Working on the Margins

This is the first ethnographic analysis, from the colonial past to the postcolonial present, of those who live and work on predominantly white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe - almost a fifth of the national population. The land question, rural development and labour exploitation are re-thought through a nuanced cultural analysis of the lives of farm workers, their families and their white bosses.

Building on Foucault's concept of 'government', the book addresses the arrangements of power, points of struggle and strategies of accumulation on commercial farms and nearby communal lands. The author suggestively analyses the historical and current dimensions of the marginalization of farm workers through state administrative practices of development and farm-based forms of authority, farmer paternalism and newly invented patriarchy, and locates strategies for amending traditions of domestic government within existing social practices and social identities.