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Studies on farm labour in Zimbabwe have often tended to neglect the plight of disadvantaged sections of this workforce. This article seeks to ftll this void in mainstream labour studies. It focuses on the "use" and abuse of elderly workers on large-scale commercial farms in Zimbabwe. Elderly workers have existed either as a recognized group of "special" workers or "invisibly" as part of ordinary workers. The article examines the nature and extent of exploitation and discrimination of elderly workers, particularly their confinement to the so-called "light" tasks. The central issue of comfortable retirement is also put under the spotlight. Aspects of pension and other terminal benefits are discussed in the light of general provision for old-age. The article grapples with the government's land reform programme and its adverse effects on farm workers who lack ethnic and nationality rights to own land. For many "foreign" workers, prospects of returning to countries of origin have become more remote by the years due to several factors, and, yet, women, children and the elderly were probably the worst affected by farm "invasions" that characterised the government's controversial "fast-track" land redistribution exercise since early 2000.

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This paper explores the experiences of Zimbabwean rural women forced to relocate to the city of Harare during the liberation war in the 1970s. Women found themselves squeezed between a repressive colonial government and coercive guerrilla armies. The accompanying war-induced violence from both sides of the combattants led to massive displacements as women and their families fled from the war-torn areas to urban centres like Harare. Within women’s stories of flight are reflections of gender relations in a war fought largely in the rural areas where women were the majority of the dwellers, and a war in which most of the combattants were male. Gender relations thus informed, and were influenced by the war. Women’s narratives also reveal the socio-economic and emotional costs of the war hardly acknowledged in the nationalist discourse about the liberation war. At the centre of these accounts is a revelation of resistance, courage, fear, and above all agency by rural women under very difficult circumstances.

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