January 19, 2007
By Ndaba Dlamini
TWO men lug a heavy refrigerator to a cross-border bus amid the bustle of a bus rank in Braamfontein. Focus shifts to a busy border post between Mozambique and South Africa, with the chaos of travellers jostling for a place in a long, snaking queue.
These are some of the images of informal cross-border traders taken by students at the Market Photo Workshop, a training institution for photographers in Newtown, and commissioned photographers from neighbouring countries.
The exhibition, Back and Forth: Informal Cross-Border Traders in Southern Africa, is the result of a photo documentary project of the International Organisation for Migration's Partnership on HIV and Mobility in Southern Africa (Phamsa) programme and the Market Photo Workshop's year-long photojournalism and documentary photography programme.
The exhibition is running at the Workshop Gallery and along its outside fence until 28 February.
"The objective of the project is to highlight the activities of informal traders in southern Africa, particularly the socio-economic factors that increase their vulnerability to diseases like HIV," says Kirsten Doermann, the workshop's project manager.
Sculptures are among the most common items sold by informal cross-border traders from Zimbabwe
(Photo: Lerato Maduna)
Although informal cross-border traders contribute immensely to the southern African region, particularly in terms of employment creation, economic upliftment of women, regional economic trade and social integration, and food security, they are often invisible - unrecognised at home and harassed in the host country.
No country has a specific permit or visa for these entrepreneurs, and they do not benefit from preferential tariffs, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
The project wanted to capture the plight of cross-border traders, so raising public awareness of their lives, particularly their vulnerability in terms of gender inequality, poor living conditions, separation from families, exploitation and discrimination, and lack of access to health services.
The photographers – six students from the Market Photo Workshop and five photographers from Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe – spent six months documenting the lives of informal traders, travelling with them from country to country.
The project was not only about capturing images, but about getting to know more about the personal lives of these people, according to Doermann.
In an image by Lerato Maduna, a young girl sits on a bag of supplies; in the background are buses waiting to ferry her and fellow travellers to Zimbabwe. The caption reads: "This young girl regularly travels to Johannesburg with her mother to buy supplies for their small shop in Harare. Here they wait for the goods to be loaded on to a bus. Waiting is no stranger for traders, since it happens a lot at bus stations and at the border."
In another image by Moshe Sekete, a woman struggles with her belongings outside Musina train station. She has just placed her luggage on the ground to rest when a voice emanating from the platform announces, "Hurry up Mama, the train is about to leave!" according to the accompanying caption.
The wretched lives of the traders are starkly revealed in an image by Maduna, taken in Durban. A woman wearily carries aluminium pots strung together to form a centipede. Metro Rail has just evicted her from where she was selling her goods.
Studies have shown that contrary to perceptions that migrants, like informal cross-border traders, carry diseases to places they visit, it is rather the circumstances and events related to the migration that put them at increased risk of contracting various infections. In other words, being mobile in itself is not a risk factor for HIV, it is the situations encountered and the behaviours possibly engaged in during mobility or migration that increase vulnerability and risk regarding HIV.
Women constitute about 80 percent of the informal traders, a factor that brings a sense of empowerment as well as challenges.
"These women are on the road most of the time and some, particularly those from Zimbabwe, sacrifice sleeping on pavements for 24 hours in order to get a waiver in paying import and export duties at the border," Doermann says.
A shot by Maduna accentuates this point: two women, exhaustion etched on their faces, sleep deeply in a bus, oblivious to the commotion around them as they return home after spending days peddling goods in Johannesburg.
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