Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics - Softcover

Rutherford, Blair

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025302403X ISBN 13: 9780253024039

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2016

Synopsis

In the early twenty-first century, white-owned farms in Zimbabwe were subject to large-scale occupations by black urban dwellers in an increasingly violent struggle between national electoral politics, land reform, and contestations over democracy. Were the black occupiers being freed from racist bondage as cheap laborers by the state-supported massive land redistribution, or were they victims of state violence who had been denied access to their homes, social services, and jobs? Blair Rutherford examines the unequal social and power relations shaping the lives, livelihoods, and struggles of some of the farm workers during this momentous period in Zimbabwean history. His analysis is anchored in the time he spent on a horticultural farm just east of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, that was embroiled in the tumult of political violence associated with jambanja, the democratization movement. Rutherford complicates this analysis by showing that there was far more in play than political oppression by a corrupt and authoritarian regime and a movement to rectify racial and colonial land imbalances, as dominant narratives would have it. Instead, he reveals, farm worker livelihoods, access to land, gendered violence, and conflicting promises of rights and sovereignty played a more important role in the political economy of citizenship and labor than had been imagined.

About this title

About the Author

Blair Rutherford is professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology (cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies, the Institute of Political Economy, and Department of Geography and Environmental Studies) at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 025302403X
• ISBN 13: 9780253024039
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 294