Maxim Bolt’s beautifully written ethnography takes us on a journey into the lives of white commercial farmers and their employees in the remote Limpopo Valley. This area is at once borderland, the site of South Africa’s increasingly militarized attempts to control illegal Zimbabwean migrants crossing into South Africa; home to those who permanently live on these farms; and a hub of networks of trade and kin that stretch across the border into the towns and rural areas of both countries. A mix of settled white farmers, permanent employees, and a transitory workforce of Zimbabwean border jumpers live on the farms. Despite the constant threat of upheaval, these “workplaces are lifeplaces” (5) for all these different actors.
Bolt’s work contributes a nuanced analysis of the intersection between personhood and workforce membership in a context of political and economic precarity. His fieldwork took place between 2006 and 2008, at the height of Zimbabwe’s political and economic meltdown. This was a period in which hundreds of Zimbabweans were crossing into South Africa seeking work, either permanently or as a temporary solution to support families back home. More broadly, market liberalization was pushing commercial farmers to approach their farms as businesses rather than paternalist quasi-fiefdoms, and the threat of losing the farms to South African land reform loomed large. Everyday stability was provisional. Yet still, people were rooted here, albeit to different degrees.
Chapter 2 examines white farmers’ perspectives on their farms. With little access to farmers’ wives or other women working on the farms, Bolt focuses on the men, a mix of Afrikaner and British-heritage farmers. Bolt shows how “the farm” is viewed as a deeply personal project, with the successes and failures of these men’s enterprises understood to reflect their own. Personal life and work histories are linked to divergent understandings of the farm. The central tension for these farmers is between diversification and deepening commitment. Caught between spreading their risk through consideration of alternative livelihoods and enterprises elsewhere, and investing in “the farm” as a way of life, they also experience this tension in relationships with their employees.
Chapter 3 presents a fine analysis of the history of the Limpopo Valley as a peripheral area that is nonetheless core to those that live there. Farmers’ reliance on migrant labor, now and in the past, conflicts with the state’s attempts to police those crossing into South Africa. Locally, however, farmers are able to negotiate with police and army officials such that migrants do gain provisional security once they are employed on farms. Thus farms shape the state, not simply the other way around. Chapter 4 deals with the different ways in which permanent (mapermanent) and seasonal workers root themselves on the farm and how work-related temporalities shape the domestic lives of farm employees. Mapermanent men occupy more senior posts and have better living conditions than seasonal workers, even though they depend on seasonal workers to ensure their permanence. Those whose wives are absent establish conjugal relationships with transient female workers in order to establish domestic arrangements that assert their belonging to the farm beyond their employment. Chapter 5 examines class difference among male workers. Zimbabwean farm workers comprise a mix of those who have previously worked as farmworkers and those who view farm work as beneath them, a temporary and desperate option forced by economic circumstance. Here Bolt once more explores the variations within a workforce, whose members are too often treated as a single, undifferentiated mass.
Chapter 6 turns to the relationships between white employers and their black employees. Focusing on the intersection between white farm owners and black farm managers’ differing visions of “the farm,” Bolt contributes to the literature on paternalism by showing how the meanings of management and paternalism are shaped by expectations of these relationships which depend on residents’ historical experiences. The final chapter focuses on farms as hubs of trade networks that span the border. Challenging classic anthropological distinctions between formal and informal economies, Bolt shows how workers and others living in the border area rely on the farms for informal trade.
Bolt’s work is as much a study of masculinity and work as it is an ethnography of borderland farms. This is both its greatest contribution and its only weakness. Women’s perspectives are, for the most part, absent, although their role in men’s lives is central to his analysis. Furthermore, each chapter relies on a series of oppositions: core/periphery, permanence/impermanence, and so on. While this makes for strong writing, the intimacy of people’s daily lives and activities on the farms other than their work is lost. Despite these criticisms, the book provides valuable insights into the divergences and dynamism within a single workforce and makes valuable contributions to studies of labor, borderlands, structural economic reform, and “whiteness” in Africa.
