinary imperatives of care and control.

The temporal strategies of Zimbabwean migrant men at the IBJC

The conditions described above could easily lead us to believe that these migrant men were ‘bare lives’ because they stayed in the kinds of spaces of vulnerability that some have linked to passive human action in which migrant lives inherently become such. The situation for these men is more complex than that, however. We could infer that Melusi, the man who was eating leftovers from the bin without a care or reasonable means to wash himself, is a modern figure of ‘bare life’. It would also be plausible at the same time to say that Melusi also relativises his suffering by distinguishing his prevailing situation from the bare life of suffering in Zimbabwe. While he may have given up on his grooming (by sheer lack or neglect), which is a key marker of his dignity and humanity, Melusi also makes it clear that he is in a better place of less suffering. Melusi's example reveals how the relationship between immobility and agency is potentially dynamic and ambivalent.

In 2019–2020, different types of Zimbabwean migrant men waited at the IBJC transit shelter and their lives embodied such contradictions of domination and agency. Some were living for the present by waiting indefinitely to lay claims while others were living for the future by waiting for new beginnings. The former's’ comportment was oriented towards simply surviving the present while the latter's’ was forward-looking towards the possibilities that lay ahead. These modes of waiting are carceral in the sense that they are characterised by constant temporal and spatial surveillance that moulds the subject into its own primary disciplinary force in a panoptic environment (see Moran et al., 2018). Yet, in spite of their differences, both modes of waiting reveal how immobile populations can turn their situation into something else.

Carceral time-space comportment: Waiting indefinitely to lay claims as living for the present

Those that had been staying at the shelter for longer than a year were responsible for making the shelter feel, to some, like a prison by means of constant surveillance of what inhabitants did with their time and how they carried themselves in the transit shelter space. These figures assumed considerable influence over labour hiring process as they had developed enduring relationships with labour recruiters, contractors and employers. Them staying that long in this space required endurance that not everyone had and was often rewarded with a security guard position. Length of stay was in this sense a form of social capital that influenced rights, claims and one's level of authority. Life experiences differed by length of stay suggesting that time and temporality indeed underlies the shelter's ‘politics of living’ (see Feldman, 2012).

Among these figures was Gogwe, whom we have already met at the beginning. His tall built and giant stature certainly aided his authoritativeness. Gogwe was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe in 1982. He studied up until his O-Level. He had wanted to proceed with his secondary education, but lost both his parents, which meant that there was not enough money. He ended up in the care of his grandmother in a rural area. She paid up the rest of his fees from Form Two up until Form Four. After completing his O-Level, Gogwe was unemployed and was at home taking care of his grandmother. This was until one of his uncles called him to come to Johannesburg in 2007 to work. He ended up returning after his uncle passed away. Gogwe arrived in Musina in 2013 at a time he described as ‘a good time’ at the IBJC since one did not have to wait for long at the robot to find work. He managed to get an asylum seekers permit and a white employer employed him as a building contract worker where he was working locally until 2017. When he went home to visit his grandmother that year, he came back to find his contract terminated. ‘From 2017 up to now I have been sitting. There is nothing and the jobs are difficult to find,’ ⁷ he complained. He had now been doing piece jobs while staying at the IBJC. When he was not doing piece jobs, he would be helping Joseph, the chief security guard who was closer to Bishop, with cleaning and security. ‘I am someone who is close to Joseph as a security’, he emphasised. ⁸

During the time that Gogwe was in Johannesburg, his uncle trained him to be an electrician. He claimed he was waiting for a job that matched his skills. ‘If I get that job I will stick with that job until I succeed and become able to help others,’ ⁹ he added. It was not easy for him to find that job in Musina and he had only managed to do electrician work three times. Other times he resorted to being a dhaka boy and mixing cement to make bricks. While he recognised that the only way to get this job would be to go to a bigger town, he claimed that his limitation was he did not have a relative to welcome him and take care of him while he looked for a job in a place like Johannesburg since his uncle passed away. Gogwe had two children but owing to his situation, he had last sent money home in 2017 when he returned home. In societies such as Zimbabwe, such practices often carry the heavy penalty of ‘social death’ (see Dzingirai et al., 2014). Gogwe carried the shame associated with his absence so much that he had resorted to not communicating with them. He lamented, ‘Since the last time I had that connection (2017) until now I have not communicated with my children. I don't know what I would say to them if I called. They are staying with their mother’. ¹⁰ Gogwe's situation meant that he could not just return home without anything to show for it and he acknowledged that it was difficult to return in his state that he described as ‘empty’.

Gogwe had a job collecting trash in people's yards on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays that was paying him R 70 (4 Euro) a day so he was relatively comfortable at the IBJC. Gogwe also had connections in government and Cashbuild that would call him when they needed to hire workers to offload cement at a ‘lucrative rate’ of R 105 (6 Euro) per day. While his asylum seekers permit had expired, Gogwe did not worry much about the police arresting and deporting him because, as he moved around, he would use his fluency in the local languages of Sotho and Venda as a strategy to pass as a South African.

To supplement his income, Gogwe resorted to a carceral kind of time-space comportment. In principle, the security cluster was there to ‘institute the law’ by avoiding fights and telling residents to flush toilets. Joseph was in charge of security and always took the final decision on matters such as punishing residents by making them clean toilets for three days. As soon as a person entered the gate as a new resident, the security would record their identity and give them an orientation on how the space operated. However, senior men like Gogwe always took advantage of their authority. Fortune, Joseph, Khulekani (some of the senior men) and Gogwe bullied residents and controlled every aspect of the residents’ lives in the name of maintaining order and security. Gogwe's disregard for the queue of people waiting for prospective employers to hire them for work highlighted in the introduction was just one example. Such bullying at the robot was a common feature. The senior men's carceral bodily comportment to time-space often clashed with that of others who were there for future possibilities. One defiant resident recounted his own experience with these men at the robot:

There are some people that I heard yesterday who were speaking with a foul mouth. They reside within this very space. They were out there [pointing towards the robot] and they gave us the impression that they wanted to claim that the cars that were parking by the roadside to hire people belonged to them. They say the cars belong to them. I personally don't like muscle games because I am equally capable of tackling you while you are running to the car. They claim to own the cars on the basis that they are well known in Musina because they have been staying here for long. They are bullies. ¹¹

These men also kept the best accommodation for themselves. While others slept on the floor in or on hard wood without mattresses in the corrugated iron structure, they slept in the two guard rooms in the front that were made from bricks. Joseph had even bought himself a bed where he would sneak in his girlfriend out of Bishop's view for conjugal visits. To demonstrate to others that they were in charge, the senior men would also hold grudges against people who defied them at the robot and would resort to ‘drinking and smoking for you’. This a term that refers to a scenario where the men would begrudgingly drink alcohol or smoke marijuana with a view to brace themselves for a physical altercation meant to settle an unresolved dispute. These men acted as if the IBJC was a prison where people ‘doing time’ often have to look out for their own survival in order to be alive for the present day:

They make this place seem like a prison with their unnecessary competition. It feels like a prison where bandits are caged in and are always fighting from dusk till dawn. Bandits are always beating each other up. I have never been to prison but I know that this is exactly what they do. ¹²

The men were also accused of several criminal activities such as stealing in the local community and from others at the shelter and peddling the proceeds for their own pockets. The lives of these men and how they inhabit the shelter are similar to what Mazrui (1999) has called ‘cultures of presentism’ that are driven by values of the here and now. Such presentism's subscription to the here and now may even manifest itself in a nihilist fashion. In the process of searching for short-term economic gain, it may be characterised by a reckless disregard for long-term environmental, social or ethical conditions, the welfare of other and by an embrace of consumerism that the senior men at the IBJC themselves displayed. The carceral oriented survivalism of these men at the IBJC had all the makings of a presentist temporal orientation.

Carceral possibilities: Waiting for new beginnings as living for the future

Unlike the senior men, some Zimbabwean migrant men only stayed at the shelter for up to three months. They quickly realised they had limited rights, authority and claims and adapted to their situation. They attached immense value to ‘basic’ human needs like food, shelter and soap they needed to sustain themselves in the present until they secured money to travel to secure a future elsewhere. Most professed having previously been at the IBJC and to using prior knowledge of the shelter to organise their precarious journeys. Others were arriving in Musina for the first time, and relied on ‘word of mouth’ to locate the religious leaders and institutions they used for physical protection. Like Melusi who described eating from the bin in South Africa as better than life in Zimbabwe, they used their immobility to evade worse-off suffering in Zimbabwe. These men would also say that their living conditions back home were far better and much comfortable yet after sleeping on the floor or hard wood in a shelter where residents had to contest to have access to water and petty theft and bullying were common; they described life in Musina as better than being at home ‘doing nothing’ or earning Zimbabwean dollars that had no real market value. They explained their journeys in terms of a more hopeful future in South Africa. They began working out their possibilities and to strategically manage their time, energy, resources, and expectations to improve their chances of a successful migration through the metaphor of the robot. They developed knowledge of which places they could and could not go to, the dangers and possibilities ahead and the limitations of the rights the South African state afforded them. Unlike Gogwe and others like him, these men were not willing to invest valuable resources such as time, energy and money or risk eviction for something, which they considered short term. In doing so, they resorted to a waiting mode of ‘futuring’. This entailed using migration as a means to achieve a certain goal by turning their suspension into a temporal interval from life sacrificed for the sake of reaching goals such as opening businesses in Zimbabwe (farming, grinding mill, shops), reaching Johannesburg, buying a house, getting married, paying for children's education, supporting family and so on. While rich with possibility, this bodily comportment can still be interpreted as carceral (i.e. carceral possibility) in the sense of being a form of temporal surveillance by which individuals are moulded as subjects of the disciplinary force of the clock and its dictates pertaining upward social mobility and institutionalised time.

On one Sunday, Bishop arrived in the yard driving his white Toyota Hilux bakkie (pick-up). Mai Bishop (his wife) disembarked and approached me where I sat wearing an African attire design with a print of Bishop's face on it. Bishop followed and I left my chair to greet him as I proceeded to enter the church with him. He was wearing a fancy purple suit. He said, ‘The boys are mostly unavailable during Sundays’. ‘Where will they be?’ I asked. ‘They will be doing piece jobs’, he responded. ¹³ The IBJC is a Pentecostal church that would promise congregants a comprehensive solution to their worries on the condition that they gave generously to their religious leaders in exchange for material and spiritual blessings (Núñez, 2015: 151). They preached a gospel of healing and deliverance. Like many Pentecostals, the IBJC held that the power to heal and deliver stemmed from ‘spiritual gifts’ granted by God. One could be healed, delivered or blessed once they entered into direct contact with the Holy Spirit that the Bishop possessed. Implicit in this religion was a linear conception of time where the future exists as a bright promise birthed from enduring suffering and being disciplined in the present (by observing rules, attending church regularly and on time, paying tithes etc.). This linear conception of time was also precarious and fragile because its demands were not aligned with the long-term temporality in which most of these men resided.

Despite their absence from Sunday church services, a majority of the Zimbabwean migrant men came from Christian backgrounds and believed in God and the importance of the church in sustaining their hope, healing, blessing and delivering them. One expressed these strong beliefs in some of the following words:

God since I have cried I hope that things will get better. I wish that things can get better so that I find a job to work only. If I can't find it here I will go forward looking for that job. God intervene and answer my prayer. God intervene. If all fails I will just go back home because I would have failed to find a job. I will go home to die of hunger. There is saying that if the jungle refuses to give you what you are looking for do not be angry, sit down, look to the ground and look to the sky then ask and pray. ¹⁴

We should not mistake this hope with a temporal pattern that focuses on attending church on a regular basis or at all. This is more of a religious symbolism that focuses upon the problem of human suffering and attempts to cope with it by placing it in a meaningful context and providing a mode of action through which it can be expressed, understood and being understood, endured (Geertz, 1966: 105). This symbolism is not necessarily a guarantee that one will commit to religious activities or allow the institution of religion to dictate how they should comport themselves daily in time-space. Since the migrants viewed themselves as strictly temporary, they were focused on saving money, working time and maintaining ties with home and less interested in integration or consolidating local authority (see Cojocaru, 2016: 8). They tended to credit the future with more value than the actual present time by ‘mortgaging’ religious activities in spite of their Christian beliefs and the judgment and criticism that came with this action. One of them said, ‘This place gives me hope that something can happen at any time. That is what I am looking forward to. God can just change things at any moment’. ¹⁵ Another credited the potential of the future over the present thus:

The last minute is dangerous. Even in soccer when there are ten minutes remaining the opposition that was leading by one goal can lose. So that is what I am looking at. The last minute is dangerous. I will keep persevering because I don't know the day I will die. Right now I am thirty something years old; I still need to reach fifty and still seventy years. ¹⁶

The last quote reveals a certain assurance that it was necessary to trail behind the opposition of the senior men who were leading the spatial politics of the shelter as a trade-off for a future that presented better possibilities of a better life elsewhere.

The notions of time and money appear to be central to the conceptions of migrants on the value of religion as they often view both as a form of capital that they could invest in future-oriented activities such as labour. This is appears to have been the case in the life of one Zimbabwean migrant men at the IBJC:

Huh, most of the time I can say is dedicated towards looking for work. A few of those times I can say to myself let me relax and look for a spot where I can watch TV and then we start watching games. Just to keep the mind preoccupied. But most my time I’m struggling and wishing that I can find a job. You will find us sitting at the robot waiting for people who are able to give us jobs. ¹⁷

No one I spoke to referred to the church services as a core activity. Yet it took more effort than waiting and doing nothing at the robot; which the men insisted was work that was preferable to ‘actively waiting’ by means of going to church to sing hymns or just enjoying some sports on TV. Many had never attended a service or gone to such spaces of relaxation as they claimed employers would sometimes hire them on weekends; including Sundays. In this sense, religion, like leisure, was a temporal and financial luxury that these migrants could not always afford. This is conceivable when we consider that access to the word of God at the IBJC was not cheap in the economic and temporal sense. Preaching hope, joy healing, deliverance and prosperity are not the only rituals Pentecostal Churches are known to perform. The IBJC also extracted resources through tithing, selling anointing oil and holy water as well as asking congregants to pay for prayer requests using sealed envelopes. The church also extracted their labour time since services took the whole day. When I first arrived at the IBJC, Bishop Jonas told me Sunday service always began at 10.30 am. He further invited me to attend the weekly services they had every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 6 pm. However, the Sunday service always began later than advertised. The men on the other hand were often preoccupied with cooking, washing clothes and bathing so they could take on their day. Only one of them who was part of the senior cabal, Khulekani, was involved in the playing of instruments but not their setting up. His more frequent participation was limited to singing and playing the keyboard and he always arrived and left according to that strict mandate. His incentive was that the church paid him R 20 per service. The other men inhabited the shelter in such a way that they had both limited time and finances to be a part of this.

Towards an ambivalent reading of immobility and carceral junctions

The findings presented above reveal that it can be difficult to reconcile the agency and subordination waiting signifies. Carceral junctions can be conceptualised as in time as much as in space as time-spaces of marginalisation and possibilities (see Moran, 2012). Jeffrey (2008: 957) has stated that waiting must be understood not only as the capacity to ride out the passage of time (resistance) or as the absence of action (domination). Rather, it is an active, conscious, materialised practice in which people forge new political strategies, in which ‘time and space often become the objects of reflection’ (Jeffrey, 2008: 957). Ghassan Hage's work has also succinctly illustrated the ambivalence in the relationship between resistance and domination in waiting. ‘Stuckedness’ allows heroism. Stuckedness is a situation where a person suffers from both the absence of choices or alternatives to the situation one is in and an inability to grab such alternatives even if they present themselves (Hage, 2009). The heroism of a ‘subject’ lies in their ability to snatch agency in the very midst of its lack through endurance in which a certain nobility of spirit comes to negate the dehumanisation implied by a situation of ‘stuckedness’ (Hage, 2009). Khosravi (2014) has also contended that the ambiguity about waiting generates a sense of uncertainty, shame, depression and anxiety but it can also be an act or a strategy of defiance by migrants. Instead of simply accepting Agamben's totalising ‘state of exception,’ some have focused on the control over futures that characterises particular formations of sovereignty (Ramsay, 2017). This kind of sovereignty can be seen as producing a temporal state of exception: ‘a condition of living in a social tense that does not correspond to the hegemonic timescapes of the governing structures’ (Ramsay, 2017: 532).

This study finds similar kinds of ambivalent political subjectivities at play in the Zimbabwe-South Africa border regime; particularly at the IBJC men's shelter. The article concludes with a challenge to the literature that suggests that disruption is a moment migrants passively experience the effects of power. This position concurs with Turner’s (2016) view that disruption and displacement can indeed produce a powerful position stemming from migrants’ ability to manage their time, energy and money to get what they want in life and remain in control of their futures. The intersections of immobility and temporal agency in this article contribute to a growing body of work that shows that the relationship between resistance and domination in waiting is an ambivalent one (see Hage, 2009; Jefferson et al., 2019; Jeffrey, 2008; Khosravi, 2014; Oldfield and Greyling, 2015 for example). The immobile individuals in this study are ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ at the same time as their actions do not readily follow the axis between resistance and naturalised domination. They are better seen as ‘slantwise’ as such actions intersect the axis of these dualities from an ‘oblique angle’ (Campbell and Heyman, 2007). This article troubles assumption about immobility as an experience that leads the inhabitants of humanitarian camps as well as carceral time-spaces to realise the status of ‘bare life’ or the statuses of the ‘exception’ state. Seeing as it is that immobility is relational to space as well as time, it is rather more befitting to begin from the ‘temporal state of exception’ (Ramsay, 2017). This state can produce ‘a condition of bare life that results from existential rupture: that is, having assumptions about the future made precarious by imposed forces’ (Ramsay, 2017: 532). Yet, even in their ‘temporal states of exception’ these migrant men are not necessarily reduced to bare life. While imposed forces make their assumptions about the future precarious, the precariousness of the future also creates multiple and new possibilities.