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

Abstract

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.

Mining and Environmental Rights in Zimbabwe. A Case of Zvishavane District

“…Over the last decade, the political and economic disasters in Zimbabwe have constrained the livelihoods of the people both in urban and rural areas of the country (Rutherford, 2014;Scoones et al, 2012). The increasing economic crisis faced by the country left limited employment opportunities in the formal sector (Rutherford, 2017;Mabhena, 2012).…”

“The Cultural Politics of Politics”: Macro and Micro Entanglements in the Work of Blair Rutherford

“…Over the ensuing decade and a half, Rutherford published a series of articles in which he built on and extended his ideas, outlining how white-owned commercial farms could be understood as "mini-colonies" (2008, and introducing the notion of "modes of belonging"-"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" (ibid., 79). Showing that domestic government was the prevailing conditional mode of belonging experienced by farm workers before the year 2000, he demonstrated how this mode was virtually destroyed by fast track land reform, and also how new territorialized modes of belonging were emerging on former commercial farms, providing a fresh "terrain of struggle" (Rutherford 2014) for former commercial farm workers to negotiate.…”