Gender justice, land and the agrarian question in Southern Africa

Abstract

In the curious interface between donors, national governments and consultants that defines the policy agenda around agrarian issues in Southern Africa today, the security of women’s land rights has become a central preoccupation.1 At one level it appears as a consensus issue, driven by the antipoverty agenda and human rights advocacy. Heightened by gender-and generationally skewed patterns of AIDS mortality, who could oppose the proposition that rural women who cultivate land should have access to it, or that widows should be able to claim the property to which their labour has contributed? Yet behind these apparently uncontroversial appeals to gender justice liefacets of the postcolonial agrarian question in Southern Africa. The contributors to this volume do not necessarily share precisely the same vision of what the agrarian question is, or on what currently constitutes an acceptable range of answers to it, but all focus on its three elements: class, politics and accumulation. They further agree that it is a strategic question that links the politics of class alliances to processes of accumulation, agricultural production to industry, and country to city. Moreover, most contributors to this book would also argue that the agrarian question of the twenty-first century does not concern the transition from precapitalist modes of production tocapitalism, but rather the position of rural people and agricultural production within global capitalism. The contradictions of contemporary capitalism have given rise to a renewal of non-capitalist forms of production, downward pressures on wages, informality and unemployment. The implication of this position is a radical rejection of all analytical oppositions: capitalist versus precapitalist, market versus non-marketed, traditional versus modern, formal versus informal. Each of these oppositions captures part of the descriptive empirical reality, but analytically they are – and this must be stressed – interdependent. The postcolonial agrarian question in Southern Africa raises three parti-cularly thorny questions. What is to be done about the enormous economic inequality, not just of income but of conditions of living, that is the heritage of the regional system of migrant labour? What is to be done about the continuing racial divide in land ownership, particularly in South Africa and Zimbabwe, where the political weight of the question seems to go beyond its economic importance? Finally, what is to be done about the link between forms of landed property and governance expressed in the divide between customary and freehold statutory tenure, between ‘citizen and subject’ (Mamdani 1996)? It may seem anachronistic to suggest that the literature on the agrarianquestion and the issues it raises in Southern Africa could provide any guidance in the debate on women’s land rights. Historically, gender relations have received short shrift in Marxist discussions of rural property rights, so one might not expect much help. However, gender is clearly implicated in all three aspects of the agrarian question, whether class, politics or accumulation, although protagonists have not always been willing to recognize that this is so. Moreover, the rejection of radical oppositions and the stress on analytical interdependence has long been understood by those working on the political economy of gender. The boundary between reproductive labour and the productive labour that formally produces surplus value is extremely fluid. Although the preoccupation of capital is necessarily with the sphere of marketed production, the dynamics of capital accumulation also depend on how non-marketed work affects the real wage and the prices of commodities that enter the circuit of capital. Above all, from the perspective of labour, a livelihood does not depend on wage income alone, for it includes the unmarketed labour of women, children and men. There is, in short, a need to both engender the agrarian question and bring the issues raised by the agrarian question into the analysis of gender relations. If such is the case, then, the debate on women’s land rights in Southern Africa needs to be reassessed in light of the concerns of the agrarian question. This chapter argues that the issue of women’s land rights has beendeployed in the policy discourse on agrarian change in Southern Africa to reinforce the moral claims of a liberal capitalist project that misrepresents and simplifies the political and economic history of the region. It discusses the ways in which a class-based understanding yields more complex andvaried questions about the relations between gender, land and livelihood. It also suggests, however, that the liberal misconstrual of gender relations has been facilitated by the avoidance of gender issues in the Marxist analysis of accumulation, class and agrarian politics. These have, I think, particular importance for what is arguably the central concern of a critical Marxist political economy in Southern Africa: constructing a politically viable counter-hegemonic response to the agrarian question, one that will challenge market fundamentalism in a way that liberalism cannot be expected to do.