In 1999 Mrs Gambanga moved to Harare from Gutu communal area, where she had been born. At first she worked as a domestic in Msasa Park, a high-income residential area. By 2001 she was living in Kuwadzana Extension, a formally planned, low-income, high-density area on the western edge of the city. She was married to a security guard who earned Z$6,800 per month but food, transport and rent alone cost them Z$4,820. She was no longer working and was a home-carer. When asked about her standard of living in Harare and her views on the pros and cons of urban life, she expressed strong dissatisfaction. According to her, there was not much difference between employment opportunities in Harare and those in the communal areas, for ‘unemployment is a problem everywhere’. She was worried about the ‘price hikes on everything’. She felt that her standard of living would be better in the rural areas of Gutu. They had some land there and had managed to produce maize and groundnuts the previous year. This rural production was important to them and had contributed to their cash income and to their food consumption in Harare. Mrs Gambanga said she and her husband planned to leave Harare soon – in less than a year. In Gutu she felt she had ‘opportunities to survive out of my own effort’. Another reason for leaving Harare was that her husband's income was ‘so little’.
In 2001 I conducted the fourth round of a series of surveys on migrants to Harare; the previous surveys were held in 1985, 1988 and 1994.Footnote 1 The case study above is drawn from the last survey round, during which over four hundred migrants were interviewed, and is indicative of what had become, by that year, an overwhelming set of understandings about their life in Harare: that it was too expensive and risky economically to survive in for long. For the vast majority, the plan was that they would leave the city at some future date (sometimes clearly specified but quite often only vaguely indicated) – usually, but not always, to take up farming in the rural areas. This was one year after the fast-track land reform programme started and the Zimbabwean economy was already in crisis. None of those involved, researchers like myself or respondents, would have believed at that time how much worse things were to become – that in a few years people would be buying basic goods with ‘bricks’ of Zimbabwean dollars bound in elastic bands; that cholera would break out in the High Density Areas; that every backyard shack in the city would have been destroyed, displacing tens of thousands; and that the majority of the city's residents would be unable to buy mealie meal (the country's staple cereal) through ‘normal’ outlets but would be using parallel markets (which were much more expensive) and other sources such as special aid programmes (see, for example, Journal of Southern African Studies 2010; Potts Reference Potts2006a; Solidarity Peace Trust 2005; 2006). Yet by 2001 a threshhold had already been passed in Harare in terms of certain key parameters relating to people's livelihoods and living standards and their perspectives on city life.
A key aspect of these migrant surveys over the years was to investigate the nature of migrants' rural–urban linkages. The significance of such links has come to be appreciated increasingly in mainstream urban livelihood literature from the 1990s (for example, Tacoli Reference Tacoli, de Bruijn, van Dijk and Foeken2001; Reference Tacoli2006; Environment and Urbanization 1998; 2003) although their importance has been widely acknowledged in much academic literature on sub-Saharan Africa for decades. Such linkages include circular migration and during this time the role and nature of such migration shifted – but often not in the ways predicted by unilinear transition models. It is arguable, however, that the changes have been predictable nevertheless. In broad terms, there have been shifts to longer-term family migration when urban economies and welfare have been improving. This has included some permanent migration, some working-lifetime migration and eventual return, and a whole range of other temporal patterns. However, when urban economies and living standards decline severely, there have been further adaptations in migration patterns which include shorter periods spent in town and a general increase in the rate of out-migration. These adaptations can be traced across sub-Saharan Africa as the impacts of structural adjustment policies worked their way through the continent (see Potts Reference Potts and Rakodi1997; Reference Potts, Bryceson and Potts2006b; Reference Potts2010; for Zambia, see Ferguson Reference Ferguson1999). In general terms these changes reflect a reassertion of the economic security aspects of rural assets and livelihoods for urban people.
The purpose of this article is to present qualitative evidence of the way in which such shifts in migrants’ livelihoods and migration trajectories have occurred in one particular African city: Harare in Zimbabwe. The artice also seeks to show how the impacts of urban economic decline are experienced in very different ways by different groups of people. In the 1980s and 1990s the research on migrants to Harare had found that rural–urban links remained very active, including expectations among the majority of those surveyed that they would eventually leave the city and return to rural areas (Potts and Mutambirwa Reference Potts and Mutambirwa1990; Potts with Mutambirwa Reference Potts and Mutambirwa1998; Potts Reference Potts2000). It was also clear that important economic turning points had been reached in 1991, with the imposition of ESAP (Zimbabwe's Economic Structural Adjustment Policy), and 1997, when a budgetary crisis led to a massive devaluation of the Zimbabwean dollar (already much weakened by SAPs). The impact of these events greatly undermined many elements of the formal urban economy throughout Zimbabwe. Real incomes were very significantly reduced, de-industrialization occurred and the informal sector expanded. Poverty became increasingly prevalent in urban and rural areas. However, the urban rate of decline in real consumption was faster than the rural, measured either qualitatively by Zimbabwean people (Potts with Mutambirwa Reference Potts and Mutambirwa1998) or quantitatively.Footnote 2
The expropriation of thousands of commercial farms in Zimbabwe which began in 2000 deepened the economic crisis. Urban poverty, already serious, swiftly became the norm. Real food insecurity was soon endemic: by 2003 an urban vulnerability survey found 66 per cent of the country's urban population was food-insecure, on a par with the rural areas. The situation was as bad in the capital city as in other towns (ZNVAC/SADC 2004). The impacts of these changes on urban residents’ lives are evident in the case studies from Harare in 2001 presented and analysed below. Along with the case quoted at the start of this article, these represent a handful of the many hundreds of interviews conducted with migrants since the 1980s. The surveys were focused very deliberately on livelihood issues and covered large numbers of people. They included quantitative aspects, and were not designed to obtain detailed life histories from the informants. Nor, for example, did I pursue questions about identity which did not relate to the key qualitative aspects under consideration. Political affiliation was not discussed: in fact, in the circumstances of Harare's High Density Areas (official low-income housing) even before the 2000s, such questions would have caused great suspicion and probably would have halted the research.Footnote 3 The considerable breadth in the coverage of the migrants’ circumstances in each survey was accompanied, however, by specific qualitative inquiries. These included the nature of economic linkages to the area of origin, which was usually a rural area (known in Zimbabwe as a communal area (CA)). In 2001 an additional key qualitative element was on perceptions of the city. Migrants were asked specifically to compare Harare and the place from which they had come in respect of the following: the ease of finding a job and the money income they could earn. These two lines of inquiry could be compared with answers from previous surveys. In addition, however, after discussion of the different monetary costs involved, migrants were asked to make comparisons between living standards in the town and their areas of origin, and to discuss the pros and cons of living in Harare. Their plans and expectations for the future, often the ultimate expression of perceptions of the city, were also investigated. As will be seen, some were adamant they were leaving soon: city life was not for them. Others intended to stay and would not envisage a return. Between these extremes was a wide spectrum of plans for the future. Compared to earlier surveys, however, there had been a very significant increase in planning for a return move, usually to the CAs and usually with the intention of farming there. This upward trend had been evident from a survey conducted in the structural adjustment era of the 1990s, but was much stronger by 2001;Footnote 4 the broad details of these trends in migrant plans have been published elsewhere (Potts Reference Potts2000; Reference Potts2006c) but the results were neither disaggregated by migrant characteristics nor did they focus on qualitative case studies.
The remainder of this article focuses on these qualitative issues, which allow for a richer analysis and new insights into the way in which urban people in Zimbabwe were experiencing the city. The analysis includes a number of vignettes drawn from interviews with individuals which summarize their migration history and general livelihood conditions but also demonstrate their widely divergent views and judgements about living in Harare and their comparisons of this with other, usually rural, places where they had lived in the past. As will become clear, such views feed in logical ways into their plans for the future and are influenced by their ownership of productive rural assets which might underpin an alternative livelihood. Before turning to these case studies, a brief note is needed on the nature of the sample of migrants. The case studies are drawn from interviews with 408 migrants in a formal low-income residential settlement, Kuwadzana, in the west of Harare. These migrants were chosen randomly; the criteria exercised were that they should have moved to Harare in the past five years and that they should be 18 years old or over. The characteristics of the migrants interviewed were very varied in terms, for instance, of their age and activity status. Kuwadzana is the largest of Harare's high density areas (HDAs), as these settlements are called. Its development began in the early 1980s, shortly after independence, and continued in fits and starts in phases (see, for example, Patel Reference Patel1985; Potts with Mutambirwa Reference Potts and Mutambirwa1991; Potts Reference Potts2010). Kuwadzana is believed to be broadly representative of the HDAs as it is so large and incorporates different phases developed under various housing policy regimes. Most of the migrants were renters, often occupying only one or two rooms to house multi-person households (as is common across urban Africa) although a significant number were single people, lodging alone or sharing a room with another lodger. Because of particular features in urban planning practice in Zimbabwe, most urban housing was within formally planned areas with good infrastructure; the migrants often faced uncomfortable and undignified overcrowding, but their housing conditions were very definitely not slum-like, as access to water and sanitation (until later in the the decade) was good by comparison with most of sub-Saharan Africa.
MIGRANTS' PERCEPTIONS AND PLANS
The security of land
Mrs Shambare
Mrs Shambare was in her early twenties and both she and her husband were working in formal sector jobs. She was a quality controller for clothing and he was a tailor, and they both earned Z$6,000 per month. Her views were strongly influenced by their involvement in the textile industry. She had come to Harare in 1996 from Mutasa communal lands, about 200 km south-east of Harare. She said the reason why she left was that she had no job there. Harare was chosen as her destination because she had relatives in Harare and thought she might find work there. Her success in finding work was reflected in her views of the city, because she talked about how the best thing about Harare was the ‘abundance of income-earning opportunities’ and of how there was a better chance of getting a job in Harare as the ‘clothing industry is more established’. On the other hand she felt that the incomes one could earn in Harare were the same as elsewhere in the country, as they were ‘negotiated for by unions’. Her husband had migrated to Harare in 1999 and they had met in town. They were lodging in one room in a house whose owner lived in the rural areas. Yet despite being in the formal sector and a member of a household with two incomes, and her acknowledgement of the job market advantages in the city, Mrs Shambare's overall judgement of Harare was grim. In her opinion standards of living were worse there than in Mutasa, where ‘everything else can be produced from the land, such as vegetables and maize’. Via her marriage she had some land in Shurugwi and she and her husband had both traditional and modern houses there, although they had not produced anything on this land in the past year due to ‘work commitments’. The family's primary outgoings were Z$4,000 on food, Z$2,400 on transport and Z$1,000 on their rent, so they were not nearly as hard up as many respondents. She was unsure of how long they would stay in Harare but thought they would one day go to Shurugwi, mainly because of the cost of living, but also because of a ‘desire to be at home’.
Compared to Mrs Gambanga, whose case is related at the beginning of this article, Mrs Shambare was not so desperately poor. Mrs Gambanga's views and experiences typified a particularly evident pattern amongst the migrants surveyed: that is, that married women with the main responsibility of addressing the reproductive needs of their households were by far the most negative about Harare: they were often far too distracted by the sheer logistical difficulties of making (and sometimes not managing to make) ends meet to enjoy their lives in the city. Mrs Gambanga was not earning any money and her husband worked in one of the worst-paid formal employment sectors, security, and it was evident that their income was barely enough on which to survive. Her comment about price hikes was absolutely typical of the issues raised by adult women in her position: the increasing real cost of living in town dominated their views and many were evidently highly stressed by the situation. Although Mrs Shambare was not living below the absolute poverty line, like very many married women interviewed in 2001 she shared Mrs Gambanga's view that current living standards were not better in Harare than in the rural areas. In both cases the comparisons made related to the certainties that came from being able to produce food on your own land. By 2001 the riskiness of living in the city coloured so many women's views because not only were incomes being seriously squeezed, so that some people were unable to feed themselves properly even when working, but also thousands were losing their jobs. This was the context which helps to explain why Mrs Shambare evidently felt so vulnerable in town and why being able to grow food was something that she valued very highly. Incomes alone at a particular point in time were thus not enough to determine migrants’ views about their future in the city, for Mrs Shambare was clearly concerned about how quickly things could go wrong if jobs were lost (as was happening all over Harare in 2001). The textile and clothing industry had shed many thousands of jobs immediately after structural adjustment in the early 1990s and major retrenchments were occurring again by 2001 as the country's economic crisis took hold. Thus she did not feel secure and she was fearful of what would happen to her family should their jobs be lost. As she noted, ‘if you do not work you will die of hunger in Harare’.
Mrs Gambanga's point about why she had preferred life in Gutu was also ultimately about security: she had felt she had more control over her livelihood as she had ‘opportunities to survive out of my own effort’. Essentially both women were reflecting on the social relations of production in urban as opposed to rural areas. If you had land, and were prepared to put in the work, you could survive: you had access to the means of production. But in town your livelihood depended on structural conditions beyond your control and your ‘own efforts’; getting work to stop you ‘dying of hunger’ was difficult. The risk of not being able to find a job was also very evidently increasing at this time.
In the case of the Gambanga family, the produce from their land in Gutu had helped to defray the costs of living in Harare the previous crop year and, given their marginal circumstances, was probably essential for their survival in town. In 1988 the migrant survey had focused on how families such as the Gambangas managed both to farm their land and live as a family unit in town. In the colonial past, male migrants frequently left their wives behind in the communal areas where they could take care of family land. However, this pattern of ‘families divided’ (cf. Murray Reference Murray1981) was institutionalized by the state and changed quite dramatically after 1980 with the abolition of various legal restraints on migration, just as it had elsewhere in post-colonial Africa. By the mid-1980s most married migrants in Harare's HDAs, including lodgers, were living with all or most of their nuclear families in town. However, a seasonal rhythm in these patterns was suspected from anecdotal evidence and confirmed by the 1988 survey. Many of the families with rural land sent one or more of the nuclear family members in town back to the rural areas during the wet season to ensure farm production (see Potts and Mutambirwa Reference Potts and Mutambirwa1990). Wives, in particular, operated this ‘rural string’ to the urban livelihood ‘bow’ in terms of a livelihood portfolio. Some went for some months, others for a number of shorter periods. However, most of the women spent most of their year in town with their husbands.Footnote 5
Maintaining a stream of rural food production for consumption in town or for sale to boost the household income is thus part of the economics of rural–urban linkages. The ultimate expression of these is anticipating a return to live in the rural areas and to support your household mainly from agricultural activities. Both Mrs Gambanga and Mrs Shambare aimed to return and both appeared to look forward to this eventuality.
For decades the study of African societies has reflected on the extent to which this expression of rural–urban linkages – a return to a rural area, and often a rural birthplace – is bound up with cultural preferences. This is often a feature of the literature on migration and rural–urban linkages: for example, for the Southern African region, in the work of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute on Central Africa during the colonial period, of the Mayers (Reference Mayer and Mayer1961) on East London in South Africa, and of Ferguson in his more recent book on Zambia (1999). The research on migrants to Harare reported here has also examined this issue. Although, as already indicated, its focus has always been on livelihood issues, many interviewees over the years have proffered explanations of their own plans and motivations in cultural terms. Quite often these are couched in terms like those used by Mrs Shambare, who said she wanted to go to Shurugwi partly because she wanted to be ‘at home’. Sometimes migrants explained that they preferred to die ‘at home’. The issue of rural birthplaces being deemed ‘homes’ (in chiShona, musha) and urban dwellings mere houses, implying a stronger personal identity with rural rather than urban places, is frequently acknowledged in the literature on migration in Zimbabwe, particularly by anthropologists (see Andersson Reference Andersson2002). This is a complicated area for urban studies in this region, given the tendency for colonial urban policies to portray such cultural links as justifications for limiting Africans’ rights within urban areas. In Zimbabwe, this ‘justification’ was tragically reinvented by the ruling party, ZANU (PF), in 2005 during Operation Murambatsvina, when informal housing and jobs came under concerted attack, and people's rights to stay in the city were challenged on the grounds that everyone had a rural ‘home’ (see Potts Reference Potts and Vambe2008). I have discussed the evidence from the research on migrants to Harare in relation to these identity issues and their social and cultural attachments to rural settings and homes in detail elsewhere (Potts Reference Potts2010), and these issues are not central to the focus of this article on migrants’ perceptions of urban settings. Naturally, perceptions and attitudes towards rural and urban areas are interlinked, however, particularly in research such as this where direct comparisons between them are elicited. For example, one migrant told us in 1985 that, ‘I would not retire in Harare for any reason; home is best’.
It is important to note that all the migrant surveys in Harare found that prosaic economic judgements dominated people's explanations of why they would, or might, leave Harare. Issues such as burial and identifying with rural ‘homes’ were rarely put forward as the primary reason for such decisions. They more frequently cropped up as secondary or supporting factors, but even these were more often economic in nature. It is, of course, difficult to disentangle motivations and another way of approaching the analysis of people's intentions is to investigate whether certain migrant characteristics were associated with particular plans for the future. One very clear pattern which emerged from these surveys was how having access to land influenced decisions. As might be expected, migrants with current access to land were more likely than the landless to say they intended to leave town in the future, since land is the starting point for building or restarting a rural livelihood if a permanent urban livelihood proves impossible. Thus, in 1985, 45 per cent of the migrants who had no rural land said they planned to remain in Harare permanently compared to 18 per cent of the migrants with rural land. However, the gap began to close as the formal urban economy weakened. In 1994, after three years of retrenchments and falling urban incomes the comparative figures were, respectively, 25 per cent and 10 per cent. By 2001, the proportion of all the migrants surveyed who anticipated they would definitely stay in Harare for the rest of their lives had not only fallen again, but had become very small at only 13 per cent. Having current access to rural land made some difference but by then only 15 per cent of the migrants without land anticipated staying for good compared to 7 per cent of those with land. Evidently the influence of previously significant factors on these plans was being overwhelmed by the stark reality of declining urban opportunities.
The influence of housing
When discussing the problems they faced in Harare many respondents alluded to the issue of housing. The city had a perennial major housing shortage for low-income people but the authorities also generally managed to prevent squatting, so most of the population was squeezed into the formal, planned housing stock or into the backyard shacks built round the edges of the legal housing plots in the HDAs and rented out by the plot owners. These shacks were not therefore squatter housing, but they were unplanned and technically illegal. The cost of housing was frequently mentioned as one of the many difficulties urban people faced but this was far from the only negative aspect of urban housing. The overcrowding, with many households living in one rented room, causes great stress. When asked to identify difficult aspects of living in town in 2001 the vast majority of respondents spoke immediately about general cost-of-living problems, but housing topped the list for a significant minority. In most cases the issues were to do with overcrowding and the general lack of control over one's living space, alongside the cost of rents. The advantages of being able to own your own house in rural areas was often identified. As one migrant commented during a focus group discussion, ‘It is important to have a rural home because in the towns most people rent property.’ In another case, a young man who had migrated from Bikita communal lands compared living standards in his birthplace favourably with those in Harare because of the housing factor: ‘Bikita is better because property belongs to one self, such as housing.’
The following two case studies of young men who, like Mrs Gambanga and Mrs Shambare, said they did not think they would live permanently in Harare, illustrate how housing issues play a part in perceptions of city living and determining future plans. Yet in these cases the problems were not as straightforward as renting from landlords and being overcrowded.
Mr Gwitira
Mr Gwitira was in his late twenties and living with his wife in Kuwadzana Unit 7 where he owned the house they lived in. He had been born in Mount Darwin communal area but had moved from there and had come to Harare from the town of KweKwe in 1997. They had a child living in the communal areas. He worked as a formal employee in a printing firm as a mechanic and earned Z$10,000 per month but their outgoings on their mortgage, food and transport alone were Z$8,800. They were just managing, it appeared, as he was quite positive about Harare where ‘people have higher incomes and are skilled’ and ‘services are abundantly available’ although there were also ‘too many people chasing too few jobs’. They had two acres of land and a modern house in the rural areas but had not produced anything in the last crop year as they could not raise enough money for inputs. He thought they would stay in Harare for at least ten years but then would have to leave because of the costs and they would farm once they left. However, the main reason for leaving, he pointed out, would be to rent the urban house out to generate income.
Mr Chimutanda
Mr Chimutanda, in his early twenties, was the unmarried son of a retired man who owned a house in Kuwadzana but was living in the rural areas. Mr Chimutanda had six rooms in this house, but had to pay Z$1,000 in rent to his father although that was way below the market rent for such a house. He worked as an assistant civil engineer, and was paid Z$6,000 per month. He had been born in the town of Bindura, about 80 km north-east of Harare, and had moved to Harare in 1996 because he was dissatisfied with his life there and could not find a job. He had thought that life would be better in Harare. However, by 2001 his comparisons of Harare and Bindura were not very favourable to the former: he thought it had become more difficult to get a job in Harare because ‘there are too many people looking for jobs now’, and he estimated that earnings were likely to be the same in the two towns but in Bindura ‘expenditures are low’. On the other hand, in 2001 Mr Chimutanda felt that it was good to be in Harare because ‘Harare is peaceful and there is little violence’. He said he paid Z$6,000 a month for food, which seemed excessive compared to the amounts mothers with families were citing – but possibly as a single man he was eating out much of the time, which would make it very expensive. His next biggest expenditure was transport at Z$3,000, and then electricity and water at Z$1,700. This helped to explain why he cited housing problems as a bad thing about living in Harare – in total he was paying out Z$2,700 for the house which was burdensome; indeed his total outgoings exceeded his income. On balance he felt that living standards in Harare were better than in Bindura, as ‘all goods and services that may not be available in small towns are available in Harare so it's better’. However, he also stated that he planned to leave the city in six to ten years time and move to Chiweshe communal land, which he regarded as his ‘home’. He planned to take up farming, although he had no land there at the time of the survey. This was in part because of the cost of living in Harare but also because ‘it is less political in my rural home area’.
The cases of these two men point to the importance of housing in people's decisions but in ways that are not usually emphasized in housing research in Africa. One of them owned his house and the other was living in a house owned by his father. Many low-income urban housing policies across sub-Saharan Africa focus on home ownership and there is sometimes a presumption that those who acquire houses will tend to be those who see themselves as permanent urban residents, while circular migrants will prefer to rent. However, if home owners become unemployed or retire, the rental value of urban housing in Harare is an inflation-proof income which goes much further in a rural area compared to town. This was the main reason why the Gwitiras planned to leave the city, because they would be able to live off the rents. Mr Chimutamba's economic predicament was partly caused by the same issue because his father, now living back in a rural area, required the urban family house to generate income upon which he could survive. This meant that even his son could not be housed for free. Thus, the seeming advantage for Mr Chimutamba of living in his father's house was worrying him as it was so costly. The phenomenon of children living in parents’ Harare houses in the HDAs, while the parents lived elsewhere, was encountered quite frequently, although often they would not be paying rent. However, 10 per cent of those who were renting from unrelated landlords or landladies in 2001 said that the house owners lived in rural areas; indeed this was as common as the owners living elsewhere in Harare (although most owners lived on plots alongside their lodgers).
It is also evident that the more general issues of urban living costs were worrying both Mr Gwitira and Mr Chimutamba. Thus, like the two women already discussed, they felt they would not remain permanently in the city, and the cost of urban living was an important factor. Both the women and these two men faced a similar constraint: their financial situation at the end of each month was very marginal. Yet neither of these two men judged that standards of living in Harare were worse than in the rural areas, as the women argued, and both of them had some positive things to say about the city. There were very many respondents in 2001, particularly women, who could think of nothing good to say of living in Harare, even when directly asked to identify a positive aspect of city life. In most such cases, it was fairly evident that if they said they planned to leave the city, they were looking forward to this. However, this was not true for all those who anticipated leaving Harare at some future date.
In the migration literature there is often a distinction drawn between forced and voluntary migration. This usually refers to obvious differences between, for example, migration caused by droughts or wars, and economic migration in which the individual exercises more agency, even if it is acknowledged that structural conditions underlie those decisions. None of the decisions being made by the migrant respondents in Harare could be considered as ‘forced’ in this sense. However, some of those planning to leave were not obviously in favour, even if they made a rational case for having to go. These might be thought of as ‘reluctant leavers’ and perhaps both Mr Gwitira and Mr Chimutamba could be categorized in this way.
Mr Chimutamba's case also illustrates how very particular economic and political circumstances, which would be very hard to generalize, combine to influence migration and livelihood plans for some individuals. On the one hand, he was typical of a young single man in not being so overwhelmed by cost issues as to lose sight of the advantages of Harare's broader amenities and services. But his views and plans were also affected by non-economic issues, for the geography of political violence played a part. His birthplace, Bindura town, had been the site of considerable political tension in 2001, shortly before the survey, as there was a by-election and ZANU (PF) had conducted a programme of intimidation of suspected MDC supporters, including house-to-house searches, which had led to many people fleeing the area (Amnesty International 2001). The town has remained a centre of conflict whenever elections have occurred in Zimbabwe post-2000, as it is viewed by ZANU (PF) as part of the party's presumed stronghold in the Mashonaland provinces. Yet urban populations have sided with the opposition MDC since its emergence at the end of the 1990s, so towns like Bindura come under strong pressure from the ruling party, which bullies people about their voting decisions (see swradio 2010, for example). Mr Chimutanda had come to Harare from Bindura in 1996, a few years before these political issues had become so significant for that town's population. Nonetheless he was acutely aware of the situation there, which strongly coloured his views. On the other hand, Mr Chimutamba's views indicate the importance of relativity – as some other male respondents argued that a problem with living in Harare was that it was politically violent. During a focus group discussion, it was also argued that ‘there is more peace in the rural areas as compared to Harare where riot police are called in every time a crowd forms’. In fact this mirrored one of Mr Chimutamba's arguments for leaving Harare in the future, which was that Chiweshe communal area would be more peaceful than either Harare or his birthplace, Bindura.
Planning to stay in Harare
The final three case studies are of migrants who intended to remain in the city. Their profiles are very different: one was very poor and evidently struggling to make ends meet; another was unemployed but had the enormous advantage of being dependent on a relative whose income was good and who could afford to look after him; the third was wealthy. The common thread in their narratives was that they all perceived that life in Harare was providing them with benefits that their place of origin could not give them.
Mrs Mazodza
Mrs Mazodza was in her late twenties and her husband was employed as a carpenter in the formal sector, earning Z$5,000 per month. This was a low income and he had a secondary, informal sector job selling vegetables, although she was unsure how much money this brought in. She had been born on a commercial farm in Mazowe District about 40 km north of Harare and had come to the city in 1998 from another commercial farm in the area of Selous, near Chegutu, about 80 km south-west of Harare. She moved to Harare to join her husband and they had lived in three other parts of Kuwadzana, at first with kin and then as lodgers. They were still lodgers in one room in a house owned by a landlord who lived in the rural areas. She thought it was difficult to find a job in Harare, more difficult than on the commercial farm. However, her general views on the city were highly positive and evidently coloured by her experiences as a commercial farmworker. Harare was good because ‘electricity is available, and water is collected nearby’. When asked if there was anything bad about living in the city, she could think of nothing. They were paying Z$3,500 for food each month and Z$750 for rent, which left them with very little left over for all the other necessities. One of their children was living on the commercial farm, where things would be much cheaper. Nonetheless in her experience Harare living standards were better, ‘because you do not work very hard’. They had no rural assets and intended to live permanently in Harare.
Mr Samuriwo
Mr Samuriwo was living in a household headed by his aunt, a nurse earning Z$18,000 per month who owned the house in which they lived. He was under 25 years of age and said that he was unemployed and was looking for his first job. He had been born in the nearby communal area of Goromonzi, about 40 km east of Harare, and had come to town from there in 1998, at first living with other kin in Chitungwiza. His primary purpose was to try and find a job, but he was still looking three years later. In his view it would be easier to find a job in Goromonzi, although he felt there was more money to be earned in Harare. What he felt was particularly good about living in Harare was that transport was so easily available. The ‘bad’ thing was that ‘ladies disturb my thinking through dressing’. The household's main expenditures were ranked as first, food, followed by transport, then accommodation and service bills (that is, the mortgage and rates). Yet he was unable to estimate how much was actually spent on anything but accommodation, which was costing Z$2,000 per month for a standard four-roomed house. For him, living standards were better in Harare. He also pointed out that an advantage of Harare was that he was able to pick up occasional part-time construction work so he had not, in fact, been entirely unemployed since his arrival. Over the four surveys, migrants quite often said they were ‘unemployed’ even if they were working in the informal sector or had part-time work, because their own idea of ‘employment’ meant a full-time job in the formal sector, although this tendency to view informal jobs as not consituting real ‘work’ was falling away by 2001. He had no land or other assets in Goromonzi, and said he would remain permanently in the city.
Mrs Mandizvidza
Mrs Mandizvidza said she would definitely be staying in Harare. She was living in Kuwadzana Extension in 2001, was employed as a teacher, and was married to a professional man who was a manager in financial services. Their joint incomes totalled almost Z$50,000 per month – about the highest recorded that year. In addition, she had a sideline, selling clothes and plates, from which she said she earned another Z$10,000 per month. They also owned their house. She had been born in Zvishavane communal area and had lived in Masvingo town prior to moving to Harare. Her views on Harare were mixed. For her, the positive aspects were that incomes were higher and that ‘life is competitive and there are many opportunities to do business’. The downsides were that the city was dirty and infrastructure was poor in some places. She felt that her standard of living had actually been better in Masvingo where transport was not so expensive and, because it was a small town, you could walk to places. This family also had an acre of land in the communal areas, and had grown maize the year before of which a little had been eaten in Harare. However, they had not built a house there.
The factors that fed into the decisions of these three migrants to remain in Harare permanently were very varied and influenced by gender, incomes and past living experiences. Thus, two of the three had no land in the communal areas and they did not make the sorts of comparisons with the cheaper living and self-provisioning of food being made by some of those who intended to leave. Mrs Mazodza's case indicates how important birthplace could be in decision making and the significance of alternative options in shaping migrants’ views of Harare and their futures. She was one of a very small proportion of migrants in the 2001 sample who had been born in a commercial farming area. Although born in Zimbabwe, she was probably of foreign ancestry, as she laid no claim to land or a rural ‘home’ in Zimbabwe – which is often a marker of having foreign parentage. There could be no doubt from her comments that, despite the seemingly very difficult economic circumstances facing her family, in comparison to her only other alternative livelihood, back on a commercial farm, Harare's advantages were clear. The surveys also found that being born in another town meant that people were less likely to plan a future rural livelihood, which is hardly surprising. Some of them, however, did plan to leave Harare and move back to a smaller town, and while costs usually played a part in such decisions, another factor was often the perception that other urban areas in Zimbabwe were less stressful than Harare. For example, one of the migrants interviewed in 2001 was Mrs Ndlovu who had been born in Bulawayo and had subsequently lived in the towns of KweKwe and Chitungwiza, before moving to Harare. Her family had one of the highest incomes of all the interviewees yet she found it ‘stressful in Harare and difficult to make ends meet – there was competition’. Her plan was to move to yet another town, Marondera, mainly because of the cost of living, but also because she wanted a ‘peaceful environment; Harare is overcrowded’.
The case studies in this article demonstrate vividly how variable were attitudes to living in the city and strategies for the future, despite the evident existence of the strong underlying trends outlined in my introduction. The most typical and predictable set of views was found amongst married women such as Mrs Gambanga. Her perceptions of Harare and her family's prospects there were dominated by the difficulties of getting by on an income which was low. For women like this, the attractions of growing one's own food were repeated again and again as a favourable factor in rural settings. The struggle to find cash to cover every necessity for urban living as real incomes were falling was a daily worry for such women. Yet the gender issue was not straightforward; younger women without much or any responsibility for other's needs, usually because they were dependants of older relatives, were quite likely to be impressed by the city's cultural aspects and/or the benefits of water and electricity, both factors which were, unfortunately, soon to become less certain benefits in Harare. They were also less likely to anticipate a future move out of the city. And male household heads (rather than sons or other male relatives living in an extended household) were more likely to be negative about Harare than daughters or other female relatives. In other words, it was ‘being in charge’ as money for food and clothing and school fees became harder and harder to find that tipped the balance about people's feelings about the pros and cons of city life, and this clearly fed through into their plans about whether they would or could stay permanently, or for how long. Being economically secure made a huge difference: the Mandizvidzas typify, in many respects, the characteristics that might be expected of a particular type of permanent urban resident. They were both middle-class professionals whose joint incomes greatly exceeded their main outgoings – and so, in 2001 at least, they were not too stressed about the negative trends in the economy. They were in a position to save and would both be expecting pensions. They were owner occupiers and so, once retired, they could rent out some of the rooms for a further, inflation-proof income. The fact that they had not built a house in the communal areas could be regarded as indicative of their strong urban orientation, both economically and culturally.
In relation to this, there were notable differences in the accuracy or ability to judge expenditure according to position in the household, and this was one of the telling aspects of the surveys, with dependants least able to make reasonable estimates. This both reflected the fact that someone else was doing most of the purchases and paying the bills, and also suggested how relatively stress-free their lives in Harare were, compared to household heads and their spouses who were usually very cost-conscious and worried about money. Thus Mr Samuriwo, a dependent relative, had little idea of the household budget. The very fact that he said his greatest problem with the city was the provocative dress of Harare's young women is indicative; household heads or wives were far less likely to make such comments relating to their social lives and leisure activities, instead concentrating on economic matters.
Opinions were also influenced by the ability to compare cash incomes being generated in Harare with incomes which were, or could be, derived from agriculture. Both men and women who had some land were less likely to judge incomes in Harare as higher than those with no land, although the landless were certainly not overwhelmingly positive about Harare in this respect either. The major significance of productive rural assets for the livelihoods of those who had land was clear (Potts Reference Potts2010). Yet there is an important caveat. It emerged from the first two surveys that some migrants who said they currently had no land also said they intended to take up rural livelihoods in the future. Fairly obviously this meant that they anticipated they might be able to obtain land. Such respondents were therefore asked in the last two surveys how they thought they would get rural land. The majority – 48 per cent in 1994 and 56 per cent in 2001 – said they would be able to obtain land from their rural kin, usually their parents. In both years about 10 per cent thought they would be allocated land by village headmen (sabhuku) and another 10 per cent intended to buy land. Furthermore, some of these people had not been born in communal areas (that is, they were born in towns other than Harare) and some were looking for any rural land rather than necessarily for land in the communal area where they had been born. Two key points can be made in relation to the analysis of migration in Zimbabwe. First, there can be no presumption that people – particularly young people – who have no rural land at the time of migration to town will never obtain any through what might be thought of as customary routes. Second, although land tenure in the communal areas of Zimbabwe theoretically does not allow land sales, it is common knowledge that these do occur, particularly of house plots and perhaps the surrounding field – the sorts of land sales in such areas which are termed ‘vernacular land markets’ by Chimhowu and Woodhouse (Reference Chimhowu and Woodhouse2010). On the other hand it must be emphasized that this was still a relatively uncommon option.
From the perspective of predicting and analysing migration patterns, these two points mean that current land ownership in rural areas is only a partial predictor of the potential for urban households to plan for a rural livelihood in the future. They also demonstrate the strong attraction for many Zimbabwean households of obtaining land as a means of economic security. Indeed, another option for obtaining land for the landless who told us they did not intend to stay in Harare was via the land reform programmes. In 1994 one third of this group said they hoped or planned to get land in resettlement areas. At this time the land reform programme was still operating in a very orderly fashion, with land being purchased on a willing seller/willing buyer basis from the mainly white commercial farming sector. It was allocated partly according to need, but there was an increasing policy of favouring experienced farmers (so-called Master Farmers with certificates, for example), which the migrant informants told us they felt was unfairly discriminatory. In 2001 this had fallen away, and the allocation of farms in the lands seized from the commercial farming sector was an opaque procedure, although having a known affiliation to the ruling party was obviously helpful. In this year 28 per cent of the landless migrants interviewed who intended to leave Harare for rural areas said they intended to obtain land via the land reform programme.
A fairly typical example was Mrs Kambarami, who had been born in Masvingo town and who judged that her living standards had fallen since she moved to Harare, because of high costs there. She had met her husband in Harare and they planned to move out soon to look for somewhere to take up farming. She said they were looking for ‘an appropriate place’ or would ‘go for land redistributed in designated farms’. The interviews did not pursue this topic further, so the details of how such migrants intended to negotiate their way onto new resettlement farms are not known. Contemporary newspaper reports did, however, note that there was strong demand for resettlement land from urban claimants. For example, in March 2002 it was reported that:
hundreds of landless people continued to apply for land under the fast-track resettlement scheme. The people, mainly from Harare said that they were keen to acquire land under the redistribution exercise.‘I need to get my own piece of land before the beginning of the agricultural season. I have just realised that without land, I will have a bleak future,’ said Miss Mercy Mugove of Kambuzuma [one of Harare's High Density Areas] … . ‘We have been very busy on Mondays up to Thursdays, the days that we accept land application forms. There is still a big demand for land from many people especially from urban areas,’ said a ministry official. (The Herald 2002)
The Herald is the newspaper of ZANU(PF) which had a vested interest in reporting strong demand for land from ordinary people, and any reports from this source need to acknowledge that it is far from objective. Nonetheless, this particular piece was not merely peddling a straight party line, for it was also noting that there were allegations of corrupt land allocation being made by war veterans, including the allegation that ‘priority in allocating land was being given to outsiders at the expense of locals’, the implication being that this included the urban claimants. There was not, however, any legal bar to poor urban people with marginal livelihoods, or no apparent income, being considered alongside poor, rural counterparts and, as has been seen, there could be no assumption at this time that poor urban families were better off than rural ones. The report does tally with the evidence from the surveys of demand for land from poor urban households; this was also clear in 1994, when allocation procedures were much more transparent.
In sum, the survey evidence found that there were discernible patterns in the attitudes and plans of the migrants who were interviewed. Gender, age and position in the household, birthplace, and ownership of rural assets all influenced people's views in logical ways. The trends in people's attitudes also reflected the shifts occurring in the urban economy, so that the relative valuation of rural lifestyles and livelihoods increased significantly as the Harare economy declined.
CONCLUSIONS: THE AMBIGUITIES OF DECISION MAKING
Some of the debates in literature about migration in Africa, including discussions about the urban transition model, have tended to divide the migrant population into two groups: those who will leave town eventually (or will oscillate) and those who will stay permanently (see Mayer and Mayer Reference Mayer and Mayer1961; Pauw Reference Pauw1973; Macmillan Reference Macmillan1996; Kok and Collinson Reference Kok and Collinson2006). There is sometimes a presumption, too, that if people want to stay (in the absence of influx controls, etc.), then they will. Ferguson (Reference Ferguson1999) has shown how this was not the case for the Copperbelt towns in Zambia, where some of the miners leaving towns in the 1990s were neither prepared for nor happy about their out-migration. In fact, the evidence from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and from all across Africa, is that structural economic conditions set the trends. What people would like to do and what they actually do are often different – their choices are constrained. The interaction of these shifting forces means that there are also shifts in the relative prevalence of different types of migrants who might be more usefully divided into four groups: characterized as willing stayers, reluctant stayers, willing leavers and reluctant leavers. For example, the typical profile for a ‘reluctant leaver’ judged on their attitudes to Harare and the sorts of reasons given for expecting to leave was a young migrant who had enough to get by or was supported by family, and who had no assets in the communal areas. Yet it is quite possible that their assessment of the pros and cons of Harare over other destinations and livelihoods might change as they got older and took on more responsibilities, and reluctant leavers could become willing leavers. If they were lucky and achieved the things they thought necessary for permanent urban residence, they could also become willing stayers. Such possibilities are evident in the case studies of individual migrants presented in this article.
It is argued that similar scenarios have been playing out across sub-Saharan Africa since the imposition of structural adjustment programmes from the 1980s onwards. Often mobility has remained high, or even increased, but the net movement into large towns has decreased as circulation has increased. In some cases the impact of net in-migration is now minor or negligible. Interwoven into these broad trends are the lives of millions of people with very different hopes and dreams. For some, the possibility of leaving the city may always have been anticipated, but for others such a move may be more to do with the difficulties of struggling with unforgiving urban economies.
