JoAnn McGregor

'Joining the BBC (British Bottom Cleaners)': Zimbabwean migrants and the UK care industry

This article contributes to the literature on ‘global care chains’ by examining the narratives of Zimbabwean women and men working as carers in the UK. It investigates why social care has become an important focus of employment for Zimbabweans, and explores the means by which migrants of different legal status have negotiated work in a diverse sector. The article explores the experiences of a highly educated, middle-class migrant group, who left their country in the context of deepening economic and political crisis. Some Zimbabweans have been able to use transnational mobility and care work as a means of coping, finding opportunities to meet family obligations and personal ambitions, while entrepreneurs have found openings to set up in business as care agencies, providing work for their compatriots and others. Yet the article also emphasises the stress and deskilling most Zimbabwean care workers have experienced in trying to support themselves and dependents through excessive hours of low-status and often poorly paid work, the strain of working in strongly feminised and racialised workplaces, and the insecurities and abuse produced by informality, including ‘tied’ and other forms of labour exploitation. There is a need for greater attention to be paid to the dynamics of race and gender in social care workplaces, and to means of securing the rights of migrant careworkers, who are playing an increasingly important role in caring for some of the most vulnerable members of British society.

Wildlife and politics: CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe.

CAMPFIRE programmes have been hailed internationally for the innovative ways in which they have sought to confront the challenges of some of Africa’s most marginal regions through the promotion of local control over wildlife management. In Zimbabwe, CAMPFIRE has been cast as an antidote to the colonial legacy of technocratic and authoritarian development which had undermined people’s control over their environment and criminalized their use of game. This article explores why such a potentially positive programme went so badly wrong in the case of Nkayi and Lupane districts, raising points of wider significance for comparable initiatives. Local histories and institutional politics need careful examination. The first part of the article thus investigates the historical forces which shaped attitudes to game, while the second part considers the powerful institutional and economic forces which conspired to sideline these historically formed local views. CAMPFIRE in Nkayi and Lupane was further shaped by the legacies of post‐independence state violence in this region, and the failure of earlier wildlife projects. This range of factors combined to create deep distrust of CAMPFIRE, and quickly led to open confrontation.

Gathered produce in Zimbabwe's communal areas changing resource availability and use

This article analyses the relationship between environmental change and the availability and use of gathered produce in one of Zimbabwes deforested communal areas. Based on a series of interviews with households of different socio‐economic status, it investigates the shifting contribution to rural livelihoods and diet made by gathered products such as fruit, nuts, leaf vegetables, mushrooms, insects, rodents and leaf litter. Species favouring arable and disturbed environments have become more abundant, whereas those flourishing in woodlands have diminished. There is no simple relationship between changing resource availability and shifting patterns of consumption and sale of gathered produce: socio‐economic changes and changing preferences are important influences on consumption, whereas the emergence of markets for gathered resources is related to processes of specialization and exchange rather than physical scarcity. There has been an overall decrease in the diversity of gathered produce eaten, with in...

Introduction. Displacing Zimbabwe: Crisis and Construction in Southern Africa

Since early 2000, political violence and dramatic economic contraction have displaced people within and beyond Zimbabwes borders on an extraordinary scale.1 The politicised state intrusions into Z...

Woodland pattern and structure in a peasant farming area of Zimbabwe: ecological determinants and present and past use

This article relates the species pattern and structure of miombo woodland in a deforested peasant farming area of central Zimbabwe to its ecological determinants and its present and past use. Data on species composition, basal area, height and physiognomy of the woody vegetation are presented for different parts of the landscape. The nature and degree of disturbance from harvesting for fuel and timber is quantified. Woodland in the arable areas and close to village lines is shown to be dominated by fruit trees, other trees with cultural controls on their cutting and species which quickly invade disturbed ground. The latter may be highly productive of woody biomass. In the grazing area, deeper soils which were cultivated in the past have retained an open structure and tend to be dominated by heavily coppiced Brachystegia spiciformis and Combretum molle (also dominants of less disturbed miombo woodland). Lithic soils which have not been cleared support denser, coppiced woodlands also dominated by climax species. Woody vegetation on kopjes and along riverine fringes is less disturbed in terms of its distribution, species composition, density and height than woodland in other parts of the landscape. The spatial pattern and nature of cutting is shown to vary between land use categories, between different species and according to the dimensions of individual stems. Miombo woodland shows a relatively high degree of stability in species composition under disturbance by cutting: of the 94 species included in the analysis, relatively few were shown to be significantly associated with a particular soil type, catenal position or land use category.

Surveillance and the City: Patronage, Power-Sharing and the Politics of Urban Control in Zimbabwe

From 2000, ZANU(PF) suffered repeated electoral defeat in the cities and lost control of municipalities to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). This turned urban governance into a battlefield, as ZANU(PF) dramatically recentralised powers over local authorities, developed ‘parallel’ party structures and used militia to control central markets and peri-urban land. Taking the case of Harare and environs during the period of Zimbabwes Inclusive Government (IG), this article explores contestations over urban authority, focusing on the office of councillor and urban spaces dominated by ZANU(PF)-aligned militia. I argue that surveillance was central to ZANU(PF)s strategy for urban control and to the politics of patronage. Inconvenient councillors were disciplined by threats and enticements from the feared Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) and were also vulnerable to suspension, while ZANU(PF) militia made political loyalty a condition of access to market stalls, land and housing cooperatives. Dominant political science characterisations of the African postcolonial state and ethnographic accounts of precarity and vigilance mislead in this context if they fail to capture the disciplining roles and social reach of a centralised partisan state security agency and militarised party structures that suffuse work and social life within local government institutions and contested city spaces. Analyses of power-sharing need to reach beyond the national stage not only because conflict over local authorities can undermine transitional political processes but also for the light they can shed on the changing character of the state and its relationship to reconstituted ZANU(PF) powers.

Introduction: Politics, Patronage and Violence in Zimbabwe

This special issue is about politics, patronage and violence in Zimbabwe. These themes provide a means of exploring Zimbabwes dramatic upheavals in the light of broader debates in African studies ...

Diasporic Repositioning and the Politics of Re-engagement: Developmentalising Zimbabwe's Diaspora?

Abstract The power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe has ushered in a period of engagement between the diaspora and homeland government, marking a distinct change from the hostility that characterised relations over previous years. This article discusses the politics of this repositioning and the character of the new diasporic organisations formed in the wake of the Global Political Agreement to take forward agendas of development and reconstruction at home. It argues that these new diasporic organisations have tried to create non-partisan platforms for engagement, have an elite social base, and connect responsibilities for development at home with the desire for formal political rights. Despite an apparent convergence of interest around development and reconstruction on the part of an array of diaspora groups, as well as the Zimbabwean and British governments, there are, nonetheless, tensions among these actors that this article seeks to reveal. It argues that a key issue shaping conversations over engagement is the divergence of interest within the diaspora between those with and without security in their states of residence. This divide is likely to become more salient in the context of a large-scale return programme, especially if there is ongoing uncertainty in Zimbabwe and if repatriation is conceived as a final one-way movement rather than as part of an ongoing circulation in which people may choose to maintain transnational lives. This discussion of the Zimbabwean case thus contributes to broader debates over the tensions that characterise policies of ‘diaspora engagement’.

People Without Fathers: Mozambicans in Swaziland, 1888-1993

This article considers recent influxes of Mozambicans into Swaziland in the light of historical patterns of migration and incorporation. It explores the perspectives of national and local leaders, migrants and refugees, revealing the weakness of accounts of outsiders’ integration which focus only on the views of national institutions and the public discourse of the hosting society. The distinction between ‘refugees’ and ‘economic migrants’ distorts the causes of migration and is blind to local, historically constructed notions of hospitality and community membership; it can also be damaging when used insensitively in international assistance programmes. The article argues that an assertion of Swazi identity and shared history as a strategy to legitimate community membership and to ascertain rights to distributed goods can succeed only in specific circumstances. By situating claims to kinship, common ethnicity and neighbourhood in a broader historical and political‐economic context, it shows them to be con...

The Transnational Histories of Southern African Liberation Movements: An Introduction

This special issue of JSAS offers new transnational perspectives on southern Africa’s wars of national liberation. It does so by bringing fresh evidence to bear on the histories of Zimbabwean, Namibian, Mozambican and Angolan liberation movements, allowing us to build on the insights of an extensive body of work on the South African African National Congress (ANC) in exile and a growing literature on the ‘global’ Cold War. In keeping with much of this work, our contributors have assumed neither the primacy (or homogeneity) of nationalist loyalties as they exist within the boundaries of today’s nation-states, nor any straightforward imposition or transfer of Cold War ideologies or strategic interests on to southern African conflicts. The articles instead follow the movement of ideas, people, institutions and goods across borders. Their primary focus is on African soldiers, politicians and diplomats, people whose relationships and motivations were varied and shifting, and whose interactions created opportunities for the circulation, promotion, and adaptation of a great range of cultural, political and military influences. Tracing these interactions within and among liberation movements, their hosts, and a wider set of external actors, reveals lasting – and sometimes surprising – legacies that have too often been eclipsed by dominant national histories.