As a result of Zimbabwe's economic troubles and displacement, the Zimbabwean workforces on South Africa's border farms display a heightening diversity of regional origins, languages, ages, ethnicities and class histories. This article asks what happens to class consciousness under such conditions. It does so by exploring how male fruit pickers on one particular far...

Paternalism and violence on South African farms have been famously intertwined. In a kinship idiom, fatherly white farmers confer 'gifts' on black workers, their 'people'. This discretion maintains the conditions for racialised violence. But, on the Zimbabwean-South African border, mass-migration and globalised agriculture give paternalism and violence new signific...

Callebert usefully critiques a ‘dual economy’ approach to South Africa. This model, posited by scholars and politicians, casts a poor ‘second’ economy as separate and excluded from a capital-intensive, globally connected ‘first’ economy. Versions of this diagnosis imply particular solutions: either bringing the second economy into the first, or bringing people from...

Dans un souci de montrer la fluidité des régions frontalières et les limites du contrôle de l’État, une grande partie des travaux anthropologiques consacrés aux frontières met en exergue les modalités, les activités et les opportunités qui échappent à la surveillance officielle. Or, alors que l'accent mis sur la clandestinité présente les frontaliers comme des pers...