Post-displacement livelihoods in mining communities: The politics of precarity and everyday uncertainty in Marange, Zimbabwe

Abstract

Drawing on an ethnography amongst displaced Chiadzwa people, this article examines their everyday lives and lived experiences of displacement and how their livelihoods were affected by forced displacement. We explore the meanings attached to displacement, and how displacement affect(ed) everyday life and socialities. We also examine the ways in which the displaced Chiadzwa people dealt with uncertainties and precariousness due to mining-induced displacement. We triangulate Agamben's concepts of ‘bare life’ and ‘camp’ as well as James Scott's ‘weapons of the weak’ as our analytical lens which brings the creative ways in which the Chiadzwa people responded to the existential challenges brought about by displacements. We argue that the creation of neoliberal mining enclaves at Chiadzwa created exclusionary terrains of disspossesion and led to multiple forms of precarities marked by physical and socio-emotional displacement(s). The internally displaced Chiadzwa people live(d) in poverty, destitution and ‘social death’; what Agamben called ‘bare life’ embodying a condition akin to ‘homo sacer’. Qualitative data were collected through participant observation, in-depth interviews, informal conversations and secondary sources.