In 1994, apartheid rule collapsed in South Africa, and went away with most of the rigid structures that had circumscribed the movement, and arguably the entire lives of black people. In a haste to close this chapter in history, major intellectual voices in southern Africa-focused social sciences offered the last, if not the penultimate, word in the study of black labour migrancy, a favoured subject of research for much of the twentieth century (see, for example, Crush, Jeeves, and Yudelman 1991; Moodie 1994). Maxim Bolt’s book, Zimbabwe’s migrants and South Africa’s border farms, which insists on the continued relevance of (labour) migration in southern Africa, may at first glance appear as an anachronism. However, it is a welcome rejuvenation of granular analysis, in which a case is made for reinterpreting labour migrancy and the moral economy of work under postcolonial and neoliberal conditions.
With the experienced instinct of a capable anthropologist, Bolt’s work is thickly descriptive. Zimbabwe’s migrants and South Africa’s border farms describes people making a semblance of stable lives amid transient and uncertain circumstances on the fruit-exporting Grootplaas Estates on the border of Zimbabwe and South Africa. The book ‘explores the lives of migrants, black farm workers and their dependants, and of white farmers and managers, as they intersect on the border’ (139). It focuses on white farmers, some of whom, in their antipathy towards black rule, escaped Zimbabwe for South Africa in the early 1980s (14). Their employees are mostly black Zimbabweans who moved southwards in the wake of their country’s post-independence crises. In addition to archival excavations, Bolt had 17 months of ethnographic immersion, living and working among the black employees and having long chats over tea with the white employers. This delicately balanced positionality, between employees and employers, blacks and whites, influences the cautionary tone (too cautionary, to the point of evasiveness about the inequalities and racial politics that still characterise southern Africa’s agriculture, a point I raise later in this review) which the book adopts. The result, nonetheless, is enviable ethnography that straddles the literature of labour migration, with displacement (forced migration) on one side, and the meaning of work on the other.
The main argument of the book is: ‘for people facing uncertain futures in current regional [southern Africa] upheavals and global capitalism, workplaces are lifeplaces’ (5). The few remaining places of wage employment are hubs where people find and experience some reprieve from the uncertainty of contemporary capitalism, and indeed from the ubiquity of southern Africa’s crises. On the one hand, the white farmers hold their positions on the border as ‘working enterprises’ in which they commit themselves and fulfil individual ‘life-defining projects’ (54). However, in the face of what the author calls ‘post-apartheid hostility to white farming, and the liberalisation of agriculture’, they exert their efforts as ‘shrewd business strategies’ ready to be disposed of as the political and economic situation dictates (61–63). On the other hand, the black employees, particularly permanent ones, embrace the possibility to assert and experience permanence at the farms, bringing stability to lifeworlds that could otherwise be peripatetic and unstable. They adapt to the structures of border and workplace control and authority or sometimes undercut them – building relationships of mutual dependency among themselves and with state representatives such as soldiers. A further argument, developed in a twist of irony, is that stability may be sought not necessarily in the traditional core of capitalist development (for example, metropolitan centres such as Johannesburg) but on the oft-marginalised periphery. Border regions, generally seen as spaces of porosity, instability, informality and other kinds of marginalities, turn out to be ‘centres of gravity, islands of wage labour in a sea of informal arrangements’ (5). Nevertheless, as the author emphasises, this book is not a story of dichotomies, but a synthesis of the oxymoronic dialectics that gird the paradoxes of neoliberal capitalism in southern Africa – fragmentation intersects with solidity, ephemerality with stability, paternalism with management, continuity with change, all in unpredictable and multidirectional ways.
Two concepts anchor the book’s argumentation: ‘accidental neoliberalism’ and ‘mediated paternalism’. The author uses ‘accidental neoliberalism’ to explain the experiences and responses of farmers to the liberalisation of the agricultural markets after state subsidies, protective marketing boards and other privileges fell away in the 1990s (23–25). It also refers to how the farmers adopt flexible business strategies, ever ready to abandon the farms, given the region’s omnipresent political and economic upheavals, and the loudening calls to redress colonial and apartheid land injustices. Bolt argues that instead of seeing the farmers’ flexibility as blanket neoliberalism at play, it should rather be seen as unintentional reactions to the vagaries of capitalism, and the post-apartheid circumstances.
Closely connected is the concept of ‘mediated paternalism’ which explains the changing workplace organisation, especially the interaction between old-style ‘paternalism’ and new notions of ‘management’ that are informed by liberal economics. Bolt writes: ‘[s]queezed by a liberal buyers’ market on the one hand and post-apartheid minimum wage and housing legislation on the other, they [the white farmers] are increasingly unable or unwilling to continue promoting themselves as their workers’ fatherly protectors’ (159). In the resultant suppleness of the whites’ authority and control, senior black male workers step in, moving between the now purportedly distant farm owners and the mass of other black employees. New vertical dependencies (and divisions), hierarchies and other arrangements emerge in the workplace, which generally benefit both the farmers and senior black employees.
It is correct to say that these innovative concepts valuably problematise universal understandings of neoliberal capitalism. However, perhaps out of caution, or intellectual legerdemain, they appear to sidestep the realities of racism and inequalities which pervade South African commercial agricultural contexts. What is apparent in the book is that the farmer-capitalists’ expansion and accumulation, and indeed flexibility, are possible mainly because of the availability of cheap and racialised labour. In a way, describing the farmers’ experiences as ‘accidental’ is putting them on the same plane as their employees, inevitably airbrushing out the immense inequalities, and even exonerating them from the latter’s sustained vulnerability. This point by no means blames the farmers for all the horrors of life that send Zimbabweans to the border in the first place, but that the farmers take advantage is not accidental. As shown in Chapters 2 and 3, which discuss the farmers’ histories and aspirations, they are active and conscious architects and proponents of their capitalist destinies, often manipulating racial, cultural and other perceived differences. What is more, ‘mediated paternalism’ can be seen as one among several conscious technologies used to manipulate differences and work to the benefit of farmer-capitalists in their pursuit of unlimited expansion – something only possible under neoliberal conditions.
Apart from the preceding criticism, the book is a testament to the endurance of regional labour migrancy in southern Africa, manifesting as it does, in clearly distinct – but also disturbingly similar – guises from the colonial and apartheid past. The prose is clear and unpretentious, accessible to anyone keen to learn the art of ethnography.