The everyday violence of eviction

Abstract

abstractIn the first ten years after the transition to democracy in 1994 over one million farmworkers, farm dwellers and labour tenants were displaced and evicted from white commercial farms across South Africa. This briefing focuses on the violence of farm evictions and its impact on farmworker women in South Africa. It views these forced removals as a violent dislocation, uprooting and separation of farm workers and farm dwellers from land and their livelihoods. It contextualises the evictions in terms of commercial farming and the apartheid legacy and identifies the current legislation relating to farm evictions. The ongoing evictions highlights the inadequate nature of these policies. It illustrates the everyday violence these women experience by drawing on interviews, conversations, reports from farmworkers and research as well as the author’s observations as an activist working on farms and with farm workers and farm dwellers mainly in the Western Cape, but also in the Eastern Cape, Free State and Limpopo for the past 10 years.