Ambiguous Bonds: Relationships between Farm Workers and Land Beneficiaries after Zimbabwe’s Land Reform Programme

Abstract

In this article, I examine the complex interplay between authority, land rights and belonging in new resettlement areas as revealed through relationships between ‘landed’ beneficiaries and ‘landless’ farm workers living on farms a decade after Zimbabwe’s land reform programme. Land beneficiaries and farm workers shared ambiguous moral bonds: land beneficiaries relied on farm workers to make their land productive, but the two groups were also closely connected socially and shared complex relations of dependency. However, in moments of conflict, land beneficiaries reconfigured farm workers not only as ‘ethnic others’ but as unrighteous beings, lacking in moral substance. Working through a land-cum-labour dispute between a small-scale land beneficiary and a group of farm workers that was taken to a local chief’s court, I argue that such discourses of moral lack can be read as attempts by land beneficiaries to assert and naturalise their authority over farm workers. Despite having been largely excluded from state land allocations, farm workers maintained a sense of entitlement to live on farms and own land left to them by their previous white employers. Land beneficiaries’ distancing of farm workers was used to try and delegitimise this sense of entitlement, contributing to the production and reproduction of a rural underclass of farm workers excluded not only from land, but also from basic citizenship rights.