Competitive Labour: Divisions between Zambian and Zimbabwean Workers

By the late nineteenth century, Victoria Falls was a popular travel destination for Europeans, South Africans, and Americans who hoped to find adventure amidst what they deemed a wild physical and cultural landscape. Although a tourism industry was first established on the northern side of the Zambezi (Zambia), the southern side of the Falls (Zimbabwe) quickly joined in commercial development. Victoria Falls is now one of the most visited sites in Africa, and labour patterns around this site continue to be strongly influenced by developments in the tourism industry. Because the waterfalls served as a natural border between Northern and Southern Rhodesia, the colonial policies and development strategies on either side led to different commercial activities. The imbalanced nature of the development of tourism at this border continues to affect the working lives of local populations today. The Zimbabwean side of the border dominated the tourist market for decades, and Zambians living just across the Zambezi often crossed into Zimbabwe hoping to find employment or customers for their goods. Over the past eight years though, that trend has reversed, and Zimbabweans living in the border town of Victoria Falls Town are flooding Zambia's tourist town of Livingstone. The recent economic, political, and social upheavals in Zimbabwe are forcing Africans in this area to search for employment, stability, and resources on the Zambian side of the border. In this article, I focus on the rather strong tensions between Zimbabweans and Zambians and men and women who are trying to earn money around the Falls, specifically in Victoria Falls Town, Zimbabwe and Livingstone, Zambia. I am particularly focused on those who earn money by working in what some scholars identify as the 'informal sector', or less commonly as the 'semi-formal sector'. It is clear that gender and nationality are playing an increasing role in the competition among workers, and that the intensity of such tensions are reaching a boiling point. In the tense political landscape of the region, the contemporary divisions between (and among) Zimbabweans and Zambians serve as a reminder that the problems in Zimbabwe are quite clearly not contained within that country's borders. This analysis also contributes to a growing literature on Zimbabwean migrants living and working outside of Zimbabwe. Most studies on the Zimbabwean Diaspora focus on the activities of Zimbabweans in South Africa, which is host to the largest number of migrants, and Britain, where a strong network of Zimbabweans exists. No studies dealing explicitly with Zimbabweans in Zambia are available, yet this is an increasingly popular destination of Zimbabweans forced to flee their country but without the means to travel abroad or too afraid to go to South Africa. This article adds another dimension to the growing attention on Zimbabwe's economic refugees.