Invisibility As Strategy? Understanding the Perceptions Toward Organising Amongst Foreign Farm Workers in Musina, South Africa

In this paper I explore issues of self representation and mobilisation amongst foreign farm workers in Musina, Limpopo. Based on original empirical research on the commercial privately owned farms in  Musina, this paper reveals a number of human rights violations against this group, and points to a lack of capacity and authority by civil society organisations and government departments to effectively address these problems.  Drawing on this context, I make two interconnected arguments: first that the political economy of Musina has created and sustained an informal-formal system through which these conditions can be perpetuated; and second that farm workers adopt tactics of 'invisibleness' to operate within this system. By this I refer to the range of sustained strategies that workers- and foreign workers in particular- engage in to earn livelihoods. Drawing on a global literature of mobilisation, and community relations, I argue that in the face of the poor and inhumane conditions that workers face, silence and invisibility are tactics that they use to fight back and survive.