Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms: the roots of impermanence by Maxim Bolt (review)

The southern banks of the Limpopo, the river marking the boundary between Zimbabwe and South Africa, are an area where white farmers have found settlement and established large-scale farms. Here, they employ hundreds of black Zimbabwean migrants, who, fleeing economic crisis in Zimbabwe, risked their lives crossing the dangerous Limpopo River to get a job in the border zone or beyond. Among those migrants are highly educated individuals with middle-class identities and aspirations – teachers and engineers – as well as people from the lower classes of Zimbabwean society. All share an experience of displacement. The Limpopo farms have become hubs where different, internally varied groups of people – white farm owners, seasonal Zimbabwean workers and permanent Zimbabwean workers – collaborate within a daily work regime and live together on, albeit in different sections of, the same farm. Bolt’s book provides a detailed account of the lives and relationships of those living on one farm: Grootplaas.

The context of Grootplaas is one of uncertainty and impermanence. For Zimbabwean migrants, joining the workforce means gaining, albeit temporarily, a (semi-)legal status and relative safety compared with the pre-employment days of economic degradation back home and the threat of the South African border police. However, employment is temporary for the seasonal workers, and even the jobs of the ‘permanent’ workforce have become more uncertain in recent years. The liberalization of agriculture and the discovery of coal in the ground under Grootplaas, among other things, have led the current generation of farm owners to adopt a different agricultural approach. They now increasingly see – and present – their agricultural endeavours in terms of a ‘managerial idiom’; they keep their relationships with workers strictly professional and take little responsibility for their lives beyond the farm. Such a ‘businesslike’ perception opposes the more ‘paternalist’ vision of agriculture of the first generation of border farmers and instigates the idea that farm owners could easily decide to continue farming elsewhere if necessary. While this idiomatic change may help perpetuate the agricultural projects of white farm owners in general, it renders the future of one farm, Grootplaas, and of the people living on it, more uncertain.

Nevertheless, ‘workplaces are lifeplaces’ (p. 5), according to Bolt, who shows that, despite a context of uncertainty, border farms are hubs of relative stability. At Grootplaas, different groups of people create a sense of permanence – they take ‘root’– on the farm, albeit in different ways and to different degrees. A managerial agricultural vision, which de-personalizes work relationships and instigates a perception of labour as merely a commodity, allows white farm owners, under pressure to corporatize, to maintain a perception of geographical flexibility while continuing their work on the Limpopo banks. A surplus of disembedded Zimbabwean migrants crossing the Limpopo, whose social statuses may easily be obfuscated by their capability to work in a context far away from home, and one that renders them vulnerable, helps instigate such an approach. However, rather than keeping workers detached and fragmented from social life, Bolt shows that the very capitalist work regimes that a managerial idiom helps make possible create new relationships. Those at the positive end of such hierarchies – permanent workers and supervisors – are keen to maintain their status in compound life. They root themselves on the farm as they invest in their residences, create networks of people in and around the border farms, and occasionally even enter ‘farm marriages’ (p. 129). Such investments are a consequence of people coming to terms with their new lives and statuses on the farm, and perhaps, although less explicitly emphasized by Bolt, to further enhance their authority on the farm.

Inspired by the situational analyses of the Manchester School, Bolt illustrates how processes of rooting, and the associated relationships and idioms – managerial versus paternalist – refract and are produced by the border zone’s wider political economy. However, while making such inferences, Bolt is keen to emphasize...