AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	37. Political Economies of Displacement in Southern Africa
Paper ID	269
Author(s)	Kalaora, Lea
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Since 2000, Zimbabwe has been marked by multiple forms of violent displacement. From a survey of popular comments by scholars working on Zimbabwe, there seems to be an emphasis on the current economic and political crisis in the country. Under conditions of displacement and market ‘collapse’, economies (both material and moral) and social identities are being reshaped. This presentation will focus on the case of white commercial farmers who have been displaced from their farms since 2000. Basing analysis on ongoing research, my objective is to underline the heterogeneity of trajectories of displacement and strategies of adaptation in spite of lingering ghosts from the past. How do current and former white commercial farmers reinvent themselves within and beyond a changing Zimbabwe? What are strategies of survival and of integration in the “new” Zimbabwe and its expanding diaspora? How are ghosts from the past to be reconciled within a society in which white commercial farmers are conventionally seen more as oppressors than victims, underlining the theoretical gap between life story and History? Most displaced farmers involved in this research travel from their various sites of displacement (Zambia, Nigeria, Mozambique, New Zealand, or still Zimbabwe itself) to reunite for summer holidays at Lake Kariba. Located in northeastern Zimbabwe, Kariba is where many have long spent their vacation months. It is a place full of memories, and for these farmers is in many ways haunted by troubled pasts. Considering life and social issues in Kariba enables us to understand the act of witnessing Zimbabwe’s violent past, of remembering through nostalgia, but also of overcoming and adapting to the country’s postcolonial reality. Relationships that these white farmers have with ethnic conflict and with their own memories are lived through their very relationship to nature. I am left to wonder whether the whites of Zimbabwe find themselves in a historical turning point in which important traces may be found in Kariba. After all, this is a place where it seems some try to make the past live again, or at least to give it new life, in spite of present-day challenges brought from new lifestyles and strategies of survival acquired through recent large-scale displacements. Are the violent past and the unsettled present, which have been lived differently by all, driving this segment of Zimbabwean society apart, fragmenting any social cohesion which may once have characterized it? As a displaced people, white Zimbabwean commercial farmers seem exiles even in their own country. This exile is not just one from the place of their youth and of generations of family members before them, but from time as well. It is an exile with such heavy burdens to carry from the past, that moving forward and adapting to a rapidly changing society is complicated at every step by ghosts who haunt the present. One may be led to ask, whether the ghosts of their individual experiences of a violent past are not also exiling these farmers from their very community of displaced white Zimbabweans?

Displaced Farmers' Gathering at Lake Kariba: make the past live again in the unsettled present