Ambivalent Mobilities

Abstract

One of the effects of the crisis in Zimbabwe since 2000 has been both the direct and indirect internal displacement of farmers, farm workers and innumerable others for both political and economic reasons, as well as the movement of millions of Zimbabweans across borders into neighbouring countries and further afield. Among some of the reluctant cross-border migrants in the region is a relatively small number (around 80 families) of mostly white Zimbabwean former large-scale commercial farmers who moved into Manica Province in central-west Mozambique in the early 2000s, with the promise and hope of generating an agricultural boom. Ongoing research underpinning this article is concerned with the often contradictory perceptions, experiences and effects of these displacees’ migration across Zimbabwe's eastern border. This considers not only the farmers’ own lives and livelihoods, but also their relationships to and impacts upon the multi-layered ‘host’ environments into which they have...