Mvundura, Wellington2025-05-202024Mvundura, Wellington. (2024). Operating under the Radar: Forestry Plantation Workers Everyday Resistance in Chimanimani District, Zimbabwe [PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. WIReDSpace. https://hdl.handle.net/10539/44930https://hdl.handle.net/10539/44930A research report Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for a Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology, In the Faculty of Humanities , School of Social Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024This thesis explores and analyses the everyday forms and practices of labour resistance that rural commercial forestry plantation labour crafts to navigate a highly insecure post-colonial capitalist plantation labour process. It attends to the scholarly puzzle that in Zimbabwe, Africa, and elsewhere quotidian forms and practices of resistance are in a much less or barely empirically demonstrated and theoretically elaborated state in both resistance and labour resistance studies. This is even more pronounced in agrarian labour politics studies, yet agriculture labour constitutes a significant proportion of the overall industrial labour-force in xii Africa and elsewhere and is arguably the most easily exploitable form of wage labour. This motivated my empirical focus on commercial plantation labour. In light of evidence from Barura plantation estate, I argue that the workers may have to accept the fact of post-colonial capitalist plantation wage employment, the plantation-specific modalities of statist ethno-national citizenship, and state-sanctioned partisan national politics while contesting the terms and conditions under which these mutual systems of domination and exploitation occur. The practices do not seek to radically decompose the historical material- cum-symbolic bases of these systems of power. The everyday practices of defiance mediate the workers’ realisation of piecemeal de facto material and status gains more than the de jure recognition of those gains. My major empirical contribution is the discovery and foregrounding of the quotidian practices of subaltern groups as an integral part of politics. In a specialised and methodical manner, I re- centre the mundane everyday acts of plantation labour as workplace politics namely labour resistance. Theoretically I deploy and test the conceptual-cum-theoretical positions of seminal scholars on (everyday) resistance and modify some of these positions in light of empirical evidence. Methodologically, I break from the intention-oriented and foreground the practice- oriented approach to everyday resistance. This study is based on a continuous fourteen-month long on-site ethnography at a state-owned commercial forestry plantation. Ethnography was instrumental for the contextualised in-depth discovery and thick description of the workers’ forms, practices, and dynamics of subterranean labour resistance. It also enabled the cultivation of high levels of trust and rapport required to discover a sensitive, incriminating, and largely backstage (hidden) social phenomenon like quotidian labour resistance. For data collection I used three levels of participant observation, unstructured in-depth interviews, casual conversations, and deep hangouts.en© 2024 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.UCTDresistanceeverydaypowerforestryplantation labourChimanimaniDissertationMM2025SDG-8: Decent work and economic growth