In the early twentieth 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.
"An explicit and well-argued critique of the polarized debate on contemporary Zimbabwe by providing an alternative understanding of the conflict in terms of electoral politics, pursuit of material livelihoods, and forms of belonging."
Peter Gibbon, author of Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, and the Global Economy
"Makes a distinctive contribution to an emerging literature on labor in Africa, specificially in relation to farm workers... The reader is drawn into both their courageous struggles and their suffering, without the writing ever descending into pathos or melodrama. Blair Rutherford's in-depth knowledge of the wider literature on Zimbabwe further illuminates these events."
Pnina Werbner, author of The Making of an African Working Class
