Farm Worker Uprising on the Western Cape: From “Flexible Work” to “Moment of Madness”

Jesse Wilderman

“We outnumber the farmers eleven to one and they still hoard the economic power and still talk to us with disrespect. We could kill all the farmers in a weekend if we wanted to and this land will be fucked up - it could happen in one day. But until this strike we were never able to get all the farm workers and all of us to come out and fight back”

Local Councilman and supporter of the farm worker protests 

In late 2012 into early 2013, tens of thousands of farm workers and their allies across more than twenty-five towns around the Western Cape of South Africa, engaged in a historic series of explosive and unexpected work stoppages and protests. There had not in living memory been a protest that reached this scale and intensity, even though grievances around low wages, inadequate housing, and unfair treatment have plagued farm workers for years; the perceived power of the farm owners coupled with a lack of large, formal organisation or trade unions among farm workers seemed to have stacked the deck against collective resistance.

Not only was the scale of this uprising historic, it displayed a form of resistance outside the “paternalistic” discourse that characterised relationships between farm workers and farm owners; as Ewert and Du Toit explain about traditional farm worker resistance, “. . . they rely on the ‘weapons of the weak’, operating within the framework of the paternalistic moral universe itself, relying on individual appeals, consensual negotiations, and the avoidance of the appearance of open conflict” (2005). Yet this uprising was defined by open conflict, including burning of vineyards, protest marches, and pitched battles with the police; farm workers and their allies adopted an overt, confrontational, and adversarial approach in an apparent break from the traditional discourse.

The Swedish Model in 2015: A ‘Safe Haven’ or a ‘Nordic Noir’?

Alexis Stenfors

Fiction versus a startling reality
I am positively surprised by the increasing number of people coming up to me asking for travel advice on Scandinavia. As is often the case, they admit to ultimately having been swayed by the dark landscapes and fictional characters in Nordic noir novels or television box sets. Simultaneously, foreign observers find the new political landscape in Sweden puzzling and worrying - and rightly so. Having slowly witnessed the deconstruction of the old ‘Swedish model’, a new element appears to have cemented the belief that Sweden truly has changed: the rise of the Sweden Democrats. How could an anti-immigrant party on the Far Right become the 3rd largest party in the country?

Initially, it would be easy to dismiss the Sweden Democrats as yet another European anti-immigration party on the Far Right, occasionally flirting with Fascism but portraying themselves as ‘neither Left nor Right’. As is then the case, the focal point gravitates towards immigration and multiculturalism for supporters and opponents alike. This might be a convenient and logical approach, but it also leads to the wrong precision.

The Swedish model offers an insight to why.

Chinese investments, Marange diamonds and ‘militarised capitalism’ in Zimbabwe

Nunurayi Mutyanda

Crispen Chinguno

Taurai Mereki

For the past two decades, China has undergone a massive global economic expansion and a continued search for resources to keep up its high growth targets. This converged with Zimbabwe’s adoption of a look East economic policy in 2003, following a fall out with the West. As a result there have been massive Chinese investments in various Zimbabwean sectors including mining, telecommunications, infrastructure development, agriculture and retail. This paper examines the experience of workers in Chinese investments, drawing from Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe. 

The mining potential of the Marange fields was discovered in 2006 following the unorthodox withdrawal of mining rights from the British-owned African Consolidated Resources (ACR) due to a strained relationship between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom (Sokwanele, 2011). 

‘Militarised’ capitalism

Zimbabwe discovered its biggest diamond deposit when it was under sanctions from the European Union and the United States. Underlying politics and the mineral rights legal wrangle presented an impediment for the attraction of investors. The regime was thus forced to adopt a militarised model of capitalism, a mining exploitation regime controlled by the military and its associates. Its industrial relations model is not receptive to independent trade unions. To start up the diamond mining operations at Marange, the government established a subsidiary closely linked to the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) through a parastatal, the Mineral Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe (MMCZ) (ibid). This was the onset of the militarisation of the Marange diamond mining operations and has a bearing on the labour relations that evolved.