‘My life got Lost’: Farm workers and displacement in Zimbabwe

Hartnack, Andrew

doi:10.1080/02589000500176032

Cited by 28 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…The first one is the destruction of the large-scale commercial agricultural sector. The decimation of the sector resulted in the displacement of over 300,000 farm workers and their families (Sachikonye 2003;Hartnack 2005). The dislocated farming communities ended up without livelihoods, and, for some of them, without homes.…”

Section: Land Reformmentioning

confidence: 98%

Of prosperity, ghost towns and havens: mining and urbanisation in Zimbabwe

Kamete¹

2012

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

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Section: Land Reformmentioning

confidence: 98%

Of prosperity, ghost towns and havens: mining and urbanisation in Zimbabwe

Kamete¹

2012

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

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“…For the majority of farmworkers who did not receive land, some were displaced by the violence (Sachikonye ; Hartnack , ), while others remained in the former commercial farming areas. Of the latter, Magaramombe () estimates that between 50 and 70 per cent of the former farmworker population remains on the farms on which they used to work or in other former commercial farming areas.…”

Section: Agrarian Labour In Zimbabwementioning

confidence: 99%

Organization and (De)mobilization of Farmworkers in Zimbabwe: Reflections on Trade Unions, NGOs and Political Parties

Rutherford

2014

Journal of Agrarian Change

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This paper examines the 'labour question' in light of the wider agrarian questions, with a focus on the ways to understand activities of trade unions, NGOs and political parties as key actors in seeking to mobilize farmworkers. Drawing on research on farmworkers in Zimbabwe and engaging with literature concerning farm labour in the drastic changes to large-scale agriculture in this country since 2000, the paper emphasizes the importance of examining the wider terrain of politics that influences the actions and abilities of extrafarm organizations to operate with farmworkers. Through critically engaging with the wider literature concerning the political economy of farm labour, the paper proposes the importance of attending to what it calls the 'cultural politics of belonging', which strongly shapes both the forms of attachment of farmworkers and farm dwellers to the farms and the strategies of mobilization and demobilization taken by these organizations. Through attending to such relationships and the wider terrain of politics, this paper proposes an alternative analysis to those currently found in the polarized literature on farmworkers and the Fast Track Land Redistribution Programme in Zimbabwe.

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“…Such claims have occurred on different fronts: between different claimants to land; between claimants and people already living on the land, be they families already resettled or former farm workers continuing to reside at their old place of employment; and between the above‐mentioned groups and state bureaucrats and ministers seeking to create some normalcy and order and potential favouritism of one claimant over another (Marongwe, 2003). 6 These territorialization tactics are especially apparent in the case of displaced farm workers whose labour new settler farmers try to secure for themselves through various means: by forcing them to pay rent for their homes in the farm's labour compound (or ‘farm village’), by providing subsidized food on condition of working on the farms, or by using force and the police to displace people from informal settlements (Hartnack, 2005; SC and FCTZ, 2001). In May 2007, the Minister of Public Service, Labour, and Social Welfare even declared that ‘ex‐farm workers still living in farm compounds, who are unwilling to work for the new owners, would be required to leave’ ( Financial Gazette , 2007).…”

Section: Jambanja and Changing Cultural Politics Of Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

Rutherford

2008

Development and Change

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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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‘My life got Lost’: Farm workers and displacement in Zimbabwe

Cited by 28 publications

References 4 publications

Of prosperity, ghost towns and havens: mining and urbanisation in Zimbabwe

Of prosperity, ghost towns and havens: mining and urbanisation in Zimbabwe

Organization and (De)mobilization of Farmworkers in Zimbabwe: Reflections on Trade Unions, NGOs and Political Parties

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

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