Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe by Blair Rutherford

Author:Blair Rutherford [Rutherford, Blair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Agriculture & Food
ISBN: 9780253024077
Google: 9nDBDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-12-19T05:27:23+00:00

Rights, Land, and Citizenship: Views from the Musososo

Many of the women workers drew on marital metaphors in describing their conflict and in explaining their understanding of rights and justice. In early December 1999, I talked with a number of the women at the musososo about their next steps and whether they would stay at the camp or not. Pedzi said that in terms of rights, it was like being a wife chased away from home for being in love with another man: “She would know that she is wrong and would return to her family. However, if a wife is chased away because her husband wants another woman, she instead goes to her tete [her father’s sister] to ask her to talk to her husband. They will then negotiate. And thus we are waiting for the court to come and tell us to pack our things and go home or to go back to Upfumi.” In other words, she had a valid claim of belonging with her husband, and she could seek intervention by relatives to reinforce that claim. Agatha agreed and said, “If you know you are wrong, you leave. If you have been wronged, you stay, even if it kills you.” To assert rights in marriage can be painful, they implied, but one had to do so to bolster one’s claims in the relationship.

From this perspective, they saw management as negligent in its unequal relationship with workers. Rather than leave the relationship, they drew in the relevant interveners, the Labor Tribunal taking on the role of tete (father’s sister) here, to try to repair the damaged relationship. The aim was not to sever the relationship but to persuade the dominant party to recognize the wrongs it committed against the weaker party.

Upon listening to this conversation, Nyasha reiterated a more liberal juridical view, asserting, “I know my rights. I acquired them through independence and learned about them through communicating with others and the teachings we got from GAPWUZ. Through all this I have learned my rights.” Here, the workers qua “workers” have rights, and they need to assert them if they are being infringed upon. In other words, the subject (workers) has rights as a self-possessed entity. She then extended this metaphor of rights to make a more nationalist claim: “As a farm worker, I now know my rights. This land belongs to us and so we should stay here. It is our land.” Nyasha was echoing statements made within ongoing wider public debates and actions concerning land redistribution and the rights of black Zimbabweans to land taken from them by white colonizers. Yet the subject position of “black Zimbabweans” has not necessarily included farm workers.

By the late 1990s, the demand that farm workers also were eligible for any land the government took from white farmers was part of wider policy and media discussions. Yet it rubbed against the dominant way in which farm workers were understood as a represented community: as foreigners with no rights to Zimbabwe other than being cheap labor.

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