Introduction
Research on small-scale farming in rural southern Africa very rarely discusses social relations of production and the social reproduction strategies of classes of labour (Bernstein 2004), working people (Shivji 2017) or semi-proletarians (Moyo and Yeros 2005).1 This gap stems from the misconception that in this region small-scale farmers or peasants employ no labour (Oya and Pontara 2015). This article aims to fill this gap, conversing with literature on redistributive land-reform impacts on farm labour in South Africa and Zimbabwe (Bernstein 2004; Sender and Johnston 2004; Scoones et al. 2018; Mtero, Gumede and Ramantsima 2019; Chambati 2021) to cautiously move beyond farm worker victimhood, without losing sight of the fact that in many post-land-reform contexts the loss of farm work is a real, burning issue (Mtero, Gumede and Ramantsima 2019).
Beyond loss, new possibilities emerge, as beneficiaries of redistributive land reform, with recent histories of farm work, farmland expulsions and economy-wide retrenchments, have the opportunity to become farmers. Trajectories are highly socially differentiated: they comprise small- and medium-scale capitalist farmers who combine the hiring of wage workers – more specifically, migrant workers – with self-exploitation and exploitation of family labour (Scoones et al. 2018; Chambati 2021).
Migrants from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are widely employed on South African farms (Johnston 2007, 2015; Rutherford and Addison 2007; Hall et al. 2013; Pérez Niño 2017; Pilossof 2018; Kudejira 2019). Much research has focused on white-owned farms in Limpopo (Hall et al. 2013; Addison 2014; Kudejira 2019) and Free State provinces (Johnston 2007, 2015) but we know very little about social relations on black-owned farms, recently redistributed following land reform, and about the social reproduction of immigrant farm workers living and working there. This article locates the plight of Basotho immigrant farm workers within their historical context of land dispossession, exploring social reproduction dynamics, remittances and class formation attached to the historical hegemony of colonial South Africa over Lesotho.
In southern Africa, immigrant farm workers are surplus labour which cannot be absorbed by other sectors of the economy and therefore end up in conditions similar to those of low-paid precarious workers who barely eke out a living through survivalist improvisation (Ferguson and Li 2018). Basotho farm workers are a very visible presence in the region bordering the Eastern Free State province of South Africa. This article presents evidence collected through fieldwork research and is part of a wider project on the beneficiaries of land reform. The research applied mixed methods to assess labour absorption quantities on land-reform farms, combined with in-depth interviews with 28 male livestock herders, of whom 60% were Basotho.
Immigrant farm workers are footloose labour (Breman 1996) whose social reproduction crises are intertwined within the wider macro-economic process, the deindustrialisation of South Africa, that led to structural unemployment (Slater 2001, 2002; van Onselen 2019). Farm workers are part of fragmented classes of labour (Bernstein 2004): they do not have stable jobs, their wages are insufficient for their social reproduction, and they are not politically organised in confronting capital. Farm workers’ lives are precarious, revolving around highly uncertain, seasonal and casual employment – a precariousness that intersects with other forms of domination related to gender, class, racial and ethnic power relations (Bhattacharya 2017). Sirisha Naidu and Lyn Ossome (2016) have theorised this reality as the agrarian question of gendered labour, highlighting the centrality of women’s labour in the social reproduction of surplus labour populations in agrarian settings in the global South. Basotho women working on horticultural border farms in Eastern Free State are an example of this reality (Johnston 2007, 2015).
Basotho immigrant farm workers are an expression of a global crisis of social reproduction experienced by surplus populations around the globe. These workers are part of the footloose global reserve army of labour, the working poor who struggle to make ends meet, particularly in the global South (Li 2009). This global reserve army of labour is also present in the global North and BRICS countries2 and it is typically most visible in farming (Bridi 2013; Salvia 2015; Kavak 2016; Alexandra 2018; Pelek 2023). It is reproduced not only through global South–North migration, but also through intra-North–periphery–centre migration, for example Eastern European farm workers in the Netherlands (Siegmann, Quaedvlieg and Williams 2022). In agriculture, the patterns are partly driven by capital concentration in buyer-driven commodity chains relying on vulnerable immigrant labour (Salvia 2015).
Basotho farm workers in South Africa work very long hours, multitasking as herders, security guards and carrying out various on-farm tasks while being confined to the farms out of fear, given their status of illegal migrants; they are also criminalised and stigmatised as livestock thieves. Their subaltern status evokes the forgotten Lesotho land question and the role of white colonial South Africa in the confiscation of the land and livestock of the Basotho people: a process consolidated in the 1860s to make way for white farmers of mainly Dutch and British descent (Sanders 1971; Suzman 1972; Eloff 1979; Keegan 1986; Mayende 2022).
Many Basotho dissidents reacted to these confiscations by reclaiming their land and livestock (Binckes 2022) through covert and overt forms of resistance (Sanders 1971; Eloff 1979) that continue until today. It is crucial to recognise that historically the farms on which the Basotho immigrant herders are nowadays employed in Eastern Free State, South Africa, were once Basotho territory. The descendants of recent ancestors who were dispossessed of their land now find themselves working on their ancestors’ land, but as an illegal, immigrant wage labour force. This conjuncture urges us to discuss the South African–Lesotho land-labour questions jointly and, to make this discussion politically relevant, to imagine possibilities for a resolution that delivers social justice and historical reparation to the Basotho people and black South Africans.
The lengthening of the working day by employers, apparent in long working hours, constitutes absolute surplus value extraction (Marx 1976). This article will show that the long working hours performed by Basotho workers correspond to value over and above the labour time necessary for the maintenance and accumulation of livestock herds for their employers. Cheapening of Basotho’s labour means that workers are exploited; the vignettes presented later will show that they are also victimised. These vignettes aim at advancing critical thinking about structural transformation that can be meaningful for working classes, rather than mere progressive adjustments of poor working conditions and basic minimum farm wages. As stated by Helen Suzman in a 1972 Memorial Lecture on Moshoeshoe, the Basotho king who vehemently resisted Basotho land confiscation by white colonialists, till about his death in the 1870s, ‘I can only hope that Lesotho experiences its economic windfall soon, and be released from its dependence on the evil system of migrant labour’ (Suzman 1972, 14). In this case, structural change necessarily entails the confrontation and questioning of historical land injustice that lies at the roots of the pattern that transformed the Basotho into a labour reserve for South Africa: the Lesotho labour reserve in perpetuity thesis that emerged out of this analysis and is developed in this article. This thesis is the assumption, borne out of colonialism, that Basotho can only serve as a labour reserve for South Africa, rather than undergoing its own path of agrarian transition. The attempt to undertake an autonomous agrarian transition was crushed by colonialism, accompanied by violent land and livestock confiscation by white colonial settlers (Sanders 1971). This research invokes the forgotten Lesotho land question through the lenses of footloose Basotho farm workers who exist and reproduce themselves in continual movement straddling Lesotho and South Africa.
The theoretical argument developed in this work is that it seems plausible that the relation to land is worthwhile and fruitful for those with secure long-term tenure and ownership rights, regardless of tenure form (communal and individual rights), rather than for landless farm workers. The landowner possesses natural wealth: land. The landless worker is helplessly poor without land ownership. In a context of post-land reform, it does not make political sense to lament lost farm jobs when former landless workers have obtained land ownership through ‘land to the tiller’ programmes. The capital–wage relation should not be treated as an immutable and unchangeable condition, especially as it potentially reproduces the accumulation of poverty for the landless worker.
Land as a natural resource is a precondition for production and in an agrarian context is very often a means of social reproduction. For the landless worker, the struggle for land can become much more meaningful than the struggle for jobs or higher wages, especially in a context of deindustrialisation and hyper-concentration of capital, also manifested through a prevalence of land concentration among descendants of white settlers. As will be seen later, the descendants of Basotho who have laboured throughout South African industrialisation have survived in poverty over the last 165 years, while the descendants of white settlers have accumulated wealth generated from the same land that was violently confiscated from the Basotho via armed colonial conquest. Much the same can be said about the South African land question.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section sketches the unresolved South African land question, followed by a contextualisation of the Lesotho land-labour questions. Subsequent sections clarify the implications of the ‘land to the tiller’ redistributive land reform for southern Africa, and Lesotho in particular, in the broader conjuncture of South African deindustrialisation and rising unemployment. Empirical findings are then presented, in the form of vignettes, preluded by a brief description of the land beneficiaries. This is followed by a section on the historicised importance of livestock and land to the Basotho people, then a section debunking the criminalisation of Basotho herdsmen as livestock thieves by showing that they are the victims of land and livestock confiscations conducted by white South Africa, especially from the 1860s onwards. The final sections draw out the theoretical implications of this work for political mobilisation and offer suggestions for new research in Lesotho grounded on social reproduction and the agrarian question of gendered labour (Naidu and Ossome 2016).
The unresolved South African land question
About 80% of agricultural land in South Africa is owned by white people (Cousins 2015), some of whom are fourth- and fifth-generation landowners and descendants of colonialists (Mayende 2022). In political debates, they have presented themselves as productive farmers who are crucial to national food security and South African exports to the global market (Mayende 2022). The reality is that they contributed to the creation of a national food system where black South Africans are food insecure; the argument of an efficient South African agriculture based on the legacy of white-owned farms is used as political muscle to block radical land-reform projects. The ruling party has conformed to the idea of farming as a capitalist, large-scale model and when land is redistributed to black people, state officials insist on having a white, typically male, farm mentor to guide black beneficiaries (Hall and Kepe 2017).
The existing political progressive forces against ‘counter-agrarian reform’ processes (Bellisario 2007) are fragile and fragmented, and those in them poor, unemployed and disempowered. Counter-agrarian reform is constituted by all the forces that push against radical land redistribution. It exists at the level of neoliberal (Borras 2003), bourgeois populist discourse, if not propaganda, that has successfully engulfed South African land reform and led to a tentative stalemate.
The unresolved Lesotho land question
Some parts of South African territory, particularly the land in Free State province, were once owned by communities of Basotho people. Their dispossession by white colonialist forces had been consolidated by the 1860s (Keegan 1986). Recently, on 29 March 2023, the Basotho Covenant Movement led by Tshepo Lipholo filed a ‘Reclamation of Lesotho Territory’ motion in the Lesotho parliament, reclaiming swathes of land in Free State, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal provinces.3
The Lesotho land question matters because, just as in South Africa, poverty is rife in Lesotho and land can serve as a buffer against crises of social reproduction (Hornby 2014; Ngubane 2020) for former farm workers who obtained farmland through land reform in South Africa. If South Africa gives back the land historically owned by the Basotho, the restitution can lead to an expansion of small- and medium-scale farming by the Basotho.
The legacy of colonialism in land ownership endures in both South Africa and Lesotho. South Africa has embarked on land reform, though the process is slow and characterised by counter-agrarian reform tendencies. Under pressure from powerful white landed interests, the South African state is reluctant to further redistribute land (Mayende 2022). Nonetheless, in South Africa land reform has enabled some working-class individuals and families to become differentiated small- and medium-scale capitalist farmers based on self-exploitation and wage labour, particularly immigrant labour (Ngubane 2020). The Lesotho land question, on the other hand, has only partially been dealt with at the political level by a political party ( The Post 2022) and lacks overt popular demand from below. The latter is problematised in the penultimate section of this article.
The South Africa–Lesotho land-labour questions encapsulate the historical backdrop in which white colonial South Africa confiscated the land of the Basotho, encountering intense resistance (Suzman 1972), and eventually transformed what was left of Basotho territory into a labour reserve for South Africa (Keegan 1986; Gill 1993).The Lesotho labour question, manifested in unemployment crises, brings back the Lesotho land question not only in overt land demand proposals by an opposition party in Lesotho, but in the very existence of a footloose immigrant workforce, working on the same land that was taken from their recent ancestors and currently stigmatised as livestock thieves in South African border farms.
The next section explores selected dynamics of the ‘land to the tiller’ ideology in southern Africa, recently dubbed ‘pro-working-class land reform’ by some intellectuals of the South African Communist Party (South African Communist Party 2022).
The promise of land for the social reproduction of the working classes in southern Africa
In the global South, the reality of self-exploitation of beneficiaries of land reforms is rooted in the ideology of ‘land to the tiller’ redistributive land reform (Wolford 2007). In South Africa this ideology, although recently reformulated in a progressive approach by the South African Communist Party, has been overshadowed by conservative and racialised stereotypes of the beneficiaries of land reforms, typified as incapable of farming (Mayende 2022). These stereotypes obscure the material realities of work on undercapitalised land-reform farms (Scoones et al. 2018; Chambati 2021). In South Africa, farm wages are generally low and land-reform beneficiaries pay lower wages than white farmers (Visser and Ferrer 2015). Too much emphasis on low wages obscures other realities, such as on livestock-centred South African land-reform farms, suggesting new ways in which capitalist relations deepen in new contexts, induced by land redistribution to formerly marginalised classes.
Immigrant seasonal farm workers from Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zimbabwe work on farms throughout South Africa (Johnston 2007, 2015; Rutherford and Addison 2007; Hall et al. 2013; Visser and Ferrer 2015; Pilossof 2018; Kudejira 2019). Should South Africa carry out a radical land redistribution, latent questions about their futures will come into the open. What would be the fate of Basotho farm workers (O’Laughlin et al. 2013)? Would they be accommodated in solidarity, similarly to former farm workers from Mozambique and Malawi who were given access to land in Zimbabwe after that country’s fast-track land reform (Scoones et al. 2018)?
The possibility of accommodating immigrant farm workers in land reform is still widely unpopular in South Africa, even in specialised circles. For example, during a conference on land redistribution in 2019, while some participants expressed sympathy for Basotho dispossessed migrants, many others were shocked at the idea that South African land reform could involve non-South African beneficiaries,4 exposing conservative if not xenophobic positions. This shows that the debate in South Africa has not yet incorporated iterations towards the resolution of the South African–Lesotho land-labour questions – something this article attempts to develop.
The next three sections present the results of fieldwork research on social relations of production and reproduction in selected case studies.
The research focused on redistributed farmlands – the Qwaqwa Farms – located close to Qwaqwa, a former labour reserve (Bantustan) in Eastern Free State, South Africa. Lesotho is a landlocked country surrounded by South Africa. These farms cover 60,000 hectares and were purchased by the state from white farmers ( Figure 1 ). Between the mid 1980s and early 2000s, the farms were subsequently subdivided and redistributed to a mix of beneficiaries – farm workers, off-farm differentiated black petty commodity producers, and established black entrepreneurs. Redistributed farms range from 70 to 1,000 hectares. They are mixed farming enterprises, combining livestock production with the farming of maize, beans, sunflower and other grains.
Map of redistributed farmland, the Qwaqwa Farms, Eastern Free State, South Africa.
Source: Slater (2002, 600).
Since the 1980s, the economic trajectories of land-reform beneficiaries have been conditioned by the geopolitical macro-economic context of neoliberal land reform (Borras 2003). In Eastern Free State, most beneficiaries were unable to service the mortgages issued by the Land Bank and were forced to lease out arable farmland to white-owned agribusiness entities. The land-reform beneficiaries were crushed by the economic pressures of neoliberal land reforms; these produced an impoverished landed property, reversing the objectives of redistribution (Ngubane 2020). The impoverished landed property is a concept developed in Ngubane (2020) delineating poverty-stricken land beneficiaries forced to rent out their recently obtained farmland to differentiated agrarian capitals for income that goes a long way towards their social reproduction, and gradual expansion of livestock herds.
Without agricultural capital, beneficiaries struggle to retain the land allocated to them, given the general absence of state agricultural subsidies within a wider volatile neoliberal market climate characterised by technologically advanced farming machinery and high input costs. The lack of wherewithal to fund high-tech agriculture, and inability to secure selective state agricultural subsidies, has forced land beneficiaries to lease arable land to technologically advanced farmers and agribusiness. In this context, Basotho farm workers step in as low-cost labour, employed in livestock keeping.
Despite the odds, some land beneficiaries are on upward accumulation trajectories. The class positioning of beneficiaries has been crucial to their trajectory. Typically, middle-class beneficiaries who had off-farm income from small businesses, or office jobs and retirement funds, have fared better and managed to accumulate; they are the employers who pay higher wages to migrant farm workers. The state and the Land Bank prefer to support this stratum of black farmers, who can comply with the dictates of neoliberal land reform.
One of the studied farms, Weltevrede, is a former labour tenant farm. Such farms are legacies of colonial and apartheid South Africa when, as black people were evicted and dispossessed of their land, they would enter into labour tenant contracts, offering free labour to white landlords in return for residential and farming rights on white-owned land (Levin and Ngubane 2023). Weltevrede was subdivided and redistributed to labour tenant families during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Figure 2 shows the subdivision plan, with family-owned plots ranging between 98 and 135 hectares.
Farmland subdivision in Eastern Free State, South Africa.
Source: Provincial Land Surveyors (1998).
Immigrant livestock herders on Eastern Free State land-reform farms
Farm work dynamics in Eastern Free State replicate conditions found in other regions of South Africa (Visser and Ferrer 2015). Wages do not meet the minimum wage regulations and there is a prevalence of migrant workers – more specifically underpaid Basotho immigrants, working for both white and black capitalist farmers, including land-reform beneficiaries. The southern African region has historically been structured to provide labour to South African mines, and Lesotho fell squarely into this migrant labour pattern. The current presence of Basotho workers is a legacy of this historical pattern (Murray 1981; Ferguson 1999; Boehm 2000; Turner 2005; van Onselen 2019). Former migrant mine workers between 15 and 39 years old generally retreat to rural Lesotho to work in small-scale livestock production (Boehm 2000), an occupation many had planned for retirement (Murray 1981). Those without livestock must seek alternative livelihoods to mitigate social reproduction crises affecting their families. One strategy is to invoke historical migration routes to border farms and beyond, on the South African side of the border. This immigrant labour force is gendered and, more generally, farming in the Eastern Free State involves a gendered division of labour: ruminant livestock herding is culturally associated with men, while the vast majority of seasonal workers on vegetable farms are Basotho women (Johnston 2007, 2015).
The study area is one of mixed farming, with both horticulture and livestock keeping (Johnston 2007); remarkably, the working conditions of Basotho women farm workers are very similar to those of their male counterparts. Even though wages are higher on white-owned farms than black-owned farms, both white and black capitalist farmers prefer to hire Basotho migrant workers, as their immigrant status makes it easier to exploit them. Such exploitation entails endless multitasking – herding, the application of veterinary medication (such as injections and dipping to prevent tick-borne diseases) and security work. Multitasking contributes to the lengthening of the working day and further exploitation of workers, while accruing value to the employer’s enterprise.
Basotho workers are widely considered to be more docile than South African workers: similar to Zimbabweans working on white-owned South African farms (Kudejira 2019), they are limited in their mobility because of their illegal status, so they must stay on-farm and accept to be paid partly in cash and partly in kind, with food supplies provided. Basotho herders are preferred to South African ones because they accept conditions that are more like those of bonded labour: they are also compelled to live on-site and are expected to work extra hours and to be woken up in the middle of the night or the early morning to attend to livestock-related emergencies. Living on-farm makes it easier to lengthen their working day – sometimes to up to 14 hours – which is often spent leading the herds on foot to greener pastures or towards water points, besides handling bales for winter grazing and being called upon for any farm duty at any time. Male Basotho migrant workers are particularly visible in Eastern Free State, where many areas have a grassland biome conducive to livestock production (Hall and Cousins 2013).
The land beneficiaries of Qwaqwa Farms are socially differentiated into three classes based on their farm production scales and attached wealth, inseparable from their class formation histories ( Table 1 ). Some entered capitalist farming with farm work experience and a few head of cattle sponsored by the state in early 2000s, while others had substantial off-farm income injections into their farming enterprises, especially those with histories of differentiated petty commodity production and off-farm entrepreneurship of various scales. The lowest class stratum, which constitutes 50% of the sample (n=62), is agricultural households engaged in marginal farming for their social reproduction needs. Within this stratum, where self-exploitation is predominant, some households employ immigrant herders. In fact, the employment of herders in livestock enterprises is a tendency that cuts across all three class categories of farmers on redistributed land ( Table 1 ).
Livestock herding work on the New Qwaqwa Farms.
| Number of herders | |
|---|---|
| Agricultural households engaged in farming for social reproduction (n=31) (50%) | |
| Mean | 1.17 |
| Median | 1 |
| Maximum | 2 |
| Minimum | 1 |
| Range | 1 |
| Agricultural households engaged in simple farm reproduction (n=16) (26%) | |
| Mean | 2.06 |
| Median | 2 |
| Maximum | 4 |
| Minimum | 1 |
| Range | 3 |
| Agricultural households engaged in accumulation (n=15) (24%) | |
| Mean | 2.53 |
| Median | 2 |
| Maximum | 10 |
| Minimum | 1 |
| Range | 9 |
| Anova | |
| F | 5.312 |
| Sig. | .008 |
For South African land-reform beneficiaries, land reform has been redistributive on at least four fronts. First, land was subdivided and redistributed to farm workers and socially differentiated (mostly off-farm) petty commodity producers who are socially reproducing themselves as farmers through farming and farm rent income, and accumulating capital from below. Accumulation from below refers to wealth accumulation by working people towards their economic emancipation, prosperity and upward trajectories of social mobility and wealth accumulation (Lenin 1977). Accumulation from below necessarily requires political emancipation, for example the democratic transition to post-apartheid South Africa and accompanying land reform which has given farm workers the opportunity to obtain land to lift themselves out of poverty and prosper economically (Ngubane 2020).
Second, the land reform gave former labour tenant farm workers the opportunity to expand their herds. Prior to this, tenants faced livestock herd size restrictions imposed by white landlords through landlord–labour tenant social relations. Increased herd sizes have raised income from livestock sales in informal ceremonial weekend markets (such as weddings, funerals and sporting derbies), thus widening the social reproduction material base, and created space for accumulation from below. Third, the emergence of the land rental market created opportunities to rent pastures, and thus expand small- and medium-scale livestock keeping. Fourth, generalised small- and medium-scale livestock production is redistributive in the sense that multiple players benefit: pasture owners through rent, and land beneficiaries, rather than one landowner, holding one large-scale farm that is run using wage labour.
For households engaged in marginal farming, owning herds of 1 to 20 head, it makes no material sense to have more than one worker as a herder. Within this stratum, the incidence of self-exploitation is at its highest. Those able to reproduce farm production at the same scale annually or seasonally have larger herd sizes (20 to 50 head of cattle) and thus employ a mean of 2.06 herders per herd. This is partly explained by their widened base of off-farm income towards farm investments, in contrast to those engaged in marginal farming. Wealthier producers, with higher off-farm incomes, seem to follow a pattern of accumulation from below, with petty bourgeois aspirations. They typically hire more workers, both to herd livestock ( Table 1 ) and to work in milking parlours.
In the next section, the daily lives of the herdsmen of Eastern Free State land-reform farms are presented in the form of vignettes, drawing from in-depth interviews.
The lives of farm workers on redistributed farmland in the Eastern Free State
A total of 60% (n=28) of the interviewed herders on livestock-centred land-reform farms in Eastern Free State originate from Lesotho.
Vignette 1
There are no working hours. We work from sunrise to sunset, and at night, because when dogs bark at night, we must wake up and go out and see what is going on. We must also patrol the fence. We patrol the farm boundary every morning to monitor possible intrusion by [live]stock thieves overnight. (Tshepo)5
Tshepo was born in 1978. He is an immigrant farm worker from Lesotho; his brother works on a neighbouring farm – both are land-reform farms. Tshepo has a verbal work arrangement with a cattle herd owner, a recently retired policeman who rents on a land-reform farm and owns about 90 head of cattle. Land-reform farms have created new rental markets enabling landless people to graze their cattle for a monthly payment of 50–100 ZAR (US$2.71–5.43)6 per head of livestock. These graziers on rent are also land-reform beneficiary aspirants, some with existing applications for land submitted to the Land Ministry – they have overpopulated state-owned municipal grazing land with their large herds of cattle and sheep. As with the other herders, Tshepo sleeps in a shack and works from sunrise to sunset, including nightfall security work, where he is expected to wake up if dogs bark to signal an intruder. There are no stipulated working hours, nor a written contract. Tshepo and his coworkers shared their feelings about the degraded work conditions they experience: ‘If we get injured on duty [by livestock thieves], we do not know what to do. We always think of our families back home in Lesotho’ (Tshepo’s co-worker).
Basotho workers are often stigmatised and criminalised as cattle thieves. Here we get a sense of how they feel endangered while they protect their employers’ livestock. In 2019, Tshepo had been a livestock herder for the same employer for four years. Prior to that he had a similar job on a neighbouring land-reform farm. There he was paid 1,000 ZAR (US$54.39) a month. Here he is paid 1,600 ZAR (US$87.03) per month. He is also paid in kind – a 50-kilogram sack of maize meal and occasionally a few cans of beans. He sends monthly remittances of 1,000 ZAR (US$54.39) back home to his wife and two children, aged 12 and 14. Tshepo outlined that ‘I normally deposit the money into my wife’s bank account. Sometimes I send it with any Lesotho-originating worker who might be going to Lesotho.’
Back in Lesotho, Tshepo’s 60-year-old father, who recently retired from mine work in the Welkom gold fields in Free State province in South Africa, is a small-scale farmer, rearing sheep under contract for a shearing company. He also produces maize on 1.5 hectares of arable land, for which he employs labour. The sheep herd also includes his son’s sheep (10 in total). For the maize field, a span of cattle is used for ploughing, drawn from their family cattle herd of eight head. Such petty agricultural production practised by Tshepo’s father is what Colin Murray (1981) described as the typical occupation for retiring Basotho male migrant workers who had accumulated cattle, and with patriarchal generational rights to a plot of arable land. Tshepo’s father is an exceptional case in an era characterised by massive retrenchments, mainly from the mining industry in Johannesburg. While Tshepo has the option of going back home to join his father or take over his small-scale farm, not all Basotho herders have this option: many come from families that are far too poor for this to be a possibility.
Insights into Tshepo’s life decriminalises Basotho herders and illuminates how endangered their lives are as they protect their employers’ livestock, even at the crack of dawn, against possible intruders. Furthermore, Tshepo hails from a stable peasant household back in Lesotho; he has invested in his family farm in Lesotho, particularly in livestock. With land restitution to the Basotho people and increased access to land, the likes of Tshepo and his father could unleash their latent peasant upward economic accumulation trajectories.
Vignette 2
Thabo works for a land-reform beneficiary for 2,800 ZAR (US$152.31) a month. His working hours are from sunrise to sunset; at nighttime, his employer expects him to guard the livestock. He is entitled to only eight days’ leave over Christmas; he spends the entire year on the farm – every day, seven days a week. He sends meagre remittances to his dependants in Lesotho – his spouse and two children, as well as two of his deceased sisters’ children and his younger brother, who is constantly searching for piece work in Maseru, Lesotho’s capital. Remittances must always wait for a fellow herder’s short visit to Lesotho, regardless of whether this is official or not in the eyes of the employer. The general tendency is to inform the employer and to share livestock herding among herders mutually, in return for favours such as sending money home to Lesotho. On the farm, Thabo sleeps in a shack and cooks his food on a fire, without electricity, running water or basic facilities.
Thabo has six dependants on his salary, from which he can barely keep himself alive. His testimony challenges the perpetual Basotho labour reserve for South Africa thesis and exposes its flaws, considering declining wages in agriculture, even if the minimum wage is met. For Thabo, the reality is a lifetime of poverty, potentially recycled by his cyclical migration between Lesotho and South Africa until he reaches old age. The end is a possible retreat to Lesotho, without a hard-earned work pension and possibly reliant on the old age social grant, which covers only the minimum necessities of life. The question is: how would the resolution of the Basotho land-labour questions transform Thabo’s situation and that of his family?
Vignette 3
Lefa was born in 1984. He started working on a land-reform farm in 2005 for 600 ZAR (US$32.63) a month. He worked on the same farm until 2017 and left to settle in a township with his wife and daughter, aged 10, from where he lived on piece work. He found a new job on one of the black-owned farms nearby. He now earns 2,800 ZAR (US$152.31) a month for livestock herding and on-farm security work. His salary is double that received by many herders because he works for a wealthy employer who also runs an off-farm business. He has no other dependants than his daughter and wife in Qwaqwa, as his parents passed away in 2015 and 2017. His father had been a retrenched mine worker since the late 1980s, forcing Lefa’s mother to leave Lesotho for domestic work in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital. Pretoria and its surrounding areas are common destinations for Basotho women aiming to find work as domestic servants or in hairdressing salons, as shop attendants, casual factory workers and so on. One alternative is casual farm work in Eastern Free State (Johnston 2007, 2015) or Western Cape to keep themselves and their children alive.
Both Lefa’s parents passed away after spending a significant part of their lives working in South Africa. Would Lefa suffer the same fate?
Vignette 4
I do not have a wife. I’m supposed to support my deceased brother’s wife. But it is a struggle to do so. I do not know how she makes ends meet because I haven’t seen her since I arrived here, and I can’t send her money either. (Matlala)
Matlala was born in 1966. He has been a livestock herder most his life. He started herding in the communal areas of Matatiele, Eastern Cape province in 1997 and was then paid one beast per year, hence he owns a small cattle herd of nine head in Lesotho. He came to Qwaqwa in 2001 and was employed by households with small livestock herds grazing on common land. He started herding cattle on a land-reform farm in 2017 in the employ of a small cattle herd owner renting grazing land on the same farm. He is paid 600 ZAR (US$32.63) per month, including payments in kind – a 50-kilogram sack of maize meal and a few heads of cabbage.
The likes of Matlala and Tshepo (Vignette 1), who own a few head of livestock back home in Lesotho, could see the expansion of their herds should the Lesotho land question be resolved. The restitution of grasslands and rich water resources of the Maluti mountains could potentially unleash the accumulation of livestock on their part.
Vignette 5
Sebokeng was born in 1986 in Lesotho. He became a herder in 2010. His monthly wage for herding sheep is 800 ZAR (US$43.51), including a 50-kilogram sack of maize meal. He has no dependants and his parents have passed away. His mother, who supported the family through piece work, harvesting vegetables on Eastern Free State farms (Johnston 2007, 2015), died in 2000. That was the turning point for Sebokeng. He dropped out of school after nine years of education, aged 15, and started working with his father on their smallholder plots on the communal fields in Lesotho, producing maize, sorghum, wheat, pumpkins and lentils. These household plots consisted of about 10 hectares of land, for which his father hired labour (paid in food). His father died in 2003 and Sebokeng relied on his relatives for food as the arable fields were taken over by an uncle. He left home for farm work in 2010 and has remained on the same land-reform farm ever since, leaving behind the hardships he endured – his parents’ passing, and his land inheritance being confiscated by his uncle. His monthly wage is insufficient for his own social reproduction. However, he takes care in replacing his boots when they get worn out and replaces his protective clothing against the harsh Eastern Free State weather, with bitterly cold winter days and nights acutely felt by shepherds such as Sebokeng working outdoors.
Against the odds, Sebokeng has peasant roots embedded in his family history of farming. He stands to thrive should he acquire land of his own in the future, should the Lesotho land question be resolved. In addition to the farming skills acquired from an early age, Sebokeng has mastered livestock production and equipped himself with agronomic and veterinary knowledge. A few hundred hectares of grassland with sufficient water resources, and agricultural subsidies from the Lesotho state, for example a few head of cattle, could potentially set Sebokeng on an upward trajectory of accumulation.
Insignificant farm wage remittances vs land restitution to the Basotho people
The vignettes illuminate the exploitation of the Basotho herders – working days of more than 12 hours and additional security work from nightfall, as well as year-round farm occupancy and limited leave days. The vignettes shed light on the probable insignificance of the remittances the Basotho herders send home, and their social differentiation in terms of income and land-based assets and livelihoods, in Lesotho and South Africa. This brings us to the following provocation: the perpetuity of Lesotho as a labour reserve for South African industry only bolsters colonial legacies imprinted onto the landscape and manifested in borders. This labour reserve perpetuity reproduces the poverty of the Basotho people.
The argument here is that Basotho immigrant farm workers of both genders can be set on similar class trajectories as land-reform beneficiaries in Eastern Free State, with improved access to land via land restitution from South Africa. The social reproduction crises they experience can be mitigated by access to land, and some of them can potentially accumulate capital from below via small- and medium-scale capitalist farming. Some Basotho herders have invested in small-scale livestock production in Lesotho (Vignette 1 and Vignette 4). These are essentially peasant articulations, or expressions of attempts, from below, to augment precarious farm wages with small-scale farming. Coincidentally, the Basotho have excellence in livestock husbandry mixed with crop cultivation, which currently cannot be expanded owing to land shortages in Lesotho. These livestock herds and cropping fields can, iteratively, multiply should the Lesotho land question be resolved, which can potentially resolve the country’s agrarian question of gendered labour otherwise known as immigrant farm workers in South Africa.
Resolving the Lesotho land question from the vantage point of labour is tantamount to resolving the agrarian question of gendered labour (Naidu and Ossome 2016) in Lesotho. This could be so, should the Lesotho land question be tailored to the struggles of migrant women and men working on South African soil. The theoretical implications of these iterative decolonial provocations are reflected upon in the concluding section of this article, drawing from lived experiences of land beneficiaries in Eastern Free State, who have seen progressive changes in their material wealth attached to improved access to land through land reform and the subdivision of large-scale farms, to which we turn next.
Subdivision of farmland for agrarian reform in South Africa
This work has underlined the socially differentiated nature of beneficiaries of land reform in South Africa, underlining the class dimension and patterns of social differentiation. The argument that the subdivision of large-scale farms to benefit fragmented classes of labour, particularly farm workers, and other working classes, is not necessarily a populist one, nor utopian (contra Griffin, Khan and Ickowitz 2002); it is rather a sign of heterogeneity of outcomes of the land reform, as shown by this case study. The South African state does not promote the subdivision of large-scale farms (Cousins 2013), especially for land-reform purposes, even though this sometimes occurs informally, especially in land restitution cases involving large communities that have settled back onto farmland (Yeni 2024).
Criminalisation of Basotho herders as livestock thieves in South Africa
Livestock farming is central to social reproduction, reproduction of farming enterprises, and the accumulation strategies of beneficiaries of land reform in Eastern Free State and for the social reproduction of the Basotho in Lesotho and South Africa alike (Murray 1981; Lawry 1988). Historically, livestock was at the centre of colonially determined struggle for lands for the Basotho people. Thousands of their cattle, as well as their land, were confiscated by colonial white settlers. At times, Basotho dissidents, led by Moshoeshoe, and some of his descendants, successfully reclaimed confiscated cattle using guerrilla means. Today most of what was Basotho territory remains owned by mainly descendants of white settlers on the South African side of the border (Binckes 2022). To the critical observer, the latter’s livestock, today in their many thousands, are reminiscent of thousands of cattle that were previously owned by the Basotho prior to their confiscation by white settlers.
The Lesotho land question remains unresolved, and the Basotho have seen neither compensation nor reparations for their livestock, land and other natural resources, especially water resources, that were confiscated by white colonial settlers.
The Lesotho–South Africa land-labour questions: implications for political mobilisation
Lesotho stands to reclaim and regain lost land with deepened political organisation from below via the ranks of migrant workers, who have been migrating for generations to South Africa and sending remittances back to families in Lesotho. Basotho migrant workers’ demand for land from below is currently latent, if not covert. Latent land politics do not necessarily reflect the absence of the politics of land nor the objective land question. Inside Lesotho, land shortages have been a bone of contention for two centuries (Lawry 1988). The political party currently demanding land in the Lesotho parliament is yet to engage with cross-border working classes who historically and generationally have been essentially peasants, ‘cultivator-pastoralists’ (Mayende 2022), and are currently forced to cross the border to make ends meet.
Thousands of Basotho women seasonally migrate to harvest crops on South African farms (Johnston 2007), while thousands more work as domestic servants in South African homes, and for other small domestic companies, in the retail and other sectors. Similarly, Basotho men herd livestock on privately owned land, land-reform farms and former reserves in South Africa. The herdsmen, typically wearing a blanket over their shoulders and gumboots on their feet, are symbolic of Basotho footloose herders in parts of Free State, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and Northwest provinces – a pervasive, cheap labour force in most parts of South Africa. Together, these working-class women and men are potential land beneficiaries, should the Lesotho land question be resolved.
With the resolution of the Lesotho land question we might see, in the future, successful peasant articulations from below, and the accumulation of wealth for the Basotho, who are generally equipped with excellent livestock domestication and rearing skills. Basotho people are pastoralists and farmers of typically unfenced farms; livestock in Lesotho is always monitored by a herder to the extent that there is no need to fence cropping fields. Their current employment as either women crop harvesters or herdsmen on South African farms is testament to their farming skills, which could be utilised given land restitution.
What then about the unresolved land question in South Africa? As in Lesotho, parliamentarians calling for land expropriation are doing so only from the vantage point of privilege, and are not politically engaged in grassroots mobilisation from below. In South Africa and Lesotho, there exists a timid patriotic bourgeoisie that is well resourced but seemingly unwilling, or too politically compromised, to deploy state resources to acquire land. This group is far from being a progressive intelligentsia equipped with sound historical materialist analysis of the social formation behind the Lesotho–South Africa land and labour questions, defending the interests of the working class. Indeed, Lesotho and South Africa are abstract categories that refer to trajectories of social formations traceable to, and determined by, colonial conquest and characterised by an unfinished decolonial process.
The patriotic (petty) bourgeoisie-classes of labour alliance are potentially a point of departure from current entanglements in a colonial present (Hebinck, Fay and Kondlo 2011), towards decoloniality in land and other natural resource ownership. Alone, the Basotho and South African fragmented classes of labour will probably be politically suppressed by the ruling elite, as we have seen with the Abahlali baseMjondolo land occupation movement in South Africa. Nonetheless, people power in its diverse totality cannot be ruled out, nor undermined.
For the work at hand, it will suffice to construe the land-labour questions of Lesotho and South Africa within a decolonial framework, deepening democracy via land restitution. Lest we forget, the colonial project was that of land alienation and forced creation of a labour force confined to reserves for controlled migration into mining and industry. Lesotho was transformed into a labour reserve for South Africa, as were former Bantustans of South Africa (Suzman 1972). Today, with deindustrialisation and high unemployment, this labour has been rendered superfluous.
There has been a clear pattern of the perpetuity of the Lesotho labour reserve thesis for South African industry, even during the present moment characterised by deindustrialisation and surplus labour. This research posits that the reproduction of Basotho people as surplus population and labour reserve perpetuates poverty for the Basotho, and that structural changes are needed, revolving around land redistribution. Within the context of deindustrialisation, and beyond the era of a working man (Ferguson and Li 2018), Basotho women have been forced to cross the border in search of work in much greater numbers than previously. Unemployment caused by deindustrialisation forced Basotho men into poorly paid herding work on the land of their ancestors – land confiscated by white South Africa.
Industry has largely disappeared: the land remains. One of the last resorts for a livelihood, at least for the Basotho women and men, seems to be in farming. This is evident in their current employment on South African farms, and their resolve to invest in livestock back home in Lesotho. It appears then that the linear proletarianisation thesis holds no water in this context. The Basotho still articulate themselves as pastoralist-cultivators, regardless of land shortages in Lesotho (see Vignette 1 and Vignette 4).
Theoretically, the Basotho have ceased being pastoralist-cultivators in a real sense since the 1860s, as colonial rulers evicted them and made them landless. Following this, Basotho men and women became fluid semi-proletarians. Men typically became miners in South African mines and women clandestinely took up work on South African border farms. Because of land dispossession, their peasant status was severely eroded during colonial rule. The last Basotho peasants were further excluded from farming in white South Africa, as were black South African peasants in the reserves and on white-owned farms.
In thinking about the Lesotho–South Africa land-labour questions, the concept of classes of labour might be a useful theoretical category to encapsulate the shared working-class status of Basotho immigrant labour on South African farms. The fragmented classes of labour thesis also sheds light on the analysis of land-reform beneficiaries in South Africa. Working-class families, especially former labour tenant households, were allocated family plots in Eastern Free State. Based on concrete evidence, should Basotho classes of labour become the beneficiaries of land restitution from South Africa, we can expect them to follow similar trajectories to their South African counterparts, in terms of class differentiation and patterns of accumulation.
What then about resolving the agrarian question of labour via land redistribution? As Naidu and Ossome (2016) have theorised, the objective daily reality is that women’s labour is the anchor of the social reproduction of society, from the vantage point of the household in the absence of state support and capital – women’s invisible labour reproduces the invisible superfluous surplus labour populations. Accordingly, further research is needed to better understand the role of Basotho remittances.
What implications would the resolution of the Lesotho–South Africa land-labour questions via land redistribution to those who lost land have on the agrarian question of gendered classes of labour? Would such a transition free women from the burden of disproportionally fuelling the reproduction of social formations? Can Lesotho shake off its colonial relic of allocating land to patriarchs? What criteria would be used to select land beneficiaries and land allocations? How can Lesotho break out of colonially determined gendered social relations inherent in the country’s gendered distribution of land? Naidu and Ossome (2016, 53) underline the centrality of these questions, observing that ‘Political demands for land and agrarian reform, therefore, should address the gender inequities underlying women’s invisible work.’
Once the land-labour questions of Lesotho and South Africa are resolved, the southern African borders question is most likely to be on the horizon. This too could be resolved as it remains a colonial burden and feeds into Afro-phobia/xenophobia elements such as the criminalisation of Basotho herdsmen as livestock thieves in South Africa.
Conclusion
On Eastern Free State land-reform farms, Basotho migrant farm workers probably outnumber South African workers. Their illegal status makes them a docile, easily exploited labour force, which guarantees loyalty and trustworthiness. Such loyalty is linked to confinement on the farm for many months, working from sunrise to sunset, and the expectation that they will act as security personnel for livestock at nightfall. The low wages and poor working and living conditions of farm workers, especially those looking after livestock on the studied farms, have been analysed against the backdrop of a broader crisis of social reproduction for classes of labour who struggle to make ends meet the world over (Bernstein 2004).
There are limited jobs in the wider economy and on white-owned farms in South Africa. Wages can be improved in the long run by introducing tailored state agricultural subsidies to newly established land-reform beneficiaries. Land-reform pessimism, charging land beneficiaries with labour exploitation and paying low wages, perhaps in comparison with wages on neighbouring white-owned land, needs to consider all the state support that white-only agriculture received during apartheid South Africa and the generational wealth of current white landowners. The juxtaposition of white and black farmers’ minimum wages is meaningless without similar juxtapositions of attached class formations and historical wealth creation or erasure.
Much intellectual work can be invested into dismantling the myth that Lesotho only serves as a labour reserve for South African industry in perpetuity. The disproportionally low wages that Basotho and other immigrant farm workers receive in the South African labour market generally, and across sectors, in contrast to South Africans, is enough to challenge this myth and encourage decolonial thought on the Lesotho land question.
These findings contribute to understandings of the actual and perceived widened base of social reproduction for classes of labour attached to land redistribution against the backdrop of generalised joblessness in the wider economies of southern Africa. It has been established that farm workers, the impoverished landed property that is created by land reform, and those working-class land beneficiaries successfully reproducing small-scale capitalist farms on the basis of wage labour and self-exploitation constitute the fluid category of fragmented classes of labour who have found it worthwhile to hold onto farm work and the land for survival, and continue their relentless efforts for accumulation from below, amid crises of social reproduction for surplus labour populations.
The burgeoning reproduction of small- and medium-scale forms of capitalist production on land-reform farms appears to be labour intensive and forms part of surplus labour populations’ few remaining options in terms of employment and self-employment opportunities. This is in contrast to large-scale capitalist agriculture, characterised by an ongoing decline in agricultural employment and tendencies to expel people from farmland, including the peculiarly South African evictions of former labour tenants and farm workers from white-owned farmland (Wegerif, Russell and Grundling 2005). Land reform seems to deepen capitalist relations in new ways: labour exploitation through the wage relation, in this case of migrant workers (Marx 1976), but also self-exploitation and employment of non-family labour in small- and medium-scale forms of farm production.
The land rental market has widened and provided space for the emergence of small-scale rentier grazers, affording them the opportunity to access land. However, their reproduction is still anchored on the exploitation of herders. Larger agribusiness renters of arable land still employ casual labour at peak harvest times, typically Basotho women. Labour is still retained on these land-reform farms. In this case, the mere absorption of precarious immigrant labour does not constitute successful land redistribution, even if wages were high. This would not resolve the agrarian question of labour for the Basotho people: its resolution requires land restitution from South Africa as the first step.
In developing an argument towards the resolution of the agrarian question of labour via state acquisition of farmland from landed elites in the global South, followed by subdivision and redistribution to classes of labour, this article has proposed possible scenarios by drawing on empirical evidence of farm workers in the Eastern Free State. These scenarios pave the way to imagining and proposing a resolution of the Lesotho land-labour questions. Empirical evidence shows that there are large numbers of land beneficiaries and cattle-keepers renting pasture, owning sizeable herds in the Eastern Free State. The quantity of livestock herders, their renumeration, attached dependants and tentative remittance flows back to Lesotho clearly suggest that land redistribution would hugely benefit the different classes of labour. Land redistribution would have heterogeneous outcomes, in contrast to what was there prior to land redistribution and farmland subdivision (Bernstein 2004) – typically a 3,000-hectare farm owned by one landlord and worked by a family or two of labour tenants under heavy restrictions on their land use pertaining to livestock herd and cropping field sizes, despotically aggravated by oppressive social relations inherited from apartheid South Africa. These oppressive social relations still exist, and go unnoticed, on white-owned farmland in South Africa and may require further deepening of the meaning and working of South Africa’s democracy (Levin and Ngubane 2023). In other words, land reform also deepens democracy by removing historically inherited, oppressive social relations and creating space for the deepening of capitalist relations along the lines of economic emancipation for previously oppressed working classes.
It follows then that concrete fragmentation of large-scale capitalist farms, with all the attached contradictions (Bernstein 2003) – through state-driven democratic land redistribution to previously oppressed subaltern classes, followed by subdivision and wider redistribution to small- and medium-scale capitalist farmers – appears progressive in economic emancipatory terms, especially in post-colonial contexts still entangled in colonial relics. Essentially this is the disintegration of concentrated capital into small constituent parts, which reflects capital’s deepening penetration into new frontiers from below. In so doing, capital evolves, from below, driven by the labour power of fragmented classes of labour in their embodiments as immigrant farm workers, family labour providers (that is, self-exploitation, and non-family labour hiring by members of family-owned land-reform farms, and by small and large graziers on rent) livestock owners renting grazing land from land beneficiaries, who are essentially landless small-scale capitalist farmers on the basis of wage labour and degrees of self-exploitation. These findings suggest that the unresolved agrarian question of labour in relation to the agrarian question of capital (Bernstein 2004), can be resolved through fragmentation of concentrated capital, and fragmentation of concentrated landholdings in ways that benefit fragmented classes of labour.
Finally, the association of immigrant farm workers, Basotho men, with livestock theft is an ahistorical moral judgment divorced from historical material reality. Colonial white South Africa confiscated the land of the Basotho, and seldom are descendants of colonialists referred to as land thieves. Current illicit South Africa–Lesotho cross-border livestock trade must be problematised within a wider reparative decolonial historical framework and land restitution to the Basotho people. Resolving the Lesotho land question this way is tantamount to resolving the agrarian question of its labour force in ways that benefit the latter and potentially unleashing expanded reproduction of differentiated scales of farming in Lesotho, currently squeezed by the unresolved South African–Lesotho land-labour questions.