Mediated paternalism and violent incorporation: enforcing farm hierarchies on the Zimbabwean-South African border

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 globalized agriculture give paternalism and violence new significance. If white extra-legal violence was previously key to maintaining racialised, hierarchical order in rural areas, today a similar order is maintained through collusion between white farmers, senior black workers, and border guards. Such distributed coercion has precedents, with white and black patriarchs enforcing their positions and agendas through physical force. Today, however, white farmers are keen to perform a corporate style, and appear removed from any vigilante violence. Senior black workers actively entrench themselves as powerful arbiters of farm order amidst transience and mass unemployment, drawing on the coercive power of border guards. But as the latter mediate paternalism down the chain of command, this remains at the pleasure of their employers. It all depends on having a job. Moreover, even as everyday influence is devolved down the hierarchy, senior workers are kept in their place by an absolute distinction between black and white.