The frontier revisited: displacement, land and identity among farm labourers in the Sundays River Valley

Agricultural Frontiers as Controversial Place-making Territories

“…The founder of Sinop, Ênio Pipino, famously declared that Gleba Celeste 'was a green world, sleeping, in the loneliness of the Amazon' (in Souza, 2006: 144) and also that he was 'planting civilisations' and creating a liveable Amazon by opening roads and clearing forests and jungles (Pipino, 1982). Since then, the vector of displacement underpinning place-making continued unabated, as an persistent phenomenon based upon dispossession and constant movement rather than upon stability, through which different layers of belonging, ties to land and group identity are revealed (Connor, 2012).…”

Borders of Mutuality, Frontiers of Resistance: Paternalism and Working Identities of Farm Labourers in the Sundays River Valley, South Africa

“…4 Moreover, many workers in the Sundays River Valley who are now considered 'coloured', have had very similar experiences of land sharing and ancestral roots as their 'Xhosa' counterparts, particularly in mission settlements in the area, but also on freehold land, either as owners, labourers or tenants. It was particularly the existence of mixed settlements in Graaff-Reinet (Smith 1976:198, Ross 1986 during the late 19 th century, in Uitenhage (Adler 1994, Swilling 1994, Cherry 2004) and even in Kirkwood (Grant 1993, Connor 2012) until 1960, that provided opportunities for a variety of different people to live together and 'own' land. In these regions, stricter influx control measures controlling the number of black people resident in towns and cities were only enforced during the 1950s, so that sharecroppers and tenants living in these so-called 'black spots' managed to hold onto land until 1970.…”

“…These, as well the methods of land use followed by many itinerant famers, which was marked by an absence of grazing camps and fencing, and a sharing of arable land, encouraged cooperative ties between residents. 6 The Sundays River Valley is thus a typical frontier (Connor 2012), where differences between people have become institutionally separated, but are very difficult to ascertain in practice. It is here that the idea of a multi-cultural frontiersman or woman emerges, who as Igor Kopytoff (Rösler and Wendl 1999:13) writes, was not located at the margins of society, but on the margins itself, between different worlds and cultures.…”

Place-making at the frontier of Brazilian agribusiness

“…The head of the colonisation company, Ê nio Pipino, famously declared that Gleba Celeste ''was a green world, sleeping, in the loneliness of the Amazon'' (in Souza 2006, p. 144) and also that he was ''planting civilisations'' and creating a liveable Amazon by opening roads and clearing forests and jungles (Pipino 1982). The vector of displacement underpinning place-making continued unabated, as an persistent phenomenon based upon dispossession and constant movement rather than upon stability, through which different layers of belonging, ties to land and group identity could be revealed (Connor 2012).…”