Zimbabwean Politics from the Ground Up On Rutherford, Blair. Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017, 294 pages

Now, around the time of writing in late 2019, might be the time for students of political affairs to take the profound lessons from Blair Rutherford’s stunningly superb ethnography seriously. After ruling for 37 years, before exiting at the end of 2017 on the occasion of a coup petit executed by one faction within his own party (Moore 2018), and at 95 years of age, Zimbabwe’s past president finally saw the sense in dying. The publication of The Ground of Politics just might allow the many gazes on Zimbabwean politics to shift focus from the élite not only to the subalterns, but to the ways in which the discourse and practice of both groups, and the many intersecting fractions and factions within them, relate to and influence each other. Rutherford offers a subtle grasp of theory and keen storytelling: combined with a nuanced take on national and ‘domestic’ modes of governance, and his book offers just the needed shift in focus. Might political analysts grow tired of delving into the myriad manoeuvres of the members of the political class who differ only in their constructions of generation, ethnicity, and cabals; in how they accumulate their corrupt gains; with which security cluster they arm themselves; or whether they mouth platitudes with or against ‘the west’? Might political analysts see that whatever new (or just slightly different, in this case) faces rise to the top, daily politics at the summit of power doesn’t change much (other than getting worse)? Ought they to venture a few score kilometres outside the cities (or even closer, into the ‘low density suburbs’) to see politics work on the terrain where most people live? One would think so. Yet maybe not, even if they should be encouraged to do so by reading this book. Why not? One of the many strengths of the book is that its pointillist illustrations of farm-workers’ battles with a nouveau bourgeois noir agricultural company (and later with a variety of much more complex forces) are viewed through a wide-angle lens on the tumultuous shifts in the national body-politic taking place near the turn of the millennium. As the battle on the farm is resolved (more or less), the bigger battle on the wider, national canvas takes the jambjana turn. The fine details on the commercial farms and their immediate context mesh intricately with a near war country-wide. One main narrative point of The Ground of Politics is that this jambjana moment was Zimbabwe’s most important political turning point since majority rule in 1980. The wave of liberal democracy spreading across Africa in the post-Cold War moment (for example, Moore 2016) allowed a strong and newly independent trade union congress to join up with human rights and constitution-oriented groups to form the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Given the ravages of a belated structural adjustment program in Zimbabwe, it seemed as if a form of social democracy might just work. It was evident to most, that this, not Margaret Thatcher’s, was the “only alternative”. At one level, it is the national and the local that merge so well in The Ground of Politics. A liberal discourse of human rights blended with its ‘second generation’ to lend credible weight to the demands of the agricultural workers whom Rutherford grew to know and like both incredibly well, and, in his wise hindsight, reflexively. These agricultural workers’ needs and demands resonated with the new national discourse of a political party born of a February 1999 conference mandating a workers’ party. And it was workers (in a complex way) that these people were, in spite of …