Exploring Borderlands and Romanticizing Clandestine Activities

The article critiques methods and theoretical issues regarding clandestine activities and borderland studies by briefly presenting some of the experiences and findings from a research on smuggling among the Penhalonga and Nyaronga borderland communities astride Zimbabwe and Mozambique between August 2005 and July 2007. The article revisits some of the research issues that I overlooked such as ethics and representativeness of the findings. I agree with some critiques on borderlands studies that the main shortcomings in researching this subject have to do with the inadequate training provided in some graduate schools on African studies. It is this weakness in the training, coupled with other reasons such as the researchers’ ‘romanticization’ of clandestine activities, that makes them take for granted crucial methodological requirements such as ethics and generalizability among other things. This is done through highlighting the methods (such as document analysis, oral history, interviews, and participant observation) which I applied, and the encounters that I met during fieldwork. I realized the impact of discussing methodological and field research encounters, for the benefit of readers and researchers, who may want to work on a similar subject in future, as this could offer assistance on how to handle certain complex methods in probing various subjects