Labor, sex and spirituality on a South African border farm

This dissertation examines how labor relations are changing in South African commercial agriculture. It is primarily based on an extended case study of a large-scale tomato farm I call “Heddon Estates”, located along the South Africa-Zimbabwe border. For nine months, I lived among Zimbabwean workers in the farm compound and, for three months, in the home of a white manager. I argue that labor relations are governed less by apartheid-era paternalism than by practices I characterize as delegated despotism. This new production regime comprises at least four processes: a growing casualization of labor, new forms of private and public regulation, the monetization or withdrawal of many previously “in kind” benefits and services for farm laborers, and an expansion of the role of black intermediaries. These processes reproduce the authoritarian legacies of paternalism, but minimize the potential for benevolence. How management secures control over workers hinges not so much on the production of servile or deferential subjects, but the generalized fragmentation of the work force. Paradoxically, the reliance on a fragmented and highly transient work force creates instability for the production regime. Strikes, work-stoppages and theft of farm property appear increasingly common. Transactional sex and worship practices emerge as important terrains of struggle within the work force. Through transactional sex, the nominally most exploited group on the farm – women workers – are often able to increase their savings above that of men. In so doing, however, they expose themselves to HIV/AIDS and other negative consequences. Worship practices afford Zimbabweans a measure of solace and comfort amidst abject living and working conditions, but the largest farm church also projects the interests of management. Managers discourage the growth of alternative church groups, and thereby limit the autonomous spaces from which challenges to the production regime might emergePh. D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Lincoln Addiso