An unsettled belonging: Zimbabwean farm workers in Limpopo Province, South Africa

Abstract

The emplacement of displaced Zimbabweans depends on the particular political economies and the modes of belonging operating at the sites at which they find themselves. This is shown by examining the situation of Zimbabweans working or seeking work on commercial farms in northern Limpopo Province, South Africa, in the border zone with Zimbabwe. As Zimbabweans flee their country in part to find a cash currency that has more value than the Zimbabwean dollar, their Zimbabwean citizenship gives them a particular symbolic currency in these jobs. Many of the border zone farmers are keen to employ them as their desperation for work typically predisposes them to work harder and often for lower wages than South Africans. Yet this latter currency is also shaped by public debates and institutional practices regarding ‘Zimbabweans’ in the wider political economy of South Africa, which in turn inform the circulation, conditions, and vulnerabilities of these Zimbabweans on the farms.

Keywords:

• migration
• South Africa
• Zimbabwe
• citizenship
• farm workers
• sovereignty

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support for this research. This article was initially presented as a paper to the AEGIS (Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies) European Conference on African Studies in Leiden in July 2007. I am grateful for comments from the audience, the two anonymous reviewers, and in particular the co-organisers of the panel, Graeme Rodgers and Amanda Hammar, who provided many insightful and fruitful suggestions. Any deficiencies are my own.

Notes

1. I thank Amanda Hammar for this point.

2. No Zimbabwean mentioned encountering any representatives of chiefly authorities in the borderland communal areas.

3. This did not include South African residents that had enforced claims under the Extension of Security of Tenure Act.

4. Game farmers tend to have few employees and are thus less reliant on Zimbabweans (though I met some whose small workforce were mostly, if not almost exclusively, Zimbabwean).

5. This court case amplified divisions among (white) farmers and their various farmers’ associations, of which the quotation from the white game farmer against Zimbabweans is an indication.

6. Many more farmers have subsequently received corporate permits for Zimbabwean farm workers (personal communication from Norma Kriger, and HRW 2007).

7. This term ‘zone of exception’ has a family resemblance to Giorgio Agamben's concept of ‘state of exception’, which refers to the marginalisation of certain individuals, groups, and others from the political community by sovereign authority as a way to help constitute the political community itself (see Hansen and Stepputat 2005). Such ‘inclusive exclusion’ is fruitful in Agamben's fecund theorisation of sovereignty (Agamben 1998), but I find the theorisation to be somewhat ahistorical and not too helpful in my analyses of the practices of sovereignty.

8. At the same time, workers and SANDF officers both told me that the latter no longer came in to deport workers when the farmer no longer needed their seasonal labour and before they were paid their final wages, as had happened in the past (Crush 2000a, 9).

9. This widely condemned programme resulted in the displacement of what the United Nations (2005) estimated to be over 700,000 people.