Blair Rutherford

Zimbabwean Farm Workers in Northern South Africa

This article analyses the precarious livelihoods of Zimbabweans working on commercial farms in northern South Africa. Based on research carried out in 2004 and 2005, we examine how these Zimbabweans seek pathways of survival and, for a few, potential accumulation across space, sectors, and international boundaries. The article analyses how these Zimbabwean farm workers are situated in an ambivalent legal terrain, the neo-liberal restructuring of agriculture and the articulation of paternalistic rule into a far more authoritarian logic of rule on the farms, all of which have made the border-zone a ‘state of exception’ for them which conditions their livelihoods. The article highlights that although these processes intensify labour exploitation, they also recalibrate the survival strategies of Zimbabweans and generate varied forms of resistance.

Commercial Farm Workers and the Politics of (Dis)Placement in Zimbabwe: Colonialism, Liberation and Democracy

The widespread land occupations of 2000 demonstrate the uneasy fit of commercial farm workers within the politics and development of Zimbabwe. Not only have farm workers borne the most violence at the hands of land occupiers, but their current socio-political situation on predominantly white-owned commercial farms has either been reduced by a nationalist liberation war binary of exploitation/abuse by racist white settlers or totally elided through human rights and democracy discourses anchored in the liberal subject. Based on periodic fieldwork research with commercial farm workers from 1992 to 2000, this paper analyses how farm workers have been represented by the various public actors during the current land occupations and the complex ways some farm workers have responded to these events. The emphasis is on how political actors need to rethink the situation of commercial farm workers if they are to take an active role in the improvement of their living and working lives.

An unsettled belonging: Zimbabwean farm workers in Limpopo Province, South Africa

Abstract The emplacement of displaced Zimbabweans depends on the particular political economies and the modes of belonging operating at the sites at which they find themselves. This is shown by examining the situation of Zimbabweans working or seeking work on commercial farms in northern Limpopo Province, South Africa, in the border zone with Zimbabwe. As Zimbabweans flee their country in part to find a cash currency that has more value than the Zimbabwean dollar, their Zimbabwean citizenship gives them a particular symbolic currency in these jobs. Many of the border zone farmers are keen to employ them as their desperation for work typically predisposes them to work harder and often for lower wages than South Africans. Yet this latter currency is also shaped by public debates and institutional practices regarding ‘Zimbabweans’ in the wider political economy of South Africa, which in turn inform the circulation, conditions, and vulnerabilities of these Zimbabweans on the farms.

Shifting the debate on land reform, poverty and inequality in Zimbabwe, an engagement with Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities 1

Zimbabwes land reform: myths and realities 2 purports to overturn the western media and academys ‘myths’ of agrarian failure and cronyism in Zimbabwes fast-track land reform with a study rooted in the ‘reality’ of its outcomes in the Masvingo area. Yet the positivist picture painted by Scoones, Marongwe, Mavedzenge, Mahenehene, Murimbarimba, and Sukume is another position in portrayals of a complex process entangling many local material struggles–including those seen as successful examples of the yeomanry admired by the authors–with the equally important processes of authoritarian nationalism they side-line. ‘Myth making’ is not counter to ‘reality’, but positions particular claims within it. By concentrating on the ‘local’ and celebrating what they see as non-technocratic successes, the authors ignore the context and politics of the state–which they later invoke to develop adequate supportive policy and stability for the new farmers. Their reality ignores as much as the myths they try to challenge, and thus fails to assist to develop the policies they would like.

The uneasy ties of working and belonging: the changing situation for undocumented Zimbabwean migrants in northern South Africa

Abstract This paper examines some of the mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion operating for Zimbabweans on the commercial farms and in the border town of Musina in northern South Africa since the 2000s. In particular, it looks at the changing political economic and regulatory contexts as well as the particular ‘modes of belonging’ operating in these two sites. Undocumented and documented Zimbabwean migrants have worked through these changing contexts, becoming included or excluded through overlapping, hierarchical ‘modes of belonging’ operating at localized scales. Such forms of inclusion/exclusion of variable durability generate senses of (in)security for the Zimbabwean migrants that directly inform their livelihood strategies in South Africa. This paper seeks to shed light on such socio-political nexuses in this border zone and contribute to conceptualizing undocumented workers more broadly.

“Settlers” and Zimbabwe: Politics, Memory, and the Anthropology of Commercial Farms During a Time of Crisis

This article examines the contested politics surrounding the participation of white farmers in the national public sphere in Zimbabwe. It examines how farm workers have acted as an “interior frontier” to white farmers and how this has helped to shape the public identification of white farmers in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. In so doing, the differential use of the term settlers and the memory of colonialism within the current violence surrounding land reform and democratization are analyzed. Through addressing some of the engagements with this ambiguous identification of white farmers, the politics of analysing “settlers” within anthropology and postcolonial studies is raised.

The politics of boundaries: the shifting terrain of belonging for Zimbabweans in a South African border zone

[Abstract This paper examines Zimbabwean immigrants in northern South Africa and the ways through which they are able to claim, or not, some form of belonging. Drawing on the concept of “political subjectivity”, I trace the changes in the power relations shaping the forms of belonging operating on the commercial farms and the border town of Musina since 2000 and the concomitant shifts in some of the Zimbabweans’ tactics in these spaces. In particular, I look at the political subjectivities of “Zimbabwean farm workers” and “Zimbabwean woman asylum-seekers”. This analysis shows what particular imaginaries have become authoritative for differently situated Zimbabwean immigrants and denizens in this region, enabling particular claims for resources, accommodation, and belonging., Abstract This paper examines Zimbabwean immigrants in northern South Africa and the ways through which they are able to claim, or not, some form of belonging. Drawing on the concept of “political subjectivity”, I trace the changes in the power relations shaping the forms of belonging operating on the commercial farms and the border town of Musina since 2000 and the concomitant shifts in some of the Zimbabweans’ tactics in these spaces. In particular, I look at the political subjectivities of “Zimbabwean farm workers” and “Zimbabwean woman asylum-seekers”. This analysis shows what particular imaginaries have become authoritative for differently situated Zimbabwean immigrants and denizens in this region, enabling particular claims for resources, accommodation, and belonging.]

On the promise and perils of citizenship: heuristic concepts, Zimbabwean example

Increasingly, struggles in the name of citizenship inspire and catch the imagination and support of individuals and groups found in a variety of locales within a nation as well as transnational spaces. At the same time, their consequences may be quite different from the assumptions and dreams of those involved in perpetuating and imagining these struggles. To analyse how new social citizenship claims can embolden and channel struggles in particular directions with varied results – the promise and perils of citizenship more broadly – I suggest that one should pay attention to the promulgators of such visions of citizenship, the techniques of promoting their claims and the cultural politics and political economies of belonging in the locales of mobilization. Drawing on an ethnographic example of a farm labour struggle in the late 1990s in Zimbabwe, I explore the importance of attending to wider shifts in the political importance of citizenship as well as its entanglement in particular localities. Through examining how farm workers are situated through such struggles, I show the promise and limits of citizenship in addressing social justice concerns of a group historically marginalized through racialized, classed and gendered processes.

In the Shadow of Policy: Everyday Practices in South African Land and Agrarian Reform

favour of the market-led “willing buyer, willing seller” principle. They claim that, because white farmers could not be forced off their land, “[t] he process of land reform in South Africa effectively erased history, memory, and space” (105). This not only oversimplifies the complexity of agrarian history and ignores the ways in which wealth was siphoned from the countryside since dispossession, but it also places the blame for the failings of land reform on neoliberalism and divests the government of responsibility for the poor implementation of land reform projects. The authors argue against the application of the large-scale commercial farming model as well as a market-based redistribution paradigm; curiously, they make no mention of neighbouring Zimbabwe where white-owned land was expropriated without compensation and most farms are now small-holdings. They also do not engage the work of those scholars who convincingly argue that the willing buyer, willing seller approach has not impeded the government’s acquisition of property for redistribution. This book posits some thought-provoking questions such as the role of the peasantry in land reform and economic development, but the central argument concerning the explanatory power of hegemony is not particularly revealing for those familiar with the country’s history, and the conclusions drawn from the book’s case studies do not transcend, and often decline to engage, some of the excellent work on land reform published in recent years. The authors’ rigorous examination and application of theory is certainly admirable, but the utility of this exercise in illuminating a more productive way forward for South Africa’s struggling land reform program is less certain.

Zimbabwean Land Redistribution

Zimbabwe has been at the forefront of the debates and contestations concerning the intersection of Africa and the world since 2000, at least in the Anglophone media, academic, and policy discourses. Major continental institutions, such as the African Union and its African Commission on Human and People’s Rights; regional bodies, such as the Southern African Development Committee (SADC); significant pan-African initiatives to engage with the outside world, such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD); multilateral institutions, such as United Nations and the Commonwealth; and the recent European Union-Africa Summit in Portugal (in December 2007) have seen recent meetings and initiatives founded on different interpretations of what has been happening in Zimbabwe.