Forms of power on commercial farms and power relations between white farm owners and black farmworkers in Zimbabwe have been explored by scholars such as Clarke (1977), Loewenson (1992), Amanor-Wilks (1995), Tandon (2001) and especially Rutherford (2001a). While most focus on the capitalist exploitation of farmworkers and forms of structural violence, Rutherford has gone beyond political-economy to understand power relations on farms in terms of the histories and complex forms of identity formation among both white farmers and black workers in pre- and post-independence Zimbabwe. However, the subtle and often obscured role of the "farmer's wife" in farm power relations, determined by the dynamics of a system Rutherford (2001a) has called "domestic government", has not been examined much in the literature. In this thesis I address this omission through an examination of the role of welfare initiatives and related activities intimately linked to domesticity and white "farmer's wives" within Rhodesian/Zimbabwean white settler society. I show that this "maternalistic" role was not only important in the colonial civilising and modernising endeavours of white farmers as they "cultivated" African fields, African workers and their own identities, but also became an important foundation on which post-independence welfare endeavours (linked to a new kind of civilising mission: that of neoliberal "civil society") were built. I then trace the impacts of the radical agrarian shifts introduced in 2000 with the "Fast-track Land Reform Programme" (FTLRP) on such interventions and on their beneficiaries, black farmworkers, as well as on the emergent power relations which farmworkers and dwellers now negotiate. Based on nine months of fieldwork, and on archival and library research, this multi-sited study takes a historical-ethnographic approach which pays attention to the longue durée and the entanglement of political-economic and gendered socio-cultural factors shaping power regimes and relations in rural Zimbabwe. The dissertation weaves together several strands of argument relating to the changing dynamics of power, welfare, modernity and belonging and how these changes are affecting white farmers and their wives, NGOs and (former) farmworkers and dwellers in contemporary Zimbabwe. It contributes to a fuller, more nuanced and gendered understanding of the (dynamic) nature of labour relations and the role of welfare and "improvement" endeavours on (former) commercial farms over the course of more than a century.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/15524 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Hartnack, Andrew Michael Carl |
| Contributors | Ross, Fiona C |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Humanities, Social Anthropology |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, Doctoral, PhD |
| Format | application/pdf |
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