Frequent droughts are swelling the flow of migrants into South Africa. They are also easing the border crossing.
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NEWSLETTER | JULY 11, 2025
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Running Dry
IT IS DAWN on a warm December morning, and Joshua Tuso, 41, is huddled with some 20 undocumented migrants in a disused warehouse in Zimbabwe’s Beitbridge Town, which borders South Africa. Some of the migrants — who have traveled here from across Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Somalia — are smoking cheap cigarettes in the dim light to calm their nerves. Others recite prayers from small Bibles distributed by the nonprofit Gideons International. A few appear drunk and aloof about the risk of their impending trip. Tuso crouches near his bags, vigilant about their contents, as a guard stands outside, keeping an eye out for border police.
Beitbridge Town, home to 58,000 inhabitants, is very dry. The town and its surroundings, which are marked by parched earth and thorny trees, is the last foothold of Zimbabwe before one crosses into South Africa. But not everyone traveling across the border goes through the high-tech immigration and customs gates at the official Beitbridge crossing, where shiny cameras capture faces, and every traveler is fingerprinted.
That’s because Beitbridge is located next to the Limpopo River, which meanders eastward along the Zimbabwe-South Africa border before passing through Mozambique and emptying into the Indian Ocean. The town’s booming formal economy is fueled by legal cross-border haulage and warehousing. Its informal economy is built around smuggling migrants and cargo into South Africa across the riverbed, and to a lesser extent, out of it, for those coming back.
“In Beitbridge, humans, cars, and donkeys don’t sleep, [constantly] ferrying humans and merchandise to and from South Africa. Let me be clear: No one is coerced here. Needy migrants pay to be trafficked down south,” says Wilo, 40, who leads the small group of smugglers (or “spotters”) guiding the undocumented migrants across the river. “It’s team-work,” says Wilo, wiping a spot of sweat from his brow. (Wilo declined to divulge his legal name for fear of being targeted by law enforcement officers and other cartels.)
Tuso is one of those migrants. He has spent the last week making the 600-kilometer trip here from his home in Birchenough Bridge, a semi-arid district in rural eastern Zimbabwe. The exhausting journey required negotiating for cheap fares in haulage trucks heading down to South Africa. He is fleeing drought and the hardships it has brought on him and his family of five children and two wives. (Polygamy is relatively common in parts of sub-Saharan Africa).
Though climate change is driving Tuso south, that’s not where its impact ends. Climate disruption is also easing the final stretch of migrants’ difficult journey into South Africa — and contributing to rising tensions across the border.
To tell this story about the plight of climate refugees, journalists Nyasha Bhobo and Tsitsi Bhobo followed a group of migrants as they crossed the Limpopo River into South Africa with the help of “spotters.”
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Photo by Tendai Marima
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