This article assesses the problem of extending social, political and land rights to farm workers in Zimbabwe's commercial farming sector in the context of current debates and protests about land redistribution there. It contrasts traditional indifference to such workers with more recent attempts to address their needs and explores the difficulties which land redistribution could present for farm workers if their interests were not made part of the agenda of change. It argues for a holistic, transformative approach to redistribution and reform, an approach which contrasts markedly withand goes well beyond -nationalist, workerist and welfare strategies that have been put forward.

This article examines Zimbabwean land politics and the study of rural interventions, including agrarian reform, more broadly, using the analytical framework of territorialized ‘modes of belonging’ and their ‘cultural politics of recognition’. Modes of belonging are the routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become ‘incorporated’ in particular places. In these spatialized forms of power and authority, particular cultural politics of recognition operate; these are the cultural styles of interaction that become privileged as proper forms of decorum and morality informing dependencies and interdependencies. The author traces a hegemonic mode of belonging identified as ‘domestic government’, put in place on European farms in Zimbabwe's colonial period, and shows how it was shaped by particular political and economic conjunctures in the first twenty years of Independence after 1980. Domestic government provided a conditional belonging for farm workers in terms of claims to limited resources on commercial farms while positioning them in a way that made them marginal citizens in the nation at large. This is the context for the behaviour of land‐giving authorities which have actively discriminated against farm workers during the politicized and violent land redistribution processes that began in 2000. Most former farm workers are now seeking other forms of dependencies, typically more precarious and generating fewer resources and services than they had accessed on commercial farms, with their own particular cultural politics of recognition, often tied to demonstrating support to the ruling political party.

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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.

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