In August 2016, I was sitting in a lecture hall in Cape Town, attending a conference on migration in southern Africa. I cannot recall much of the content of the conference, but after one of the lectures, I engaged in an unforgettable discussion with Beauty,1 a postgraduate student around my age, in her mid-thirties. We ended up sitting for hours in a campus café as she narrated a moving account of her family’s migration history that conveyed images of precarious living conditions in both Zimbabwe and South Africa. Her husband, who resided in Bulawayo and from whom she later separated, owned a kombi or minibus, and her widowed mother sustained herself with a widow’s pension of some 50 US Dollars2 from her late husband who had worked in the Zimbabwe Republic Police forces. Beauty’s small study stipend supported her mother, husband, and two unmarried brothers in South Africa. One of her brothers worked in the vineyards in Stellenbosch, South Africa, having overstayed his visitor’s permit, like many other Zimbabwean migrants. The other had returned to Zimbabwe ‘empty-handed’, as Beauty put it. He had tried to find a livelihood in South Africa, but lacked the ‘skills’, ‘patience’, and ‘networks’, to ‘make do’. He had ‘become a burden’ to his South Africa-based relatives, and Beauty had paid for her brother’s bus ride back to their maternal home in Zimbabwe.
I was interested in understanding Zimbabwean migration and particularly return migration, and migrants’ practices and attempts to establish belonging and sense of security in both domestic and public spheres. I continued to explore potential places and spaces in Zimbabwe where the returning migrants, like Beauty’s brother, were being assisted by agents of the state or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I was particularly inspired by the anthropological literature that approaches state-making as a performative and relational process, as ‘always in the making’, imagined and reproduced by a myriad of mundane bureaucratic, legal, and documentary encounters between state and state-like agents and ordinary people (e.g. Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014; Das and Poole 2004a, 2004b; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Hagman and Péclard 2010; Hull 2012a, 2012b; Li 2005; Lund 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2007, 2012; Sharma and Gupta 2006; Reeves 2013, 2019; Thelen et al. 2018; Trouillot 2001). Therefore, I tried to map the availability of any state or NGO assistance provided in Zimbabwe, such as social grants or assistance schemes, that would potentially help Beauty’s brother. She dismissed the idea, however.
Help for my brother? Why? You know that we have disabled people on the streets. You see blind people selling airtime.3 You see them singing and begging for money. Then what about someone who has two eyes, two hands, and two legs? Oh, he just has to make himself useful. He must kiya-kiya and survive.
The Shona term kukiya-kiya and its isiNdebele equivalent ukuhlanganisa both refer to the urgent need to organize life so that needs are met today. People defined the terms as ‘mixing things in order to survive’, ‘running around and closing up economic gaps’, or ‘making life go on for a bit longer’.4 Jeremy Jones (2010, 2014) has identified kukiya-kiya as the core to economic actions in twenty-first-century Zimbabwe, where ‘informalization’ of the economy, party politics, and migration characterize livelihoods (see Raftopoulos, conference keynote quoted in Hammar et al. 2010, 269). This has led to a situation in which planning short- and long-term futures is difficult as lives are characterized by continuous attempts to mix and match resources to cope in the present. People often illustrated ukuhlanganisa/kukiya-kiya by repeatedly crossing their fingers. These concepts are central to my idea of economies of care, which unites this book’s empirical chapters and will be revisited later.
When I began research for this book, I noticed that return migration was largely invisible in policy, public debate, and scholarship – even though up to a quarter of Zimbabwe’s population lived abroad (UNDP 2010). By contrast, the effects of ‘Zimbabwe’s exodus’ (Crush and Tevera 2010), driven by long-term economic and political insecurity, attracted significant academic and policy attention. Brain drain, for instance, and its household and national-level economic and developmental effects, as well as the role of remittances as an important lifeline for most Zimbabwean households, were relatively well addressed (e.g. Bracking 2014; Dzingirai et al. 2014; Maphosa 2007; Tevera and Chikanda 2009; Thebe 2015; UNDP 2010). As others have noted – and this study confirms – remittances form an ‘internationalised informal welfare system’ (Bracking and Sachikonye 2009, 203), with most households relying on cash or goods from relatives in the diaspora. A study by the Southern African Migration Programme (SAMP) found that each Zimbabwean in South Africa supported an average of five people back home (Crush and Tevera 2010, 3). Yet the Solidarity Peace Trust (2009) reported that remittances’ role in reducing poverty is overstated and uneven – especially in Matabeleland, where most poor households with family in South Africa received no support or did so irregularly.
Since the early 2000s, a growing number of ethnographic studies and policy reports show, however, that Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa often struggle to stay. Their everyday lives are characterized by social and economic vulnerabilities and uncertainties, irregular immigration status, xenophobia, and struggles to meet trans-local moral and economic expectations (e.g. Crush et al. 2012, 2015; Kihato 2013; Morreira 2010, 2016; Muzondidiya 2010; Rutherford 2008, 2010; Worby 2010). Some commentators have emphasized that in the continuous conditions of Zimbabwe’s ruinous economy, ‘it remains a puzzle as to who, why, and indeed how, anyone could stay’ (Crush and Tevera 2010, 2). Yet most literature views Zimbabwe’s crisis through the experiences of migrants abroad. Therefore, in this ethnography, I turn the lens around and look at the phenomenon of migration and its effects inside Zimbabwe, through the optic of those who move back, although, as the ethnography demonstrates, the lifelines of those who return are revealed as being inherently linked to mobility, and ‘return’ is rarely perceived as an end of a migration cycle.
As Beauty’s response suggests, return migrants are not seen as a distinct group entitled to any specific state support; their return is viewed as ordinary and non-spectacular. Their realities differ from the policy discourse and scholarly discussions in many other parts of Africa where return migrants are defined as ‘agents of development’, at both national and household levels (Åkesson and Eriksson Baaz 2015, 1). In Zimbabwe, during the period of the Unity Government (2009–2013), when the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), shared the government with two factions of the opposition party, the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC), some empirical evidence of a desire to return started to appear among members of Zimbabwe’s diaspora. However, research mainly examined the return considerations of diaspora people, who weighed the hardships of staying abroad versus returning (e.g. Bracking 2014; Makina 2012; Mortensen 2014), though some policy briefs addressed actual returns (Dillot 2013; Dziva and Kusena 2013; Mandiyanike 2014). Yet these studies largely focused on the economic and developmental impacts of the return of relatively well-off rural returnees, overlooking poorer and urban returnees. At the same time, the Zimbabwean government, ‘in cooperation’ with international organizations, started to ‘see’ some aspects of the phenomenon of return. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), together with the government, provided short-term reception services and humanitarian assistance for people fleeing xenophobic attacks or returning due to forced deportations or under the ‘Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration Programmes’. They also tried to attract skilled emigrants with incentives like job portals and travel cost recovery schemes (IOM 2015).
However, the return mobility that I started to observe differed from such accounts. Returning migrants were not treated as a specific administrative category. They were not entitled to any ‘integration’ or ‘resettlement’ services. Despite high expectations for migrants’ economic upward mobility, those who returned – like Beauty’s brother – often had very few means to re-establish their livelihoods. Beauty paid for his travel, while their mother had clothed and housed him. Beauty described him in isiNdebele as izanka – someone who has ‘lost control’ and with ‘no direction’. Indeed, from conversations with Zimbabweans at home and abroad, it was clear that migrants – especially the sick, dying, new-born, and those struggling in South Africa – often return. A recurring isiNdebele term in these discussions was injiva, which I examine in Chapter 2. Originally, injiva referred to male migrants from Matabeleland working in South Africa’s mines, implying expectations of remittances and cyclical migration. However, it has since adapted to the precarious realities of the present, now applying to poorer migrant sectors – both women and men – whose migration patterns are unpredictable and remittances irregular. These observations led me to study the broader life-worlds of injivas, examining the politics and intimate dynamics that are involved in their return processes and everyday life: in other words, how their social and material life-worlds are reconstituted through, and along with multiple crises and displacement at different phases of the life cycle, from birth to death.
To better understand the intimate and bureaucratic dynamics of return migration, I conducted two ethnographic fieldwork periods: a one-month trip to South Africa and Zimbabwe (August–September 2016), and eight months primarily in Bulawayo5 (August 2018–March 2019). I collected the main body of data during the latter stint through observation, participant observation, interviewing, and media and archival exploration. Most of my research concentrated on Bulawayo’s high-density suburbs and the Central Business District (CBD). I was accompanied by my stay-at-home partner and our son. I primarily participated in and observed the daily life of returning injivas, and households who accommodated them or children whose parents resided in South Africa. To understand the social world of my interlocutors better, I visited Zimbabwe’s borders with South Africa and Botswana three times, interviewing immigration and social welfare officers, observing deportation procedures, and speaking with deportees at reception centres.
In general, I accompanied interlocutors to their homes and to various encounters with different authorities at different stages of their return. These included both local and central government-level authorities, as well as ‘street’- and ‘community’-level figures such as Community Case Workers (CCWs), omalayitsha (long-distance carriers of goods and people), pastors and spiritual authorities, NGO and charity workers, and legal practitioners. Such categorizations appeared, however, simplistic, since people often occupied different, overlapping subject positions. As such, discussions with ‘officers’ often touched on not only their professional points of view, but also their own personal experiences of migration, rendering the two domains of ‘kinship’ and ‘state’ as inseparable in their narratives as elsewhere. Furthermore, casual conversation with participants, neighbours, friends and acquaintances, municipal and other authorities, and more or less randomly met people, also form a rich part of this material. Moreover, when political violence escalated in January 2019, my family and I relocated to South Africa for a two-week-period, where I met Zimbabwean migrants, especially relatives of my interlocutors.
In addition, I collected newspaper articles and documents from the archives of the Bulawayo City Council, the Chronicle newspaper, and the National Archives in Harare. The archival material taught me a great deal, especially about two key features of the (colonial and postcolonial) nation state: firstly, how it has tried to safeguard the national territory and economy by encouraging the movement of some people and controlling the undesirable movement of others; and secondly, how the welfare of part of the Black population has been discussed and argued over during the course of history. I also engaged with a trust that assisted people, mostly children, with struggles to obtain birth certificates. Through legal experts and social welfare officers, I got access to court cases and social welfare reports on child repatriation, custody, and maintenance. These materials helped me to understand the broader context, legal framings, and multiple ways in which different state agents value different social relations and define the responsible caretaker. They also revealed how expectations towards the state were articulated and empathy and care expressed and claimed.
Following central ethical principles, such as those in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ALLEA 2017) and the Finnish Advisory Board of Research Integrity guidelines (TENK 2012), I tried to explain the research goals, funding sources, and ethical considerations to participants in ways they could understand. Besides anonymizing my interlocutors, I stressed that participation was voluntary and that they could withdraw at any point during the research, while emphasizing that they would not be benefitting directly from the study. Recordings and fieldnotes were securely stored in encrypted files on my laptop, and all physical data was kept in locked, safe spaces. Furthermore, being aware of the ‘with publications we run the risk of making public that which our informants would prefer to keep secret’ (Barnes 1967, 208). Charles Piot (2019) has reflected on similar issues in his study of how Togolese try to obtain visas to America using practices that the US consul would define as fraud. He has reflected on ‘how to go about writing about specific cases and individuals who might be punished, even deported, if discovered’, emphasizing the need to contextualize such practices ‘within the constraints and possibilities of the current historical moment’ (Piot 2019, 19). In a similar way, besides being careful to disguise the identities of the people, I also try to locate the ‘illegal’ social practices, for instance the ‘informal’ border crossings, in their longer colonial and postcolonial, regional histories, defining them as historically constructed ways to enable caring, living, and making a living amidst radical uncertainty.
As Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 17) put it, an ethnographic project is always ‘bricolage’ as we use ‘whatever resources are at hand’ and always ‘put something of ourselves into it’, at all stages of research. Positionalities – both individual and institutional – and broader structural circumstances affect how we define interesting research topics and formulate our research questions, as well as how we choose appropriate analytical and methodological tools with which to address them. For instance, my initial interest in migration, child welfare, and state-citizen relations stems from work in Finnish immigration and welfare services, studies in social services and development anthropology in Europe, and volunteering at a child welfare charity in Harare. Being a married woman in my mid-thirties with a child plausibly helped me to connect with many women of my age. On the one hand, it helped me to fit into the cultural expectations of what a woman my age should do, and to gain access to certain spheres of life, especially those perceived as belonging to the sites of the ‘private’ and ‘intimate’ (see Korpela et al. 2016). On the other hand, the ways in which my family life was organized differed from most people whom I met. My partner was a stay-at-home father who did not easily fit the available social categories. Knowing that our son would not sit quietly when adults were talking, and would occasionally throw tantrums instead, I often preferred to visit my interlocutors alone. Having a family in the field also had a practical influence on how we lived, and how I structured my days and fieldwork. I was also partly motivated by the need to find a field-site that would not only provide insights for my research questions, but also safe and suitable housing for my family. Furthermore, although my interlocutors were primarily Black, I was a White European woman, often associated with the upper-class White minority or with international NGOs. This influenced both our encounters and how people perceived me, especially in the beginning.
Nevertheless, while establishing contact with women and NGO workers was relatively easy, interviewing men and government officials often required more effort. Around one third of my interlocutors were men, mostly relatives of my female participants. Although not without exceptions, for a female researcher, discussions with men often tended to be more formal and arranged. In terms of government officials, research clearances were crucial for conducting any interviews with social welfare officers, CCWs, teachers, and immigration officers. Although I had secured a research clearance from the Research Council of Zimbabwe (RCZ) prior to my entry to the country, all government departments required separate clearance, which took significant amounts of energy and time in the first months of research. Finally, I secured clearances from the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, and the Department of Immigration, which was located under the Ministry of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage; clearance from the district-level authorities and from the Bulawayo City Council was also secured. Besides protecting the safety of myself and multiple stakeholders, the clearance processes also opened windows onto the bureaucratic work and documentation in which I was interested. Indeed, my multiple visits to the immigration services, social welfare department, and education sector in both Bulawayo and Harare headquarters deepened my understanding of how bureaucratic processes and state institutions were maintained and hierarchically structured. I also established important connections with government officers, especially in immigration services, that proved significant entry points for delving more deeply into my research topic.
Consent was mostly oral, since some of the elderly participants were illiterate, and the academic language and terminology used in the forms was irrelevant and unfamiliar to many. Furthermore, registration papers have strong connotations of colonial and postcolonial forms of population control, associating me with either government or the plethora of charities. Therefore, I did not insist that people signed such papers, rather obtaining consent orally.
Furthermore, the research was crucially influenced by the turbulent historical moment during which data collection was carried out. Indeed, I gathered most of the data during the specific historical moment that followed the enforced resignation of Robert Mugabe, who had been ruling Zimbabwe for thirty-seven years and was replaced by his former ally, Emmerson Mnangagwa, in November 2017. Mugabe’s removal raised cautious hopes for positive political, economic, and social transformation, which started to fade during the period of my fieldwork, which was characterized by violent state crackdowns, shortages of cash, fuel, and basic commodities, power cuts, strikes among teachers, nurses, and doctors, and fluctuating currencies – a context that I describe as a crisis and discuss in a more detailed manner in Chapter 1.
In such conditions, lives were shaped by material necessities. The interconnected intimate, moral, economic, and bureaucratic politics of return were largely about the politics of life: people returned at crucial stages in the life cycle – at times of birth, death, and illness. Those who returned for other reasons – due to their inability to make a living, for instance – were framed as having failed to sustain life for themselves and others. Life upon return was conceptualized around various forms of care – material, emotional, religious, medical – and care activities took place not only in homes and households, but also at borders, on travel routes, in government offices, at charities, and in the ‘communities’ where people resided. By examining the life-worlds of those who return, I found that what I was actually trying to understand was not just the ‘dynamics’ or ‘politics’ of return migration, as I had initially anticipated. Rather, the notion and practices of ‘return’ also provided me with a lens through which to learn about how Zimbabwe’s crisis had influenced the overlapping, intertwined moral, intimate, political, and material economies of care, and especially to understand the ways in which families encountered and experienced the state through frontline state agents and bureaucratic routines.
Indeed, the driving question of this ethnography concerns the ways in which bureaucratic and intimate relations and practices of care are co-constituted to sustain the continuity of social and material life-worlds under circumstances of dislocation and crisis, in a context where the state is also experienced as a source of fear and suffering, and kinship as an arena of tension. While investigating the everyday lives of returning injivas and their social and bureaucratic environments, I explore how ideals and a sense of belonging to the state and kinship are shaped under these conditions: how do these domains coexist, intertwine, disagree, and co-constitute relations and practices of care? What kind of top-down and bottom-up institutions, subjectivities, categories, and conceptualizations of care have grown out of Zimbabwe’s crisis-driven displacement and the informalization of economies? In what ways have they shifted through time and been attuned to new conditions? How have the lines of exclusion and inclusion in kin- and state-provided care been revised? In what ways do state and NGO categorizations and conceptualizations of care influence people’s claim-making behaviour? Conversely, how do religious, cultural, and kin-related ideas of care influence the actual work of state agents? How is the image of a caring state maintained despite the state’s material scarcity in terms of protecting its citizenry, and given the widespread experiences of state violence in Matabeleland both in the present and past?
By addressing these questions in the following chapters, the ethnography adds to the rich interdisciplinary literature on the multiple effects of Zimbabwe’s post-2000 displacement and crisis by providing an account of them from the perspective of care (e.g. Crush et al. 2015; Hammar 2014b; Hammar et al. 2010; McGregor and Primorac 2010; Muzondidiya 2010; Worby 2010). I next briefly introduce how the keywords ‘state’ and ‘kinship’ emerged as central concepts of this study. I then elaborate on how the economies of care framework helps to reach an understanding of their co-constitution and entanglement but also to distinguish their distinctive logics.
Like Beauty, most people I spoke to used the term ‘state’ as a synonym for the ZANU-PF Party government, which has ruled the country since independence in 1980, mostly exclusively but at times (2009–2013) pressured to rule in coalition with the largest opposition parties of the time. Ordinary citizens saw this state as derelict in its duties of care, a view reinforced by its often corrupt and unpredictable politicians and state agents, and its violent party politics, manifested, for instance, through electoral violence and displacement operations. For instance, many recalled horrifying experiences of the state-led Gukurahundi massacres of the mid-1980s, when state forces killed at least 20,000 mainly Ndebele people, injuring and traumatizing countless others (CCJP/LRF 1997). The operation – ‘the spring rains that sweep away the dry season’s chaff’ – targeted those seen as supporters of the largest opposition party of the time, Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) (e.g., Alexander et al. 2000; Msindo 2012, 211–28). Families saw relatives mutilated, killed, or simply disappearing, and the tactics of state terror had instilled long-standing trauma and patterns of fear.
Beauty also feared and resented ‘the state’, which materialized in her life as displacement and dysfunctional basic services. In 2005, Operation Murambatsvina (‘Clean up the Filth’), formally presented as a government crackdown on illegal housing and trading, destroyed informal settlements and livelihoods and displaced an estimated 700,000 people (Tibaijuka 2005). It had diminished Beauty’s family’s income, as the extra building where they accommodated tenants was destroyed. Amid hyperinflation (2007–2009), Beauty’s brothers migrated to South Africa in 2008, like hundreds of thousands of others. Beauty followed six years later. In Zimbabwe, Beauty’s premature baby died in a state hospital, when a power cut disabled the incubators. Such experiences echo studies showing that access to citizenship rights and state resources in Zimbabwe has always been selective and politically shaped (Alexander and McGregor 2013; Raftopoulos 2009; Ranger 2007; Schmidt 1992b).6
Indeed, for most interlocutors, daily life and experiences of the state were grounded in fear, mistrust, disruption, and loss. While taking seriously the experiences of disruptive events and everyday forms of suffering (Das 2006) described by Beauty and many others, I nevertheless could not ignore the fact that in navigating daily hardships, they also gravitated to various state and state-like authorities. Alongside social and material support from kin, friends, and peers, people turned to various governmental and non-governmental authorities who operated in the fields of social and child welfare, civil registration, migration management, and family law, collectively constituting ‘the government of the precarious’ (Fassin 2015, 3).
Even though resources were limited, the authorities whom my interlocutors encountered were involved in the bureaucratic tasks of registering people for various purposes, providing advice for them, or training them to help themselves, and issuing identity documents (passports, birth, and death certificates) for them. Many of them were ‘psycho-technocrats’ (Howell 2006a), experts in family law or social welfare whose task was to determine how family resources and care provisions ought to be distributed, who has the right to custody of a child, and who can access the limited welfare regimes. Others, such as migration officers and teachers, worked towards other ends as well, in addition to the ‘care work’ they performed by carrying out ‘species of activities’ that were crucial to sustaining continuity of life (Tronto and Fisher 1990, 40). Through encounters with such bureaucrats at street, community, municipal, and government level, the state paradoxically, in other situations, also came to be experienced and encountered as potentially caring. Indeed, as Michel Foucault (1991, 2008) has shown, the welfare of the population became an increasing task of the (European) state from the eighteenth century onwards, with the establishment of legislation and institutions to protect ‘vulnerable’ populations and to correct the behaviour of other groups, that is, with the regulation of life through what he called ‘biopolitics’ (see also Cruikshank 1999; Donzelot 1979). In the context of the present study, bureaucratic acts of ‘care’, as the following chapters will discuss in greater depth, were framed around politically and emotionally calibrated idioms of care, such as ‘help’, ‘services’, ‘development’, ‘protection’, and ‘welfare’, and around transnational aid labels and slogans, such as ‘an orphan and vulnerable child’ or ‘the best interests of the child’.
Since its early stages, my research has been based on the recent work in the anthropology of the state that recognizes the state and its institutions as constituted by myriad bureaucratic, legal, and documentary encounters and practices, and by the mundane work of state functionaries. As the rich scholarship shows, the state operates at different levels, from the central governments to district and local authorities, and in tandem with global and regional politics and guidelines, constituted in people’s everyday encounters with ‘representatives of the state and its presentations’ (Lund 2006, 689; see also Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014; Fassin 2015; Sharma and Gupta 2006). Specifically, this book has been motivated by recent anthropological attempts to redefine public services in Africa beyond their dysfunctionality (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014; McKay 2018). State bureaucrats in general are often described as indifferent (Herzfeld 1992), and African bureaucrats in particular as corrupt and morally dubious, rather than as professionals providing assistance (Neumark 2020). However, the one-sided image of the state as cold and coercive has been challenged by anthropological accounts that focus on the state as a ‘welfare’ provider, and the emerging branch of literature that focuses on how affects and emotions constitute ‘the substance of politics’ (Stoler 2004, 6). Following the so-called affective turn and the rise of affect theory in the humanities and social sciences in the 1990s and 2000s, ethnographers have been paying increasing attention to the emotional dimension of bureaucratic encounters, using affects as their entry point to understand state formation (e.g. Ahmed 2004; Andreetta et al. 2022; Aretxaga 2005; Laszczkowski and Reeves 2018; Navaro-Yashin 2007, 2012; Gupta 2012).
While it is important to take seriously the painful experiences in which the state, as a powerful institution, provokes intense emotions and reactions (Aretxaga 2005; Trouillot 2001), the state – whether in Zimbabwe or elsewhere – should not be understood as a singular, static entity with a uniform logic and affective effect. Rather, it is better seen as a constellation of processes, governing practices, regimes, policies, programmes, and agents. This book aims to flesh out this multiplicity and the fragmentation by exploring, through the life-worlds of returning injivas, how ‘the sphere of everyday practices is the primary arena in which people learn something about the state’ (Sharma and Gupta 2006, 11). Thus, it directs attention to the dynamic interplay of a range of state and state-like actors, policies, and practices that mediate the experience and image of the state in the day-to-day life of my interlocutors. Such work reveals care and claims for resources as central factors in poor people’s encounters with the state, in postcolonial Africa as elsewhere, often mediated via intermediaries, legal papers and other documents, and registration practices. Such everyday routines of frontline state agents are what makes the state paradoxically appear as a coherent entity, while at the same time being experienced as fundamentally fragmented (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Gupta 2012).
This ethnography explores the ways in which the state, despite its limited material resources, seeks to portray itself as a distributive authority and service provider, as ‘a carer-in-chief’ (Holbraad 2021, 112) committed to the moral imperative to care for its most ‘vulnerable’ members. My aim is not to romanticize the Zimbabwean state as altruistically caring and hope-evoking, but to present my empirical investigation of how state discourses, practices, and classifications of welfare and protection in my research field are discussed, imagined, and practised, and affectively experienced in relation to their particular colonial and post-independence histories. In general, the Zimbabwean state can provide very little material assistance. Its agents often struggle within ‘the mutuality of precarity’ (Takabvirwa 2023, 240): even those with formal employment usually find it difficult to make a living as their salaries have lost value due to inflation and the instability of the local currency. As a result, they often need to supplement their income through kiya-kiya activities. I demonstrate how the state nevertheless wields power as the arbiter of resources it does not directly supply, such as mobility rights and the legal distribution of family assets. Indeed, I argue that this form of state care is both selective and disciplinary. Furthermore, affects for and about the state and state agents, in addition to those of the state agents themselves, are diverse, although this multiplicity, as well as the state as a welfare provider, are rarely studied in the context of postcolonial Africa. In this book, I approach the role of affects as ‘one of the constitutive conditions of state formation’ (Gupta 2012, 13), ‘crucial in structuring political fields, imaginaries, subjects, and objects’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2018, 3).
While scholarship on the so-called welfare state is largely West-centric, considerable attention has been paid to the role of transnational development and humanitarian aid in maintaining welfare services in the Global South (e.g. Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Ilcan and Lacey 2006; Lewis and Mosse 2006;, Bierschenk et al. 2000). It has become the international duty of rich countries to ‘develop’, distribute ‘aid’, and more recently to work in ‘partnership’ with poor countries, especially since the Second World War (Hann and Hart 2011, 105–12). Such care often cultivates a Western-centric terminology – with keywords that include development, protection, welfare, human rights, and the best interests of the child – in relation to the allocation of different entitlements and responsibilities (cf. Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Li 2007). In Chapter 1, I explore how ‘development’ has been historically discussed in Zimbabwe, and especially in Bulawayo. I also examine how the state’s responsibilities for care, driven by neoliberal policies, have been radically redistributed from the state to the ‘private’ market and NGO sectors. However, I argue that they do not necessarily replace the state as such but also contribute to the continuity of the state (see also McKay 2018; Thelen et al. 2018, 5). Indeed, Chapter 6 demonstrates how international care idioms are translated into legal child welfare processes in my study field, while Chapter 7 shows, on the one hand, the reliance of state institutions on the financial framings of the ‘donors’ and their understandings of what care means and, on the other, that charitable forms of care are also dependent on existing state institutions – relying on state organization, departmental structures, and the army of state agents and volunteers who mediate people’s encounters with the state. Furthermore, as discussed in Chapter 1, the state has both historically and recently also actively opposed and limited the space of many such organizations, accusing them of being supporters of Western interests and opposition politics.
A key arena wherein the statutory and charitable forms of care operate is ‘a community’, where ‘crime control, economic development, psychiatric services, punishment, and social welfare’ take place (Ilcan and Lacey 2011, 81; Cruikshank 1999), and where resources are distributed to various categories of beneficiaries. According to the transnationally cultivated narrative, such communities can be best empowered by their own members. These are ‘local development brokers’ (Ilcan and Lacey 2006; Lewis and Mosse 2006; Bierschenk et al. 2000) or ‘volunteers’ (McKay 2018; Prince and Brown 2016), self-positioned as experts advising on how to live well and how to behave respectably and determining how the resources on the ground should be distributed and on what terms. However, as existing scholarship reveals, and this study confirms, in real life what constitutes a community is often unclear, and internal conflicts, hierarchies, and power relations remain hidden in the policy framework (see also Bähre 2007; McKay 2018).
Furthermore, scholars have shown that definitions and categorizations by the state and NGOs of who deserves institutional care and protection might overlook local forms of suffering. I explore how categorizations of ‘vulnerable’, ‘orphan’ (Chapter 7), ‘refugee’, or ‘illegal migrant’ (Chapters 2 and 5) risk leaving unattended other aspects of reality that go beyond these categories and do not fit into such state-centric framings. At the same time, these affect-provoking concepts can also be mobilized and tactically performed to access care by those defined by such categories, bringing to the fore the performative and improvisational potential of discourses of care (Fassin 2013; Honkasalo 2018; Malkki 1996; Nakueira 2018; Zetter 1991).
In light of my early enthusiasm for studying the state, I did not anticipate exploring kinship when I started research for this book project. On the contrary, I felt rather uneasy with the notion. My admittedly outdated view of contemporary kinship studies led me to imagine kinship charts that drew on an idea of kinship as a static form of social organization. Looking back, I see this echoed the British structural-functionalist scholarship of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw kinship as a formal way to organize societies and power relations in ‘stateless’ societies (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1951, 1974; Gluckman 1950; Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950). Since my plan was to research dynamic processes and transformations of social and state-citizen relations in contemporary Zimbabwe, I could not ‘see’ the analytical relevance of rigid kinship systems to my study (cf. O’Laughlin 1995). As Peter Geschiere (2020, 336) writes of his Cameroonian research participants, my reluctance to study kinship stemmed from ‘what I then saw as its major limitations: an anthropologists’ hobby that see [sic] African societies apart as “traditional”’, tied to kin-based hierarchies. Indeed, I feared representing kinship among the people I met as the Other to their Western, presumably ‘modern’, counterparts.
Nevertheless, when trying to sketch the economies of care and modes of belonging available to the returning migrants, I saw that the prolonged crisis and mass migration were most acutely experienced in intimate relations. As we saw, for example, the return of Beauty’s brother was facilitated and assisted by his mother and sister. Kin members, dead and alive, were typically people’s first resort when they needed material and emotional support. I was particularly moved by the moral and material struggles for a dignified, liveable life and continuity among injivas who tried to remain in South Africa, attempting to send groceries and money home to maintain their family’s lifeline. I was also moved by the situations of the relatives still at home, especially those who were elderly, who were struggling to meet ethical obligations to care for ‘injiva children’, who were ‘left behind’ and ‘posted back’ because their parents, particularly mothers, resided in South Africa, a topic discussed more deeply in Chapter 3 (cf. M. Ncube 2018).7 Others struggled to care for sick family members and to raise funding for repatriation and respectful burial, as Chapter 4 shows. Many female injivas tried to maintain a balance between the role of breadwinner and that of a mother. Often, moral obligations to care seemed to clash with material challenges to accommodate and provide for needy returnees, striking in situations where extended family networks were already burdened by the devastating number of orphans and adult kin who needed care due to the tragedy of HIV/AIDS (see Parsons 2012, Chapter 7).8
The material and moral concerns over the fabric of Zimbabwean transnational families were also debated among the local politicians, church authorities, civil servants, and Community Case Workers whom I encountered. The dominant view was that large-scale migration had caused parental absence, broken marriages, and family breakdown. This created both moral panic over the social institution of family and practical challenges in caring for children, the sick, and otherwise needy returnees (cf. Kufakurinani et al. 2014). This was painfully demonstrated by cases of children found on railways and border zones, and a failed NGO initiative to set up ‘baby bins’ where ‘unwanted babies’ could be left, which was turned down due to the government’s inability to facilitate such ‘luxurious’ services (X. Ncube 2018).
Confronted with these issues, I had to come to terms with kinship. Yet these observations were not supported by accounts of African kinship and family that emphasized unity and continuity (e.g. Mkhawanazi and Bloch 2016; Preble 1990). The domestic sphere of care, as I observed it, was often characterized by conflicts and tensions, neglect, and disconnections; living arrangements and family composition were manifold and under sometimes tense negotiations, yet the family certainly provided ‘a powerful network of relations of care’ (Manderson and Mkhwanazi 2020, v). However, although households took in relatives, the web of care did not appear to be an endless source of support. Networks and budgets could not always be ‘stretched’, and discussions on how to arrange childcare seemed tense and perpetual among the injiva families, especially the women and grandmothers who were the main day-to-day caregivers.
Migration scholars have investigated care in the framework of transnational migration and emphasized the role of ‘global care chains’ (Hochschild 2000), and how disadvantaged mothers and other women from low-income classes – disproportionately women of colour and women from the Global South – maintain the intimate relations that affect the wellbeing of their children/families back home by caring for others. This care is often provided to upper-class, mostly White families in the more economically advanced countries of the Global North (Drotbohm 2009; Hochschild 2000; Liebelt 2014; Parreñas 2001; and, for literature on Zimbabwe’s situation, see Chinouya 2010; Kufakurinani et al. 2014). Furthermore, studies often show women using resources, especially money, to sustain new transnational communities and ties at home (e.g. Bryceson and Vuorela 2002). However, such studies tend to overstate solidarity, paying less attention to conflict and rivalry within groups. Migration and remittances are a crucial economic and moral family welfare strategy, but also a source of tension between migrant parents and spouses and the family members who stay behind, leading sometimes to an overwhelming imbalance between expectations and diasporic realities. To manage such discrepancies, it is known that many migrants developed various ‘economies of appearances’ by managing information and communication, postponing return, and sometimes disconnecting (Cole 2014; Worby 2010). Furthermore, it strikes me that while the mobility of African women is often conceptualized as an act of care to reproduce families (e.g. Bledsoe 1990; McGregor 2008), the migration of young African men tends to be seen as an individual strategy to make money in the high-risk context of clandestine relocation, focusing on their individual struggles to manage uncertain futures and to move existentially and socially forward (see e.g. Lucht 2012; Vigh 2010).
In addition, my frustration grew as I traversed blind alleys while trying to map the kin networks of the people I met, attempting to draw some sort of lineage charts with pen and paper. While such draft maps were useful in tracking how the family settings were arranged, who resided where and with whom at a given moment, they failed to explain shifts in kin relations and care configurations, to explain why social life and domestic care were physically organized in often seemingly haphazard ways. People’s intimate life rarely replicated any classificatory kin systems. Indeed, children in particular often moved between households in ways that, to me, did not seem to follow any pre-existing script – such as the patrilineal kin system generally ascribed by anthropologists to Ndebele society. Generally, the principle of patrilineality is defined as an economic and consanguineal exchange relation whereby a woman moves from her own paternal family to be part of the lineage of the husband’s family in exchange for lobola, or bride-wealth, usually paid in cash and cattle after family negotiations. The children of such marriages ‘formally’ belong to the lineage and ancestors of their father, who is their guardian and custodian, and share his lineage, totem, and surname (Maboroke 1987; Armstrong 1994). Kin care and family life were embedded in much more complex social, moral, and economic processes of belonging, framed by scarce material resources (see Chapter 3). The social institution of the family was not always experienced as an immutable unit, and ideas of lineage and filiation were under constant renegotiation (e.g. Alber et al. 2013). Although the dominant culturally patterned discourses about care, kinship, and parenting – what Cati Coe (2016) calls ‘kinscripts’ – provide framings on how kin care ought to be organized, day-to-day care arrangements often differed from such models, and were challenged by the fiscal and practical hurdles to distributing care.
These observations suggested I should look beyond the constitution of kinship to find analytical tools that would help me understand how kinship, and all that it entails, is experienced, reconfigured, and used in negotiating care. In other words, rather than addressing what kinship is or is not (Sahlins 2013), my material provoked questions of what kinship does, how it is experienced and used to claim belonging and rights to kin-based entitlements, and to explain social reality (Carsten 2013). Indeed, reviewing the anthropological literature on kinship, I learned that many scholars, those espousing Marxist and feminist scholarship and, most recently, so-called new kinship studies, had moved beyond the classic anthropological theorizing of kinship as either biology, culture, or a static structure. Rather than presenting it as a structuring force of ‘stateless’, non-Western societies, such scholarship has shifted attention to the processual nature of kinship (Carsten 2004, 2007, 2013; Howell 2003, 2006a, 2006b). These scholars emphasize kinship as a process that requires active work; it does not merely contain ‘mutuality of being’, that is ‘participation in one another’s existence’ through, for instance, feeding, procreating, shared living, and other context-specific practices (Sahlins 2013, 18).9 In addition, ‘the everyday experiences of kinship’ (Carsten 2004) might also include conflict and negative implications, with abandonment as the flipside of caring, and have the potential to revitalize or shake people’s assumptions and ideals of family, kin, and care (Collier and Yanagisako 1998; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995; Carsten 2013; Dahl 2009, 2016; Reynolds 2016).
This book draws on and contributes to this line of kinship studies. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 make specific use of Signe Howell’s (2003, 2006a, 2006b) term ‘kinning’, and its modifications ‘de-kinning’ and ‘re-kinning’. Originally, Howell developed these terms to understand the ways in which kinship is created in the absence of biological ties in the context of transnational adoption. She defines kinning as:
[The] process by which a foetus or newborn child is brought into a significant and permanent relationship with a group of people, and the connection is expressed in a conventional kin idiom. Kinning need not apply to a baby, but to any previously unconnected person such as those connected through marriage. (2006a, 8; see also Howell 2003)
In this book I use the term to explicate the various situations in which injivas formed, reformed, or deformed their belonging to a kin group or state in order to safeguard ancestral continuity (Chapters 3 and 6), and access state services, such as respectful burial (Chapter 4) or state-protected identity (Chapter 5). My research shows that kinning is not only a process whereby one becomes part of a family or a kin group; the kinning (de-kinning and re-kinning) practices in which people were involved were also directed at building or unbuilding relations with the state through citizenship. This became especially tangible in situations where people built ‘papered’ kin relations to access citizenship documents and protective identities recognized by the state. Yet these practices sometimes tied people to others legally and on paper in unintended ways. However, the material raises questions of whether the kinning process creates ‘permanent relationships’ per se, as Howell has rather controversially put it, considering the processual understanding of kinship that she has advanced. Such a definition, I think, serves rather as an ideal, which does not necessarily materialize in lived kin experiences, as kin relations are always unfinished, under constant repair, and being reworked, as Howell also suggests. In this spirit, rather than theorizing what constitutes kinship as such, I use kinning as a tool to tease out the processes whereby people form significant relations with kin groups, as well as states, and the creativity embedded in the lived realities that such inventive practices create.
As an outcome of an affective, cumbersome process of writing and rewriting about injivas and their struggle to maintain life amidst large-scale insecurity, I have developed the economies of care framework to think about the multiplicity of relations, interactions, and rationalities through which everyday life is formed in the ordinary processes of trying to sustain and repair life at the frontline of multilayered precarity. As a starting point, it builds on Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s generic definition of caring as ‘a species of activities that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Tronto and Fisher 1990, 40). Tronto and Fisher acknowledge caring as a practice that can take various ‘modes’: the household/community mode, the exchange mode that is found in markets, and the bureaucratic modes (ibid.). These have varying care actors, such as family members or professional care-takers, but also those whose work is not labelled as ‘care work’ but is nevertheless crucial to meeting caring needs. Together such modes constitute a ‘complex, life-sustaining web’ (ibid., 40), although this book emphasizes that such domains are not clearly defined entities but overlapping and in mutual interaction.
Furthermore, while I find Tronto and Fisher’s conceptualizing helpful, I also consider it ‘somewhat too centered on the self’ and self-care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 198), creating a rather idealized vision of life where the individual is trying to live ‘as well as possible’. Furthermore, whereas practices that some people might consider ‘caring’, as they secure their own world-making, might make the world more hostile for others, caring can also be associated with paternalism, and a practice that has been intended to protect ‘the vulnerable’ may be used to control, or even become an instrument of violence (Mackenzie et al. 2014). Indeed, I find María Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2011, 100) formulation of caring as ‘a means to hold things together in a livable way’ more realistic in terms of the social and material realities I observed. As already illustrated, such means are resources drawn from varying domains, not only from kin and community, but also from the state in its plural forms, and non-state public authorities. Indeed, as Heike Drotbohm and Erdmute Alber (2015, 2) have argued, care practices can be directed to maintaining ties, a sense of belonging, and access to the resources of kinship, neighbourhood, or community, but also to states, cities, and transnational regimes of care.
Analysing my data and reviewing the existing literature on care in its institutional and domestic forms, I often asked myself where the multitude of ethnographic bits belonged – within ‘state’ or ‘kinship’, and in relation to the ‘moral’, ‘economic’, or ‘political’. In other words, I caught myself trying to identify distinct domains of anthropological analytic discussion to which my empirical evidence would contribute (cf. McKinnon and Cannell 2013). The umbrella notion of ‘economies of care’ started to emerge out of such pondering, being a way to give up such boundedness and to help me to approach my material from multiple, overlapping angles: to see the interconnectedness and mutual constitution as well as incoherence within and between various domains, especially the state and kinship. Furthermore, as across southern Africa more broadly, the livelihoods among my interlocutors in Zimbabwe were in a state of constant improvisation (cf. Ferguson 2015, 102–17; Mususa 2021; Vigh 2010), drawing resources from various terrains. Changes in one domain of life meant readjusting care practices in other care domains. Consider the following narrative of Martha, a 39-year-old woman who had returned from South Africa and lived in Nkulumane, one of Bulawayo’s high-density residential areas.10
Martha’s narrative is characterized by shifting and overlapping experiences of mobility and immobility. She had lived in Johannesburg for three different periods. When I met her in August 2018, she had recently returned from South Africa for motives that were entangled with economic, personal, and familial issues: the sudden loss of her job and her subsequent inability to send money to her husband and five children who had remained in situ. Furthermore, while her husband had been trying to save his failing poultry business in a nearby city, the oldest daughter, Zina, then 17, had dropped out of school to look after her younger siblings, and Martha felt a moral obligation to return and sort out the caring arrangements for her children. Indeed, in August 2018 Martha had firm plans to move back to South Africa ‘by the month end’ after she had ‘rested’ from the hard work in South Africa and found a trustworthy ‘live-in’ maid or relative to take care of her five children. They could reside in the house where Martha’s family lived, which was owned by her husband’s South Africa-based sister, who had promised to send money to pay for a lift from an omalayitsha. However, when the ‘month end’ came, Martha still had ‘businesses to finish’ and the money that her sister had sent had been spent on more urgent things, such as paying her children’s school fees. Martha seemed to be waiting for the right momentum to re-embark, but she was also having problems with obtaining the required documentation to cross the border. The government was struggling to import passport paper and ink and waiting times for a passport were estimated at between six months and 1.5 years (e.g. Zimbabwe Situation 2019).
Although I met Martha weekly, I had difficulties keeping account of her economic activities. She would normally start our discussions by explaining that she had been busy ‘running around’ trying to make ends meet. Her daily life was focused on how to make do today, and she was constantly on the lookout for income in the informal sector, but also assistance from church, relatives, and charities. Her husband sold cigarettes, fish, or meat, ‘door to door’ in the neighbourhood. Martha was active in different WhatsApp groups that circulated information about employment opportunities and where one could sell products. One day she would plan a catering business with a church peer, another day she collected a parcel of traditional herbs from a long-distance bus that she then re-bagged and tried to sell on the streets. On some days she collected tin cans and bottles that she planned to sell for recycling. When Martha found out that the payment would be much less than she expected, she took the tins to a Vapostori (Apostolic) church where they were melted and turned into pots, which she then tried to sell. On other days she travelled to the homes of rural relatives to help with farming.
Martha was also engaged in the ‘Sound Prosperity’ (Spurt) cryptocurrency scheme, whereby people could accrue digital ‘Spurt currency’ in their online MySpurt accounts by establishing local Spurt groups and carrying out ‘projects’. Launched in Bulawayo in 2017, and particularly active in Nkulumane where Martha lived, it had about 40,000 members in July 2019, 90% in the province of Matabeleland (Moyo 2019). At some point, Martha became part of a women’s group – established by her church peers, registered in a local Spurt office, and supervised and monitored by a local Spurt Inspector – that collected trash and tailored cushions together. The idea was that they could then use their Spurt ‘points’ to buy services or goods provided by other groups. However, Martha’s engagement was short-lived as the group work was too time consuming; Spurt rules required her to take part in the activities for a minimum of four days a week. Furthermore, she struggled to find resources to buy the materials for the sewing work.
Indeed, Martha’s plans often changed suddenly as new opportunities emerged while others collapsed. She called herself ‘a jack of all trades’, sometimes claiming, ‘You can find business opportunities in Bulawayo, you just need to be in the right place in the right time.’ Most often, however, she was frustrated, and explained that ‘this barter trading is just about survival’. Although constantly looking for opportunities, Martha described her life as ‘boring’, referring to the sense of ‘stuckness’ (Jones 2014, 207), a feeling of being stranded and unable to move forward, existentially and physically (see also Hage 2009). Imagining and planning for the future were anchored to the practical hopes of the present and making the best out of the limited resources available. Indeed, her key strategy for making do was to ‘run around’. The more she ran around, the more connections she would make, and the more opportunities of making do she would encounter (cf. Vigh 2009; Jones 2010, 2014).
Martha’s life echoes Jeremy Jones’ (2010, 2014) observations in his study among young men in Chitungwiza, a high-density area near Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, in which he shows how the common form of making do included mixing and matching ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economic activities. As he argues:
[S]ince 2000 the ‘real economy’ of Zimbabwe has turned into kukiya-kiya economy, with an emergent logic and historical motion quite different from that which preceded it. This has entailed a progressive encroachment of economic styles and tactics formerly relegated to the urban social margins. Indeed, activities formerly associated with down-class urban youth and ‘part-time’ female work, have rapidly become the source of livelihood for much of the urban population. (Jones 2010, 286)
I agree with Jones (2010, 285) that the kukiya-kiya economy constitutes ‘a new logic of economic action in post-2000 Zimbabwe’ characterized by the temporal limitation to ‘now’. Similarly, in his study among Zimbabwean farmworkers on the Zimbabwean-South African border, Maxim Bolt has argued that ‘the monthly rhythm of life’ of the farmworkers, whose existence was in many respects unpredictable, was nevertheless ‘built around wages’ (Bolt 2014, 114; see also Rutherford 2003, 2008). This temporal horizon was, by contrast, what Martha and most of the people I met were utterly lacking and longing for. Instead, every day was a possible payday and every day one had to be ready to recognize moments of opportunity, ‘to find the five Dollars that one needs for surviving today’, as one participant put it. Indeed, people in similar positions to Martha ‘tried to be at the right place at the right time’. Therefore, people lived in the instantaneous, uncertain present, and life was characterized by precarity, that is, life ‘without the promise of stability’ (Tsing 2015, 2; see also Allison 2013). Many told me about challenges, especially towards the ‘month end’ when bills and rates had to be settled, with a sense of frustration with the continuous struggles to plan for an uncertain future.
However, from the perspective of care, my account expands Jones’s conceptualization and can, I believe, be read as a feminist extension to it. I do not merely mean that this book complements the male view by bringing in female voices. Indeed, while Jones (2010, 2014) examines economic activities that focus on the creation, circulation, and accumulation of wealth, especially through informal markets and money, resonating with the classic economic perspective, my study among primarily low-income women and households instead confirms Marxist feminist arguments that emerged in the late 1960s claiming that economies go beyond economics. This book demonstrates how making do is also dependent on non-marketized issues and logics, making it empirically difficult to distinguish income-earning activities from other domains of life.
To begin with, in the Zimbabwe context of crisis and precarity, which I discuss in greater depth in the following chapter, basic economic factors including the value of currency, commodity prices, wages, and the labour market are characterized by shocks and politically motivated manipulations, rather than by predictability and stability. Livelihoods can rarely be sustained via markets and wages or by state-distributed welfare provisions. As James Ferguson (2015) has argued in his study of social distributions in southern Africa, an increasing number of people are becoming excluded from the economic production system, whether part of the agricultural or urban industrial working classes. These people are considered ‘surplus people’ (Ferguson 2015, 80).
Such people. . . may often be found engaged in tasks whose fundamental purpose is not to produce goods at all but to engineer distributions of goods produced elsewhere by accessing or making claims on the resources of others. . . . Processes of distribution have thus come to acquire an extraordinary salience in the lives of those who inhabit the margins of the global economy, even as they have remained underdeveloped in our theoretical and analytical protocols. (Ferguson 2015, 90)
In such conditions, the tactics of making do go beyond what is usually attributed to the sphere of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economies; to sustain life, people also draw upon an assemblage of institutional, familial, spiritual, and other non-monetary forms of care and ways of getting by. Therefore, I suggest that the zigzag arrangements through which people piece together livelihoods not only characterize people’s efforts to generate money in the present (Jones 2010), but also their attempts to access other forms of care, such as kin-distributed care, global humanitarian regimes, and legally provisioned forms of care.
Indeed, kulezinsuku (referring to the temporality of ‘these days’) family income was composed of a multitude of unstable material and non-material forms of livelihood. Like Martha, anyone who was able-bodied seemed to be engaged in the ‘informal’ labour market, and family income was drawn from a multitude of irregular and unstable sources, from remittances and piecework to vending, informal foreign currency trading, and accessing maintenance fees and pensions.11 People also tried to supplement their family welfare by seeking access to different ‘aid’ distributions and social protection, like school fees programmes or medical assistance schemes. Religious and spiritual authorities were consulted, and protection from the ancestral world was sought via n’angas (traditional healers), herbalists, and prophets; people also invested significant energy in trying to figure out food, accommodation, and childcare through their kin and community networks. A range of local authorities and brokers, and non-governmental and voluntary organizations played key roles in distributing, channelling, or providing advice on such distributions, which helped people to navigate the largely informalized economic and social institutions. At the same time, the functioning of such organizations was dependent on – and hence competing for – small grants from individual well-wishers and international organizations.
Furthermore, in parallel with these various forms of sought-after care and protection was a range of novel ‘economies of mediation and fabrication’ (Reeves 2019). These acts were carried out by a range of fixers including omalayitsha long-distance transporters and others who would not necessarily define their activities as that of ‘caring’, but whose role was crucial in maintaining lifelines by, for instance, facilitating children’s journeys between carers or securing protective passport stamps to manage legal precarity by extending the duration of protective legal statuses or the validity of their travel permits. Others, often ordinary civil servants or welfare officers, knew how to construct a believable birth story to access further ID documents and citizenship rights, or to access the global protective label of ‘refugee’ or ‘Orphan and Vulnerable Child’ (OVC), especially fostered by ‘transnational regimes of care’ (Ticktin 2011) and their local counterparts.
Often, such claim-making processes involved an element of ‘make believe’, where ingredients of ‘truth’ and ‘fake’ were mixed and matched, making them inseparable in lived realities (Navaro-Yashin 2007, 2012). A term I use again in future chapters, Yael Navaro-Yashin (2012, 5) defines ‘make believe’ as a ‘social form’ that does not merely refer to space and territory, but also ‘to modes of governance and administration and to material practices’. She highlights such practices as being both about ‘making-and-believing’, or ‘believing-and-making’ (Navaro-Yashin 2012, 6). In the current case the made-up narratives are not, however, necessarily ‘believed’ by the parties who assess and process them. The teachers, Community Case Workers, immigration officers, and others who listen, administer, construct, and evaluate such narratives and their material manifestations, such as affidavits, might be well aware that the claims contain fictive elements. Yet such stories could work if they were made believable by following a believable storyline or fitting into bureaucratic procedures.
Given this plurality of forms of making do, it is somewhat ironic that, although the term economy originates from the Greek oikos, referring to a household-based estate, modern economics has become associated predominantly with things that fall outside the domestic domain (Hann and Hart 2011, 19), an approach that has been critiqued by feminist economists and anthropologists for being overly focused on the material aspects of social life (Hammar and Rodgers 2008; Ortner 1984). Earlier Marxist feminist scholarship placed particular emphasis on the unpaid reproductive labour and domestic care work of women at the centre of women’s oppression (see Glenn 1992, 2). In contemporary feminist scholarship, the term ‘economies of care’ has been used in this spirit to examine how the increased number of women in waged labour has altered the understanding of women’s duties and responsibilities to provide care for others, especially children (McDowell et al. 2005). The term and its corollary, ‘care economy’, have also been used to emphasize the global, gendered, and racialized field of care work, with scholarship aiming to establish how to increase the value of that work, so necessary to maintaining global economic growth (LSE 2019).
Besides feminist scholarship, economic anthropologists have also emphasized the economy as a socially constructed mode of living that ensures the availability of the basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter, and sustains social reproduction. For instance, Chris Gregory and John Altman (1989, 1) have argued that the ‘economy’ is best understood as ‘a mode of living’ constructed through social relations – for instance between parents and children, males and females, and among different groups of people – that people ‘establish to control the production, consumption, and circulation of food, clothing, and shelter’. The economy has also been redefined more broadly to cover different domains of life, combined with ‘moral’, ‘political’, ‘cultural’, and ‘spiritual’ variables (Hann and Hart 2011, 4).
Making do operates at the intersection of market and non-market logics and moral ideas that are embedded in different social organizations and institutions, also causing areas of life that are usually considered ‘non-market’ to be subjected to market principles. This ethnography, and the concept of economies of care it addresses, advances our understanding of how people invest, both materially and non-materially, in these social networks, and the kinds of claims and justifications used to generate ways to maintain continuity. This intersection of logics and claims is at the centre of the conceptualization of economies of care.
I use the notion of economies of care to problematize the persistent distinctions made between discrete domains, such as the state/politics, family/kinship, and the economy, by indicating their entanglement and coproduction and the empirical impossibility of separating such domains in lived reality (e.g., McKinnon and Cannell 2013; Thelen and Alber 2018, 2022). For instance, the scarcity of resources crucially affects how domestic care work – not as a romanticized component of kinship, but as a practical challenge in day-to-day life – is organized and articulated, and how its logics are expressed. Yet cultural kinship ideals, like patrilineal ancestral belonging, also matter, and are used as a means to claim access to necessities, or to express how social relations should ideally be organized (e.g. Lambek 2013; Pine 2018). As Janet Carsten (2013) has maintained, different factors, including economic resources, can ‘thicken’ or ‘thin’ one’s ties to kinship and the ability to realize the ideals of belonging and caring. Indeed, as Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) has argued, caring is not just abstract well wishing, a stage of being concerned about someone; it requires recognition of the ethical obligation to care for others and concrete involvement in one way or another, which again requires resources.
The following chapters illustrate that kinship extends beyond the ‘domestic’, encompassing economic, governmental and disciplinary state practices (e.g., Collier and Yaganisako 1998). They build on scholarship on how the state uses what Foucault (2008, 78) termed biopolitics, or the ‘politics of life’, to (re)make certain kinds of citizens through, for instance, education, registration, and documentation (e.g., Das and Poole 2004a, 2004b; Hansen and Stepputat 2001). These techniques are also used to constitute certain kinds of families by regulating their social and biological reproduction and recognition (Donzelot 1979). Indeed, family and parenting became central to state-building, prompting domestic monitoring and intervention through growing family policies and welfare services (Cruikshank 1999; Donzelot 1979; Rose 1990). This has been investigated in the context of transnational adoption (see Howell 2003, 2006a, 2006b; Mariner 2019), assisted reproductive technologies (Edwards 2000), institutional childcare, such as social work, day care, and health care (e.g., Papadaki 2018; Bungaard and Olwig 2018), and in relation to displacement and migration control (e.g., Fischer 2015; Luibhéid 2002; Ramsay 2017). These scholars emphasize the significance of the role of state agents, formal legal institutions, and frameworks, including laws regulating migration and cross-country adoption through which the political enters the realm of kinship, and the state participates in disciplining and (re)making the family (Drotbohm and Alber 2015).
However, as Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber (2018, 16) have pointed out, while it is increasingly recognized that the state influences kinship practices through legal frameworks and the mundane work of civil servants, there is less empirical research on how kinship practices and ideas influence state practices. I have tried to balance this by teasing out how kin care, such as repatriating the body of an injiva home for respectful burial (Chapter 4), registering births, and the constitution of papered kin relations (Chapter 5), is affecting state practices, or how individuals and families, via legal practitioners (Chapter 6), community level bureaucrats (Chapter 7), or other brokers, respond to state regulations, and make claims on the state. Furthermore, I demonstrate that state agents are multiply situated subjects who also draw on cultural understandings of care and kinship in their actual work, thereby challenging the general assumption that citizens or residents are ‘closer’ to society than officials (Lammer 2024, 128).
The book does not provide a clear-cut definition of what care includes or excludes; rather, it approaches it as a relational and situated process. What constitutes ‘good’ or ‘liveable’ life is always contextual, meaning different things to different actors, recipients, and providers of care.12 Therefore, the means to ‘continue, maintain, and repair’ the world are also relative, and depend on the motives and ideological and moral framework of the relevant actors. For instance, views within a state and between agents of a particular state institution might also be internally conflicting. In other words, the ‘worlds’ that they anticipate maintaining, and the means to do so, might differ radically, and the ‘things’ referred to in Puig de la Bellacasa’s definition of caring do not stay linked together in a static way, or at all, but rather require active reworking. Furthermore, the caring web is not overly flexible or always life sustaining; it can be punctured and needs constant maintenance and patching. Although the moral imperative to care for those more ‘vulnerable’ carries on in different forms, the nature of the crisis shapes social dynamics and concomitant care obligations in particular ways.
In this ethnography, I use the economies of care framework to understand how life is sustained in conditions of dislocation and precarity. It produces knowledge on the relationship between varying care agents and migration-affected families – state and kinship – in terms of how they co-produce practices to ‘hold things together in a livable way’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 198). Yet, these same agents can, in different contexts, also make worlds uninhabitable and lives unliveable. The argument unfolds over nine chapters.
How is life sustained in conditions of displacement and chronic crisis? In which ways are bureaucratic and intimate relations and practices of care co-constituted across nations and generations as people live in, rather than through, crisis? This Introduction has introduced these questions through the ethnographic case of return migration to Zimbabwe. It has sketched the background of the book, the research problem, methodology and the key analytical terms, and explained how the book is approached and organized.
Chapter 1 contextualizes the crises in Bulawayo and roots the contemporary economies of care in longer histories of colonial and postcolonial politics. Focusing on the colonially rooted practices of population registration, documentation, and welfare distribution, it teases out how such practices continue to constitute central domains that low-income, urban Bulawayoans must navigate in order to sustain life in the contemporary context of uncertainty.
Chapter 2 approaches migration as a historically constituted form of care. It explores historical mobility across the Limpopo River, a boundary between South Africa and Zimbabwe, which is shaped by colonial dispossession and extraction regimes. It discusses various historically rooted forms, concepts, agents, and categorization of mobility that have been engendered by the ongoing crisis. It mobilizes an old, but actively used isiNdebele term injiva, which has historically referred to men engaged in circular migration between Zimbabwe and South Africa. However, as Zimbabwe has faced increasing political and economic instability, migration patterns have evolved. More women and children now participate in migration and migration has become less predictable as people respond to life cycle needs. This shift towards the feminization of migration and changing migration temporalities are significant recent trends in southern Africa. The chapter problematizes the term ‘return migration’ and complements state-centric definitions attached to migration and mobility by investigating the various, locally defined subjectivities, agents, and institutions that have emerged to sustain life across borders.
What happens when one does not know where her child will sleep the next night? Chapter 3 explores how enduring crises are acutely experienced in the domestic sphere, shaping reconfigurations of childcare. While the previous chapter discusses how children move across borders and households in conditions of legal and economic insecurity, this chapter examines the moral and economic discussion and practical arrangements involved in their care. I address how the common form of child fostering in which children move between households is linked to the southern African context of colonial labour migration, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. I also address how the current crisis has challenged kinship norms, and how relations of intimacy are entangled with monetary and material transmissions, as care chains that accommodate children are characterized by short-termness and open-endedness. While kinship undeniably forms a powerful network of care, the ethnography complicates the romanticized view of African kinship as inherently flexible and nurturing, revealing a more complex reality in which inclusion and exclusion boundaries must be negotiated amid daily practical challenges.
Chapter 4 investigates how Zimbabwe’s crisis and the subsequent large-scale migration to South Africa have shaped care practices and relationships surrounding transnational death and the repatriation of dying and deceased migrants. While accounts of African burials and death have largely focused on the mortuary rituals and belief systems providing central scripts for end-of-life care, the chapter brings to the fore the interconnections between intimate, bureaucratic, religious, and economic domains. It asks how ‘undocumented migrants’ are repatriated home at the event of death. How is transnational death bureaucratically, economically, and religiously facilitated? It reveals that the economies of care related to death are simultaneously entwined with state documentation and cross-border practices, as well as the broader political economies of migration. Specifically, under the informalization of economies and state-produced conditions of illegality, it examines how injivas – together with various state authorities – deal with (un)documentedness and the sometimes multiple legal identities of those who die, and, in doing so, attempt to secure the deceased’s safe passage to the afterlife.
In contexts where the state struggles to issue official identification documents, where many border crossings happen informally, and where numerous births go unregistered, Chapter 5 examines how crises contribute to undocumentedness and impact the state’s capacity to provide citizenship certificates. It also explores how people respond to these challenges in creative ways, often leading to identity ambiguities. It examines strategies people use to obtain documents, the narratives they construct to justify access, and how they manipulate the materiality of documents to cope with undocumentedness. By looking at the creativity embedded in their struggles over travel documents and birth certificates, the chapter shows how different local authorities are involved in the bureaucratic yet often intrinsically informal social practices where claims over identification are made. It demonstrates how a singular bureaucratic act, such as birth registration, can produce membership of both citizenship and kinship. Yet, what is documented in state registers and papers might differ from the actual physical and social situation of the document holder. The chapter also addresses the creative capacity of documentation to bring into being new, often unintended forms of relatedness, dependency, and belonging, and the ways in which people – often with the help of frontline state bureaucrats – try to deal with such outcomes, to ‘get things straight’.
Recent scholarship has suggested that states are, globally, doing less in terms of the care and welfare of their citizens and that the role of the state is diminishing as non-state organizations are expected to take over state duties (Muehlebach 2012; Sharma and Gupta 2006, 22). Chapter 6 complicates these arguments by examining how the state nevertheless reproduces its authority by portraying itself as a distributive authority, committed to care for its vulnerable members. Drawing on court papers, social welfare reports, and maintenance claims that utilize ‘the child’s best interest’ in the source of formal, state-regulated repatriation of Zimbabwean children from South Africa to Zimbabwe, the chapter argues that even when the state’s economic resources are limited – or non-existent – it still has power to distribute resources that it does not supply itself. By translating how the global child welfare principle ought to be translated in practice, it has powers to make decisions on how domestic economic resources ought to be distributed. In so doing, varying ideas of proper kin relations and personhood are enhanced. The state-produced papers, whether they describe actually existing kinship relations or fictive ones, produce material arrangements in social life and, in so doing, direct affective responses. This challenges reified ideas of kinship that tend to presume an ever-elastic and accommodating ideal-type of ‘the African family’.
Chapter 7 considers how the image of a caring state is both performed and contested by the actual workings of Zimbabwe’s volunteering Community Case Workers (CCWs) and their affective encounters with ‘the vulnerable’ members of their communities. It also explores how they negotiate their often ambiguous role vis-à-vis their ‘cases’, mediating the care between the state and ordinary people, and how the targets of their interventions respond, resist, justify, and transform as a result of such interventions and in their relations with the state. Officially, the CCW policy mandate is built on an assumption of their affective closeness to their communities. By zooming in on their actual work, I show how they utilize their connectedness to other welfare providers to sustain life. The chapter also illustrates how global categories of ‘orphans’ and ‘the vulnerable’ are translated, utilized and mobilized on the ground. Conceptualized as multiply situated, community-level caring bureaucrats, the CCWs also assist their ‘cases’ in constructing claims of vulnerability that fit into the narrow categories of welfare organizations, although their legitimacy is based on their ability to recognize and address forms of vulnerability that go beyond such definitions from outside. Through these processes, the credibility of both welfare institutions and the CCWs themselves is challenged and reproduced.
In the conclusion, the book returns to the question of how life is sustained under conditions of crisis, synthesizes arguments made throughout the book, and sketches out future investigation needs.