In southern Africa, where the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa is divided by the Limpopo River, tired bodies move through the darkness each night. They carry bundles of cigarettes on their backs, wading through cold water or walking dusty trails to avoid the gaze of border guards.
Locals call them porters (Kolbars) runners, but they are neither dealers nor major criminals. They are victims of a system one that feeds on poverty, unemployment, and despair, turning human beings into instruments of profit.
The smuggling of cigarettes between Zimbabwe and South Africa is more than the illegal movement of goods. It is a modern reproduction of the same exploitative relations Karl Marx once described: when human labor becomes a commodity and even the human body itself turns into a tool for someone else’s profit.
Zimbabwe is one of Africa’s main tobacco producers. In recent years, more than 200,000 small-scale farmers have made their living from growing tobacco. But the real value added is not created in the villages, it is made in factories and along borders, where the farmer’s crop becomes a lucrative commodity.
On the other side, South Africa has high tobacco taxes and strict controls on cigarette sales. The price difference for a pack of cigarettes between the two countries can be as much as fivefold a gap that fuels the smuggling trade.
But that price gap hides layers of exploitation:
- At the top are the tobacco corporations and organized smuggling networks making millions in illegal profit.
– At the bottom are the human carriers at the Beitbridge border, who earn just a few dollars for hauling 30–40 kg bundles on their backs.
According to the Atlantic Council, tobacco smuggling in southern Africa generates hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal profits each year, while border carriers typically earn less than $5 per trip.
Beitbridge is not just a political border it is a dividing line between survival and ruin. In small towns near the frontier, unemployment exceeds 60%. After the collapse of Zimbabwe’s domestic industries, many people turned to informal work, and carrying smuggled goods became one of the few available sources of income.
One porter told NewZimbabwe reporters:
“We’re not smugglers, we just want bread. If I don’t carry this load, my child will have nothing to eat.”
Such words lay bare the human truth of this trade. Smuggling here is not merely a crime against the law but a human response to an economic crisis one created by governments and corporations themselves.
Each night, hundreds of people cross the Limpopo River. Many are women, wrapping cigarettes in fabric or plastic to keep them dry. Border guards sometimes fire warning shots or beat and arrest them but the same faces return the next night.
In this underground network, the human body itself becomes part of the value-creation process. Porters (Kolbars) are paid by weight each kilogram of cigarettes equals a few rand or dollars. Profit grows in direct proportion to the pressure placed on their bodies.
This is exploitation in its barest form stripped of legality or disguise.
In the factory, the worker sells labor; at the border, the porter sells their body.
Capital functions the same way in both: extracting value from human suffering.
According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime:
“Most smuggling operations in this region are carried out by local groups using impoverished laborers to transport goods. These people face violence, arrest, and even death.”
The bodies of these porters are, in effect, vessels for the transfer of value much like the colonial ships of the 19th century that carried goods and people across oceans, the porters’ bodies now carry profit across borders.
Viewed from above, the cigarette-smuggling process forms a multi-layered chain of exploitation:
- Farmer exploitation; the tobacco farmer sells their crop to middlemen for less than production cost.
- Factory exploitation; workers in tobacco-processing plants labor in harsh conditions for low pay.
- Porter exploitation; people carry the finished product across dangerous borders for meager wages.
- Final profit; flows into the pockets of multinational tobacco firms and organized crime networks.
In all these stages, human labor is invisible yet the added value it produces is very real. This structure reflects what Marx called primitive accumulation: the building of wealth through the dispossession of others.
Both the Zimbabwean and South African governments face a contradiction: on one hand, they want to control borders and collect taxes; on the other, parts of their own local institutions are mired in corruption and collusion.
Reports suggest that border officers at Beitbridge take bribes to overlook crossings. An official document from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) states:
“Beitbridge is one of the most corrupt border points in the region, where small-scale smugglers are forced to pay a portion of their meager earnings to officials for safe passage.”
This cycle continually reproduces poverty: the porter gives up part of their pay as a bribe; the major smuggler takes the profit; the corrupt officer takes a cut; and the state remains trapped in poverty and disorder.
Among border porters, the number of women is rising many, are single mothers. They face not only the risks of drowning or being shot but also sexual violence.
A Herald Zimbabwe report noted:
“Last year, several women crossing the Limpopo River were gang-raped. None of the cases reached court.”
Gender-based exploitation is hidden within this trade. A woman who moves her body to feed her children ultimately sells that same body at the cost of danger. Here, the border is not only geographical but also gendered a line dividing those who own from those whose bodies are their only means of survival.
Paradoxically, the globalized economy feeds on this shadow economy. A World Bank report on illicit trade notes:
“The informal economy in the Global South is effectively part of the global production chain.”
This means that the poor smuggler at the Zimbabwean border is a link in a chain stretching from tobacco factories in Virginia to luxury stores in Johannesburg. The same illicit cigarettes end up in the hands of consumers who may publicly advocate “fighting poverty.”
Amid this exploitation lies a kind of silent resistance.
The bodies that cross the Limpopo each night cry out, in their silence, that the official economy has failed to sustain life. By crossing the border, they not only move goods but challenge the very meaning of borders, borders that are closed only to the poor.
As one local activist said:
“These people break the law out of necessity, but perhaps the law broke their humanity first.”
The smuggling of cigarettes from Zimbabwe to South Africa reveals a world where poverty, law, and capital intertwine in complex ways. This trade is not merely a security or economic issue — it is a portrait of human exploitation in its rawest form: the body turned into an instrument of wealth transfer.
In this system, the porter is not just a carrier of cigarettes; they carry the weight of all the contradictions of modern capitalism: from privatized lands to failed states, from unemployment to corruption, from gender inequality to global injustice.
Until these roots are addressed, the crossing of porters over the Limpopo will continue carrying cigarettes, fear, hope, and suffering.
