Worker-Peasants and Farmer-Housewives in Africa: The Debate about 'Committed' Farmers, Access to Land and Agricultural Production

Literature › Works

Deborah Potts (2000). Worker-Peasants and Farmer-Housewives in Africa: The Debate about 'Committed' Farmers, Access to Land and Agricultural Production. Journal of Southern African Studies, 26(4), Special Issue: African Environments: Past and Present. Taylor & Francis.

Type	journal article
Scope	Comparative and methods
Method	synthesis review
Period studied	c.1900–c.2000
Regions	Zimbabwe, South Africa (homelands, Transkei, Ciskei), Bechuanaland/Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Kenya, Tanzania, West Africa
Themes	mining migrant labour, agriculture land, bantustans removals influx, inequality poverty unemployment, demography urbanisation, comparative theory, origins segregation
Citation key	potts2000

Argument

Potts challenges the development narrative that migrants with rural land are poor 'uncommitted' farmers who should lose their land rights and choose between farming and permanent urban life. She argues that this view is ahistorical and agro-economically over-simplified, and that it ignores both the coercive origins of southern African circular migration and the role of rural land as a safety net for urban workers. Her case rests on Harare migrant surveys (Zimbabwe), South African and Bechuanaland evidence, and comparison with West and East Africa, where circular migration is treated as normal. She concedes that South Africa is exceptional, because homeland land is so scarce and agriculture so marginal that rural 'houses' often matter more than farmland. She concludes that removing land rights would be unjust and would not benefit workers or agriculture.

Evidence and method

Her own longitudinal surveys of migrants in Harare (1985-88, with C. Mutambirwa), the report of Zimbabwe's Land Tenure Commission, and secondary literature. This includes Morapedi on Bechuanaland, Heron, May, Westcott and Clarke & Ngobese on the Transkei and KwaZulu, Bowen on Swaziland, Sunseri on Tanzania, Oucho on Kenya, and Guyer on Ibadan. It also draws on archival quotations from the South African Native Affairs Department as cited in Delius, the Tomlinson Commission, and Low's household-economics model.

Findings

• The paper identifies the policy argument that migrants should lose their land rights and become either committed farmers or permanent urbanites. (p. 3)

  Because the patterns are predicated on migrants retaining rights to rural land in rural areas, arguments are sometimes made that migrants should lose their land rights,

• In the apartheid-era system, rural subsistence production subsidised labour costs and bore the costs of reproducing labour. (p. 6)

  The system meant that the labour costs were subsidised by rural subsistence production, which bore all the costs of the reproduction of labour and the maintenance of workers when they were unemployed, ill, disabled or old.

• Most Harare migrants with land kept it in production despite labour bottlenecks. (p. 9)

  at least 85 percent of recent migrants surveyed who were living in a low-income settlement in Harare in 1988, who had access to communal land, were found to have used their land productively in the 1987/88 crop season

• A substantial share of farming migrant households also marketed surpluses. (p. 9)

  a minimum of 65 percent, 46 percent and 47 percent respectively of such 'farming' migrant households produced marketed crop surpluses.

• Women's labour is central to production on migrants' land. (p. 12)

  the labour of the farmer-housewife was involved in 91 percent of cases in 1986/87 and 95 percent in 1987/88.

• South Africa is an extreme case: apartheid undermined peasant agriculture and created severe land shortage. (p. 11)

  The degree to which peasant agricultural production was neglected and undermined, and the severity of land shortages for many people during the apartheid era, was much more extreme than elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa,

• In the Transkei, maize output was driven by cattle ownership, not by migration as such, which supports a multi-causal view. (p. 15)

  He found that possession of cattle was the key determinant in the 1980s of maize production in Shixini district in the Transkei.

• Betterment planners wanted to turn worker-peasants into landless proletarians. The scale of the resulting displacement alarmed officials and helped stall the policy. (p. 18)

  The architects of betterment policies in South Africa and the Native Land Husbandry Act in colonial Rhodesia were keen to make worker-peasants (and their farmer-housewives) real proletarians without access to farm land,

• Northern Transvaal officials estimated that very large shares of the population would have to be removed from the land under betterment. (p. 19)

  In the Northern Transvaal, the estimates of the 'numbers that would have to be moved off the land ranged from 40 to 60 per cent.

• Elsewhere in Africa, remittances flow into rural land and farming. (p. 22)

  48 percent of remittances are spent on land purchase or improvement of land

• Land rights can be dispensed with only where there are strong social security and urban wage sectors, which Zimbabwe and most of Africa lack. (p. 23)

  It is only in economies that have the resources to maintain a social security system and/or have fast growing urban-based formal wage sectors that land rights for urban migrants might be dispensed with without dreadful repercussions.