Paper short abstract:

The Zimbabwean-South African border is a place of transience and fragmentation. Many migrants join farm workforces, shaped by the ‘flexible’ capital and crop flows of export agriculture. But despite this apparent ephemerality, workforces incorporate and root people, offering provisional permanence.

Paper long abstract:

What is the role of settled, residential workplaces in a place of transience? During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed through the South African apartheid-era border fence, searching for ways to make ends meet. Many joined black farm-worker populations on white-settler farms, in turn shaped by the 'flexible' capital and crop flows of intercontinental export agriculture. Today's 'flexible capitalism' is commonly seen in terms of ephemerality and perpetual change. Local arrangements are commonly thought so ad-hoc and fleeting that contracts collapse into informality, employment into entrepreneurialism. Acute crisis is seen merely to hasten capitalism along its path. But this paper argues that, on the Limpopo River, amidst transience and short-term strategies of making do, resident workforces are settings in which people strive for a provisional permanence. Workforce hierarchies incorporate transient people: regular labour migrants; recent fugitives seeking work; actual or would-be dependents; and traders, drawn by the lucrative markets represented by hundreds of waged workers. Indeed, on this border, migrants have long had manifold reasons for moving, and are made labour migrants through their social incorporation at places of employment. The border farms and their workforces mediate intersecting flows of people, goods, tangible cash and virtual capital. The paper argues that, for people facing uncertain futures in today's regional upheavals and global capitalism, workplaces are lifeplaces.