Each December, a familiar pilgrimage unfolds across southern Africa. Long-distance buses, minibus taxis, and private cars stream northwards from Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban, converging on Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo. This annual ritual marks the seasonal homecoming of the injiva—the migrant worker returning for Christmas, laden with gifts and expectations.
For a few weeks, the city’s economic decline is masked by a temporary infusion of life. Streets fill with cars bearing South African number plates. Residents sport the latest urban fashions from across the Limpopo. The most telling signs, however, are the trailers hitched to these vehicles, loaded with “Christmas boxes”—carefully curated remittances in-kind containing cooking oil, sugar, soap, and other staples scarce or expensive back home. Parks host jumping castles; restaurants pulse with South African house music and the laughter of reunions. This spectacle is a powerful, public performance of success earned abroad.
This tradition is deeply rooted in history, a refashioned version of a colonial-era practice. For over a century, men from the Matabeleland region traveled to work in South Africa’s mines and farms, returning home perhaps once a year with gifts—a blanket, a bicycle, cash—that demonstrated their endurance and provision. Today’s injivas include both women and men working in diverse sectors, from hospitality to construction, but the symbolic weight of the Christmas return remains unchanged: it is a vital display of maintaining one’s role within the family and community.
Yet, beneath this festive veneer lies a stark reality known to every migrant and their family. This performance is often financed by immense struggle. The migration experience is frequently characterized by economic precarity, legal uncertainty under South Africa’s complex immigration regimes, workplace discrimination, and the constant challenge of sending money home through formal and informal channels. The pressure to return with a “box” worthy of the year’s sacrifices can be immense, turning a joyful homecoming into a source of financial and emotional strain.
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Parallel to this festive migration runs a quieter, solemn, and constant south-north movement: the final homecoming of Zimbabwean migrants who have died in South Africa. While December brings trailers full of groceries, the A6 highway from Beitbridge to Bulawayo year-round sees trailers of a different shape—coffin-shaped. These journeys are a silent counter-narrative to migration’s promise, a stark reminder that the search for prosperity carries the ultimate risk of loss. They represent not the closure of a seasonal visit, but the permanent closure of a life lived in exile.
This profound aspect of the migration cycle, which I studied for my PhD in anthropology, is shaped by a complex triad of forces: bureaucracy, cost, and intergenerational care.
My research reveals how families sustain a life-affirming web of care that extends even beyond death, contributing to critical discussions on migration, kinship, and the role of the state in the most intimate of human experiences.
The Moral Imperative and Economic Burden of Final Return
The migration corridor between Zimbabwe and South Africa is one of Africa’s oldest and most populous, rooted in colonial labour systems and supercharged by Zimbabwe’s economic collapse in the early 2000s. Hyperinflation, political turmoil, and mass unemployment drove millions to seek refuge and livelihood south of the border. While estimates vary widely due to undocumented movement, between one and three million Zimbabweans likely reside in South Africa.
Within this context, the repatriation of the deceased is not merely a logistical task but a profound cultural and spiritual necessity. While burial in South Africa is possible, to bring a body khaya—home—is to restore the deceased to their ancestral lineage. It allows the spirit (mudzimu) to be properly mourned, settled, and integrated among the ancestors, where it can then protect and guide the living. Failure to repatriate risks creating a restless, wandering spirit, potentially bringing spiritual misfortune (ngozi) and social discord to the family. Thus, the final homecoming is as crucial to sustaining generational ties as the Christmas return.
This moral duty collides with a daunting economic reality. Repatriating a body is exceedingly expensive, involving embalming, a specialized coffin, cross-border transport, and fees for paperwork on both sides. Costs can run into thousands of dollars—a prohibitive sum for most families. Consequently, a grim calculus emerges: those who foresee their death due to prolonged illness will often strive to return home before they die to spare their families the financial burden. The coffin trailers, therefore, often carry those whose deaths were sudden—from accident, violence, or acute illness.
To meet these costs, families mobilize extraordinary transnational networks of care. Relatives pool savings, take out loans, and appeal to extended kin across borders. This is where a critical institution comes into play: the burial society. These collectives, formal and informal, exist precisely to absorb such catastrophic shocks, transforming an impossible individual burden into a manageable collective responsibility.
The Ecosystem of Care: Formal and Informal Burial Societies
The landscape of Bulawayo, with its shuttered factories repurposed as churches and workshops, tells a story of deindustrialization. Amid these adaptations, the funeral industry has become a paradoxical pillar of the city’s economy. As migration has increased, so too has the infrastructure for managing its ultimate consequence.
Formal funeral parlours with names like “Doves” and “African Pride” are key players. They offer packaged services to navigate the entire repatriation process. Alongside them thrive informal burial societies (mukando or stokvels focused on death). These are community-based savings clubs where members contribute a fixed amount monthly, creating a fund that is paid out to any member upon a death in their family.
These societies ingeniously bridge the formal and informal economies. Many undocumented migrants, unable to open bank accounts, contribute through a relative or friend with legal status. Transactions are tracked via WhatsApp messages and bank receipt screenshots, maintaining transparency and trust. Participation is not just financial; it is a powerful signal of social responsibility and moral standing within the community. To contribute reliably is to build one’s social capital and ensure one’s own family will be supported in turn.
Navigating the Bureaucracies of Transnational Death
The journey of a body home is fraught with paperwork. Between death and burial lies an administrative maze: a South African death certificate, a coroner’s release, an embalming certificate, a Zimbabwean police clearance, and an import permit for human remains. Each document requires stamps, signatures, and fees.
This process becomes exponentially more difficult when the deceased was “undocumented” or living under a different identity in South Africa. Families must then procure affidavits to explain discrepancies, navigating a legal grey zone where the deceased’s existential reality conflicts with their bureaucratic identity. This paperwork is not neutral; it is a political arena where recognition and inequality are played out. A missing stamp can delay a burial for weeks, compounding a family’s grief.
Yet, within these state bureaucracies, there is also room for humanity and shared cultural understanding. Immigration officers, police, and clerks—often themselves part of migration networks—may apply rules with sympathy, recognizing the profound importance of a dignified return. They operate at the intersection of formal law and informal logics of care, sometimes expediting processes or guiding families through complexities. This highlights how the state is not a monolithic barrier but is enacted by individuals who can bridge institutional and cultural demands.
In the end, the two homecomings—the festive and the final—are mirror images, binding the diaspora to the homeland in a continuous cycle of obligation, sacrifice, and love. The same highways that carry hopeful migrants south later carry their remittances north in December, and, ultimately, may carry their bodies home. The “Christmas box” and the coffin are thus two facets of the same story: one celebrates temporary reunion and provision, the other seeks permanent peace and continuity.
The complex systems that have emerged—the burial societies, the funeral parlours, the adaptive bureaucratic navigation—are not just coping mechanisms. They are the very infrastructure of dignity, allowing families to remake connection and affirm belonging against the backdrop of economic precariousness and physical dislocation. They ensure that even in death, one is not forever an injiva, but is brought home to become an ancestor.
Saana Hansen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki