Madness, Corruption and Exile: On Zimbabwe's Remaining White Commercial Farmers

Abstract

Since the launch by the Zimbabwean government in 2000 of its ‘fast-track land reform programme’, many white farmers have been expelled from their farms. This article focuses not on the evictions themselves, but rather on what their effects reveal about the social order of the white farming community, its values and changing ideas about otherness and belonging. The effects of displacement are analysed indirectly through an examination of those farmers who have managed to remain on their land. In particular, this article considers the social meaning of the opprobrium faced by some of those who are still on their farms. In the cases considered here, this opprobrium takes two forms: accusations of corruption and labelling of people as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’. Those who manage to remain on their farms are seen as a threat to a social order that is based on separation between white farmers and black Africans. The racial cohabitation that currently takes place on some farms is experienced by the rest of the white farming community as a form of symbolic, social and mental disorder, a betrayal of the values and ‘habitus’ (to borrow from Bourdieu) of their community. Opprobrium can then be understood as a final attempt by some members of the white community to contain this disorder. Indeed, many of those who have left their farms but stayed on in Zimbabwe have tried to keep the values of the white community intact. They are maintaining these values in the face of the community's disintegration as a result of farm occupations, which have put them in a position akin to internal exile.