The law of the land: party and state in rural Zimbabwe

Journal of Agrarian Change

2014

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.

Section: Agrarian Labour In Zimbabwementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Journal of Agrarian Change

2014

“…By the time I began to research farm workers in 1992, these committees were either defunct, or operated solely to help management on the farms. Since the mid‐1980s most of these interventions had subsided as ruling party activists and politicians became less interested in challenging the mode of belonging of domestic government on commercial farms (Ladley and Lan, 1985), particularly for those who became commercial farmers themselves.…”

Section: Domestic Government In Post‐colonial Zimbabwementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the first years of the 1980s, there was a marked presence of 'outsiders' seeking to intervene in labour relations, in stark contrast to the colonial period when very few government officials were interested in farm workers, and trade unions for them were prohibited. Trade union and ZANU (PF) activists (who were sometimes the same individuals) and Department of Labour officials made their presence known on many commercial farms (Ladley and Lan, 1985). They sought to enforce new labour legislation, bring commercial farms and farm workers under ruling party control, establish legitimacy for competing unions and, at times, simply to extract resources from workers and/or farmers (Rutherford, forthcoming).…”

Section: Rights and Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2008

Development and Change

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.

“…After it won the first postcolonial elections in 1980, ZANU (PF) rapidly expanded its cells throughout the countryside. These cells, later called village committees, played a variety of roles on the farms in the early 1980s, from facilitating the presence of trade union officials to demanding a say in the running of the farms (Ladley and Lan 1985;Rutherford 2001b). The party's presence in most commercial farming areas, however, soon became relatively dormant save for the parliamentary elections held every five years when it sought to impose its power over farm workers through a combination of fear and authority.…”

Section: Targeting White Farmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Desired Publics, Domestic Government, and Entangled Fears: On the Anthropology of Civil Society, Farm Workers, and White Farmers in Zimbabwe

2004

Cultural Anthropology

Why did you join the farm development committee?" I asked Mai' Loveness, 1 a woman in her late forties, and Shadrek, a man in his mid-thirties. We were sitting on the deep couch of her living room decorated tastefully with pictures from magazines, wall-hangings, and framed certificates from a number of health training institutes in Zimbabwe. The room was in a small three-room house allocated to her on the farm where she was the farm health worker and a preschool teacher for the children of the over two hundred farm workers who worked and lived on this successful tobacco-and maize-growing commercial farm in Mashonaland East Province, Zimbabwe. It is July 2000.The ensuing actions speak to the intersecting forms of power, desire, and fear that have been involved in the promotion of "civil society" amongst farm workers in Zimbabwe. By critically examining this development intervention and its entanglement in the unfolding political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe, I address the racialized and gendered politics of place of farm workers within the nation, the practice of "civil society" in Africa, and the positioning of an anthropologist within these fields. Let me return to the house on the farm compound."I think we farm workers need to improve ourselves and the FADCO [farm development committee] enables us to take control over our living conditions and communicate with the murungu [white farm owner]," Mai' Loveness answered, looking over toward her younger co-member who was also the chairman of the FADCO. Shadrek cleared his throat and glanced at Mai' Loveness and an older man sitting in one of the armchairs observing. "It builds on the important help the murungu here provides us-the electricity in most of the compound houses, the free trips to the [health] clinic, and the like. And it can Cultural Anthropology 19(1):122-153.