Shopping-Oriented Mobility Across the Zimbabwe-South Africa Border: Modalities and Encounters

In recent years, South African border towns such as Musina have grown exponentially in retail services and become subregional “hubs” for cross-border shopping. The existing literature on cross-border shopping has paid little attention to understanding the nature and extent of this phenomenon in less popular shopping destinations. This chapter discusses the spatial practices of shoppers, especially how different categories of shoppers experienced mobility across the Zimbabwe-South Africa border depending on whether they travelled by car, bus or other forms of public transport. It examines the modalities and practices associated with cross-border shopping by Zimbabweans in South Africa’s border town of Musina. The focus is on long-distance shoppers whose shopping trips require more organising, planning and financial resources while their journeys take anything from 3 to 8 h to get to the border post. These shoppers are worth studying because most of them come to Musina from larger towns and cities (than Musina) such as Bulawayo, Mutare and Harare the capital city. This brings a fascinating twist to common norms in the study of cross-border shopping, where scholars have paid attention to shopping by communities which live astride borders. Through their mobility patterns, Zimbabwean cross-border shoppers stimulate mobility of other actors whose aims are to control or benefit from their movements.