Gendered Labour, Migratory Labour

Sugar has played a contentious historical role in the development of Mozambique. Following the country’s 16-year civil conflict, the industry has re-emerged as an important sector for investment and national rebuilding. This article explores how the industry’s narratives of technical efficiency and success in increasing production mask dynamics of agricultural labour in the country’s largest sugar estate at Xinavane, southern Mozambique. Based on archival and ethnographic investigation, the paper interrogates the recent transformation of sugar cane production by South African investment and management. The paper identifies gender- and migration-based labour management practices that are not only consistent with a trend toward labour ‘flexibilisation’ within South African agribusiness practice, but also constitute rules and orders that reiterate Portuguese colonial practice. This analysis undermines current ahistorical narratives of the Açucareira de Xinavane - or Xinavane Sugar Mill - that depict the company as a beneficial exemplar of industrial production and technological advance. It suggests that the search of South African agribusiness for cheap labour north of its borders not only reinforces the low social and material valuing of Mozambican rural life and labour, but also reconstitutes labour relations from the country’s colonial past. This paper argues that these insights are critical to an understanding of the country’s post-conflict reconstruction, and its re-emerging linkages with South African capital

Capital (architecture · Cash crop · Colonialism · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Geography · Investment (military · Political science · Production (economics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Law

• The impact of a malaria elimination initiative on school outcomes

  Open Access•Laia Cirera, Judit Vall Castello et al.•Economics & Human Biology•2021

  Incluir item

• Sugarcane outgrower schemes model

  Open Access•João Guilherme Dal Belo Leite, F M Langa et al.•World Development Perspectives•2020

  Incluir item

• No separate spheres

  B O''Laughlin•Review of International Political…•2021

  Incluir item

• The workplace at the bottom of global supply chains as a site of reproduction of colonial relations

  Open Access•Sara Stevano•Gender Work and Organization•2021

  Incluir item

• The expansion of capitalist agricultural production and social reproduction of rural labour

  Carlos Muianga•Review of African Political Economy•2022

  Incluir item

• The implications of sugarcane contract farming on land rights, labor, and food security in the Bunyoro sub-region, Uganda

  Open Access•Ibrahim Bahati, Giuliano Martiniello et al.•Land Use Policy•2022

  Incluir item

• William Munro Tapp

  Open Access•Nicolas Bell-Romero•The Historical Journal•2023

  Incluir item

• Mediating bureaucrats

  Open Access•L Buur, Malin J Nystrand et al.•The Journal of Modern African…•2020

  Incluir item

• Reinvestment, Resource "Rushes," and the Inalienability of Place

  Alicia Hayashi Lazzarini•Annals of the American…•2020

  Incluir item

• Becoming and unbecoming farm workers in Southern Africa

  Maxim Bolt•Anthropology Southern Africa•2017

  Incluir item

• Gender, politics and sugarcane commercialisation in Tanzania

  Emmanuel Sulle, Helen Dancer•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2020

  Incluir item