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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Structural Unemployment, Small Towns and Agrarian Change in South Africa
Author:Murray, ColinISNI
Year:1995
Periodical:African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society
Volume:94
Issue:374
Period:January
Pages:5-22
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:urbanization
employment
informal settlements
agricultural workers
Economics and Trade
Labor and Employment
Development and Technology
Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/723911
Abstract:This paper analyses the predicament of an expanding but politically neglected constituency: ex-farmworkers and their families concentrated in the new shack peripheries of small towns throughout the highveld region of the Orange Free State (South Africa). The paper has three objectives. First, at the macrolevel, it identifies trends in structural employment in the mining industry and on white-owned farms. Second, at the mesolevel, it draws on the results of small surveys carried out in 1993-1994 among inhabitants of the shack peripheries of two small towns, Tweespruit and Dewetsdorp, and concludes that relations between farmer and farmworker are characterized by an extreme imbalance of power, and that the loss of a job also means the loss of a home for the farmworker and his or her dependents. Third, at the microlevel, the paper pursues two case studies of displacement from farms in a mixed arable and pastoral zone south of Tweespruit. The changes over time which induced the removals are analysed with reference to the experience both of white farmers and of Africans displaced from their farms. These experiences are shown to be intimately related. Displacement from farms is an outcome not only of structural changes in commercial agriculture but also of the interaction of the cycles of family demography of both farmers and farmworkers. Notes, ref.
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