‘Going back home to my family and community’: Lived realities of old-age return migrants in Zimbabwe

When Zimbabwean migrants age, they often retire and permanently return to their families in their home country. Before that, they periodically visit home on holidays and for family functions such as weddings, funerals or burials. Otherwise, they spend much of their lives abroad. Following their ‘retirement return’, several dynamics emerge about their reintegration, power dynamics and care needs within their families. To better understand such issues, this paper explores the lived realities of old-age return migrants in Zimbabwe to answer the question: What informs the return and reintegration of old-age migrants in Zimbabwe? We unpack this and other questions using data from in-depth interviews with 10 old-age return migrants, as well as several snapshots from semi-formal and informal conversations with returnees' family members in one of Zimbabwe's mainstay migrant communities in Matabeleland. To fully describe the context in which informants live and perceive their experiences, research findings are complemented by long-term participant observation from the researchers' erstwhile studies and ethnographic knowledge of the study area.