People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the Global South 9781782384687

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People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis

The Human Economy Series editors: Keith Hart, London School of Economics John Sharp, University of Pretoria The social sciences and humanities concerned with the economy have lost the confidence to challenge the sophistication and public dominance of the field of economics. We need to give a new emphasis and direction to the economic arrangements that people already share, while recognizing that humanity urgently needs new ways of organizing life on the planet. This series examines how human interests are expressed in our unequal world through concrete economic activities and aspirations. Volume 1

People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis Perspectives from the Global South Edited by Keith Hart & John Sharp Volume 2

Economy for and against Democracy Edited by Keith Hart Volume 3

Gypsy Economy Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century Edited by Micol Brazzabeni, Manuela Ivone Cunha and Martin Fotta Afterword by Keith Hart Volume 4

From Clans to Co-ops Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily Theodoros Rakopoulos

People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis Perspectives from the Global South

░░░ Edited by

Keith Hart and John Sharp

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2015, 2016 Keith Hart and John Sharp First paperback edition published in 2016 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data People, money, and power in the economic crisis : perspectives from the global south / edited by Keith Hart and John Sharp. pages cm. -- (The human economy ; volume 1)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-78238-467-0 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-78533-342-2 (paperback) -ISBN 978-1-78238-468-7 (ebook)    1. Sustainable development--Developing countries. 2. Financial crises--Developing countries. 3. Money--Developing countries. 4. Power (Social sciences)-Developing countries. I. Hart, Keith. II. Sharp, John (John S.)   HC59.72.E5P464 2014   338.9’27091724--dc23 2014016234

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78238-467-0 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78533-342-2 paperback ISBN: 978-1-78238-468-7 ebook

░ Contents

Preface. The Human Economy Project Keith Hart and John Sharp Introduction Keith Hart and John Sharp

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Chapter 1. After the Big Clean-Up: Street Vendors, the Informal Economy and Employment Policy in Zimbabwe Busani Mpofu

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Chapter 2. Immoral Accumulation and the Human Economy of Death in Venda Fraser McNeill

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Chapter 3. ‘Letting Money Work for Us’: Self-Organization and Financialization from Below in an All-Male Savings Club in Soweto Detlev Krige Chapter 4. Market, Race and Nation: History of the White Working Class in Pretoria John Sharp

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Chapter 5. Negotiating Inequality: The Contemporary Black Middle Classes in Salvador, Brazil Doreen Gordon

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Chapter 6. Live Music in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Cape Verde Juliana Braz Dias

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Chapter 7. Congo-Gauteng: Congolese Migrants in South Africa Saint José Inaka and Joseph Trapido Chapter 8. Neither Nationals nor Cosmopolitans: The Political Economy of Belonging for Mozambican Indians Jason Sumich

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Chapter 9. Marwari Traders between Hindu Neoliberalism and Democratic Socialism in Nepal Mallika Shakya

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References

207

Notes on Contributors

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Index

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░ Preface The Human Economy Project KEITH HART AND JOHN SHARP

This book is the first in a series that asks how the economy might become more human. Economies were always human, of course, in that people are indispensable to their functioning; but how human interests are expressed in the economies that dominate our world has long been obscure. The aim of the series is to explore economy from the vantage point of people’s concrete activities and aspirations, while extending the range of our inquiries to take in the human predicament as a whole. Southern Africa and the global South are our principal focus in this volume, but the comparative perspective that frames our case studies aims to be more inclusive than that. For several centuries now humanity has struggled to break out of unequal society with the hope of achieving genuine democracy – government by and for the people. The world economic crisis that began in 2008 and provoked the first stirrings of political revolution in 2011 offers a new opportunity to launch intellectual initiatives with this aim in mind. We must address the sources of inequality at present and ask how greater economic democracy might be achieved through development strategies based on what people want and are doing already. The humanities and social sciences have lost their way. One reason for this malaise is that economics has acquired a degree of autonomy, technical sophistication and public dominance that has greatly reduced intellectual exchange with other disciplines that have an established interest in economy – such as anthropology, history, sociology, political economy, geography, literature and philosophy. At the same time, society has come to be identified with the market economy and economic considerations are now seen as being central to the achievement of political democracy. We invite a much broader coalition of engaged intellectuals and activists to contribute more to public debate about the economy, while renewing an interdisciplinary conversation with those economists who are open to such a possibility.

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The Berghahn Human Economy series assumes that at base economies are more alike than the contrasts between them as capitalism, socialism and the rest suggest. People everywhere combine reliance on government support, commerce, kinship, voluntary associations, religion, crime and much else. We need to give the specific combinations they live by a new direction and emphasis, with the aim of mobilizing their efforts for the common good. Social rights rest not only on citizenship and market contracts, but also on the mutuality that grows out of living together. We ask in this book: How do people in South Africa and comparable societies insert themselves into the actual, unequal economy? How might a more equal economy be built by harnessing and expanding what people already do for themselves? Ultimately, we need new answers to the question, ‘What is a human being?’ These should reflect human unity and diversity more fully than the economists’ narrow vision allows for. The idea of economy has an unfinished history, and the current global crisis, far from weakening the ascendancy of free market economics, as many of us expected, appears to have strengthened it. Economy was at first management of a rural household’s budget and it has lately come to be identified with markets everywhere. In the last century it referred principally to the national economy and political conflict over its management was organized around the poles of market freedom and state socialism, neither of which did much to promote economic democracy. We can no longer afford ruinous swings between these poles. Nor is it obvious how a revolutionary break with ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘capitalism’, conceived of as a totality, might be achieved. The economy is too important to be left to specialists whose ideas are far removed from how ordinary people understand the world they live in. The approach adopted here for studying the economy is institutional; that is, rather than rely on totalizing abstractions, we pay close attention to the particular arrangements through which people engage with economic life, whether these are public bureaucracy, commercial firms, self-organized activities, the informal economy or domestic groups – and these are always plural. The narrow view of economic needs and interests offered by mainstream economics should be replaced by a wider conception of human well-being. We hope to broaden discussion of how to bring about meaningful economic democracy through dedicated research and writing on the ‘human economy’. The public might then be able to place themselves imaginatively and practically in such a vision of how the economy works. Above all, we hope to learn from and give a voice to those who are usually neither seen nor heard. Economic democracy means nothing if not trusting the people to identify and express their

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own interests. The practice of ethnography – of joining the people where they live in order to find out what they do and think – is central to such an approach. Its source is modern anthropology, but the general method has now been adopted, at least in name, by a number of disciplines. The present project grew out of the activities of an international network of scholars who have been engaged for over a decade in trying to advance a more just and inclusive approach to the development of the world economy. This network, starting out in Latin America and Europe, has widened its international range through several important publications, the most recent being The Human Economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010a). This was an attempt to bring the fruits of the international project to English speakers or at least to those who speak English as a second language. All its predecessor volumes were called, in various languages, Dictionary of the Other Economy. The editors dropped that particular formulation for several reasons. We felt that labelling our intellectual work as ‘the other economy’ lent itself too readily to radical binaries. We based our programme on what Marcel Mauss (1990 [1925]) and Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]) understood by economic change, since we were looking for a more positive construction than a simple negation, and this is where the idea of a human economy came from. What makes an economy ‘human’? First, it privileges people before abstractions. People make and remake their economic lives and that has to be the foundation for thinking about economy. Any economics should be accessible to them as a practical guide to how they manage those lives. But the economy is also human in that people everywhere increasingly confront economic problems and dilemmas that are common to us all. The future of humanity as a whole is at stake in the economic crises that we face, not just the world seen through the blinkers of national politics and media. So the idea of a human economy points in these two directions: towards what people really do and hope for, while seeking to extend our perspective to a global level, without ever losing sight of local realities. Since that volume was published, the editors of this series set up a research programme on the human economy at the University of Pretoria (UP) in South Africa’s capital. UP has generously funded a programme of post-doctoral fellowships drawing initially from the global South (with fellows from Southern Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean). Subsequently, with the support of the Mellon Foundation, the programme has brought researchers from the global North and South together in a creative dialogue focused on Southern Africa. Before The Human Economy (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010a), publications were largely

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a Francophone and Latin American venture, so the range of contributors was widened to add authors from Britain, North America and Scandinavia. But Asia and Africa – where most of the people live – were still missing from this impressively diverse volume. These books offered a digest of existing knowledge and experience concerning the economy that might help to inform readers who want a better world. None, however, provided much guidance for how to carry out active research on the human economy. So the Pretoria programme aims to fill these two gaps: first, to enrol Africans and Asians to collaborative study of economic development, alongside Latin Americans, North Americans and Europeans; and second, to coordinate research that would help to inform and refine this programme. The Mellon Foundation and UP have now helped to launch an interdisciplinary cohort of African doctoral students. Karl Polanyi’s (2001 [1944]; 1957) call for a return to social solidarity, drawing especially on the voluntary reciprocity of associations, reminds us of the need to mobilize ordinary persons to contribute their energies to the renewal of the human economy. It is not enough to rely on impersonal states and markets. There is a tension between the impersonal conditions of social life and the persons who inevitably carry it out. This relationship is poorly understood, perhaps never more than now, when the difference between individual citizens and business corporations operating on a scale larger than most countries has become obscured. Ideas are impersonal, human life is not (Hart 2005). So, at one level, the issue is the relative priority to be accorded to life and ideas. At the heart of our public culture lies an impenetrable confusion of people, things and ideas. The feminists were right to insist that the personal is political. By the same token, the political is often personal. But, if we relied on persons alone to make society, we would be back to feudalism or its modern equivalent, criminal mafias. There must be impersonal institutions that, at least in principle, work for everyone, regardless of who they are and who they know. What place is there for the humanity of individual persons in the dehumanized social frameworks we live by? This is the conundrum at the heart of the human economy. In sum, our project understands world economy as a human economy. In what sense ‘human’? Our focus is on what people actually do and think; economic action is directed towards the well-being of whole persons and communities, not a mechanical and one-sided individualism. We emphasize the local particulars of economic institutions in all their variety, and our horizon is humanity’s historical project to achieve effective stewardship of life on this planet. In the end everyone should feel ‘at home’ in a world economy that has been made initially through the ex-

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tension of markets, but we cannot survive on the basis of markets alone. We do not imagine that the prospects for a human economy rest exclusively with the West. Indeed, the epicentre of world society now seems to be moving inexorably back to where most of the people are: Asia and Africa are together projected to be home to 80 per cent of humanity by 2100, with equal shares, whereas now Asia outnumbers Africa by 4 to 1. A focus on human economy might offer one disciplined approach to questions of overwhelming significance for our species’ management of our common planetary concerns. The Western roots of the project must be cross-fertilized with other intellectual traditions if we are to fulfil its global mission and contribute to a more inclusive human future. For us, the human economy exists everywhere in dialectical tension with the dominant economic institutions of our day. We conclude with Bill Maurer’s (2012) eloquent summary of what we aim for: [The book’s authors] propose a mode of inquiry and practice into economy that would reorient the discussion towards a fully ‘human’ economy, an economy focused on well-being-in-the-world. … The reader is pulled towards a more engaged practice: not applied research in an instrumental sense, at least not as conventionally done, but a disposition of openness to the world, a critical engagement with the world, while seeking to make the world anew. … They are not anti-market or anti-economy. They are for a human economy. This is not a romantic or utopian vision, they say. It is a pragmatic one. The economy is a ‘creation of all humanity’, and as humans we have an obligation to engage it, rework it as we make our way with and through it … grappling with ‘the world economy as a whole’. Apprehending wholeness entails an expansive notion of economy: it is about the flourishing of human well-being. This claim is profoundly political, because that expansion, in turn, depends on recognizing that there is a broad range of human needs, not just private interests.

░ Introduction Keith Hart and John Sharp

What Crisis? The world went into an economic recession in 1873. It mainly affected the United States (where it was known as a ‘long depression’ lasting until 1879) and Europe, especially Britain, which was considered to be in continuous depression for over two decades. It was known there as ‘The Great Depression’ of 1873 to 1896 and was widely thought to be global in scope (Capie and Wood 1997). In retrospect, economic historians view the last decades of the nineteenth century and the run up to the First World War as a time of tremendous expansion for the world economy, fuelled by Brazil’s rubber, South Africa’s gold, Siberian minerals, an oil boom, the scramble for Africa and much else. Fifty million Europeans migrated to lands of temperate zone new settlement and a similar number of Indians and Chinese indentured labourers went mostly to the tropics (Lewis 1978). Yet in Britain, whose industry was facing intense competition from Germany and the United States, profits were squeezed and returns on middle-class savings in consolidated annuities (‘consols’) fell. This was a world crisis, for after all the British Empire was the world. Meanwhile the rest got on with building the twentieth-century economy. Russia was the China of its day, experiencing 10 per cent average annual economic growth from 1890 to 1913, and we all know what happened next. The financial crisis precipitated by the fall of Lehman Brothers bank in September 2008 likewise affected the United States and Europe first, and has been widely seen as being global in scope ever since. Comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s has been commonplace, but the last time that three decades of financial globalization ended in world war (1913 to 1914) has been mentioned less often. China, India, Brazil and some African countries have continued to post impressive growth rates since 2008, although signs of possible economic weakness have been noted, particularly in the Western media, and insurrections in North Africa and the Middle East, not to mention the general crisis gripping

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Southern Europe, raise the possibility that in some regions at least the economic downturn may be taking a political turn. The Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria was launched to bring an added perspective from the global South (beyond the existing prominence of Latin America) to the movement for a better world known as ‘alter-globalization’ (Pleyers 2010). The present volume – a series of case studies from Southern Africa, plus South Asia, Brazil and Atlantic Africa – is mainly concerned with showing how ordinary people from a wide range of class positions experience the contemporary world economy from their particular place in it. But we also aim to make a contribution to understanding the political economy of the world we all live in, and so local circumstances are inserted into a comparative perspective, which gives priority to the experience of the global South. It becomes immediately obvious that any notion of crisis, whether global or whatever, cannot be readily extended from the North Atlantic societies to the South. Many of the places considered in this volume did not participate in the credit boom that fuelled growth in the West from the 1980s. That decade was notable for the ‘Third World debt crisis’ and for structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank that had ruinous consequences for many African countries. Equally, rising commodity prices from the millennium have boosted some raw material–exporting countries. Of the countries included here: the Democratic Republic of Congo has suffered a devastating war and collapse of infrastructure; Zimbabwe has endured hyperinflation and continuing political crisis; Nepal has gone through a short-term export boom and bust, followed by a sort of Maoist revolution; South Africa is in the economic doldrums despite having been admitted to emerging markets’ elite club, the BRICS; tiny Cape Verde is fairly buoyant on the proceeds of world music and tourism; and Mozambique, coming out of a crippling civil war, is currently one of the top ten fastest-growing economies in the world. It is hard to make sense of any of this in terms of global generalizations about political economy, but we begin here by situating our case studies in a historical narrative about the relationship between political power and money – the state and market pair which between them, not least as the ideological face of the Cold War, did so much to make the twentieth century the most murderous in history. First, however, we establish a more limited goal for this volume. Almost all our contributors here came to the Human Economy Programme as anthropologists and their common method is ethnography, combined in varying degrees with a



Introduction

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historical and comparative approach. The remainder of this introduction considers the roots of the human economy approach in anthropology, then addresses the theme of people, money and power, and finally summarizes the contributions made by individual chapters.

The Anthropological Roots of the Human Economy Programme The Human Economy research programme combines two intellectual traditions from the twentieth century, social anthropology and development studies. Social anthropology’s principal method has long been ethnography, a commitment to joining people where they live in order to find out what they do and think. The key terms of this process are ‘fieldwork’ and ‘participant observation’, meaning engagement with local people’s lives and activities for a prolonged period. Many other disciplines have taken up what they call ‘ethnography’, which generally means making qualitative observations on the spot for quite short periods. Social anthropologists, however, by virtue of their long-term immersion in local society, internalize its norms and this encourages them to generalize about the society as the project. The raw material of observation and interaction may be the same across disciplines: particular events occur in real life, people say whatever comes to mind and conversation takes place. In the empirical tradition of positivist science, that is all there is to it. But human beings – and social anthropologists drawn temporarily into sharing their local worlds – bring broader forms of understanding to these interactions and build much wider patterns of association from them. If it were not possible for us all to extend the range of our comprehension beyond the minutiae of everyday life, there would be no cities, nations, regional federations, empires or world religions. The whole project of addressing the human predicament as a whole would be impossible. As the idealist philosophers have always insisted, without the general idea of a cat we would not know the specimen that just jumped onto our lap, and it is the same with society even if how we know it lacks the concreteness of daily encounters. The humanities in general are not afraid of making this leap from particulars to universal propositions: great literature and literary criticism depend on it, judges make case law on this basis, and philosophers construct imagined examples to illustrate general truths. What makes ethnography anthropological is this willingness to link concrete persons and events to universal propositions concerning local society and even

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humanity as a whole. There is nothing scientific about this and anthropologists – who nowadays find themselves pigeonholed as a social science – usually do not dwell publicly on this aspect of their procedures. Many of them have retreated from the aspiration to address the human predicament into a much narrower version of empirically verifiable ethnography. But if the human economy approach is to stand a chance of linking local circumstances to the world society that is emerging in our times, this aspect of our method will have to be made much more explicit. Almost all the contributors to this volume were trained as social anthropologists (one is a historian with a predilection for ethnographic research). They report here on case studies that they carried out previously as part of their doctoral research programmes. Additional chapters were commissioned from social anthropologists based in Pretoria. In the course of preparing this volume, we conducted a quite intense conversation among ourselves, comparing these case studies to each other in the light of a general discussion about the principles of a research programme on human economy. As social anthropologists ourselves, the editors were content to leave many aspects of our programme vague, while we sought to uncover some general ideas and methods that might inform a human economy agenda (see this book’s preface). The leap to human universals is particularly difficult in this instance since, in the last half-century, world society has emerged as the real framework for general propositions about humanity – not an idea, but the fact of seven billion people trying to find a way of living together on a planet whose problems are very widely shared. Given that social consciousness is still closely defined by local or national concerns, the task of a human economy project is not to move directly to generalizations about world society (although this remains our ultimate goal), but rather to extend the framework of inquiry to more inclusive levels. In many instances this first involves placing a local case study within a national framework, but sometimes it is possible to go further. The authors assembled here all saw their prime responsibility as providing an accurate and realistic depiction of the places and people they studied intensively. From there they took one or more of several routes towards broader generalization. These included engagement with questions of development, historical extension of research horizons in time and space, the comparative method, issues of national politics and analysis informed by a wide range of economic, and social and anthropological theory. If one leg of our methodology is ethnography, the other is an institutional approach. Against the prevailing rational choice assumption to eco­nomics, we examine the set of particular institutions through which



Introduction

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people experience an economy whose principles are always plural, not singular. This approach has its roots in German historicism and it comes to us through Max Weber’s historical sociology, the institutional economics of Thorstein Veblen and in economic anthropology under the influence of Karl Polanyi. A dispute arose in the 1890s between Gustav von Schmoller, the doyen of German historical economics, and the Austrian followers of Carl Menger, one of the founders of marginalist economics. It hinged on the oikos (house) thesis of Karl Rodbertus, published thirty years earlier. Schmoller endorsed Rodbertus’s idea that ancient Greek economy, following Xenophon and Aristotle, was organized on different principles from those of contemporary German capitalism, being focused rather on household management. However, the economists, and sympathizers such as Eduard Meyer, could point to the existence of thoroughly modern capitalist firms in Athens and elsewhere producing for international markets. A ‘battle over methods’ (Methodenstreit) was waged over whether the new economics could offer a universal foundation for the pursuit of human welfare. The anthropologist Karl Bücher held a middle position: he sympathized with Menger’s aspirations to scientific rigor, but held that it was not possible to apply the same body of theory to each historical stage of the economy. The German historicists insisted on contextualizing economic life: the principles of the market and the new methodological individualism could not explain all economic behaviour, not even in modern Germany. Max Weber, the leading sociologist of the time, put the lid on this argument in his magisterial Economy and Society (1978) by suggesting that we would not be interested in ancient Greece unless it was different and we could not understand it unless our knowledge was capable of embracing the Greeks as the same as us in some sense. This was based on the dialectical method of Hegel and, before him, Kant – sameness in difference, not same versus different. Weber made much of Kant’s dualistic conception of the human faculties, the division between ‘form’ arising from the operations of the mind and ‘substance’ or perception of the material world through the senses. He argued that not only were the formal and substantive rationalities of capitalism different, but they were often at odds. The ‘bottom line’ of accountancy for profit could, and often did, lead to economic failure (unemployment and the like) at the cost of disruption to people’s livelihoods. Weber, as a liberal, was sympathetic to the subjective individualism of the new economics, but as a sociologist he could hardly discount the human disasters wreaked in its name. The Methodenstreit resurfaced in American economic anthropology after the Second World War as ‘the formalistsubstantivist debate’ (Hann and Hart 2011).

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Economic anthropology flourished in the decades after the Second World War. Karl Polanyi did more than anyone to establish the field as a self-conscious intellectual community. In his seminal essay ‘The Economy as Instituted Process’, Polanyi (1957) argued that the ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ meanings of the word ‘economic’ had been erroneously conflated. The first refers to a means-end relationship, the mental process of economizing, whereas the second is concerned with general provisioning of material wants in society. A ‘formalist’ approach emphasizes the regular operation of ideas, in this case the universal claims of neoclassical economics, while a ‘substantivist’ approach gives priority to the actual empirical content of material circumstances and disputes that this diversity can be adequately grasped through just one set of concepts. Both formalists and substantivists recognized the importance of markets for economic coordination, but for Polanyi the market principle was not the main ‘form of integration’ in world economic history. The principles of reciprocity and redistribution were of greater significance than the market in non-industrial societies. Markets were present in primitive and archaic societies but they did not yet pose a threat to the integration of the economy in the wider social system (being ‘embedded’ in it). In Polanyi’s philosophy of history, the rupture created by industrialization – and above all the creation of a market for free wage labour in Victorian England – led to a ‘disembedding’ of the economy. This ‘utopian’ elevation of the market principle to the dominant form of economic integration was bound to fail. He identified a ‘double movement’: on the one hand the economics of laissez-faire, and on the other social resistance to it. The resulting dynamic led inevitably to the crises and world wars of the twentieth century (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). Polanyi’s followers, notably Paul Bohannan and George Dalton, applied these insights to non-Western regions. Unlike the substantivists, their opponents – economic anthropologists known as ‘formalists’ – were not led by a single seminal figure. Rather than chart a new paradigm, they generally saw themselves as applying the refined instruments of mainstream economics to unfamiliar settings. For them, the central concepts were in principle applicable everywhere, because they defined economics in terms of the choices made by individual actors under conditions of scarcity. They thus extended the logic of rational individualism to settings where the substantivists considered it to be inappropriate, since reciprocity and redistribution were the dominant forms of integration there rather than impersonal markets. For example, Polanyi made much use of Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1922) Trobriand ethnography to show how the economy was substantively embedded in local social networks. But formalists, such as Robbins Burling (1962), could

Introduction

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readily reinterpret these materials to confirm standard neoclassical assumptions. In the absence of advanced technologies and storage facilities, the accumulation of productive capital was not an option. Malinowski’s demonstration that the Trobrianders produced many more yams than they were able to consume, in order to display them to neighbours and fulfil obligations to matrilineages, was consistent with the utility-maximizing assumptions of the modern economists. The influence of development studies is to be found in the theme that underlies this collection and in one or two of our chapters, but the question of how the human economy project might contribute to a progressive political agenda of development is only suggested here. The second volume in this series addresses this question directly and fully. In this volume we seek to build bridges between ethnography and world history by focusing on the perennial conflicts and alliances between classes formed by political power and money respectively. This was the broadest level of comparison that we achieved in our first year. Subsequent waves of recruitment were able to build on this foundation while extending our group’s interdisciplinary and geographical range to include the North as well as the South. But this collection brings together authors who either come from the global South (Braz Dias, Gordon), are citizens of the countries they write about (Inaka, Krige, Mpofu, Shakya, Sharp) or have lived there for extended periods (McNeill, Sumich, Trapido).

Rulers and Moneymakers in World History The last half-century saw a Cold War between superpowers claiming to represent state socialism and the free market respectively. Since 1945 the world has seen three decades of social democracy marked by state management of the leading capitalist economies, followed after the watershed of the 1970s by another three decades of neoliberal globalization, which culminated in today’s general economic crisis. It is important to grasp where this relationship between government and business came from and how it is unfolding now. The case studies presented here illustrate the historical process from the perspective of ordinary people’s lives in places which do not normally figure prominently in global discourse. It is relatively easy for anthropologists to show that diverse realities undermine prevalent ideas, but more difficult to build a vision of the world from such particulars. Social science originates in the liberal attempt to carve out a space for civil society separate from that of the sovereign. Society is here conceived

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of as a formal order governed by laws. At the same time we all know that the real world is more confused than this, and we need to somehow keep both ideas in our heads at once. The idea of an informal economy (Hart 1973, 2006) came out of an ethnographic perception that there is more to the economy than the prevailing emphasis on its regulation by the state: fieldwork revealed economic activities that were largely invisible to bureaucracy, but formal and informal dimensions of the economy were integrated in reality. In recent decades, an anti-liberal tendency has criticized the bourgeois separation of subject and object, individual and society, personal and impersonal; but collapsing the difference between them is just as dangerous. The basic issue is the claim that public and private interests are normatively and even legally separated in capitalist societies. This was the objective of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, having abandoned hope of making an alliance with the workers against the landlords, the capitalists forged a new alliance with their erstwhile enemies, the military aristocracy, to form governments capable of containing the social energies released by industrialization. The resulting synthesis – which we call ‘national capitalism’ – soon provided a platform for the emergence of large business corporations as the engine of economic development. The neoliberal phase of world economy – which began in the late 1970s and is still flourishing despite or because of the financial meltdown (Mirowski 2013) – hinged on withdrawing political controls from markets and money and on the extension of commercial principles into public and domestic life. The result has been the wholesale privatization of public assets in the name of a ‘free market’, which disguises the abuse of political power to accumulate personal wealth. In the meantime, twothirds of the one hundred largest economic entities on the planet are corporations, not countries, and the drive for their self-government, when they are not content with buying governments, continues apace. Is this what is ‘new’ about neoliberalism? Not really, if we mean the collapse of the boundary separating public and private interests. A strong case can be made that private capital and political power have been in bed together for half a millennium at least. The public/private divide has been illusory when it comes to the management of money since the invention of central banking over three centuries ago. The Bank of England, Banque de France and US Federal Reserve all appear to be part of the state apparatus when they are hybrid entities formed by the sovereign and the banks, but outside effective political control. Their public face makes much of their being subject to the laws, but in practice they serve the interests of

Introduction

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private capital. This is an old story. Politicians need money and money men need political cover. Perhaps the only thing new about today’s economy is that, whereas the privatization of public interests was covered up before, now it is made an open virtue. The idea of ‘economy’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘household management’. The concept of oikonomia arose to express the interests of one side in a long war that crystallized the basic conflict of the agrarian empires, which emerged in the late Bronze Age. The two sides would later be known, with reference to medieval Europe, as ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’, systems of property and politics based on control of the land and money respectively. A military aristocracy with manor houses in the countryside extracted rents from a servile agricultural labour force, while cities linked by seaborne trade supported their populations through commerce. In the Greek case the political slogans of the two sides were ‘aristocracy’ and ‘democracy’, rule by the best versus rule by the people (not all of the people, but a significant proportion of the male population). In most parts of the Mediterranean throughout the first millennium bc, aristocratic and democratic factions contended for power, forming alliances with like-minded parties that cross-cut geographical divisions. The result was an endless series of wars and revolutions ranging from local fights to international conflicts lasting decades. The sequence was suspended when Rome defeated Carthage and annexed the Eastern Mediterranean to its empire. By the beginning of the next millennium, military landlordism had triumphed over waterborne commerce and the ancient world was unified under Rome. It took another 1,500 years for merchants to take on landed power again and win, this time in Northwest Europe. England was the main site of that victory, but its apostate colony, the United States, soon eclipsed Britain in shaping the global capitalism we know today. When Marx and Engels pointed out in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) that the history of class struggle was between town and countryside, they had in mind this European history.

The Perspective of People from the Global South This fluctuating relationship between public power and private money is not the only feature of recent patterns of global alliance and conflict between interests conceived of as ‘state’ and ‘market’, but it does provide one common thread to the chapters assembled here. World history and much of prevailing social thought has been written from the perspective

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of North Atlantic society – Europe and North America – as a way of expressing and reinforcing their dominance. The nine case studies assembled in this volume are drawn from the global South – six from Southern Africa, where the Human Economy project is located, and one each from South Asia, Brazil and Atlantic Africa. The economy is human at all levels of society and our case studies illustrate a range of class positions organized in a sequence that moves, roughly speaking, from the bottom to the top. We start with the urban poor of a city in Zimbabwe, followed by a depressed rural area of South Africa. Next we consider inhabitants of that country’s black townships, working-class young men with aspirations for upward mobility, and their white counterparts who have experienced downward mobility since the end of apartheid. Many members of the dominant black population of Salvador in Brazil have moved into the middle classes in recent decades, while the small island society of Cape Verde has prospered from a mixture of migration, tourism and world music without generating strong class divisions so far. Migration is a prominent feature of our last three case studies. The movement of Congolese to South Africa is here illustrated by a cross-section of classes: the poorest are in no position to leave the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but the experience of lower-class, middle-class and elite migrants differs sharply. The last include political exiles and capitalists who offer a bridge to two Indian trading communities in Mozambique and Nepal, both of whom have had to negotiate political upheavals in recent decades. Most of our chapters refer to historical developments, but in these last three, as well as the chapters on Zimbabwe’s urban poor and South Africa’s white working class, analysis of the human economy is strongly anchored in a historical narrative. Busani Mpofu is a historian who prefers to visit the archives with questions informed by previous ethnographic fieldwork. He provides insight into Zimbabwe’s tragedy by focusing on the worsening circumstances of the residents of Bulawayo, his home city and once the centre of Zimbabwe’s textile manufacturing industry. The demise of manufacturing since the 1980s has swollen the ranks of the city’s informal economy. For a time after the war of independence, the central government and urban authorities briefly endorsed the development potential of such informal economic activities as street trading. But before long they reverted to the colonial pattern of antagonism towards the uncontrolled presence of rural Africans in Southern Rhodesia’s ‘white’ towns and cities. The post-colonial government’s hostility was based first on the attempt to create an urban environment conducive to the development of indigenous enterprise though foreign investment; but this degenerated into aversion



Introduction

11

to the presence in the cities of poor masses who displayed a marked tendency to vote for the opposition to the ruling party. As Zimbabwe lurched, by the end of the 1990s, into the condition of a ‘failed state’, the ruling elite devised various stratagems to muscle into the informal economy itself, bending the interface between informal activities and the state in the interest of their own accumulation. As Mpofu observes, this just shows how desperate Zimbabwe’s ruling elite has become today. Without access to or an accommodation with a significant moneymaking elite, the ruling party has been obliged to turn to a latter-day form of ‘primitive accumulation’, scrabbling for the means of staying in power by dispossessing poor citizens of the small resources at their disposal. The next three chapters deal with the resilience of South Africans in the face of an increasingly unequal political economy, although none points to significant ways of reversing an institutional pattern of social exclusion. One focuses on the rural masses of a remote poverty-stricken region who spend their state grants on funerals; a second looks at a few young aspiring city dwellers in South Africa’s largest black township; while the third examines the downward mobility of the Afrikaner working class through one life history. Fraser McNeill shows how the rural poor live in South Africa, taking the Venda district of Limpopo Province as his case study. He describes the dramatic rise in unemployment there since the end of apartheid, and how social grants and pensions help to maintain the population’s loyalty to the ruling African National Congress. Moreover, the province’s poor are afflicted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which has spawned a local ‘death’ industry comprising undertakers and funeral insurers, tombstone makers and gravediggers. Given the paucity of wage incomes, this industry is funded largely out of pensions and social grants. McNeill shows how funeral insurance agents follow the vehicles paying out pensions from one site to the next, resulting in a substantial portion of receipts being paid out in contributions within minutes. Some locals benefit from job creation in this industry (as they do from the jobs created by AIDS education initiatives), but it is also significant enough to attract the attention of big insurance capital, which works through local agents to claw back some of the money contributed in taxes to fund social grants. It is small wonder, given their involvement in this gravity-defying circuit, that Venda’s poor explain what is happening by invoking occult notions. Poor South Africans are caught between the state’s neglect and failure to create employment and the saving grace of welfare payments. Without the latter they would join the Zimbabwean and Congolese millions who migrate to escape their misery. But the fact that they stay where they are

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or move only within South Africa does not imply that they are passive. Detlev Krige tells the story of a group of young men in Soweto, a cluster of townships as populous as each of the country’s three main cities, who attempt to take matters into their own hands in interesting ways. These men are not from Soweto’s poorest stratum, but they are far below the local elite, which has benefited from black empowerment policies allowing some of them to leave the townships for Johannesburg’s formerly white suburbs. As Krige explains, they occupy an uncomfortably intermediate position – close enough to Soweto’s growing middle class to share their ambitions and desires, but without the resources of education and property that would allow them to be upwardly mobile. In their thirties, many of them still live in their parents’ homes and struggle to find jobs that would allow them to marry and establish themselves as independent adult men. What they do have is a fair understanding of how money is made in the present South African dispensation. Whether this represents a plausible means of upward mobility is another matter. Krige relates how these men try to figure out ways of overcoming the obstacles in their path by jumping in one go from small-scale savings clubs (stokvels), which have long been a feature of social life in Soweto, to the world of high finance. Their aim is to find a way to invest the money they pool on the stock exchange, thereby making ‘our money work for us’. This reversal of the old order where one expected to work for one’s money, suggests that they have fathomed the secret of a neoliberal economy dominated by financiers who make money without any apparent effort. Many of the poor in rural Venda may still be bewildered by this occult economy, but these young men in Soweto apparently understand its principles. The real question, to which no clear answer can yet be given, is whether they have any realistic chance of fulfilling their ambition. South Africa’s white working class was strongly favoured by the apartheid regime, especially in and around the capital, Pretoria, which was and to some extent still is a bastion of Afrikaner power. Now their key industries have been dismantled and many members of this class have good reason to think they have been discarded by the state. John Sharp’s is a story of downward mobility on the part of an Afrikaner working-class man who lost his job after the end of apartheid. He used his severance pay, like many others, to launch a self-employed enterprise. His first white partner cheated him and later he hired a black worker whose family came to live with his. Their partnership echoed relations between Boer farmers and African sharecroppers earlier. This arrangement ended acrimoniously, but our protagonist was saved from making a go of it as a businessman by finding secure and well-paid wage employment as an electrician once

Introduction

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more. On this basis he formed an impromptu social club with some of his white friends, which combined drinking and karaoke with building and disbursing a small fund used to promote the welfare of all members of their racially mixed neighbourhood. This man was lucky enough to find a job and he expressed his gratitude through a form of charity. Whereas the British-dominated liberal economy oversimplified humanity for the sake of accumulation through trade, the Afrikaners devised a system that was inhuman in practice and conception, reducing people to ethnic stereotypes and labelling them as different nations conceived of as being formally equal while kept apart. Many Afrikaners were economic losers when South Africa was incorporated into the empire. This obliged some of them to interact with Africans as rounded human beings, which does not mean they necessarily liked or behaved nicely towards them. Later many took time to acclimatize to the ruling vision of imposed exclusion. Then they were economic losers again and rediscovered their humanity in this context. They drew partly on their past, but working people must look beyond ideology to survive. This segment of South Africa’s population has responded more flexibly than most to changing configurations of race and class. Brazil offers an interesting comparison with the countries of southern Africa. It is, along with South Africa, one of the most unequal societies in the world, where white landowners and industrialists still exercise considerable political power and the descendants of African slaves are disproportionately poor. But over the last two decades, unlike South Africa, Brazil has enjoyed remarkable economic growth while implementing redistributive policies on a large scale, recapitulating in its own way that combination of national capitalism and social democracy, which marked the post-war decades in Western Europe. While it seemed at first that Brazil was not seriously inconvenienced by the financial crisis, cracks have appeared recently in the edifice that Lula built. There has been a run on the national currency and widespread social protest culminated during 2013 in the largest demonstrations since the military dictatorship. The city of Salvador, where Doreen Gordon carried out her research, has recently suffered gridlock and escalating violence during a police strike. So perhaps it is too early to say that the class compromise between capital and state after the dictatorship has reduced racial and other forms of conflict in Brazil. Gordon describes the rising black middle class in Salvador, Brazil’s third-largest city. These are people who have benefited from the oil industry there and other developments in what was once one of Brazil’s poorest regions. She questions whether Brazil was ever a ‘racial democracy’ in which ‘colour’ and life trajectories were infinitely

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negotiable. Overt prejudice against black Brazilians may have been less harsh than in the South African case, but the poverty of the vast majority of Brazil’s black people speaks to a history of structural racism there. Gordon describes individual members of the black middle class, looking at their life trajectories, personal qualities and social relationships. Her account resists easy generalizations. Some are, in fact, downwardly mobile, having to make do with fewer resources than in previous generations, but they manoeuvre astutely to maintain their status by other means. Many are on an upward path where better economic prospects and higher educational attainment reinforce each other. Some of Gordon’s most interesting observations concern black middle-class attitudes towards the consumerism that is now within their grasp. While many aspire to own their own homes, motor cars and domestic appliances, several were quite critical of the ‘empty’ consumerism they associate with the established (largely white) middle class. Moreover, many were determined to maintain their ties with the predominantly black, working-class neighbourhoods of their origin, either by staying there despite being wealthier or by keeping up ties – such as church membership – with the people they left behind. This contradicts the claim found in earlier literature that upwardly mobile black Brazilians renegotiate their race and are therefore obliged to dilute ties with their poorer counterparts. Such developments reflect a widespread social movement generating a sense of pride among black Brazilians. The fact that the government has recently endorsed this movement has fostered a climate propitious to its growth. Most of the case studies considered here offer some variant of the theme of state and market refracted through the experience of different classes – politicians and capitalists, the rural and urban poor, the middle classes of several colours. Our next case is Juliana Braz Dias’s evocative study of Cape Verde’s music industry. This is a group of former Portuguese islands stuck in the Atlantic Ocean with a miniscule population. Despite their small size and isolation, Cape Verdeans are visible as migrants to Europe and parts of the United States. Their cultural vitality is manifested in various ways, most recently by the success of the national football team. They are a significant tourist destination. But their most striking achievement has been to make an impact on the world music scene. The recent rise of Mauritius as a vigorous island economy (Mbeki 2009) points to the possibility of engaging positively with the world economy from a small population base. In the case of Cape Verde, the government’s ambitions seem to be rather limited and foreign capital is largely offshore. This has allowed some Cape Verdeans, following in the footsteps of the celebrated singer Cesária Évora, to make a direct bridge between



Introduction

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their own local society and the world market for cultural commodities. In this sense, Braz Dias’s ethnography suggests one possible route out of economic backwardness, unmediated in this case by the state or capital on any major scale. It is salutary to consider how people from a small cluster of Atlantic islands have inserted themselves creatively into global markets as migrants and makers of music, without losing their sense of identity or being exposed to the savage contradictions documented in other chapters here. The economic crisis of our times has led to much criticism of both states and markets, even to rejection of their contemporary forms. The crisis that record labels have been facing since the digital revolution in communications is deeply intertwined with countless small-scale musical performances around the world, challenging dichotomous understandings of the relation between recorded and live music, global and local processes. Braz Dias approaches this theme through analysis of two kinds of events – Cape Verdean nights and tokatinas – showing how musical activities there are related to both the world market and internal national issues. Our case studies by no means demonstrate how the poor of the global South can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But in some of the cases presented here – Nepal, Mozambique, some segments of South African society, Brazil, Cape Verde – economic success, however limited, has been shown to rest on integrating levels of social, cultural and economic life that are discounted in mainstream analysis. In that sense, our collection points towards a more human economy by identifying its operations in contemporary social life beyond the reach of most media and academic analysis. Citizens of the DRC have a long history of migration to European cities such as Paris, London and Brussels, but the tempo of their migration to South Africa has picked up considerably in the past decade and a half. Saint-José Inaka and Joseph Trapido take the unusual step of analyzing these streams through the class composition of migration to Gauteng (the province containing Johannesburg and South Africa’s capital, Pretoria). They stress that these are not from the poorest sections of Congolese society, but are poor members of the next stratum above this who have the minimal resources needed to make the trip, but lack the formal means of negotiating work and bureaucracy in South Africa, so that they are limited to menial and irregular employment. The Congo has long produced large numbers of professionals – in this case mainly engineers and doctors – who are able find formal employment, but not without entering the informal economy in their own way. Finally the authors address members of the DRC political elite in exile whose ill-gotten gains

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may acquire a measure of formal legitimacy through residence in South Africa. They use the country as a refuge when their faction has fallen from favour and rely on its sophisticated financial industry to launder the proceeds of primitive accumulation at home. South African xenophobia – encouraged from the top, but manifested concretely in the townships – focuses hostility on poor Congolese migrants who are supposed to steal jobs from citizens. Inaka and Trapido remain agnostic concerning the facts of this case, but Congolese mining engineers and doctors certainly help to overcome South Africa’s skills shortage. Moreover, there is rarely any criticism of the DRC political elite’s presence, despite their own manipulations of the boundary between legal and illegal economic practices. The presence of large numbers of migrants from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the DRC and other African states is a source of popular resentment in South Africa, but there is a strong official dimension to this xenophobia. An intransigent bureaucracy creates many problems for migrants seeking refugee status or trying to renew their permission to be in South Africa, thereby spawning a lively industry forging documents for Congolese residents of Johannesburg. Mozambique is a small country whose global image has been more prominent than its achievements. It was in the forefront of socialist revolution not long ago, endured a terrible civil war and now has adjusted to the constraints of neoliberalism by becoming one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Jason Sumich’s chapter traces the political fortunes of a Mozambican Indian trading community through the country’s recent history of revolution, war and capitalist development. Some members of this group have amassed considerable wealth in the period since the country abandoned its socialist experiment in the early 1990s. The ruling Frelimo party’s exchange of a command economy for the virtues of the free market might lead us to expect that these Indian businessmen would have become the acceptable face of neoliberalism in the new Mozambique. But this hardly describes the situation they face. As a small minority, the Indians were accorded significant privileges by the Portuguese colonial authorities, but were otherwise marginal to the main conflict between the colonists and the black African majority. Some of them occupied an important niche as traders, but their marginality limited their wealth and influence. During Frelimo’s experiment with socialism, all Mozambique’s inhabitants were expected to support the plan to centralize the economy under party control with the aim of transforming a still largely agricultural country into a developed, industrial economy within one generation. Many Indian traders found their commercial activities restricted and some were punished for profiteering, but

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Frelimo’s commitment to non-racialism guaranteed full membership of the new nation to any who supported the government’s project. In the post-socialist period, the Indian merchants have been given a freer hand. Mozambique’s rulers now expect to make money from international trade and are willing to extend protection to the Indian minority with this end in mind, not least because of their links to India, Portugal, the Gulf and southern Africa, which the African majority lacks. The government still does not control the whole country, and Indian merchants do not have the strong external backing enjoyed by Nepal’s Marwaris. Mozambican Indians are becoming the butt of African resentment. Their alliance with the ruling elite is thus decidedly uncomfortable. The government in turn can deflect blame for their own failures onto a group of ‘outsiders’. The Indian minority’s new freedom to accumulate has been won at the expense of their security as citizens. Despite now being richer, many Indians are replacing loyalty to the Mozambican state with adherence to a global Islamic fellowship. Mainstream economic ideas do not describe adequately the people whose business it is to make money, never mind the rest of us. Even less do they allow us to investigate the links between rulers and money that lie at the heart of the world’s economic crisis today. The Marwaris in Nepal, who form the principal focus of Mallika Shakya’s case study, are part of the dominant trading diaspora in South Asia. Their entrepreneurial success comes from their business acumen, collective social cohesion and ability to form political alliances with local rulers. Nepal has undergone several major upheavals since the Marwaris were invited there by its feudal rulers in the 1850s. These included a transition to modernizing constitutional monarchy in the 1950s, a Maoist insurgency since the 1990s, a disastrous flirtation with economic liberalism around the millennium, and recently a move to install democratic socialism fuelled by another uprising by the people of Nepal’s border with India, where Shakya has carried out her main research. The Marwaris, having successfully negotiated earlier political transitions, now find themselves confronting identity and class politics that brand them as privileged outsiders. But their economic expertise is still at a premium and their ability to speak with a single voice matters as much as their financial clout in helping them to ride the storm. Shakya offers a long-term account of Nepal’s history in support of her claim that there are powerful continuities at work in this ‘revolution’. The Marwaris take the pragmatic view that all rulers need money and are therefore predisposed to seek accommodation with those who have it, just as the owners of money need the protection of existing powers.

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These last two examples raise a wider issue that is particularly relevant to countries of the global South, but by no means exclusively to them. In Nepal and Mozambique, economic behaviour is embedded in political relationships, for the simple reason that those who make wealth and those who rule these states belong to different categories of the population. Feudal landownership sustained Nepal’s Himalayan isolation for centuries, but it was not enough for the modern nation building to which its rulers aspired from the 1950s. They needed alliances with ‘outsiders’ such as the Marwaris, who successfully displaced the small mercantile elite that already supplied the Nepali kings while they dominated political groups opposed to the monarchy. The Marwaris in Nepal could draw on their proximity to India, where more powerful Marwari organizations controlled trade, giving rise to a multi-national business network that now extends to many parts of the world, including Africa. The experience of the Mozambican Indians reminds us that these alliances between rulers and moneymakers in the global South are highly variable, as well as unstable.

Chapter 1

░ After the Big Clean-Up Street Vendors, the Informal Economy and Employment Policy in Zimbabwe BUSANI MPOFU

This chapter is an attempt by a social historian to contribute to new understandings of the economy that embrace holistic conceptions of everyone’s needs and interests. Employing a human economy perspective and focusing on the politics of street trading in a post-colonial African city, Bulawayo, I highlight how people insert themselves practically into their daily economic lives in ways that are invisible to, marginalized and repressed by the dominant, state-driven formal economic institutions and ideologies. Understanding the history of the development of the informal economy in Zimbabwe is thus crucial for an inclusive development policy that considers the circumstances of the participants in this sector. While I mostly highlight bureaucratic obstacles imposed on the livelihoods of the majority of the urban poor, the inexorable expansion of this informal trading also reveals people’s continuing engagement with unequal society in ways not wanted by the state. In 2005, the well-publicized ‘clean-up’ Operation Murambatsvina (OM) in Zimbabwe demolished business premises and vending sites, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without a source of livelihood (Tibaijuka 2005: 7). The operation was meant, among other things, to remove vendors from the streets of the country’s urban centres, ostensibly as part of an urban renewal campaign. Yet in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, despite the brutality of the clean-up operation, street vending is now more widespread than ever. The informal economy is a permanent feature of the country’s socio-economic landscape. Here I critique the state’s continuing hostility towards it. Based on interviews, Council minutes and newspapers,1 I argue that it has become the main source of any hope for improvement in living standards for millions of people, particularly in the cities, and that development policy must connect with the

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reality of people’s livelihoods. The chapter questions whether the idea of an informal economy is adequate to describe the depths to which Zimbabwe’s economy has been reduced by the ruling elites.2 The Zimbabwean state has never been able to create enough formal jobs nor has it been able to develop a comprehensive strategy to deal with the unemployment situation. The major decline of the urban economies that began with structural adjustment policies (SAPs) in the 1990s worsened with the onset of the current economic crisis in 1997 and accelerated with economic collapse after 2000, forcing many into the informal sector, especially trading, for survival (Potts 2006: 287–288). Seen in this historical perspective, Zimbabwe’s crisis has a rather different shape from the global situation in which 2007 to 2008 marked the bust of a decades-long credit boom. I focus here on the politics of street vending in Bulawayo because, owing to low barriers of entry and set-up costs,3 as elsewhere, it has become a core component of the informal economy. It is also the most visible example of informality in the city. Although the government attempts to control the environment for vendors’ operations, it has no consistent policy for how to improve the lives of the thousands of people involved (Hansen and Maa 2004: 27). African development is a site of class struggle between bureaucracy, both national and international, and the people, however they might be labelled. Human lives have been overridden by planning recipes that cannot accommodate people’s real interests and practices (Hart and Padayachee 2010: 56). There is a contradiction between the drive to modernize African cities and activities like street trading that do not live up to the bureaucracy’s ideas of modernity (Kamunyori 2007: 11). Street trading is ‘a manifestation of both poverty and underdevelopment, so that its disappearance is viewed as progress’ (Bromley 2000: 12). But rapid urbanization in Africa has failed to generate regular employment for the flood of migrants. So governments and the informal economy still coexist in parallel universes. Nothing has changed since the International Labour Organization (ILO) characterized the informal sector decades ago as being ignored, ‘rarely supported, often regulated and sometimes actively discouraged’ (Palmer 2004: 18). The idea of an informal economy originated from Keith Hart’s (1973) analysis of informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana. The ILO Kenya report launched the concept of an ‘informal sector’ and defined it as a labour market of last resort for those who could not obtain jobs in the modern formal sector (Ndlovu 1989: 9). In the 1970s, however, most governments believed that only the state could lead an economy towards development and growth (Hann and Hart 2011: 115). Newly independent African governments did not approach urban growth

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as a development issue but rather as a problem to be contained (Hansen and Vaa 2004: 14). But by now it is clear that the state cannot provide for all citizens and the hope that Africa’s new leaders could generate modern economies, with the state expected to deliver economic development to its peoples, has faded. So what would be an appropriate urban employment strategy for an economy like Zimbabwe’s where informal employment has become the rule rather than the exception (Heintz 2010: 209)? Why should national and local authorities continue to take a dim view of street vending and other forms of informality, when the formal economy fails to provide for the majority of city dwellers (Freund 1988: 75)? For example, in 2008, the ILO, using enterprise- and jobs-based concepts of informality, concluded that four out of every five jobs in Zimbabwe were informal (Ministry of Labour and Social Services [MLSS], and Ministry of Youth Development, Indigenisation and Empowerment [MoYDIE] and ILO – Southern African Regional Office [SRO] 2009: 14). ‘Operation clean-up’ in 2005 revealed the urgency of finding answers to these questions, when national government officials, including the president, vice president and the police officer commanding Harare Province claimed that all Zimbabweans have a rural home, which they could return to if expelled from the cities (Mpofu 2011a: 180). This often-tacit assumption of ruling elites undermines the right of urban Zimbabweans to live in the city. Since independence, the state has been determined to send people ‘to the land’, even when in reality many who work in the city have nowhere to live in rural areas (Dorman 2007: 19–20). This view of state authorities that Africans belong to a home elsewhere is a century old: ‘For the African communities … the idea of belonging, of where counted as home, was linked not to consumer items and department stores, but to cosmology, ancestry and control over land. One could live in the town, but one did not “come from” town. People “came from” their lineages; lineages were linked to ancestors; and however flexibly, ancestors were linked to land’ (Jeater 2000: 37). There are now generations of city dwellers born and bred in urban areas, some with very little or no rural connection (Jeater 2000: 37; Ranger 2008: 78). Worse still, overcrowding and environmental degradation in communal areas has often made the land less productive (Potts and Mutambirwa 1990: 679). This misguided view about ‘land’ was underwritten by a common-sense view that the urban workforce consisted of migrants who were then blamed for urban problems and for the size of the unwanted informal sector. ‘This characterization … is old and tired but it will not lie down’ (Potts 2007: 17). Violent confrontations between urban authorities and street vendors over the use of public space for commerce have been commonplace in

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African cities after independence. Vendors have often been removed from the streets on the pretext that they are untidy, disruptive of licensed businesses and criminal (Hansen and Vaa 2004: 13). The ‘criminality’ of the informal sector has often been used to demonize it and justify draconian interventions. By definition, many informal activities are illegal since they are unlicensed and lie outside public regulations (Potts 2007: 6). To claim that the entire informal sector is criminal is another matter, however. The people themselves know how to distinguish between criminality and informality (Potts 2007). The legal standing of work in African cities is thus complicated and must be addressed systematically (Hansen and Vaa 2004: 16). There is an urgent and critical ‘need [for the state] to decolonize [its] imagination about city-ness … if it is to sustain [its] relevance to the key urban challenges of the twenty-first century’ (Robinson 2002: 546; see also Demissie 2011: 225). It is time to stop treating the informal sector as an undesirable consequence of development; rather, it should be seen as an integral and valuable part of the urban economy (Maldonado Sethuraman 1992). This is particularly true of Zimbabwe, where the need to address unemployment and economic deprivation is urgent. The Zimbabwean state’s reliance on an almost universal policy of formal jobs without creating them is scandalous. Governments should recognize efforts made by the poor to develop, protect and recreate themselves without state assistance instead of leaving their human economy obscure, marginalized or repressed by an ideology of an impersonal society run by bureaucrats, capitalists and scientific experts. In what follows, I highlight the contradictory ideas of the informal economy that have dominated government policy in Zimbabwe since independence, emphasizing continuities between colonial and post-colonial regimes. I provide a history of informality in Bulawayo in the twentieth century, focusing on the politics of street vending there. I show how structural adjustment destroyed the formal economy in the 1990s with inevitable consequences. I then discuss how the further collapse of the formal economy in the last decade led to uncontrolled expansion of its informal counterpart and give other reasons for the increasing informality of the economy. These include how the commanding heights of the informal economy have been appropriated by ruling elites and their hangers on, while they claim to ‘provide basic commodities to the poor at affordable prices’. This process has been linked to dubious indigenization and empowerment laws that do not benefit the majority of the population. I end by briefly assessing the 2009 Zimbabwe National Employment Policy Framework (ZiNEPF), considering especially its likely impact on the rift

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between the state and the mainly informal economy in which the majority of citizens live.

The Informal Economy in Zimbabwe: An Overview There is more continuity between colonial and post-colonial government policies in Zimbabwe than the latter would like to acknowledge. Here I provide an outline of general policy before recounting the history of informal activities in Bulawayo, my main case study. The maintenance of repressive, indeed racist, influx-control measures in urban areas throughout the colonial period failed to prevent the expansion of informal trading. But they did generally prevent the growth of large shantytowns or informal housing and other informal activities (Ndlovu 1989: 13). This was achieved through the Town and Country Planning Act (1946), Vagrancy Act (1960), Urban Councils Act and the Vendors and Hawkers By-laws (1973), among other pieces of legislation that effectively made the informal sector a hidden feature of the economy (Dhemba 1999: 12). The informal economy exploded after independence in 1980 following the removal of influx controls. As a result, the informal sector in postcolonial Zimbabwe emerged by default rather than design. The new government in 1980 emphasized the informal sector as an important source of income for poor people, the unemployed and the destitute (Ndlovu 1989: 17–19). Very little was done to support the sector and harassment by police continued along with coercive legislative measures like restrictive trade licensing, artificial health and safety regulations (Ndlovu 1989: 17–19). The creation of a Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises by the state after independence recognized the importance of self-employment in a stagnant or declining formal economy. Rather than promoting the interests of the majority of informal traders, however, its main beneficiaries are said to be a few individuals well connected to the ruling class.4 Since the 1980s, the government has carried out various campaigns, referred to as ‘clean-up’, ‘crackdown’ and/or ‘blitz’ operations, ostensibly aimed at ridding city streets of prostitutes, squatters, hawkers, beggars and petty thieves (Jackson 1999: 146). The Zimbabwean economy today still reflects the dual or enclave economy inherited from colonialism, with employment creation being mainly focused on the formal sector, which in 1980 only accounted for 20 per cent of the labour force (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 3). Strategies to deal with unemployment and underemployment in Zimbabwe have

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been fragmented, isolated, supply driven, self-duplicating and without adequate funding (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 2). In 2004, the share of formal-sector employment had declined to around 13 per cent of the labour force or roughly 10 per cent of the population. Informality has accelerated (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 3). Whenever the prospects for employment creation in the formal sector seemed to be good, the government’s hostility towards the informal sector was expressed as stiff and oppressive regulations. As the employer of last resort, the government and local authorities hoped that the informal sector would eventually disappear, but changed their mind when formal employment levels went down, urban populations increased and structural adjustment induced public and private sector retrenchment in the early 1990s (Ncube 2000: 166 and 174). The state’s capacity to create employment started to diminish before independence in the mid-1970s when global economic sanctions against the 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) of Ian Smith’s white minority government began to bite and the national liberation war for black majority government intensified. Companies that were starved of foreign currency by sanctions in the period 1966–1980 resorted to more capital-intensive strategies with limited use of the abundant labour supply available (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 34). The erratic growth of the economy in the 1980s worsened the unemployment problem. Although public sector employment was relatively high, it was not sustainable (Ncube 2000: 161). Under such circumstances, an expansion of informal employment was inevitable. Not surprisingly, rising unemployment and dwindling real incomes in the 1980s led to the launch of various small-scale businesses by poor people, leading to the ‘industrialization’, ‘commercialization’ and ‘agriculturalization’ of residential areas. That is, in addition to letting and sub-letting, small-scale industries mushroomed after independence, as did unauthorized tuck shops, street corner vendors, roving vendors and hawkers (Kamete 1999: 142–143). Zimbabwe’s informal economy was relatively small in 1980, accounting for less than 10 per cent of the total labour force, mainly because of various colonial influx-control laws and by-laws and of restrictions on the informal sector itself. But it grew steadily after independence due to deregulation of migration and the stagnation and decline of the national economy (Tibaijuka 2005: 13–14, 17). Zimbabwe adopted the World Bank– and IMF-sponsored Structural Adjustment Programme in 1991 under a domestic policy known as Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP). SAPs aimed to reduce what became known as ‘urban bias’ through cutting out anything that ‘smacked of state subsidy, effectively making

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town life more difficult than in the countryside according to many criteria’ (Freund 2007: 156). The ‘urban bias’ idea held that the rural/urban income gap was too large, and that this was caused by inefficiencies in resource allocation. This was linked to a labour aristocracy thesis that the urban sector in sub-Saharan Africa was characterized by high wages and many privileges, for example, subsidized food and housing; but the living standards of the urban poor were reduced through falling per capita urban incomes, public-sector retrenchment and deteriorating urban infrastructure (Potts 1995: 245–247). The launch of the Third Chimurenga5 in 2000 precipitated the collapse of the formal economy in Zimbabwe. Since then, formal and self-employed workers put in extra hours, sometimes without pay, to save their jobs. Employers and employees agreed to reduce the number of working hours (with salaries also reduced accordingly) or employees worked longer hours without overtime pay or without pay at all as strategies for maintaining production and avoiding the closure of firms (Mbiba and Ndubiwa 2008: 26). About 95 per cent of workers preferred to work for two more extra hours without overtime pay to save their jobs. After work, most workers headed back to their homes where they engaged in informal economic activities for survival (see Mbiba and Ndubiwa 2008: 26). Free-market economics in the guise of SAPs ripped African cities apart, resulting in what Paul Zeleza (1999: 46, 54–55) called ‘a demonization of African cities,’ with large-scale urban unemployment the consequence. The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists who have portrayed the economy as an impersonal machine, remote from the everyday experience of most people and with devastating results (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010b: 4–5). In spite of the contraction of the formal economy in Zimbabwe under SAPs, the state still regarded informality as a threat to private-sector development. Increasing unemployment rates since the early years of ESAP reduced the government’s revenue base. This only made it more determined to widen its revenue base by taxing the informal economy. Since 1998, the government has increasingly moaned about the growth of informal unregistered businesses and the resulting loss in tax revenues (Shinder 1998).6 This complaint did not acknowledge that the country’s informal economy was already marked by low incomes, harsh working conditions, poor safety and security especially in vending and other street types jobs, in a word by poverty (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 14–15). The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), however, fiercely resisted taxation because the collapse of formal manufacturing retrenched thousands of workers whose only safety net lay in informal employment.

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The ZCTU also opposed taxation because the government had not done much to support the informal sector. Government taxation plans were therefore bound to ‘strangle the sector to death’ (The Standard, 9 January 2005). The government’s claim that any business operating outside state regulation is illegal was strongly challenged. One outcome of ESAP was the tension between the need for deregulation to promote small-scale and informal-sector urban employment and the maintenance of health, building and environmental standards, as required by national and local legislation (Pasteur 1994: 19). Whereas national government partly relaxed its laws to allow some informal business activity because of severe economic hardship (Mlambo 2008: 10), local authorities had no capacity to regulate the mushrooming informal economy. Jotham Dhemba (1999: 17) already argued that the informal sector was ‘there to stay’ in Zimbabwe because of ‘mass urban poverty’. This situation became worse after the millennium. The government labelled informal economic activities immoral and criminal and then unleashed the brutal ‘clean-up’ operation that left hundreds of thousands of the poor without a source of livelihood (Tibaijuka 2005). Government regulators talked about the crackdown on vendors as an urban renewal campaign, stating that the real purpose of the ‘clean-up’ operation was not to destroy and cause pain, but to deal with crime and squalor, to fight poverty (not the poor) by rebuilding and reorganizing urban settlements and encouraging micro, small and medium enterprises as a way of bringing dignity, order and prosperity to all stakeholders and the nation at large (Government of Zimbabwe 2005: 20).7 Some have shown, however, that these stated purposes were not achieved (Mpofu 2011a). Certainly, this urban (mis)management style undermines attempts to improve employment opportunities for the poor and thereby reduce poverty. A viable urban regulatory framework that improves security of access to public assets among the informally self-employed is needed urgently (Heintz 2010: 209). Because of government interventions like the ‘clean-up’ operation in Zimbabwe, Ferguson once argued that ‘nowhere is the tension between pragmatically “informal” economic life and putatively “formal” state structures more evident than in the domain of poverty interventions, which typically aim to bring state institutional power to bear precisely on those who are most excluded from the “formal sector”’ (2007: 1). The even harsher macro-economic environment of the last decade has led to an explosion of the informal economy. As a result, those remaining in the cities must work, ‘if the formal sector cannot provide, self-employment is the answer, and if city by-laws and government policy and

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development agencies deem this “informal” and “illegal”, so be it’ (Potts 2007: 9).

The Politics of Informality: Bulawayo in the Twentieth Century Bulawayo was formally established as a white settler town on 1 June 1894 (Kaarsholm 1999: 230) and informality existed there from the beginning of the colonial period (Pasteur 1994: 11). In the Old Location (Makokoba Township) in 1895, for example, some residents survived through illicit beer brewing (shebeens) and lived in informal housing (Ashton 1994: 54). Since then, the government and the Council pursued policies aimed at keeping out a floating population of African loafers and self-employed persons, and meant to restrict the population in the city to those in formal employment (Kaarsholm 1999: 229). In the 1940s, hawkers were found throughout Bulawayo trading illegally and continually on the move (Wild 1992: 37). In July 1957, a survey of self-employed Africans concluded that there were fifty-four women informal traders who sold baby clothes, fruit and vegetables, groundnuts, newspapers, needlework and wood (Ndlovu 1989). More than 700 African men informal traders operated as basket makers, barbers, builders, carpenters, curio sellers, cycle repairers, fruit and vegetable hawkers, furniture polishers, hedge cutters, mattress makers, cleaners, old clothing hawkers, painters, photographers, shoe polishers, tailors, tinsmiths, upholsters, well sinkers, watch repairers, wood sellers and in many other activities. Many of these traders were operating illegally (Ndlovu 1989). In the late 1950s, when the colonial authorities increasingly depicted towns as being besieged by vice and criminality, the police waged constant battles against unemployed Africans. Illegal traders, including informal vendors and ‘loose women’, became serious targets. Police also rounded up vagrants or tsotsis (criminals) and there were ‘clean-ups’ of thieves (West 2002). The 1960 Vagrancy Act also affected those whose livelihoods depended on the informal economy in Bulawayo (West 2002: 11). In the 1970s, growing numbers of unauthorized vendors operated in Bulawayo townships, mainly children who sold vegetables and fruit while moving from house to house. In 1971, youths in the city were said to ‘haunt the streets’ mainly because of joblessness. Some resorted to pilfering, pickpocketing, gambling, vegetable hawking and other illegal activities as ways of raising income (Sunday News, 5 January 1975). By late 1973, there were about 250 women vendors in township beer gardens,

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200 women market stall holders, 1,000 welfare garden allotment holders (mostly women) and a floating number of clandestine women vendors. A large number of women were also thought to be ‘shebeening’ as a sideline in the townships or as a main means of livelihood (Ndubiwa 1974: 24; Davies 1978: 4). In 1974, Makokoba market was the largest in Bulawayo with 149 registered stalls. Vegetables, cooked eggs and meat, fruits, second-hand clothes, herbs, snuff and edible caterpillars were some of the goods on sale. Twothirds of the Makokoba stalls were run by women, mostly widows, deserted wives and divorcees, for many of whom the market provided their only means of livelihood (Ndubiwa 1974: 24). In 1979, informal economic activities had grown out of control and Rob Davies warned of ‘illegal or private tax operators, vegetable hawkers, curio markets, tailors, prostitutes, shebeen queens … people providing services, all of whom are ignored in the official definition of economic activities’ (Ndlovu 1989: 10). In the 1980s, running battles intensified between the municipal police and illegal hawkers in Bulawayo townships, as many more families and individuals resorted to unauthorized hawking, vending and light industrial activities in their backyards and at shopping centres (Director of Housing and Community Services [DHCS] June 1984: 4; June 1985: 5, 10). In the 1987–1988 financial year alone, over 4,000 illegal hawkers were arrested in the city. Of them, 1,400 were charged by the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) and almost 3,000 had their wares confiscated (DHCS 1988: 3). In June 1989, many illegal vendors were reported operating in the Lobengula housing area. This was despite two vendors’ markets being available in the area (DHCS June 1989: 9). The problem with a number of markets in the city was that they were located in isolated areas patronized by very few customers. According to Ndlovu, a vendor: Take for example the vegetable market at Corner Third Avenue and Lobengula Street, it’s on the outskirts of the city and infested with street thieves. … People who pass by the market are the residents of Makokoba, Mzilikazi and Barbourfields Townships. Most of them usually do not buy our commodities because they can find cheaper ones in their townships, so we are forced to abandon our stalls and go to trade illegally in areas where thousands of potential customers pass by each day. That is dangerous as we would be risking being raided by the municipal police and having our wares confiscated, losing money and sometimes failing to have enough to continue with the business because of losses. We try to take our goods nearer to many customers, but in the process risk ‘donating’ them to the police. (Interview: 5 April 2008)

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Officially designated informal trading areas were not popular because of the attendant financial and commercial drawbacks, including the reduced clientele due to greater distance, the payment of rents and costs incurred through strict adherence to health, safety and environmental sanitation by-laws (Kamete 1999: 141). The Council opposed illegal informal activities in the CBD, townships and backyards in residential areas, arguing that this destroyed amenities, lowered property values and disturbed the peace normally associated with residential areas (see Ndlovu 1989: 24–25). This was worsened by the collapse of formal industries in the 1990s. In Bulawayo, the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme led to much retrenchment through the closing of many factories and other businesses (Masiye Pambili, May 1994: 19). Liberalization opened up the national economy by removing import duties, swamping the domestic textile industry with a flood of imported second-hand clothes. Although cheap enough to be afforded by poor people, second-hand clothes were considered by many to be a retrogressive aspect of trade liberalization (Sachikonye 1999: 41–42). Five of Zimbabwe’s eight largest textile manufacturers, all based in Bulawayo, collapsed leading to massive retrenchment of jobs. In 1995, for example, Merlin, which produced towels marketed throughout the Southern African region, retrenched one thousand workers. The Bulawayo Clothing Factory and National Blankets Limited laid off several hundreds. Contextiles closed down altogether. In October 1996, the big G and D Shoes factory was placed under judicial management. Several other textile factories, including Merlin, Zeco and Security Mills, were placed under provisional liquidation and some were de-listed on the stock exchange. An estimated ten thousand textile- and clothing-industry workers in Bulawayo lost their jobs due to business failure and retrenchment in the 1990s (Zaaijer 1998: 23). Close to twenty thousand jobs were lost in the city between 1990 and 2002 (see Mbiba and Ndubiwa 2008: 12; Hansen 2000). The Bulawayo Council, however, did not establish more vending sites to accommodate ballooning informal trade, leaving the municipal police unable to contain illegal trading (DHCS June 1993: 4). In 1996, 40 per cent of the city’s one million residents were regarded as unemployed and surviving through informal activities (Chronicle, 18 July 1996). In 1998, at least 40 per cent of the city’s economically active population was informal (Zaaijer 1998: 26). In 1998, it was estimated that of some 320,000 students sitting annually for ordinary level exams in Zimbabwe, only about 10,000 obtained formal jobs afterwards, while 20,000 progressed to further ex-

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ams and 270,000 joined the unemployed (Mutiwanyuka 2006: 1). In Bulawayo during 1999 to 2000, over 40,000 people were regarded as formally unemployed, more than 25 per cent of this category countrywide (Mbiba and Ndubiwa 2008: 21).

The Expansion of Bulawayo’s Informal Economy after 2000 One of my informants, Zulu, quit his industrial job in 2001 because he thought he was working for nothing: ‘My wages only lasted a few days into the month and I would spend time after working hours and weekends trying to make more money for survival’ (interview: 5 December 2008). After 2000, Bulawayo witnessed a new upsurge in illegal vending activities. While this was not new, the degree of people’s dependence on this sector for daily living and its dominance as a way of life was certainly new in Zimbabwe. This dependence was essential for survival (Potts 2006: 288). Townships became a ‘sea’ of poverty, made up largely of illegal vendors, with a few ‘islands’ of prosperity. In the suburbs, clusters of illegal vendors could be seen along the roads and in shopping areas. Ncube, a gardener, noted that vendors in the suburbs also doubled as domestics: ‘Their employers encouraged them to resort to vending to supplement their income because they could not afford to pay them high wages’ (interview: 4 January 2009). The Bulawayo Council complained of illegal vending in all areas of the city. Vendors were rightly accused of impeding pedestrian and vehicular movement while they sold goods of all sorts, including vegetables, grocery items, motor spares and second-hand clothes (DHCS 2000: 2, 5; 2003: 17, 21–22; 2004: 17). In all townships, unauthorized vending intensified. Tuck shops, kiosks and barbershops sprouted up everywhere, causing health concerns (see DHCS 2001: 21, 36; 2002: 19, 21, 23, 25, 27; 2003: 17, 21–22, 29; 2004: 17). Illegal vendors set up stalls in front of shopping centres and along major roads. Registered vendors cried foul and many were tempted to abandon their vending bays and join the illegal traders at undesignated points, since illegal traders operated successfully without licences. In Nkulumane Township, for example, registered traders blamed the Council for the multitudes of unregistered vendors who set themselves up on strategic sites along major roads, on store verandas, pavements of existing shops and entrances of beer gardens, which affected sales for established retailers. Some of the latter refused to pay rates and levies to the Council, citing low or no profits and blaming the Council’s failure to control illegal traders as the reason, pressurizing it to

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clamp down on illegal traders (DHCS 2001: 21, 36; 2002: 19, 21, 23, 25, 27; 2003: 17, 21–22, 29; 2004: 17). Illegal vending activities overstretched the municipal police force. The housing department bemoaned that it had had the ‘unfortunate experience’ of enforcing Council by-laws by destroying illegal trading structures (DHCS 2002: 19, 21, 23, 25, 27). While it registered and issued vending licenses and vending bays to some informal traders, demand outstripped supply and this was partly the reason why some traders resorted to illegal trading (DHCS 2003: 17, 21–22, 29; 2004: 17). The Bulawayo Council blamed the surge in illegal vending on deficiencies in the Council’s policing activities due to staff shortages. This was not true. Illegal trading activities were exacerbated by increasing unemployment and poverty. Whether or not the police were present, desperate residents would resort to informal activities for survival, more so in an economy where the formal sector was shrinking and paying low wages. According to Nkomo, a vendor at Makokoba market, ‘no amount of policing can prevent a hungry person from trying to raise money for food. The last decade has taught me that the stomach rules our daily activities, if you are hungry on a daily basis, there is very little you can do’ (interview: 12 April 2008). For Jimmy Ncube, the last few years in the city had taught him a ‘hard lesson’, that is: A person or anything that makes it possible for you to ‘visit’ a toilet regularly is your king (I mean going to the toilet to defecate). If you see yourself visiting the toilet regularly in a normal way … you have to thank that person or be committed to that activity that allows you to lead a normal life. Otherwise, I have witnessed a horrible situation myself, that is, going for days on an empty stomach, and believe me, I could not fall asleep every night when my stomach was empty. … Vending has been our ‘King’, I mean the sole provider for the majority of people in townships … who can stop this? (Interview: 12 April 2008)

In 2004, unemployment in the country stood at 80 per cent. The worsening economic crisis forced more company closures and over 70 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line (The Standard, 28 November 2004; Tibaijuka 2005: 13–14, 17). ‘Real jobs’ and ‘real work’, professions requiring any form of specialized education and others linked to wage labour had become less rewarding in the eyes of many Zimbabweans (Jones 2010: 285–299). Working in the informal sector had become the norm and was unlikely to be viewed as unemployment. ‘Proper’ formal sector jobs were now associated with poverty (Potts 2006: 289). Almost everyone in the country was getting involved in kukiya-kiya8 when in the past people involved in such activities were looked down upon as either

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lazy or as tsotsis. Jobs that ‘real’ men were not expected to do, like selling tomatoes by the roadside, had almost become a necessity by now (Jones 2010: 285–286). In 2005, vending had become a key source of livelihood in Bulawayo. ‘Everyone has become a vendor’ was an oft-heard phrase (Bird and Prowse 2008: 17). Despite the brutality of the clean-up, street vending is now more rampant than before 2005 and the government has still failed to provide vending bays. In Bulawayo, where the central government promised to build 41,000 vending bays before August 2005, more than a year later only 120 bays had been built (Chronicle, 5 July 2005; Solidarity Peace Trust 2006: 20). In 2006, about 9,000 vetted and licensed vendors in the whole of Bulawayo operated in legal vending sites. Thousands more continued working illegally in the informal economy and were subjected to harassment from time to time.

New Political and Socio-Economic Landscapes in Zimbabwe since 2000 Landscapes have changed significantly in Zimbabwe over the last decade. The cities are in a crisis. Access to employment, shelter and services is precarious. The Third Chimurenga policies churned out new classes of the urban poor in the form of displaced victims of electoral violence and land occupations, among others. Thousands of black workers in former white commercial farms lost their jobs. Those who came from neighbouring countries found themselves jobless and without a home. They swelled the informal sector for jobs and shelter in the country’s urban areas. The current systems of governance cannot cope with the rapid challenges of urban growth and as has been often repeated, the inherited colonial legal, institutional and financial arrangements for managing urban development are inadequate (Hansen and Vaa 2004: 18). Former middle-class professionals like teachers and nurses were pauperized by the collapse of the formal economy. They joined industrial workers and the unemployed as a new class of the urban poor (Ndlovu 2008: 219). Some teachers abandoned the classroom for menial jobs while those who remained there could be found selling sweets and other small foodstuffs in their classrooms, juggling formality with informality. Because of low pay, school children laughed at their teachers and likened them to boys employed to herd cattle in rural areas (Mpofu 2011b: 16). The economic situation is bleak. Prospects for formal businesses to generate jobs are limited since the country’s narrowly based economic struc-

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ture continues to support high levels of unemployment. Real economic growth deteriorated from an average annual rate of 4.6 per cent in 1986 to 1990 to 2.8 per cent in 1991 to 1996, minus 0.7 per cent in 1997 to 1999, minus 4.5 per cent in 2000 to 2007. The year 2008 recorded the largest decline of minus 14 per cent (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 6). While the economy has stabilized since dollarization rescued the local currency in 2009, job creation remains disappointing. Economic recovery has not significantly led to job creation (Economic Commission for Africa [ECA] 2011: 10). This is largely because credit to the private sector dried up after the dollarization of the economy. While this stopped inflation ‘dead in its tracks’ and improved growth, it also increased the cost of doing business and reduced the availability of credit in the productive sector (Ncube 2011). The question remains how economic development policies can improve the welfare of millions of people operating in the informal economy. Since 2000, the majority of Zimbabweans have literally become scavengers, laying their hands on anything just to get by under the kukiya-kiya system (Jones 2010: 285–299). Eight hundred manufacturing companies have closed down since 2002, while twenty-five were struggling and eight faced closure in 2004 (The Standard, 28 November 2004; Tibaijuka 2005: 17). In June 2005, about three to four million Zimbabweans supporting another five million people earned their living through informal sector employment, while the formal sector employed only about 1.3 million people, little more than a tenth of the country’s population (Tibaijuka 2005: 13–14, 17). In Bulawayo’s industrial areas empty factories are now a common sight. Firms continue to downsize, close or relocate to other urban areas. Some companies continue to operate at less than half their capacity with most businesses still suffering from undercapitalization. Figures from the Ministry of Planning indicate that in 2010, eighty-seven companies involved in the clothing, auto and construction sectors closed down in the city (New Zimbabwe, 29 May 2011). The 2008 manufacturing sector survey of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) established that the country’s use of industrial capacity declined sharply from 35.8 per cent in 2005 to 18.9 per cent in 2007 and this worsened in 2008 (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 6). The economic crisis after 2000 was accompanied by hyperinflation that in 2008 had reached an official level of 230 million per cent and was depicted by Robinson as notorious for concentrating incomes in the hands of the rich while impoverishing the poor, often making already highly unequal societies even more

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Busani Mpofu divided. In Zimbabwe’s case, this undesirable process has been magnified through being accompanied by the high levels of patronage. Key resources in a highly distorted environment (such as cheap credit and foreign currency at the official rate) have been allocated to selected individuals and groups, enabling them to amass enormous levels of wealth in a very short space of time. Those with political clout have borrowed heavily from the banks and then declined to pay, waiting for inflation to remove the burden of the original debt and claiming the ‘in duplum’ rule to evade paying interest. The small depositors bear the cost, in effect subsidizing the rich. (Robinson 2007, cited in Raftopoulos 2009: 220)

Thus informalization of production structures provided new opportunities for entrepreneurs linked to the ruling party to accumulate in various sectors, often relying on the state’s monopoly of coercion and selective law enforcement in the race for riches (Raftopoulos 2009: 223). The highly politicized nature of Zimbabwe’s informality entered a new complex accumulation through the exercise of state power that poses analytical challenges for more common conceptions of informality (Mawowa and Matongo 2010: 319). Some aspects of this, for example the roadside currency trade, not only provided a social enclave for the country’s urban poor, but also reproduced of a schizophrenic, militarized and dictatorial state in a historically unprecedented crisis. Mike Davis (2006) has called this a ‘pure rentier economy’, in which the ruling party created incentives for trading in goods in short supply ‘not only as a way to become rich but also as virtually the only way to survive’. The rewards for longterm investment in production became minuscule when compared to the rapid profits to be made from buying cheap and selling dear (Raftopoulos 2009: 221). This version of national capitalism, where the state had become extractive rather than developmental, cannot become a springboard for economic development in Zimbabwe. In 2007, for example, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), under the Mid-Term Monetary Policy Review Statement of 1 October 2007, established the Basic Commodities Supply-Side Intervention facility (BACOSSI) aimed ‘at boosting production through targeted financial support to manufacturers of basic goods as well as selected wholesalers and retailers’ (RBZ 2008: 38). As of July 2008, a total of 13.5 million US dollars and 2,704 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars had been disbursed to ninety-five manufacturers, while a total of 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars had been disbursed to support fifteen major grocery and hardware wholesalers and retailers (RBZ 2008: 38). Some beneficiaries of the funds never supplied the basic commodities. For example, a former popular TV and radio personality in the country was arrested in

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2007 for allegedly defrauding the RBZ’s BACOSSI programme by not supplying the goods he promised after being advanced funds by them, but the case is yet to go to trial (Mpofu 2011b: 19). Since most beneficiaries were ZANU PF (Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front) leaders, one may be forgiven for thinking that the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe had become the Reserve Bank of ZANU PF party. The other stated RBZ aim was to ensure the availability of basic commodities to urban populations at cheap prices, but this failed. All supermarkets in Zimbabwe had empty shelves towards the end of 2008. Whenever the BACOSSI commodities were supplied, which was rarely, people pushed and shoved each other in winding queues just to buy one of those scarce commodities. Basic commodities could only be found in the ‘black market’ at exorbitant prices, reducing most to becoming hunter-gatherers of basic commodities on a daily basis. It was obvious that well-networked political elites fed off the economic crisis through the RBZ-sanctioned BACOSSI programme (Biriwasha 2008). The same bureaucratic institutions that were supposed to lay the ground for ‘straight’ progress themselves operated in the kukiya-kiya mode (Jones 2010: 298). Politically, a massive attempt by the country’s ruling elites in the last decade to ‘blacken’ the ownership of the country’s economic resources through ‘indigenization’ and economic empowerment legislation is hampering economic recovery efforts by scaring away investment in the country’s undercapitalized industries. This resource nationalism began with the invasion of white-owned commercial farms by supporters of the ruling ZANU PF party. Now the Zimbabwean state has moved on to other sectors of the economy, including banking, manufacturing, retailing and mining. Companies investing in the country must embrace the country’s indigenization equity laws, effected in March 2010, that require large foreign companies valued at more than 500,000 US dollars to surrender a 51 per cent shareholding to black Zimbabweans (Mpofu 2011b: 19). Poor Zimbabweans, living on a hand-to-mouth basis, cannot afford to acquire stakes in such companies. This ‘blackening’ of the economy will continue to benefit the politically privileged few while the majority of urban residents languish in poverty. Actually, there are fears that this drive is only another way of handing the economy over to the ZANU PF (Mpofu 2011b: 19). Perhaps, as in Jamaica (Robotham 2000: 27), the attempt to ‘blacken’ the ownership of the country’s economic resources in Zimbabwe after 2000 has impoverished all strata in the population, especially the already poor, while jeopardizing the very existence of the nation. There is no evidence that the elevation of ruling elites to business ownership in Zimbabwe has improved the conditions of the masses, rather

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the opposite. RBZ Governor Gono has complained: ‘This economy is littered with cases of productive farms lying idle, farms which have been turned into grasslands instead of maize lands, soya lands and so forth, yet we need to be utilising the available resources … to advance our national economic fortunes.’ He went on to say that the beneficiaries of the Land Reform programme ‘should not be allowed to go and multiply that failure into other sectors such as mining, manufacturing and many others’. The governor opposed the indigenization policy because it benefitted ‘a few connected cliques of people … while the majority of intended beneficiaries remain with nothing as witnessed in the past’. This had potential to harm the country’s economy further by continuing ‘to concentrate new and scarce resources and opportunities on a few individuals, some of whom are even struggling to utilize what they already have to the economy’s advantage’. The RBZ chief concluded, however, ‘I do not think that the intention of the lawmakers when they passed the Indigenization and Empowerment Act was to [equate] it with the conglomeration of unsound corporate practices, corruption, misappropriation of funds or a lowering of the bar of accountability to allow blacks to get away with anything and everything untoward in the name of indigenization and empowerment’ (Nyambabvu 2011; Sunday News, 14–20 August 2011). The Zimbabwean post-colonial state has thus been labelled anti-majority and anti-development, a state that reproduces itself through patronage, coercion, repression, clientelism and rent-seeking activities (Biti 2009). Its indigenization and empowerment laws did nothing for the millions of Zimbabwean workers and the poor who have to survive on less than one US dollar a day and are dying in their thousands every week. Moreover, the indigenization law only allows the minister, a ZANU PF party member, to execute its provisions (Biti 2009). There is little chance under these circumstances that the rift between the ‘formal’ state and its predominantly ‘informal’ citizens can be narrowed.

The 2009 National Employment Policy Framework: Dawn of a New Era? In 2009, the government introduced ZiNEPF ‘to promote and secure sustainable, full productive and freely chosen decent employment for all under conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity’ (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 36). Since 1980, more than ten economic development strategies have been adopted and implemented by the government, while endemic poverty, unemployment and underemployment

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have all deepened. ZiNEPF pointed out that the colonial legacy of treating informal activities as ‘illegal’ and hence outside the policy domain persisted and that policy towards the informal segment of the economy remains ambivalent and contradictory. For example, at times the informal economy is hailed as critical for survival, but then it is also seen as a drag on the economy (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 15). Various measures undertaken to deal with unemployment were ad hoc, fragmented and uncoordinated, with several governmental institutions duplicating roles and no framework for building synergies between them. This led to a failure to integrate the non-formal sectors (communal and informal) of the economy into the mainstream economy. The new policy nevertheless seeks to correct all these imbalances, to promote the integration of marginal and vulnerable groups such as women, youths and the disabled and to target the informal and communal sectors where they predominate (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 33–34, 36). The grey zone where formal and informal sectors co-exist must be addressed by the state because it alone has the capacity to do so. The state may facilitate new partnerships for development and can organize the urban informal economy as a launching pad for sustained economic growth in the future, through linking the formal and the informal sectors of the economy for the benefit of the majority of the poor citizens (Hart 2010a: 380). ZiNEPF acknowledges that the government could provide leadership in creating smart partnerships at all levels (national, meta-sectoral and micro) encompassing individuals, groups, communities, civil society, the private sector, local and central government as part of an overall participatory approach (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 370). The government and local authorities cannot afford to continue relentlessly destroying the self-help efforts of the poor who have created their own jobs in the face of overall scarcity of formal employment and housing. Sibanda, a vegetable vendor in Bulawayo, did not approve of the government clampdown on street vendors: the ZANU PF government is … acting like an irresponsible father who does not want to provide for his girl child, refusing to buy her clothes, give her food and even to send her to school. When the child is forced into ‘prostitution’ as a survival strategy, the father turns against the child, accuses her of being a delinquent and then uses that as an excuse to chase her away from home so that he frees himself from the ‘burden’ of providing for the child. We are the creation of this government, it is our guardian, our parent, but now it has now turned against us. (Interview: 16 January 2008)

One major principle promoted by ZiNEPF is to nurture a culture of ‘job creation’ as opposed to job seeking, and to encourage an entrepreneurial

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culture (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 38). This is perhaps in line with other developing countries ‘where stable full-time waged formal sector labour was never the norm, it … may never become the norm that it is in Europe’ (see Ferguson 2007: 82). Others have approached unemployment not as a hazard, but as a normal condition for most people and have sought to make it productive. Productivity is not a function of formalsector employment (Ferguson 2007: 82). Neoliberal perspectives on the informal economy have emphasized its potential for employment creation and growth, viewing it as more democratic than state-led economic development that never comes (Hansen and Maa 2004: 17). In Bulawayo during 2012, the city fathers finally allowed street traders, in return for a small fee to the Council, to conduct their trade in one of the city’s busiest areas outside Basch Street Terminus (Egodini). The mayor admitted that thousands more residents had become jobless following the closure of nearly one hundred companies: ‘We had noticed that chasing around and raiding people does not work, people have to pay’ (Chronicle, 2 May 2012). The state should not use activities like tax evasion, selling without a licence, smuggling, use of child labour and breach of health and safety regulations to justify its failure to promote the informal economy as a legitimate economic sphere (Hart 2010a: 379–380). After all, illegitimate activities are also rampant in whatever remains of the formal economy. Clearly, the state must weed out undesirable tendencies in the informal economy. Some attempt must be made to harness the coordinating power of the state bureaucracy to the self-organized energies of the people (Hann and Hart 2011: 116). The government could adopt a developmental rationale based on the idea that the informal economy could play a transformational role similar to that which petty capitalism once played in the industrialization of the developed nations (Mhone 1996: 4). Alternatively, the state might appreciate the informal sector’s welfare role as a safety net for the destitute, providing employment for surplus labour that is surplus to the formal and communal sectors in the face of economic stagnation, crisis or just slow growth (Mhone 1996: 4). While ZiNEPF conceded that isolated interventions have failed to boost employment levels or decent work and called for concerted efforts by all stakeholders under the leadership of the state to minimize unemployment, it is mute concerning the political will on the bureaucracy to achieve this. The policy does not say how overall policy coordination and effective stakeholder participation, which has been the government’s Achilles’ heel, would be achieved. The same applies to the constant switching of mandates across ministries that has affected consistency

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and often results in overlap and duplication. Public accountability and responsibility for addressing deep unemployment is as far away as ever. It is perhaps overzealous for ZiNEPF to promote ‘freely chosen’ decent employment when there are no jobs to choose from and unemployment is over 70 per cent. Structural conditions determine that the majority of the urban poor must make a living informally, whatever the government orders; the goal of tidy, modern Third World cities is a pipe dream (Potts 2006: 288). ZiNEPF encourages a review of the regulatory framework to encourage the growth of small and medium enterprises and promoting employment creation; yet it is silent on the forms of self-employment deemed acceptable in the eyes of the state. Street vending is slowly becoming more acceptable, but the problem goes far deeper than that.

Conclusion The informal sector accounts for more than 80 per cent of Zimbabwe’s labour force, yet the government’s focus remains on hopes for a shrinking formal sector to generate employment. Since the formal sector has tended to move towards greater capital intensity, it cannot generate the required levels of employment on its own. Since the market cannot address the country’s economic problems by itself, the state is thus needed to resolve the impasse left by a colonial enclave or dualistic economy (MLSS, MoYDIE and ILO-SRO 2009: 33, 37). Informality is by now a permanent feature of the country’s urban areas and thinking about employment policy must shift towards removing the constraints that limit productivity and mobility in informal employment (Heintz 2010: 209). The bureaucracy and the poor need to enter into new partnerships for the development of new linkages between the formal and informal economies, especially since Zimbabwe’s narrowly based economic structure continues to contribute to high unemployment levels and the economic recovery that began with the dollarization of the economy in 2009 has done little to add to the number of jobs. The human economy approach recognizes the importance of public and private sector bureaucracies in the general drive for economic development; but it starts from the need to acknowledge the reality of people’s livelihoods as a necessary first step towards instituting economic democracy. The Zimbabwe example is a stark illustration of what happens to ordinary people’s livelihoods when their government persists in refusing to recognize and legitimize what they already do for themselves (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010b: 6). Under these circumstances, with the informal economy

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fast achieving universality at every level of society, it has become a label for an enclave economy, which now pits a dwindling number of out of touch politicians against the people as a whole. NOTES 1. My method combines ethnographic participant observation and archival research, with the former often providing lead questions for my documentary searches. 2. The now decades-old conceptualization of the informal sector, which according to Frederick Cooper, represented the urgent desire of social engineers to separate an economic arena where legal regulations and official categories prevailed and an arena where they did not is hardly applicable to a post-colonial era of economies dominated by informality (1987: 182). 3. Low set-up costs are also synonymous with low returns, long working hours and no safety or security at work. 4. The operation of the Ministry of Small Scale and Medium Enterprises is similar to the operation of the Affirmative Action Group, whose policy of ‘black advancement’ on behalf of the African professional and business strata Michael West equated to a policy of ‘racial uplift’ of African businessmen during the colonial period. But in post-colonial Zimbabwe black advancement effectively became another policy for promoting the interests of an aspiring ruling class, one targeted exclusively at elite Africans (West 1993: 283; Mlambo 2008: 10). 5. This refers to the period from 1999–2000, which was marked by chaotic farm invasions. It was portrayed by government as an extension of the liberation wars, this time to achieve economic independence. 6. This relates to the parasite view, which sees informal businesses primarily from the perspective of their illegality (La Porta and Shleifer 2008: 275–276). 7. For more information on the possible causes of the clean-up operation, see Potts (2006); Fontein (2009); Kamete (2006); Bratton and Masunungure (2007). 8. Kukiya-kiya refers to the desperate exploitation of whatever resources are at hand just to survive.

Chapter 2

░ Immoral Accumulation and the Human Economy of Death in Venda FRASER MCNEILL

‘Death lives with us every day. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living. Or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying?’ – Zakes Mda, Ways of Dying (1995: 98)

This chapter offers an ethnographic analysis of how poor, rural people in South Africa engage with and construct critical commentary around economic processes associated with funerals. I examine rumours that have been built around those who are thought to benefit financially from death and argue that such rumours speak to conceptions of illegitimate accumulation in a context of pervasive economic insecurity and growing inequality, widely perceived as a crisis of social reproduction. Whilst the rumours reveal concerns of an economic nature, they also point towards how funeral finances are gendered. Thus, the second half of the chapter focuses on the role of elderly women in negotiating funeral payments through various ‘balancing acts’ involving formal and informal economic processes, whilst revealing how language is mobilized as a ‘weapon of the weak’. Ethnographic evidence for the arguments presented below is taken from intensive fieldwork (2005 to 2010) in the former homeland of Venda.1 The arguments are also informed by a much longer association with the region, stretching back to 1995, during which time I have been an English teacher, HIV/AIDS educator, performing musician and, only latterly, a social anthropologist. At just over one million in number, Tshivenda-speaking people (Muvenda – sing, Vhavenda – plural) constitute only 2.3 per cent of the South African population (Lehohla 2003). This minority status is exacerbated by linguistic and geographical factors: Tshivenda is unusual, and generally

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unintelligible, in South Africa in that it is not of Nguni origin (like Zulu or Xhosa) but rather part of the Niger-Congo linguistic cluster that includes Shona in Zimbabwe and Lozi in Zambia. The Venda region – formerly an ‘independent’ homeland under the apartheid regime – is geographically remote and borders directly on Zimbabwe and the Kruger National Park in the northeastern corner of the country. The fact that Venda is peripheral to South Africa’s centres of power and influence has led to a stereotypical representation of the region and its inhabitants as being mystical and highly secretive masters of the occult who possess an extraordinary ability to invoke witchcraft: a conviction that has been reinforced by a recent increase in ritual murders in the area (McNeill 2011). Despite this apparent peculiarity, the region shares broadly similar socio-economic and political characteristics with other parts of rural South Africa and, since the official demise of apartheid, has undergone significant political and economic change. In economic terms, a dramatic fall in the number of outgoing migrant labourers – and a widespread rise in unemployment within the region – has impoverished many. While a minority engage with criminal livelihoods, a majority in the region depend on the extensive welfare handouts of the current ‘distributional’ regime (Seekings and Nattrass 2005) or on funding donated by international donors to the plethora of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the region, which serve to cover a distinctly underdeveloped reality with a veneer of ‘development’ (Southall 2007). In political terms, Venda’s incorporation in 1994 into the Northern (later Limpopo) Province under the democratic leadership of the first ANC-led government was preceded by a series of political manoeuvres that surprised many commentators. Most significant, perhaps, were the opportunities created for traditional leaders – widely accepted as apartheid stooges in the former Bantustans – to participate in the structures of post-apartheid governance. Reflecting the global trend for the growing influence of traditional authority (cf. Koelble and Lipuma 2005; Oomen 2005), post-apartheid South Africa has thus witnessed, especially in the former Bantustans, a significant reinvention of traditional leadership. The policies of ‘development’ alluded to above have often been introduced and implemented in rural areas through – or at least with the approval of – these recently bolstered structures of kingship. Kings, chiefs and headmen have thus taken a central role in the political economy of the ostensibly democratic post-apartheid era, whilst neoliberal economic policies coexist with pervasive welfare payments. As a result, life for many people in Venda is experienced as a series of seemingly contradictory, fragmented and frustrating encounters with the state and the market.

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In this context, the economic dimensions of death and dying have taken on particular significance. I should start by outlining some methodological issues pertaining to the ethnographic analysis of funerals in this part of rural South Africa. Death has been a concern of anthropologists in southern Africa for many years. Recently, anthropologists have sought to relate an increase in mortality to the wider social dynamics wrought through the AIDS pandemic in rural areas (Posel 2005; Niehaus 2007; McNeill 2009). Given that this topic of investigation is drenched in taboo, how to investigate the social dynamics of death perhaps demands more attention than they have been given. In Venda, there is a common sense relationship between openly expressed knowledge of death and its implied causes; so death – especially the causes of death – are usually discussed behind closed doors among trusted friends and family (McNeill 2011). Negotiating access to such tight-knit networks clearly involves long-term engagement and influential gatekeepers, but even then, much information is withheld. However, the groups of high-ranking male relatives who convene directly after a death to organize funeral arrangements, as I outline below, are somewhat easier to access, especially if the researcher can offer the use of a pickup truck (bakkie) to assist in the transportation of people, chairs, tents and the array of organizational duties that go into organizing a funeral. While the social and metaphysical aspects of death continue to receive scholarly attention, its economic aspects do not attract much sustained scrutiny.2 Ethnographic analysis of funerals demands a consideration of economic issues, embedded as they are in changing social formations. But this focus raises its own set of methodological conundrums. For example, researching formal and informal insurance schemes demanded a somewhat unconventional approach. Walking through Venda’s urban centre around the town of Thohoyandou, one is struck by the proliferation of funeral parlours. Many of them offer their own insurance schemes, or are in partnership with brokers for the major insurance providers. Competition is rife and spies are often sent to funerals hosted by business rivals to report back. A researcher with no relative to bury is met with suspicion when entering parlours to enquire about their products. I was suspected of conducting research in order to assess and undercut the competition for the benefit of my own funeral business, and no one wanted to talk. The urban core of the death industry around Thohoyandou is largely dependent on collecting cash from the rural periphery. As indicated above, state welfare is one of the most reliable forms of income in post-apartheid South Africa. Pensions, disability grants, child support and the like are distributed in rural areas via armoured mobile cash vans that charge

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around villages on a monthly rotation, giving out state benefits. In what has become known in Venda as the ‘dzigoloi dza mbulungo’ (literally, ‘cars of the funeral’, meaning ‘funeral procession’), the armoured vehicles are closely followed on their rounds by a procession of mobile funeral insurers, who duly set up shop directly opposite the payout points. The pension payout is a bustling affair, with a monthly entourage of entrepreneurs selling fruit, chickens, vegetables, second-hand clothes and the like. Once the insurance vans pull in, two or three men or women jump from them and mingle with the crowd; fulfilling the dual role of spying on any opposition and tracking down known clients who have defaulted on their payments. Approaching insurance representatives in this context, I was either ignored or physically pushed away.3 Many of the ‘mobile funeral insurers’ allegedly act as a cover for illegal loan sharks and various illicit dealings. It is hardly surprising that the men in charge of these outfits – and their customers – were suspicious of my presence there. Not knowing me, I was a potential spy. A new tactic was needed. I rounded up several research assistants from my doctoral fieldwork and briefed them on my current project. Armed with just enough cash, they were dispatched to various rural pay points, where they signed up for different funeral-insurance policies. They made the small monthly payments, collecting documentation and ethnographic information in the process. There is preliminary evidence from these encounters that the funeral insurers at the peripatetic pension pay points are involved in elaborate scams whereby their customers – mostly elderly women (gogos) – are often duped out of their investments. This is connected to how the insurers themselves are insured. For example, one assistant’s first instalment (for which he paid 70 rand) was marked on his pay card as 6,030 rand. When he questioned this, he was told it would be rectified the following month. A man of his word, the insurance broker made my assistant sign a month later on the 6,030 rand book under ‘received’, and then produced a new one, indicating the 70 rand payment. The 6,030 rand book was carefully placed into a plastic bag, apparently full of other dodgy pay books, and never seen again. Clearly, more evidence would be necessary to substantiate claims of fraud here, but the wider point concerns the degree of mystification associated with an insurance industry that has flourished recently along with the increasing frequency of funerals. As we see below, funerals have become extremely expensive markers of class and status, and most people cannot afford to stage an impressive one without a large contribution from insurance. It is big business.

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This pervasive mechanism of economic accumulation and the sense of mystification surrounding it lie behind the rumours to which I now turn. Through the circulation of rumours demonizing those thought to make significant financial benefits from the death industry, frustrations are vented, disapproval is expressed and collective moral judgment is passed.

Of Rumours and Parlours The proliferation of life insurance schemes has been matched by a sharp increase in funeral parlours and there is a clear symbiotic relationship between the two. Moreover, they are connected in terms of patterns of both ownership – often along ethnic lines – and upward social mobility. However, the significance of contemporary patterns of amassing wealth is to be found in historically constituted conceptions of legitimate accumulation. It is widely known in Venda that a businessman’s rise to success used to follow a distinct pattern. Conventionally, acceptable success for a businessman began with owning a taxi, progressing to a fleet of taxis, then to a beer hall. The pinnacle of such a trajectory is reached if the beer hall can support an adjoining butchery and general store, next to which the businessman’s fleet of taxis take people to and from the area. In this way, successful entrepreneurs construct small business empires around a shop ‘complex’, which caters for the needs of the surrounding population. The rural landscape is dotted with well-established ventures of this type – many of which have been passed from father to son over time. In the current politico-economic climate, however, success is just as likely to come in the form of a lucrative government tender or a Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) appointment, through which the previously privileged have entrenched their economic advantage. In informal interviews with successful businessmen in and around the Tshivhase district, accumulation of wealth – and relative success as a businessman – was spoken about in terms that loosely evoke notions of legitimacy, morality and ‘old-fashioned’ hard work. The ‘old-fashioned’ route, through which gradual accumulation brought social standing and engendered a wider sense of kudos, was defined in relation not only to rapid BEE enrichment, but to those who have recently made millions of rand (quite literally) through the funeral industry. One very successful businessman suggested: ‘It is not right; the way these guys [newly enriched funeral directors] do it. We worked very hard, through apartheid up until now, building our business and struggling with the people. Sometimes we also went hungry. But the money from funerals is not good. I will not let my

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sons get into it’ (interview: P. N., 26 March 2009). Another voiced his opinion: ‘I started with three head of cattle. Now look! [He has his own bustling complex with beer hall, butchery and a taxi rank]. This is not BEE, this is not from robbing people to bury their families, this is hard work … no I would not do it [open a funeral parlour], no way, I’m a Venda! Do you see any of these funeral parlours being run by Vendas?’ (interview: D. L., 13 May 2009). This is significantly different from trajectories of change reported in other parts of the country. Rebekah Lee (2011) reports that Xhosa taxi owners in Cape Town became involved in the funeral business through their desire, and ability, to keep migrants moving between the city where they work and the rural areas where they bury their dead. In Venda, it would appear that starting up a funeral parlour is interpreted, at least by some, as an immoral act (although it is difficult to tell if this is an expression of jealousy prompted by the lavish lifestyles of parlour owners). Why then is opening a funeral parlour – and cashing in on the perceived crisis of social reproduction – not a logical progression for a successful businessman in Venda? To answer this question, we have to consider wider cosmological fears and fantasies that surround death in general. But first, I should point out that the successful businessmen above were telling only half-truths. There are some recent funeral parlours in the area that have been opened by local Venda men, and the start-up capital from which they sprung came directly from groups of businessmen who have made their money, relatively recently, through government tenders and BEE. These business ventures have been a target for persecution through rumour and gossip – and the detail of the moral panic surrounding them reveals, at least partially, an explanation for why some businessmen will not branch out into the funeral industry in their own backyard. The first rumour, recorded in 2004–2005, centred on a poison that became known as ‘seven days’.4 The name is self-explanatory; a victim died seven days after consuming the poison. During the seven-days scare, several competing theories were in circulation to explain its origin and pattern of distribution. One of the most common was the whispered suggestion that mourners attending funerals organized by the Venda-owned parlour5 were being poisoned by undercover agents of the undertakers who circulated at the after-burial feast to contaminate the food with ‘seven days’. The second rumour began to circulate in or around 2009, and remains common at the time of writing. Various versions of this rumour are current (one of them was distributed by email and on Facebook). This version is widespread in Thohoyandou and the Tshivhase district of Venda. It con-

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cerns an unidentified man who is known only by his choice of vehicle: a Hummer.6 The Hummer driver, who speaks only Tshivenda, reportedly patrols the streets of Louis Trichardt, Thohoyandou and Giyani until he convinces a Tshivenda-speaking woman to get into his luxury vehicle. Once inside, she is seduced and taken to an expensive hotel for the evening, where she discovers that the millionaire is wearing a nappy (pampas, from the brand Pampers) instead of underpants, under which he hides an abnormal manhood. In the morning, she wakes to find only a note and an envelope from the Hummer driver. In the envelope are thousands of rand in cash, and the note explains that she must take this money to purchase a fresh human liver from a ritual murderer, and the liver must be used to feed the maggots the Hummer driver deposits inside her vagina. At the time this story started doing the rounds, the only two individuals in the area with Hummers were the joint owners of a Venda-run mortuary.7 The two rumours have one thing in common: the owners of Venda-run mortuaries are involved in attempts to kill, or otherwise intimately maim, innocent Venda people. The Hummer rumour is particularly meaningful. Instead of depositing sperm, the Hummer driver deposits maggots that have to feed on human liver, lest they eat the woman from the inside out. She is faced with a choice: get involved with ritual murder or face a slow and painful death, being consumed slowly by a strange force that lurks inside her body. The symbolic resonance here with HIV (before the mass rollout of anti-retrovirals) is striking: sex – the source of life – has morphed into a potential cause of death. Moreover, the human liver that may save her from this fate is to be bought with enormous sums of cash; this evokes BEE accumulation that is perceived to be illegitimate by those who are excluded from it. I would suggest that this vivid symbolism captures and serves as a means of negotiating frustrations alluded to earlier. It expresses discontent with pervasive neoliberal economic policies implemented by the post-apartheid ANC government that enrich a few with relative ease whilst the majority – depending on welfare handouts – continue to struggle for a living. The excluded masses feel entitled to a share of the spoils, given that ‘the struggle’ against apartheid was waged more generally than just by those who are benefiting from the current situation. Similar repercussions of economic activity perceived to be illegitimate are to be found throughout sub-Saharan Africa. One example would be how ‘419 men’ in Nigeria have been woven into rumours of ritual killings. As Daniel Jordan Smith (2001) has described, email scammers accumulate rapid wealth through illegal means. The illegality is not the problem, but their failure to distribute their money through established kinship networks – and

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their conspicuous consumption – have led to their being demonized by the poor majority as ritual killers. There are two central factors that go towards an explanation for the strange allegations currently circulating through rumour and gossip in Venda. The first is that funeral parlours in the region were, until around 1990, almost exclusively run by a white Afrikaans-speaking undertaker from Louis Trichardt (who had offices staffed by Vendas in Thohoyandou and Sibasa). This undertaker had little or no competition, and those who profited from it were relatively inconspicuous with their wealth. They blended into the white elite of Louis Trichardt and Polokwane – then Pietersburg – rather than engaging visibly in flashy consumption. The role of the undertaker has thus, until very recently, been that of an outsider. With the incorporation of the previous homeland into the new South Africa and the death industry being opened up to the forces of the free market, it was again ‘outsiders’ who established businesses to manage and profit from death. That they made vast sums of money from it served to reinforce their immoral nature as outsiders; hence the rhetorical question from the ‘legitimate’ businessman, ‘Do you see any of these funeral parlours being run by Vendas?’ Following this line of thought, those Venda men who do venture into the funeral industry are thought of as parasites, killing and eating their own people: spreading poison at funerals to ensure the continuation of their businesses. The second possible explanation for these allegations and rumours is related to the physical handling of death and knowledge of how to prepare a corpse. It is striking that the peripheral, informal entrepreneurs who physically construct tombstones and coffins are generally thought of as ‘making an honest living’. As we will see, these businesses are commonplace throughout Venda, some being more successful than others, but they have escaped victimization. Theirs is not an enterprise that handles a dead body (tshitumbu), the corpse is not chilled in a fridge on their property, they have no knowledge of how to prepare the corpse for burial, and thus they are free in general from potential involvement in any form of death. If they lack knowledge about death, they are unlikely to have been involved in its cause. The Hummer rumour captures the paradoxical manner in which the funeral industry is, quite literally, making a killing from the recent increase in AIDS-related death. In the story, sex is not connected to reproduction, but rather to a malfunction of the reproductive organs, for both the nappy-clad millionaire driver and his innocent victim. This is reflected in Zakes Mda’s novel, Ways of Dying, when the main character, Toloki – a professional mourner – observes: ‘soon we shall experience the death

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of birth itself if we go on at this rate’ (1995: 20). Or as John and Jean Comaroff have described it, in characteristically colourful prose, ‘[Reproduction’s] protracted failure, real or imagined, carries with it the spectre of degeneration: of the future as still born, as impossibility, as telos in retreat’ (2004: 336). In an interesting twist, however, the Hummer rumour seems to turn the tables on the normal gendered pattern of blame for the transmission of sexual illness and, at least in part, for the perceived crisis in social and sexual reproduction. Across southern Africa, maintenance of sexual health is largely perceived as the responsibility of women – enmeshed in beliefs about menstrual blood, monthly ablutions and the (mis)management of fertility. Such dangerous knowledge is transferred across the generations from old to young in ritualized contexts such as initiation schools, under the legitimating forces of ancestral and kingly authority. In Venda, this is formalized in the wider ontological conception of malwadze dza vhafumakhadzi (literally, ‘the illnesses of women’) under which all sexually transmitted illness, including HIV/AIDS, are located (McNeill 2011). In the case of the Hummer rumour, however, it is the man – an illegitimately rich man – who harbours, and eventually transmits, his bizarre illness. The sickness here is wealth, a bounty from which the majority are structurally excluded. The young woman becomes a depository for the sickness – a metaphor for society’s ills – through which the fears and fantasies of illegitimate accumulation become embodied in a regional trope that frames young women as carriers of pollution. However, as I argue below, gender plays an ambiguous role in the death industry. While young women are central to stories of society’s potential collapse, elderly women have become key players in managing the pragmatics of burying the dead.

Organizing and Paying for a Funeral At sunrise on a cold Saturday morning in winter 2007, I put on my best suit jacket and joined the crowd of mourners walking up the path towards Duthuni graveyard. Like most graveyards in the former homeland of Venda, this one is high on a hillside, overlooking the surrounding villages and accessible only by poorly maintained roads that have forced local undertakers into the precautionary measure of purchasing fleets of four-by-four hearses. As we walked up the hill into a spectacular sunrise, a hearse trundled slowly though the crowd breaking the silence with the

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sound of its heavy tyres pushing through the mud. We were gathered to bury Rendani, who had died after a short illness at the age of twenty-eight. I had known him since 1997, when we played together on a football team and subsequently when he became infamous around Duthuni for driving a mini-taxi with the most powerful subwoofer in Venda, an accolade that earned him a reasonable income and made him popular with the local ladies. Around the crowded grave, standing with the smell of freshly dug earth and rain, were his family, neighbours, former teammates, ex-lovers, drinking buddies, members of the taxi association and a scattering of relatives from the former homeland of Gazankulu. After the short service – during which a family feud unfortunately broke out – we each threw a handful of soil into the grave and prepared to leave for a feast at Rendani’s mother’s homestead. Before we could do so, we were addressed by a representative from the undertakers who had organized and coordinated the morning’s proceedings. He hit us with his sales pitch: ‘Do you like the way we have organized this morning’s funeral? This month at Mudzunga Funerals we have special offers on luxury caskets and marble tombstones. You can sign up for our funeral insurance today [pointing towards a man with a clipboard, paper and pen at the ready] and receive a discount on your first three months payments … please take a leaflet as you leave.’ Walking down the hill, about fifty metres from the graveyard entrance, another salesman – propped atop an empty beer crate and thrusting photocopied brochures into our hands – addressed the departing crowd: ‘Luxury funeral cover from Dembe Funeral Directors; the oldest and most trusted in Venda! Family plans include up to six children … low premiums and instant cash payments to help you prepare.’ In the two hundred metres or so between the graveyard and the car park, there stood a further three representatives of local funeral insurers/ undertakers. They were marketing policies, distributing leaflets and offering free transport for the short distance to the homestead where we were due to eat. At the time, I had not considered this a research outing: I was attending a friend’s funeral. But the nature of our departing encounters with representatives of the death industry was intriguing. No one seemed perturbed by their presence – in fact most people gladly collected leaflets, asked questions of the salesmen and discussed the best deals amongst themselves. A friend commented to me that this was a great place to pick up a bargain; he was on the lookout for a coffin and tombstone for a relative who was preparing a funeral in the neighbouring village, and he had promised to scout for the best deal. Rendani’s funeral had become a marketplace of the macabre.

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This description of men profiting from the funeral industry leads into the more grounded issue of cost. What is involved in paying for a funeral, and where does the money come from? Regardless of how their ownership is perceived, how do parlours actually make their money? There are a plethora of activities that must be organized and paid for in the run-up to a decent and dignified funeral. Depending on the level of insurance coverage – defined largely by the monthly premium rate and the length of time this has been regularly maintained (see below) – some or all of these duties will be covered to a variable extent by a cash payout upon death and ‘a funeral to the value of n’. One of the most time-consuming responsibilities is selection of and payment for a tombstone. If this is not part of the insurance package, then (in March–April 2009) a tombstone from one of the established funeral parlours in Thohoyandou would have cost the bereaved family between 4,000 and 40,000 rand. At the budget end of the scale, the tombstone is a small, simple, rectangular granite affair with a black enamel front and plain, white engravings. At the more exorbitant end, and in a choice of white, black or grey, the tombstone resembles a grand marble altar, with four dominating pillars, two thick slabs of stone on top and below, and – protected in the middle – a stone of baroque complexity, often made specifically to order, surrounded by outlandish built-in flower vases. Smaller independent tombstone makers are scattered around Venda, but the quality of their work varies and, unable to purchase their materials in bulk, they are unlikely to offer a stone for less than 3,000 rand. Still, they are popular in the more remote – and poorer – regions, where the cost of comprehensive insurance cover is out of most people’s reach. Along with the selection and purchase of a tombstone is the need to source a coffin. Again, this may be included in the insurance payout deal, but it may not. Purchasing a coffin from an established dealer in Thohoyandou in 2009 cost between 20,000 and 45,000 rand. For the destitute, a plywood box is available for 350 rand. For millionaires, coffins can be made to order for upwards of 60,000 rand.8 In a similar manner to tombstone makers, various small-scale entrepreneurial outfits have emerged in town and in rural areas, designing, manufacturing and selling coffins from their workshops. One such group, ‘Murunwa Luxury and Budget Coffins’ consists of four young men who were trained in carpentry and plumbing at the Venda Training Trust (VTT), then partly subsidized by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) from 1994 until graduating with a ‘diploma’ in 1997. In 1995 to 1996, I was their English teacher, and upon dropping into their workshop at Murunwa village in 2009, I was pleased to hear that they still greeted me in a Scottish accent.

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Having graduated from the VTT, they had all struggled to find employment. After reading an article in The Sowetan newspaper, reporting on the burgeoning trade undertaken by informal coffin makers, they decided to establish their own business venture. One of the carpenters explained his motivations, in English, thus: ‘I have lost two sisters and one brother in the last four years. All of them were younger than me. My family are broke because we had to pay for the funerals; my mother cannot keep up the payments [for the insurance]. So I decided to help her, at least with something [money]. Lots of people need coffins, lots of them’ (interview: M. T., 17 May 2009). But ‘Murunwa Luxury and Budget Coffins’ is not making as much money as the four owners had hoped. Suffering a similar fate to small tombstone makers, they are unable to purchase raw materials in bulk, and thus the price of their coffins remains relatively high. Still, they do a reasonable trade with customers who are willing to spend between 7,000 and 15,000 rand, offering a particularly upmarket model with padded velvet lining and a Perspex window through which the deceased can be seen until the very last minute. Most of their trade, however, comes from the Thohoyandou and Louis Trichardt Municipality morgues. Every two or three months, unclaimed corpses are laid to rest in the municipal graveyards, and many of them are placed in plywood coffins purchased from Murunwa for 200 rand apiece. Their profit margin on each box is a mere 30 rand, but they are afraid of losing the contract if they increase the price of their pauper’s coffin. In addition to a tombstone and a coffin, the guests at a funeral must be seated inside a tent. The most expensive insurance plans cover this, but it is rare for such policies to be bought in the area of my research. The tent and chairs, in fact, are the first things that have to be organized. In the run-up to a funeral (which for royalty [Vhakololo] takes place at sunset on a Friday evening and for commoners [Vhasiwana] at sunrise on a Saturday morning) friends, neighbours and relatives gather for a prayer service (thabeloni) at the homestead of the deceased. The hire of chairs and a tent must be taken care of early enough to accommodate thabeloni in the days immediately after death, and so they are generally organized at a ‘community’ level. For example, the civic organization in the village of Chiawelo, in Duthuni, collected thirty rand from each household during 2001 to 2002. With the money raised, they purchased two community tents. In 2003, every house was requested to purchase two plastic chairs. Today, if there is a death in the village, the tent and chairs are brought the next day, free of charge. If there are multiple funerals on the same week-

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end, then tents and chairs are hired, for variable fees, from neighbouring civics, churches or traditional leaders. Another major expense for a family hosting a funeral is the provision of food. Notwithstanding the possibility that mourners may be poisoned by ‘seven days’, the meal served after a burial is of central symbolic importance. Without it, jealousy, suspicion and witchcraft allegations are likely to emerge. Eating is fundamentally connected, at least in Venda, with trust. Only witches eat alone. At a time when death is looming over a family and blame is never far away, it is of central importance that members of the family are seen to be trustworthy and innocent. By far the most convincing way to do this is to offer free food to anyone who wants it. To be sure, competition has played a part in escalating the extent of these feasts, but an elementary reason for their popularity is their success in ‘levelling things off ’, and, in essence, demonstrating to the mourners (who may well suspect various family members of collusion in the death) that the family has nothing to hide.9 Perhaps because of this close connection between eating at a funeral and economic and spiritual insecurity (Ashforth 2009), food is often organized, and partly subsidized, by female social clubs, which are essentially church prayer groups. Some of them have become semi-professional, wearing uniforms in the shape of aprons with logos and mottos printed on the front. The groups that I have spoken to are adamant that they make no profit from their funeral catering, but some have branched out to cater for birthday parties, weddings and other functions, from which they do make a profit. The ethos behind this is clearly driven by a moral concern not to profit from death and is closely related to the Hummer rumour in which a Venda man forsakes his ability to reproduce for the sake of illegitimate accumulation of wealth from death. In addition to these main expenses, other smaller-order and less expensive activities must be organized before a funeral can take place. These include the writing, typing, printing and photocopying of a programme, or ‘order of service’, on which the day’s proceedings will be formalized. This has a customary obituary on the back and often sports a picture of the deceased in good health. Of all the transitions and transformations that have been wrought through the pervasive commoditization of death, however, the humble figure of the gravedigger demands a closer look. Until very recently (possibly the mid-1990s) a gravedigger’s job was shrouded in shame. It was, to all intents and purposes, an elaborate form of begging, carried out under the cover of darkness by a group of men known only to the grave-

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yard keeper – generally a very old man with a royal connection. They are known in Tshivenda as dziphele (hyenas) as they prowl around in the night, scavenging for sustenance from other people’s misfortune and thus are seen to be potentially deadly witches or rumoured to be zombies. Until recently, they were remunerated for their services by an elderly woman, designated by the deceased’s family, who left food and beer in a calabash by the grave, and remained hidden from sight as the diggers performed their duties in the hours before burial. Recently, however, they have become minor celebrities, lauded in the local newspaper as ‘tireless servants of the community’, who volunteer so that others may receive a dignified burial. In one newspaper report, a gravedigger from a rural area boasted about the transformation in his social and economic status, having been hired by the Makhado (Louis Trichardt) municipality to train a newly recruited team of ‘municipal gravediggers’ to work in urban areas. They are now paid in cash, and can negotiate their fee in relation to others who perform the same service. Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear grave digging being advertised as a ‘piece job’ on the radio early in the morning. Their dramatic change in fortune, and the way their profession has become socially acceptable through its inclusion in the popular economy of death, deserves a closer analysis than I have space for here. Nonetheless, their transformation from hyenas to celebrities, and their rapid inclusion into the market economy, speaks not only to general acceptance of the need for more underground accommodation, but to the diverse and somewhat contradictory implications of how money circulates in and around the human economy of death. Other activities must be organized. In order for relatives throughout Venda – and others in the Johannesburg area – to be notified of the death, radio announcements must be made. Every weekday evening, between 7:30 and 8:00 pm, listeners to the hugely popular Phalaphala FM (South Africa’s only TshiVenda radio station) are subjected to a roll call of people who have died the previous week and will be buried the coming weekend. This information is supplied directly to the radio station by grieving families, who pay around three hundred rand for a single announcement. The daily intimations follow a strict formula: name of the deceased, place and date of birth, employment history, names of surviving close kin, date of death, time and place of prayer meetings and funeral. On no occasion is a cause of death alluded to. This is related to the themes of proximity to death, knowing how to handle and prepare a corpse, publicly expressed knowledge regarding the cause of death, potential implication in the death, and expressions of innocence in relation to this, such as a

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public silence, or the free offer of food after a burial (McNeill 2009). In announcing that a relative has died, great care must be taken to negotiate a myriad of potential pitfalls, through which blame is likely to be allocated for the death. If the range of tasks before the funeral organizers seems vast, these pale into insignificance when compared with the complex and multifaceted means by which funerals are paid for. With the exception of the very rich – who can afford the highest monthly premiums on funeral insurance and have the entire affair covered by an insurance payout – the vast majority of people in Venda have to cobble together payments from various sources. No one funeral will have the same pattern of payment; this is dictated by a series of variables such as the deceased’s former employment, their general standing in the community, and the extent to which their funeral insurance (if they have one) covers the final costs. One possible source of assistance is once-off payments made through employment unions or workers’ association funeral funds. Among the people I know, taxi drivers, bus drivers, teachers, other categories of civil servants and public health workers have all received small sums of cash to assist in the funeral process. The ‘community’ is also a source of assistance. Civic associations, as we have seen through the organization of chairs and tents, may be useful in this regard. In some villages, civic structures have organized a form of humanitarian aid known as ndoliso. There are various ways of collecting ndoliso, which is gathered when a death occurs in a homestead well known to be poverty stricken. The chairperson of the Phiphidi civic association explained it as follows: ‘This is Ubuntu. People are people through other people, and we must not forget that. This is our human duty.’ An example of this was brought to my attention, in the village of Phiphidi, in April 2009. The daughter of a young woman (whose husband had recently died) passed away. It was common knowledge that the mother was living in abject poverty and for some months neighbours had been donating leftover food to her and her increasingly sick daughter. When she eventually died, each household in Phiphidi was asked to pay a certain sum that was calculated from the nature of its socio-economic composition. Every mother (owing to the fact that they receive a monthly child support grant) paid ten rand. Every ‘independent, single man’ over the age of thirty-four was also asked to pay ten rand, and anyone else was told that donations were welcome. The civic association, in some villages, has significant power over the allocation of resources, and a ‘request’ to donate can as well be read as an instruction to do so. In the end, they raised over five thousand rand and the woman’s daughter was given a dignified if low-key and small-scale burial.

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In most cases, the funeral-insurance policies taken out by family members pay out enough to assist only partially in the overall cost of burying a relative. For example, a policy taken out with Dembe Funeral Services, in which the client (under the age of seventy-one and in good health) pays 75 rand a month, will pay out 20,000 rand for the death of the policyholder, 10,000 rand for the death of a child aged between fourteen and twenty-six, and 4,500 rand for the death of a baby. The payout will be more if the monthly premium increases and less, of course, if it is lower. From data gathered in 2009, it was apparent that the vast majority of payments made to the funeral insurers currently come directly from state benefits – mostly women’s old-age pensions distributed and collected at the monthly ‘mobile funeral insurers’ referred to above. Elderly women (gogos) occupy a complex position in this scenario – one borne from a particular historical trajectory. As elderly women, they are often recipients of, and responsible for, the sole income coming to a household from state welfare payouts. But it is extremely rare to find a literate gogo, and they often take grandchildren with them to pension payouts to read documents on their behalf. Their illiteracy, however, should not be misunderstood as stupidity. They are more than competent in counting money, calculating change and bartering for chickens, vegetables, clothes and whatever else they purchase from the mobile marketplace. But they do it in a specific linguistic format, which could be described as zwa kale (‘from the past’) and constitutes an example of what James Scott (1985) famously termed ‘weapons of the weak’. Younger traders (and anthropologists) who are not familiar with their specific vocabulary get confused very quickly, often to the amusement of the elderly women they are trying to communicate with. They use terms that were conventional when South Africa was a member of the British Commonwealth. In 1961, when South Africa pulled out of the Commonwealth and the rand was introduced as the national currency, there was a great deal of confusion ‘on the ground’ over how the rand would replace the pound. As an elderly friend of mine explained, ‘We never stopped thinking in pounds, it is easier for us [old] people to just say it like we always did.’ In this way, specific amounts in rand have a particular word in Tshivenda that equates to the old value of pounds and shillings. Two rand is called bondo, for one pound; ten rand is bondo thanu, for five pounds; twenty rand is fhumi, for ten (the pound is taken for granted); one rand is disheleni, for ten shillings; and ten cents is sheleni, for one shilling. Spoken in these terms, relatively simple sums of rand are communicated through

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elaborate plays on words: for example, fifty-five rand is mahumi mavhili na bondo tanu na mbili na disheleni (two R20 and R14 and R1). While this constitutes the conventional way of counting for elderly women at pension points, funeral-insurance representatives – mostly young men – struggle to talk in this idiom and steer the vocabulary of transaction into English terms associated with rand. Much gets lost in translation: the payees are often left confused as to what they have paid, what they owe and what they are entitled to, whilst the insurance representatives are left bewildered as to what the elderly women are talking about. This often leads to a sense of joviality amongst the elderly contingents who seem to revel in their esoteric linguistics, to the extent of competing with each other for the most flamboyant terms in which to express otherwise simple calculations. At the same time, it is a bittersweet process. They are well aware that the insurance investments from their pensions are to cover the possibility that younger relatives will die before them. In terms of the perceived crisis of social reproduction, the older generation is literally paying for the actions of the youth. And yet, through tricks of the tongue, they garner a sense of control in a context that depicts explicitly the deeply felt sense that they have lost the capacity to act meaningfully in – and to exert influence on – the world in which they live. Such elderly women, then, are often in charge of organizing payments in complex webs of multiple insurance schemes, where they take out different policies for different family members. As Lee (2011) has suggested, the recent success of the funeral industry in South Africa has accompanied a ‘feminization of finance’ in that, by and large, it is women – elderly women – who take responsibility for managing monthly payments to funeral-insurance schemes. However, given the evidence presented above, most people clearly think of insurance payouts as contributions to the overall cost of a funeral, and they are in no way perceived as a panacea. Again, responsibility for this bricolage or cobbling together of financial management falls largely on women. In parallel with the formalized insurance schemes outlined above, more informal savings networks and burial societies help top up the funeral fund when it is required (Bähre 2007). When faced with a funeral to organize, then, a family has a significant job on its hands. Tombstones, coffins, tents, food, radio announcements – all have to be paid for by a combination of formal and informal insurance, employment donations, ‘community’ humanitarianism and, usually, the calling in of old financial debts. But this is not done in a haphazard manner. On the contrary, it is a highly organized – and strictly gendered – process.

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If I have focused so far on the role of women, it is the men who make the important decisions, as is normal in patriarchal contexts, and funerals are no exception to this. In Venda, upon the death of a family member, a council is convened, consisting of four or five high-ranking men in the family. Ideally, they are members of the civic or the deceased’s church. The local traditional leader sends a delegate to join the council, who usually takes the position of secretary. Every evening in the run-up to a funeral, after the daily prayer service (thabeloni), the council holds a short meeting with other senior members of the family such as the Makhadzi.10 Here, actions to be taken are delegated to specific people, who report back on their progress the following day. All decisions are taken regarding the financial affairs of the funeral process in this council: decisions on the coffin, tombstone, caterers and flowers, transport, and programme design, in consultation with other high-ranking family members. For example, not all the money from a cash payout may be used for the funeral. The funeral council may decide to pay for the deceased’s children’s school fees or to start up another insurance policy for members of the family. In this way, while the funeral industry has clearly seen a ‘feminization of finance’ in that women perform long-term negotiations between formal and informal savings schemes to generate cash for the burial of their children, the ultimate decisions as to where this money goes are, at least in Venda, taken by a group of men.

Conclusion From the above we can sketch the outline of a human economy of death in post-apartheid rural South Africa. Constantly in the background of this ethnographic analysis, in which people make and take money through the death industry, is the perceived crisis of social reproduction in the region more widely. Life is experienced as uncertain at the best of times, sons no longer follow their fathers to the mines and daughters often fall pregnant before they are out of their teens. Old people feel they are no longer respected – and blame society’s ills on a generation devoid of morality (Comaroff and Comaroff 2004). Young people feel profound pressure to engage with – and participate in – the spoils of democracy that are so conspicuously consumed by a few, but from which they are structurally excluded. Death in this context – and the increase in mortality brought on by HIV/AIDS – is symbolic of how many people feel profoundly uncertain about what the future holds for them.

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In this context, the accumulation of wealth is deemed legitimate or otherwise in moral terms. Older men holding onto notions that businesses take time to build up are speaking directly against the recent and rapid rise of the politically connected black middle class – who invest in funeral parlours or other aspects of the industry. In one sense then, the ways people are included or excluded from this economy involve a discourse about protection from the consequences of benefiting from illegitimate accumulation. The Hummer rumour above clearly illustrates one potential penalty for making money from death, but it could also be read as being about how poor rural men mobilize gossip and rumour to regain sexual access to women that has been recently usurped by the new rich. The rumours discussed above should not be read as irrational narratives. On the contrary, they represent how the majority of poor, rural South Africans understand the multiple and contradictory influences that the state and the market have on their lives. I have argued that the accumulation of wealth in what are perceived to be immoral ways is expressed in metaphor as sickness; generated in men and deposited in young women – the category on whom social reproduction relies for the birth of children, but also the one most susceptible to embodied pollution. Elderly women manage the pragmatics of this crisis by organizing family finances, and men make the ultimate decisions on how the money is allocated. In this way, gender and generation dovetail to express discontent for – and to assert a sense of control over – how death has become one of the most profitable economic endeavours in contemporary South African society.

NOTES 1. All names of people and places are pseudonyms. 2. There are a few notable exceptions here. See Bähre (2007), Lee (2011), Jindra and Noret (2011). 3. On two occasions, the insurers I approached fled after I had attempted to talk to them. This did not please the long line of people behind me who were waiting to make monthly instalments. But changes are afoot. In December 2008 branch managers of post offices throughout South Africa were informed, on behalf of the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA), that the South African Post Office would be responsible for giving out benefits through Postbank accounts. This is intended to reduce the sums of cash trundling around the country in conspicuous armoured vehicles that have recently been the object of many armed heists. The mobile pay points for welfare benefits in

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

Fraser McNeill rural areas throughout South Africa will thus be replaced. Benefit claimants will need to travel to their local post office, on any day of the week, to withdraw their monthly benefit. Nonetheless, by the time of writing in 2012, such changes have yet to be implemented. See McNeill (2009, 2011) for more on ‘seven days’, in which I argue that the ways in which people speak – and refuse to speak – about poison mirrors the ways in which they do not speak openly about causes of death in general, and AIDS in particular. This is essentially a critique of ‘AIDS denialism’: the public silence reflects a desire to create ‘degrees of separation’ between innocence and potential involvement in an unnatural death. Actually, the funeral parlour in question was being managed by a Shangaan, but it was owned by a conglomerate of Venda men who were successful bidders in several government contracts. Hummer SUVs are extraordinarily expensive vehicles that can cost up to 3 million rand, and look like large mobile refrigerators. In the other common version of this rumour (the Facebook/email one) – circulating around southwestern Venda, which borders on the former Gazankulu homeland and is populated mostly by Shangaan speakers – the driver is a Shangaan-speaking man, who picks up Venda women. He is rumoured to have recently changed his car, but still drives very expensive vehicles. With this new disguise, he continues to implant maggots in the vagina of his Venda lovers, instructing them to feed the maggots with human liver, lest they eat the woman. I read this version as a means by which poor Venda men discourage potential Venda lovers from having relationships with rich outsiders. According to a friend who used to work for a funeral director in Thohoyandou, the owner of a very successful bus company, who was gunned down in 2003, was buried in a particularly lavish coffin costing 60,000 rand. His family allegedly employed security guards to watch the grave and ward off grave robbers for a month after the burial. The same source also indicated that the markup on coffins was vast. Having worked briefly as an accountant for a major auditor in 2004, he claimed that the wholesale price for a 10,000 rand coffin was less than 1,000 rand. This is unsubstantiated, but worth further investigation. The process of eating together after a funeral has taken on some particularly lavish characteristics in recent years, with the growth of the ‘After Tears’ party: a wake at the homestead of the deceased at which parties can go on until well into the next day. It is common for group pictures taken in front of piles of food, alcohol and soft drinks to be published in the popular tabloid Daily Sun, which hosts a weekly page for the group photos of their readers at such gatherings. Makhadzi is the elder sister to one’s father. She holds significant ritual responsibilities and has considerable influence in wider decision-making processes relating to family affairs.

Chapter 3

░ ‘Letting Money Work for Us’ Self-Organization and Financialization from Below in an All-Male Savings Club in Soweto DETLEV KRIGE

Global finance was previously obscure, beyond the well-documented roles of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Several recent financial crises, however, have now turned the eyes of academics, activists and citizens all over the world to how it shapes national currency fluctuations, the dynamics of national economies especially in the Global South, the prices of oil and other global commodities, and surging inflation. Anthropologists too have turned their attention to the social organization and culture of the trading pits and offices of stock and commodities exchanges in New York, Chicago and London, where currencies and financial products are traded and global finance is enacted (Zaloom 2006; Ho 2009). The emerging body of literature on financialization points to the phenomenal growth of finance-related trade, credit rating agencies, offshore tax havens, speculation in financial markets and the influence of banks on policy making and discourse (Martin 2002; Epstein 2005). This literature resembles, in some ways, earlier debates about the impact of globalization, focusing as it does on this dimension of the financial system. Few accounts trace the emergence of new social groups, practices, institutions and subjectivities at the local level that are encouraged, discouraged and produced by the unfolding processes of financialization. The impact of ‘high finance’ on ‘everyday life’ is assumed to exist rather than be examined empirically. How, for example, do the consumers of finance contest, negotiate, domesticate and resist top-down financialization in their everyday lives? We seem to agree that finance – as opposed to money or trade – has taken on greater importance in our lives across world society, but this does not mean that fewer spaces for practicing solidarity, self-organization and the reproduction of human life are available.

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I make here the counter-intuitive argument that financialization may require the very principles of self-organization and solidarity that some argue it erodes. I seek to demonstrate, through a case study of a small rotating savings and credit club (ROSCA) in contemporary Soweto, how citizens can appropriate the world of finance for their own social and economic ends – or to make their economy human. Readers will not find here actors without agency, their subjectivities determined by neoliberalism and global finance running amok. Rather, I argue that, despite depending on the world of money and being more closely connected to financial markets, for these young men, finance opens up spaces for self-organization and experimenting with old and new forms of solidarity that could best be described as ‘financialization from below’. I draw here on David Graeber’s (2011) idea that economic relations in human societies are characterized by a combination of moral relations and practices of exchange, hierarchy and everyday communism, and that capitalism is a particular way of organizing ‘baseline sociality’ – practices of open-handed sharing, generosity and human sociability that are prevalent in all human societies to varying degrees. By differentiating between social relations that produce human life on the one hand and systems organizing such relations in political and economic units on the other, Graeber is able to argue that ‘all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actuallyexisting communism’ (2011: 95). Similarly, I point out in this chapter how the financialization of collective savings – from below and from above – will be seen to depend on a range of everyday practices, including those based on sociability and mutuality. This moves beyond arguing that capitalist firms are often internally organized in communalistic ways (Graeber 2011: 96), but that the profitable financialization of collective savings by formal financial institutions has the unintended consequence of multiplying organizational forms characterized by mutuality. First, I briefly discuss the emergence and popularity of rotating savings and credit clubs in urban Johannesburg over the past century, paying attention to recent efforts by public authorities and commercial banks to draw on this ‘indigenous’ form of saving to capture the considerable amounts of cash flowing outside the formal banking system – informally within township households, savings clubs, neighbourhood moneylending circuits, ponzi schemes and criminal enterprises. Financialization of these collective savings results party from the alliance between the African National Congress (ANC) government and predominantly white capital in post-apartheid South Africa. But, as my ethnography will show, this

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dynamic is also sustained from below by what Graeber calls ‘everyday communism’. I then describe how members of the all-male savings and credit club I joined transformed its organizing principles, membership and functions over a period of two years. By taking a processual and interactionist approach (Denzin 2001), I analyse the shift from ‘social club’ to lekgotla in relation to the economic uncertainties and social anxieties members faced in trying to achieve the cultural ideals dominant in Sowetan society – establishing new and independent households and becoming respectable adult men. While a general money shortage is a main reason for postponing this dream – getting married, having their own home and being the provider – money is also the vehicle through which they hope to meet these aspirations. This idea is articulated in a phrase that members came to adopt as their rallying cry: ‘Letting money work for us’ rather than ‘working for money’. Members saw their self-organized savings club as being intimately tied to participation in the new political and economic order, a response to the promises that post-apartheid citizenship made to them, especially when compared with their experiences under the apartheid system of racial capitalism (Terreblanche 2003). They were also informed by a sharp reading of new avenues for moneymaking, which linked the state’s emerging system of affirmative action tenders – and the rise of the ‘tenderpreneur’ – with an ease similar to how financial elites were ‘making money out of money’.

Mutual Associations and Self-Help in Johannesburg and Soweto In many South African urban centres over the past century, rotating savings and credit clubs have emerged in the slums, hostels and municipal townships designated for African occupation (Kuper and Kaplan 1944; Kramer 1975; Lukhele 1990; Ross 1995; Burman and Lembete 1995; Bähre 2002). Together with unregulated mutual aid associations such as burial societies (Hellman 1935), these clubs have played an important role for working-class neighbourhoods in mobilizing collective credit and savings, retaining flows of monies within township communities and practicing solidarity and mutuality in a hostile environment. Such clubs were formed among migrant labourers working temporarily in the city who used them both as a savings mechanism, for purposes that included ‘building the [rural] homestead’ (McAllister 1980; Moodie 1994), and as a way to raise money for ethnic and sporting associations in the city

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(Kynoch 2000a). But they came to play an even more central role in areas of the city designated ‘African’ or in African municipal townships outside the city. Known in Johannesburg as stokvels, ‘social club’, lekgotlas or just ‘societies’, these clubs provided important savings, credit and insurance functions mainly for working-class Africans whose participation in formal finance was severely curtailed before the coming of ‘democracy’. The generic term stokvel has come to cover a huge variety of voluntary associations ranging from social clubs, which emphasize sociality, to investment clubs, which invest savings in the money markets collectively. The stokvel was historically a central economic institution for wage workers and their families. This prominence was the result of its association with another institution that thrived in constricted township economies, namely, the informal tavern or shebeen (Kuper and Kaplan 1944),1 as well as with the long history of ‘unemployed’ women’s production of illegal sorghum beer to generate income outside the formal labour market and independently of husbands who controlled income and expenditure within the ‘individualized household unit’ (Hellman 1935; Bozzoli 1991; Krige 2011a). Some regard these clubs as the quintessential working-class institution in Johannesburg, given the scorn heaped on them by the white-controlled state and the Christian-educated African elite under apartheid’s warped moral economy (Brandel-Syrier 1971). Elsewhere in Africa, of course, such clubs were closely tied up with the development of ethnic identities and support networks in urban contexts and with the lack of formal political space for Africans in colonial states. In contemporary South African public culture there has, unsurprisingly, been a significant reconsideration of the role of stokvels. They are now held up by a diverse variety of actors and public authorities as a solution to a range of economic ills and problems. Whereas the stokvel was pushed underground before, it is now feted by government. Public authorities such as the Reserve Bank, the Minister of Finance and the Department of Trade and Industry have emphasized the need for citizens to develop a ‘culture of savings’ in order to tackle the national economy’s imbalances. A recent newspaper report put it bluntly: The weak savings culture is a big headache for the government because it hampers speedy economic growth. With less cash sloshing around its banking system, South Africa cannot finance the infrastructure such as roads, ports and broadband Internet needed to move its economy up a gear. … Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and his predecessor, Trevor Manuel, both begged South Africa’s 50 million people to save more, but their entreaties were trumped by the power of bling – those with disposable income would rather spend it on the latest flat-screen TV or smartphone than put it away for the future. (Reuters 2012)



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This drive to push cash hoarded informally by township households into the formal banking system partly explains why the government accuses wage workers of conspicuous consumption. The same report explains the low rate of savings as follows: ‘This partly reflects South Africa’s racially divided apartheid past in which millions of marginalized blacks had no access to credit and other financial services. They are now grabbing the chance to acquire assets at the expense of saving.’ This aggressive attempt to promote a ‘culture of savings’ and the historical narrative that legitimizes it are similar to the arguments and governmental techniques promoting the privatization of household water provision as a way of controlling the poor (Ruiters 2007). Greg Ruiters saw a public discourse characterizing township populations by a ‘culture of non-payment’ as a mechanism to discipline the poor on the principle of ‘user pays’. The ‘culture of savings’ discourse similarly attacks ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘short-termism’ among new wage workers. Moreover, the idea of forging a savings culture in order to address macro-economic problems diverts attention away from policies that allow large South African companies to take large amounts of cash out of the country. It is also, of course, in the interests of commercial banks for these ‘informal’ monies to enter the formal system. The same newspaper report quotes a deputy CEO of the Association for Savings and Investment South Africa, a trade group for firms providing savings products: ‘A strong savings culture is almost a prerequisite for sustainable economic development and South Africa has in the last 10 years or so gone backwards very fast.’ This is one reason why commercial banks and research institutions have invested in studies focusing on the financial behaviour of ‘township populations’. The purported size of the informal stokvel circuit is given as a reason for greater formalization: ‘An estimated R 40 billion ($4.8 billion) is invested in stokvels, a recent study shows, but the money rarely finds its way it into the formal financial system, denying the economy access to funds that could help fund crucial investment. Banks and investment companies are trying to get access to that money.’ The onus of economic growth – the undisputed silver bullet for South Africa’s social ills – is thus shifted to the shoulders of every working and saving man and woman. The context for this revaluation of the stokvel should be evident. Public authorities and commercial firms want to capture the savings of masses of working-class households who they imagine keep their cash under their mattresses. One way to achieve this has been through a moralizing discourse of savings and consumption (which is seemingly best done, in South Africa, by calling it a ‘culture’). Commercial banks were initially reluctant to enter the ‘unbanked’ market – comprising those without

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even basic transaction accounts – because of the risk entailed and the expense of administering accounts. While they once publicly protested against the state’s efforts to cajole them into providing affordable savings products, they have now come to realize that it is in their interest to try to capture some of the large pools of cash circulating outside the formal banking system. The financial and political elites have latched onto mutual aid organizations like burial societies and stokvels as ‘indigenous’ (African) mechanisms through which the savings of the African working class – the majority of the ‘unbanked’ – may be put to profitable ends. This allows commercial banks to administer the savings of large numbers of customers at a low cost since each collective operates only one bank account. One consequence of this drive, I argue, is yet more growth in the popularity of urban rotating savings and credit clubs. Whereas commercial banks and their researchers anticipated a decline in these associations when Africans were given access to formal financial instruments, their increased popularity has raised the profits of the commercial banks, since they can effectively outsource the collection of group savings, as well as the risks associated with default, to the clubs themselves. My ethnography of one such club throws light on the social effects of this process. Actors other than the moneymakers and the ruling elite have woken up to the significance of these clubs. The South African Communist Party has hailed indigenous savings clubs as a buffer protecting the working classes from the vagaries of neoliberal capitalism, especially after Mbeki’s government dropped the Reconstruction and Development Programme in favour of more conservative fiscal and monetary policies. The SACP launched its own ‘communist stokvel’ for party members. The cooperative movement, supported by the ‘independent left’, has also sought to mobilize independent and fragmented stokvels into a new cooperative movement, in part by introducing the anti-capitalist discourse of ‘solidarity economy’ (Co-operative and Policy Alternative Center [COPAC] 2011). The government itself has thrown huge sums at ‘entrepreneurial cooperatives’, drawing on a version of mutual aid society that regards them as social enterprises rather than as self-organized democracies. Financial fraudsters have found inspiration in the stokvel too, with several ‘ponzientrepreneurs’ cloaking their money-multiplication schemes in a rhetoric of savings clubs, while exploiting both low levels of financial literacy and the public discourse promoting saving as a means of personal gain (Krige 2012a). But efforts to turn large and small clubs around the country into a national federation, and perhaps into a political movement, have not succeeded. In sum, the stokvel as a local form of self-organization has

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drawn more than its fair share of interest and not just from political and commercial elites. Some perspective is needed. We know from earlier literature that participation in informal financial societies was always commonplace and that participation in burial societies used to be higher than in stokvels. Ellen Hellmann (1935: 57) reported that a tenth of the residents of Rooiyard slum in Johannesburg belonged to a burial society in the 1930s, and Hilda Kuper and Selma Kaplan (1944) wrote that nearly two-thirds of households in the city’s Western Native Township subscribed to these societies in the 1940s. A 1989 Markinor survey confirmed that participation was still at a high level half a century later. It is initially surprising that these high levels have not diminished since the advent of democracy and of easier access to formal financial services. The recent Financial Diaries project, which analyzes the use of financial instruments by poor households across South Africa, found that two-thirds of the poor households in their sample belonged to a least one stokvel or burial society (Collins 2005; Shezi 2005). These statistics are important for the government; given that South Africa’s estimated total savings (by government, households and corporations) is only 13.5 per cent of GDP, far below the desired 20 per cent (Shezi 2005). Moreover, the FinScope (FinMark Trust 2005) survey also affirmed continued high levels of participation in stokvels, despite a 5 per cent decline. This means, in effect, that many more South Africans belong to these informal savings clubs than to all political parties combined (Naidoo 2010). Elmar Thomas (1991) has divided South African ROSCAs into three categories according to scale and function: (1) small groups dealing with small amounts of savings usually with no option of lending out capital; (2) targeted saving groups with variable membership and the possibility of a fund from which money can be borrowed at interest; and (3) ‘high-budget’ ROSCAs with a large membership, large amounts of money and the capacity to lend money to members at high interest. Thomas found that the last category was usually dominated by men and the first by women, raising the important question of how financialization from below is gendered. During my research I encountered several high-budget investment stokvels consisting of small numbers of men, with the main aim of investing in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and in money market funds. Such investment clubs are still few, but growing in number. Much industry-oriented research aims to establish the amounts of money saved in these clubs and how their members may be convinced to put their savings in a commercial bank; but not much ethnographic work is being done on this front.2 This drive to formalize informal mutual aid societies

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and get the ‘unbanked’ banked is the most recent wave in South African capitalism’s long history of creating new markets, a process often driven by global imperatives, but refracted locally through market segments and geographies defined in terms of race and class. The growth of self-organized and bottom-up financial clubs, whether formal or informal, is indicative of a changing political economy. A sizeable part of Soweto’s upper middle class has left since 1994 for what were whites-only suburbs (Selzer and Heller 2010). This movement has given rise to the phenomenon of ‘sleeping in the suburbs but living in Soweto’, whereby upwardly mobile men move their households to the suburbs, but sustain their social, neighbourhood and kinship networks within Soweto. This is most visible on weekends when many former residents enter Soweto by car to attend funerals and family events. Social inequality within Soweto appears to be deepening at the same time (Piazza-Georgi 2002), alongside drastic transformations of gender relations resulting from the growth of female employment and a drop in formal wage employment for unskilled male workers (Krige 2011a). The consequences of all this were evident in the voices of the men who belonged to the stokvel I describe below. I now explore their self-organization around finance and their quest to reproduce human life by achieving full adulthood.

The Stokvel: From Social Club to Lekgotla A few months after I had located a room to rent for 350 rand per month in an area of deep Soweto, I attended a funeral nearby. I was introduced to several people from the kasi (neighbourhood, street), including a group of men in their thirties still living in their parents’ houses. This public event allowed my neighbours to get to know me better and to find out why a white, middle-class Afrikaner had decided to move to Soweto. They had resisted visiting me in my room because, I learnt later, they were scared of the matriarch who owned the house I was living in whose late grandfather had been a Jewish shopkeeper in the city. A few months later, after getting to know the group of men better in a local tavern, I was invited to one of their stokvel meetings, which took place on the first Sunday of every month. I became a regular, establishing myself as one of a few noncontributing ‘sub-members’ of the stokvel. Sub-members were not allowed to attend the formal part of these meetings during which money was pooled and allocated among members, but they could buy plates of food from the host, take part in the festivities afterwards and be considered for future full membership.

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Before its transformation into a lekgotla, a ‘serious’ organization, the social club’s members were childhood acquaintances who had grown up around each other and were already spending a great deal of time together on weekdays and weekends. Different cliques existed in the club, but the men were long-time acquaintances and their parents knew each other well. The municipal township in which we lived was established in the 1950s and the families, which came to rent the houses from the municipality, had been in the city for three or four generations. Some had been forcibly relocated from Sophiatown and Western Native Township, while others came from different areas of the city including Soweto. Today this township is seen by other Sowetans as a relatively ‘quiet’ neighbourhood characterized by upward mobility and ‘privacy’, because many soldiers, policemen, nurses and teachers – professional occupations carrying middle-class status – came to occupy the houses that had internal rather than outside toilets (Krige 2012b). These young men were the first generation of their families born in this neighbourhood and growing up on its streets. When I became a sub-member, the club had seven members, all of whom had grown up in our neighbourhood and were of similar social class background. Their households were considered to be working rather than middle class; but, in comparison to poorer Soweto neighbourhoods, they could be seen as being lower middle class. There is no neat fit between how residents talk about class and the language of academics (Phadi and Manda 2010). Club members reserved the label ‘middle class’ for men who had left Soweto to live in the former white suburbs. Unlike some of the other men I befriended from the same neighbourhood, stokvel members did not socialize at the upmarket club nearby where new social elites mingled, more middle-class English was spoken and drinks were expensive. The seven core members who ‘played’ the stokvel in 2004 were aged between twenty-eight and forty years. One worked as a hair stylist in a township outside Soweto. Another lived rent-free in a backroom of his uncle’s house in a neighbouring section. The remaining five, like many working-class men in Soweto, all lived in their parents’ house or in a back room in their yard. This set them apart from the middle-class men and women in our neighbourhood who had moved out of their parents’ homes to establish households elsewhere in Soweto or in the city. With the exception of our secretary, Okre, and one other member, all had relatively secure full-time wage work in 2004 and 2005. Even though he had attended one of the best schools in Soweto, Okre struggled to find formal employment. He had helped to launch the Socialist Workers Party in Johannesburg in the early 1990s, but had since lost interest in

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socialist politics. He had also worked as an electrician and had ‘odd jobs’ around Soweto. When we met, he was trying to establish a spaza shop in a Tshwane township. Even though the business grew slowly but steadily, he gave it up after relations with his landlord turned sour. He lost money that he had borrowed from family members (for instance, to hire a sangoma or ritual healer to cleanse and bless his shop). In 2005, after failing to become a prison warden – because, he said bitterly, he had not bribed the selectors – he tried to start a business organizing recreational tours for school children, but this too did not materialize. As with the other unemployed member (who had previously worked as an electrician), Okre struggled to meet his monthly contributions to the club. The other members, in contrast, were all able to meet their contributions. At the time, none of the members owned a motor vehicle, although one planned to purchase a car at the end of the year. This man, Keno, was the president of the club and he worked in the procurement division of a well-known food retail store; another worked as a gymnastic instructor at a Montessori school in the northern suburbs; and another was employed as a ‘set runner’ for a television production company. The last, who was employed as an office worker in a construction company, was the only one to have completed a degree at a technical college, and he had daily access to an email account as well as a mobile phone contract. Having a mobile phone contract indicated participation in the formal world of finance at a higher level, since it required a credit history and creditworthiness. The unemployed electrician worked for a company for several years, but resigned because he felt he was not paid enough. He intended to start his own company to add independence of work to his ambition for independent residence. Given that they had few assets or additional income, the wages the men earned were insufficient to enable them to marry and establish independent homes. As men in their thirties (Keno and Okre were nearing forty), the fact that they had long-term relationships (which had produced offspring), but were not yet married and were still living with their parents, resulted in considerable anxiety and frustration. Their dissatisfaction was like that found among working-class men of similar age in England during the Industrial Revolution (Smelser 1959). The latter went on to develop a range of working-class associations such as cooperative stores, friendly societies and trade unions. Because he is the last-born son, Okre is assured, according to Soweto custom, of inheriting his parent’s home in due course. The other men were faced with the choice of saving money to build a room in their parents’ backyard, renting a room from someone else or buying another

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house. Renting a back room cost upwards of 300 rand a month at the time. Buying a house was out of reach for working-class men, given the dramatic increase in Soweto prices from the 1990s and the reluctance of commercial banks to finance the purchase of former municipal housing, especially in ‘deep’ Soweto. As a result, most men opted to invest in backyard structures in their parental homes. While this offered security of tenure for their partners and children, it often resulted in a lack of privacy and conflict between their sisters and partners over contributions to household resources and the allocation of household duties. But while it was near impossible for working-class men to purchase houses, it was becoming common for members of Soweto’s elite to own more than one house and rent them out to working-class people. It was also important for the club’s members to go through a public wedding ceremony in order to communicate to their kin and neighbours the ability to assemble the resources to get married and provide for a household. But marrying was also an increasingly costly affair. Like property prices, bride wealth prices skyrocketed during the 1990s. Men would complain that parents suddenly ‘charged’ much more for their daughters, and would add several thousand rand for every year their daughter had been enrolled for tertiary education. A daughter with a degree, they complained, would now be ‘worth’ close to 20,000 rand. Furthermore, they saw that weddings had become ‘tournaments of value’ (Appadurai 1986), fuelled by the rise of the new elite, during which newfound wealth in the form of vehicles and clothes (and indeed social networks) could be exhibited. In a dramatic shake-up, three members left the club at the end of 2004. One left without giving clear reasons, while two claimed they did not approve of the new direction Keno and Okre intended to take the club – they wanted it to remain a ‘social club’. Three new men – myself and another two from the neighbourhood – were invited to join in early 2005 after informal discussions between Keno and Okre. We were apparently seen to have the ‘right stuff ’, despite being, to some extent, outsiders. In 2005 the new membership bonds were tested in various ways. The electrician, Pitso, struggled throughout the year to meet payments. It was taking him longer than expected to get his own company up and running. In June his girlfriend – to whose family he had wanted to give bride wealth the next year – had a miscarriage and subsequently left him. He battled to cope with this loss and we spent hours after club meetings talking about it. The day before the July meeting he was caught on a train without a valid ticket. He was arrested by the police and spent the day of our meeting in jail. In August we had a special weekday evening meeting

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of all the members. On the agenda was a request from Pitso to be allowed to withdraw the total amount of his contributions to the club in order to go to Durban on business. We all knew by then that he wanted to leave the club, even though he insisted on remaining a member. We gave him his money and he failed to show up at subsequent meetings. Rumour had it that he had spent all the money on liquor and never reached Durban. Pitso’s fate was a constant reminder in the coming months of the need to sustain our commitment to the club as a kind of forced saving. Keno and Okre, the two senior members, were keen to shape the club into a vehicle for improving their prospects of getting married and forming new independent households. Looking around them at all the upward mobility and accumulation going on, they realized they had to do something, individually and collectively. They saw the club as something they could shape into a vehicle to overcome their struggles with money. They realized they had a better chance if they ‘progressed’ as a group. This was an acknowledgment both of the need for self-discipline and of the influence – for good and bad – of the company we keep. It was impossible for them to separate their social lives from their economic aspirations, especially since their exclusion from power, lack of tertiary education and inability to start a new enterprise severely reduced their prospects for upward mobility. At some point we even discussed becoming members of the local ANC branch in order to be eligible for municipal tenders (cleaning parks, constructing pavements) that ward councillors used to build patronage. The club had to be transformed and the bar raised. This meant recruiting new members to a formal vehicle for ‘financialization from below’. On an analogy with similar processes in the industrial revolution (Smelser 1959), how did these men respond to the challenges outlined above? What spaces and practices did they modify? How did they seek to insert themselves, their bodies and their organizations into the larger economy?

Formality and ‘Financialization from Below’ The club meetings I attended in 2004 were relaxed and informal in their rhythm. The sub-members joined the members after their formal deliberations and the contributions were handed over to their host who received the monthly pot. Meetings were held on the first Sunday of every month at the house of whoever’s turn it was to ‘play’ stokvel. Usually hosting members and their mothers or girlfriends spent Sunday mornings preparing the food offered to club members during meetings. Whereas

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members got a plate of food and a few beers for ‘free’, sub-members had to pay. From 2005 several innovations altered the club’s organization and the rhythm of its meetings. Suddenly, members dressed up for the occasion with polished shoes and ironed trousers and shirts. Although our meetings were open only to full members, they were visible to passers-by. Conducting our meeting under the fig tree in Okre’s yard meant that no one could pass without noticing that our club was in session, that we were all dressed up for the occasion and that this was a ‘well-organized’ stokvel with ‘committed members’, adult men taking seriously their roles as sons, fathers and partners. In this way we communicated to kin and neighbours both the club’s existence and our individual aspirations. Bringing the club to the community’s notice placed an added sanction on members, inhibiting behaviour that could harm the organization. Another aspect of the club’s transformation was internal ‘formalization’, particularly the adoption of a constitution and other rules relating to dress code and behaviour during meetings. As president, Keno produced typed copies of an elementary constitution he had drawn up or copied, parts of which read: We as members of the above mentioned club commit ourselves to the club & its Rules & regulations which are been drafted by all of us as members. Old & New members coming, going or leaving the club through whatever reason. … NB: each & every member who have signed on dotted line of this agreement papers … of which the club is still running any member who fails to follow the agreement the fine is imposed on the guilty ones. The laws are to be respected everywhere in the world.

This last sentence emphasized that formality was a self-initiated process to signal the club’s inclusion in a larger social space. Using a club devoted to raising money and organizing finance, the members were making a conscious connection to other spaces in and beyond Soweto, on which they would be able to draw to alter their own environment and counter their dissatisfactions. All of this happened without direct intervention from either the state or the market. As of 2005 the formal part of meetings became decidedly sober affairs, beginning punctually at 2:00 pm in summer and 1:00 pm in winter. Members were obliged to be present during such meetings and to remain until at least 8:00 pm (or 7:00 pm in winter), although it was considered prudent to stay longer and ‘bond’ with fellow members and supporters. To crown it all, the members also decided to open a ‘club bank account’ – a product developed by commercial banks to cater for savings and credit clubs

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such as ours.3 It was decided that, despite bank offices now being more common in Soweto than before, we would go into the city to open this account, not only because we were sure to get better service there, but also because it would signal our intention to connect ourselves to the world beyond the township and beyond the social difficulties it presented to working-class men. In the process of ‘raising the bar’, our banking practice shifted from allocating contributions to members in a monthly rotation to pooling them as savings for future use. In 2004 every full member gave the host a monthly amount of 80 rand. The host received 560 rand (80 rand multiplied by seven), plus 20 rand from every sub-member who attended. In return, the host gave members and sub-members a plate of food, as well as a crate of twelve Hansa Lager quarts (costing 60 rand) to be shared among the members (sub-members bought their own beer). The club was organized along the lines of a typical rotating credit association and had no method for collective savings or investment funds. The changes introduced in 2005 meant that every member contributed 100 rand to the host in return for a plate of food and this was called ‘table money’. The host no longer provided beer to members, who had to bring their own. In addition, every member contributed 150 rand for ‘banking money’, which was deposited into the club account we had opened. ‘Fine money’ was also collected in the meetings and kept separately by one member who kept track of this money. We retained an element of rotating credit in that every member contributed 100 rand to the host, but in addition we now also saved 1,200 rand collectively (150 rand multiplied by eight – one member contributed 300 rand every month). At times meetings would take up to two hours to complete, with discussion centred mainly on the club’s future and how the monies we were saving were ‘going to work for us’. We expressed our various opinions about how the banked money should be used. Initially we agreed to share out the money in December, with one member taking home the equivalent of two members’ shares given his double monthly contributions. The financially most-secure member wanted us to use our savings to travel as a collective to Cape Town or Durban. Okre wanted the money to pay school fees for his son and for the festive expenses that December and January always bring. Pitso hoped to use his savings for the business he wanted to open. Keno never expressed his wishes, partly because he felt he had to support Okre, given his intimate knowledge of his financial struggles. The other member wanted us to save more money and to invest the money we had already saved in buying cattle that he would keep safe at his village in the Northern Province. We discussed buying a taxi that

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could be used for public transport in Soweto. This was ruled out because of the high risks involved. It was also suggested that we buy a pickup truck to lease to the municipality, which would take responsibility for its maintenance. I suggested that we use our savings as a deposit on buying a house in Soweto, as it remained one of the few areas in Johannesburg where monthly rental income exceeded bond repayments. Members’ monthly contributions could be used to service the bank’s bond on the house while additional income from rent would be saved for a deposit on another house, until every member had acquired a house. This idea was particularly appealing for members who were living with their parents or in backrooms and had no prospect of inheriting a house. As the months passed by, members became increasingly caught up in a vision of ‘not working for money, but making money work for us’. This became an important catchphrase expressing their desire to participate in a formal economy where ‘money makes money’ and most of the wealth they saw around them was created. We discussed investing the club’s savings in shares in the JSE (Johannesburg Stock Exchange) or with a commercial bank to invest in the ‘money market’. The phrase ‘making money work for you’ was also used then by one of the commercial banks in a print advertisement where a smiling (white) professional man leant back in a chair with his hands clasped behind his head. In it the bank promised investors returns that were not unusually high, but it communicated a kind of work of which these men could only dream: relaxing while your money grows by itself. In their eyes, of course, this was how many white men had become rich in the first place: profiting from the rich mineral deposits underground while sitting in their air-conditioned offices above ground ‘managing’ the armies of black workers who did the hard work underground. They also linked the switch from working for money to letting money work for you, to the political freedom Africans had obtained with the advent of constitutional democracy. In short, the tables had turned: under apartheid they had to work for money, but now money had to work for them. Whereas previously they may have associated ‘letting money work for you’ with white people, because of their seemingly superior financial knowledge and skills, they now recognized a new regime of wealth, where a black elite got rich through financial deals and debt-funded empowerment schemes that they too could take part in. While I was struck by how little club members knew about the lives and earnings of our neighbourhood’s new social elites, whom I also came to know well, they often attributed their riches to this notion: money is working for these men and not for us. It is not difficult to understand

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why. We were then witnessing the consequences of the 2001 to 2004 economic boom that fed the growth of a new class, together with more job opportunities opening up for English-speaking Africans with higher education because of affirmative action and government employment (Seekings and Nattrass 2000; Terreblanche 2003). Locally, this group became an important point of reference in continuing reformulations of models of masculinity, models closely tied up with business success and the ability to be mobile. The club members were also critical of these elites in terms common among poorer residents: for their selfishness, materialism and conspicuous consumption. They foregrounded their own struggle to come to terms with increased social differentiation in the neighbourhood, with the demands that new local formulations of masculinity placed on them, and with changes in the gender dynamics of relations with female partners and girlfriends. Their conversations were dotted with references to the disjuncture between their own position and the seemingly unlimited possibilities for accumulating wealth by local men and women who had ‘moved up the league’.4 Such talk often included stories about men winning huge government tenders, being coopted as a Black Economic Empowerment partner, or even winning the National Lottery. Every now and then someone from the neighbourhood either moved out of Soweto to the suburbs or bought a new black BMW 320i straight from the showroom floor. Or they spotted a younger sister of a mutual friend at a wedding driving a new silver Hyundai. Often those same men and women had grown up not far from them, a few even in a council house not too different from their own. This is why such consumption is important yet problematic: it is a crass symbol of growing social inequality. It stands not for changing relationships between persons and objects (materialism or consumerism) but for changing relationships between people (inequality). That there are suddenly men from the same neighbourhood apparently earning huge sums of money and displaying this wealth by driving costly vehicles, drinking expensive alcohol and getting married ‘in style’ places an enormous strain on them. These elites are not only raising the bar in the status game, but also reshaping definitions of masculinity and raising mothers-in-law’s expectations regarding bride wealth. They explicitly linked struggles over money to the increased costs of establishing a home and getting married, the demands that female partners were making on what they earned, and the pressure social elites put them under by redefining what it means to be successful. Club members condemned these practices as being the opposite of the concept of ubuntu. These elites were further accused of ‘forgetting where they come from’, of ‘wanting

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to be better than us’ and ‘becoming too white’. Yet these same elites, especially the men, provide the club members with tangible evidence of real upward mobility, with new consumption practices to emulate and with role models other than the ‘gangster’. These men and women were evidence of the ability of money to ‘work for black people’ now, mirroring how urban middle-class youth have appropriated workingclass dress styles to express a new class position in post-apartheid South Africa (Bogatusu 2002).

Institutional Change, Reconfigured Mutuality and Cultural Ideals How then can we understand what happened with this particular club in the space of two years – the near fixation with rules, constitutions, fines and so forth? An earlier generation of scholars interpreted such formal practices as both an aping of white behaviour and evidence of some ‘African philosophy’. Writing about women’s church groups (manyanos), Mia Brandel-Syrier (1962: 46–57) commented, whereas ‘Europeans’ (white South Africans) approach matters of dogma, cult and conduct in terms of general principles, the ‘African concept of Law comprehends the totality of rules and regulations, customs and usages by which personal behaviour and social conduct is regulated and directed’ (1962: 54). She described the manyano matrons’ respectable behaviour as being typical of the ‘law-needing and law-respecting’ bourgeoisie of the time (1962: 56). Peter Magubane (1963), in his study of sports, voluntary associations and politics in Durban, when writing about the Durban and District African Football Association in the 1930s, argued that African elites were aspiring to the practices of the dominant social group. But such interpretations do not consider how formalization from below expresses agency, and it should not be surprising if this is expressed today through such institutions with a long history of self-organization, reciprocity and sociability. While self-organization is not new to the working classes of Johannesburg, this type of formalization from below is an experiment in agency under conditions of financialization. It was less about aping a certain notion of whiteness or conforming to middle-class behaviour than a conscious decision to start performing on another level; to raise the bar, so to speak, and to domesticate formal finance as part of a process of selfmaking. The emphasis on producing a constitution, getting everyone to sign it publicly and the elaborating of all sorts of regulations, was less about conforming to perceived white middle-class behaviour than about

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creating organizational space that was geared to participation in formal finance, and thus stood normatively and practically in opposition to the challenges of everyday life in a Sowetan neighbourhood. Forging new organizational practice was a way of elevating the club onto a different plane as an association, to a space and time dimension that set it apart from other, mostly informal neighbourhood spaces, styles and rhythms. One must remember the context of informality that characterizes the forms of sociability and everyday life in Soweto. Club members were constructing a boundary between ‘business’ and ‘pleasure’, between formality and informality. And this helped them to draw a line between the frivolity of everyday life and their very serious desire for respectability as mature men. A number of pressing organizational dilemmas had to be solved. On one level, this involved moving relations between members from friendship to quasi-contract. One can see the club’s introduction of a signed constitution and the elaboration of rules, regulations and fines as part of an uneasy movement from being an association based on friendship to one based on contract (Hart 2001).5 The constitution, a formal bank account, regulations and fines served as impersonal sanctions against absconding or not meeting monthly contributions. This made it possible to reduce the highly personalized content of relations between members and to express, through the association, the members’ shared but separate interests. Still, the contract among members was inherently very fragile, since there was no impersonal sanction to enforce the contract. There was no such force as a religious ideology or legal system and state bureaucracy with the power to sanction members and enforce agreements. In the absence of an enforceable contract, the members had to develop other sanctions in their efforts to generate trustworthiness. As they transformed the club’s organization from one of friendship and informality to contract and formality – reflecting the move from the informal to the formal economy – the physical bodies of club members became increasingly important as sites for expressing discipline, commitment, organizational sanction and the making of trustworthiness. In other words, following Mauss (2006 [1935]), the members had to cultivate a different set of ‘techniques of the body’ within the context of the club. But these new techniques were not just strategies for minimizing risk and maximizing savings. Why would becoming a man, a father and a citizen be in any way tied to men’s participation in a tiny, neighbourhood savings club? The limited literature available attests to the importance of money in the construction of gendered and class identities in South Africa’s urban areas (Glaser

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2000; Bähre 2002). To state the obvious, in capitalist economies money is of central importance for both economic survival and social and cultural reproduction. Money is not just a medium of exchange, a means of payment, a store of value and a unit of account. Money is also a symbolic system, a form of communication; it is regulated by state and non-state actors in ways that bring cultural and social contexts to light (Bloch 1989; Zelizer 1994; Bähre 2002). For the men featuring in this chapter, the meaning of money lies in its incredible ability to turn one into an adult man and give expression to new-found political freedoms. The dark side of money, as they know full well, is its ability to postpone or even deny the most ‘natural’ of rights – becoming an adult and an economic citizen. The structural position of these men in society and the dissatisfactions they felt as a result of their inability to reproduce human life, led them to respond to social change by investing considerable effort in a new financial institution. The members’ participation in this club and how they transformed it and themselves, were not just about saving more effectively, but also about trying to become adult men and citizens. While their subjectivity was not explicitly political in the sense of being open to formal political action, these men were actors in an unfolding political process. Were they successful in domesticating finance? This question hardly addresses the immense structural shifts that were taking place above the level of their immediate life goals and the domestic economy. While the processes of self-formalization and ‘financialization from below’ are driven by global and national market interests seeking to extract profit, it is also sustained by individual and groups bent on achieving culturally defined notions of what it means to be a human and, in this case, adult men. There is no easy fit yet between these two levels and the contradictions between them are apparent in the lives of the men described here. The fact that commercial banks can increase their profits by administering the savings of working men and women through the proliferation of clubs such as these means that they are encouraging their formation. This argument echoes Graeber’s (2011) argument about what he calls the ‘everyday communism’ that underpins sociality in every society. It is evidently in the interests of South Africa’s commercial banks that this ‘baseline sociality’ not only exists but flourishes. The financialization of collective savings thus depends, in unexpected ways, on a range of everyday practices grounded in principles of reciprocity, sharing and even mutuality. Perhaps financial markets depend on these social processes more than other markets. In this dependence perhaps lies the potential for a politics of finance, yet to be explored, in which both financialization from above and self-organization from below can play a role.

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NOTES I would like to acknowledge the following people who have contributed in one way or the other to shaping this chapter: Deborah James, Keith Hart, Joe Trapido and the Human Economy collective at the University of Pretoria. 1. Stokvels have long been seen not only as savings clubs but also as vehicles for earning income. How did stokvels facilitate business and generating profits, and why was there such a strong association between stokvels and the sale of liquor? Kramer (1974: 42–45) described how a stokvel meeting that was primarily about ‘savings’ could easily be converted into a moneymaking enterprise through the sale of alcohol. Members could charge exorbitantly high prices for alcohol and food at stokvel meetings and parties (sometimes called ‘swinging bashes’). He noted how hosts would sometimes make 100 per cent profit on the sales of liquor and food, especially if they advertised the party well and other members brought friends (‘supporters’ or iziwengu). Brandel-Syrier (1962: 77) noted that even some manyanos engaged in regular stokvels for the purpose of making money. Lukhele (1990: 10) wrote that liquor runners (illegal bootleggers) were unlicensed wholesale distributors who served shebeens and stokvel members. He estimated that 80 per cent of these runners’ business came from shebeens and 20 per cent from stokvels and street sales. These liquor runners sold from well-guarded ‘liquor forts’ which were located right next to licensed liquor premises. The forts and liquor stores were connected with underground tunnels hidden by clever false doors. Bottles were sold from hatches or windows in the forts that kept dealers’ faces hidden from customers (Lukhele 1990: 11). Kramer (1974: 46–47) refers to a story appearing in The World newspaper at the time which dealt with the puzzling question of why people would be prepared to pay such inflated prices for food and drink. He suggested that they fulfilled an important entertainment function, especially given the lack of places for it. He also observed the close link between stokvels and shebeens, and suggested that they met the same need: ‘Both are deeply rooted in the activities which arose during the period prior to 1962 when it was illegal for Blacks to buy or be in possession of alcohol’ (1974: 46). Moreover, they provided male members with the opportunity to entertain their girlfriends or ‘concubines’, as members did not bring their wives to such gatherings (1974: 47). Given the scarcity of opportunities for entertainment and recreation, there was no doubt very little ‘choice’ for Soweto residents. There was not much chance for residents to express their preferences or to organize boycotts and other forms of ‘consumer activism’. Stokvels were not only used by migrants living in the townships; Kynoch (2000b) mentions that the urban-based and ‘ethnic’ Basotho organization of migrant workers called the Amarashea made use of stokvels on the Free State mines to raise funds for the Basotho Congress Party. They had other ways of raising and pooling funds: burial societies, membership fees and organized protection rackets with which they bribed police and hired lawyers (Bonner 1993; Kynoch 2000a, 2000b). 2. Vol. 82 of Africa contains a special issue on popular economies in South Africa.

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3. This Club Account was designed for stokvels and was a basic transaction account to which three members had signing rights. A constitution and copies of our identity documents were also required by the bank before we could open it. 4. Many working-class men I interviewed claimed that their culturally defined role as sources of authority was being challenged on all fronts – at home where girlfriends or sisters earned more than they did, in work situations where they work for women managers and in media representations of strong, financially secure and independent women. Men, even middle-class men, often complained about the positions that women are assuming in households and public life. On a number of occasions, men traced this change to the 1995 Beijing conference on women’s rights. This was one of the first major women’s conferences after 1994 that South Africans attended and was reported on in the national media. For this particular generation of men at least, it signalled a turning point in the transformation and construction of gender relations linked to real changes in the opportunities afforded women in politics and business. No wonder then that the ‘unfair’ demands women make on men cause these men to feel bitter towards them, a situation made worse by the fact that there are men in the same neighbourhood who are seemingly able to accept and satisfy these new demands. The members of our club, however, were never placed in a situation – unlike me – where they could see and understand the private frustrations of such social elites. 5. Hart (2001: 108ff ) wrote about the choices confronting Frafra entrepreneurs in the slums of Accra during the 1960s in terms of kinship, friendship and contract. The system of contract was fostered by civil society, with individuals entering market contracts freely while accepting their binding obligations, as they sanctioned by impersonal state laws. This model was hard to adopt since the state bureaucracy was very ineffective and demanded literacy from people who wanted the state to work for them (2001: 109). Also, the conditions of rational calculation were constantly subverted by the general shortage of money that pushed people into credit relations of a highly personalized nature. A second model, a ‘primitive’ form of guarantee, was based on kinship identities and shared language that was pre-adapted to the statelessness of the slum. It was difficult for the entrepreneurs, however, to employ kinship idioms to express the idea of shared but separate interests. Thirdly, there was a zone of free-floating association where self and other met in some reciprocal understanding. Interest was negotiated within relations moulded by shared experience and even friendship. The relations were personal, active and concrete and the currency within this sphere was trust (a willingness to endure risk and uncertainty in human relations based on partial prior knowledge).

Chapter 4

░ Market, Race and Nation History of the White Working Class in Pretoria JOHN SHARP

People who used to make up the white working class in Pretoria have fallen on hard times since the ending of apartheid in South Africa. Many of the industries in which they were given preferential employment for much of the twentieth century have been shut down, exposing them to a diminishing labour market in which they must compete directly with black jobseekers. They have lost most of the advantages that accrued to them in consequence of being classified as white and belonging to the Afrikaner volk (nation), and many black people have come to reside in their once carefully segregated suburbs. In this chapter I want to give some examples of how these people are coming to terms with their new circumstances, showing how they contrive to insert themselves into an economy that is increasingly stacked against them, and how they relate to the black people around them – now their fellow citizens – in the course of doing so. My argument will be that these people have gone a long way to confounding the prophets of doom who insisted, when the apartheid era was ending, that white, Afrikaans-speaking, blue-collar workers would never be able to cope with the changes that lay ahead of them (Schutte 1995). Far from being paralyzed by bitterness, resentment and acute antipathy towards black people, members of the former white working class in Pretoria have displayed more pragmatism and resourcefulness than most observers thought possible. This does not mean that they have all adapted smoothly to the post-industrial economy in their part of the city, Pretoria West, or that they have suddenly become ‘colour blind’ or converts to the ideal of non-racialism that is held up to all citizens by the post-apartheid South African constitution. But what they are doing in both areas deserves recognition, not least because it casts critical light on some of the more politically correct ideas about ‘race rela-

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tions’ and the economy that are currently in vogue among South African elites (Erasmus 2008: 169–181). I will also try to explain why members of the white working class have proved themselves more adaptable than the gloomy predictions held possible, and why the observers who made them got things wrong. This will involve an excursion into the history that has led up to the present. But I want to start the discussion with a current example.

‘Farming’ Together Jan Visser was retrenched from the steelworks in Pretoria West in 1993. He was one of thousands of white, mainly Afrikaans-speaking, bluecollar workers who lost their jobs after the works, which had been run by the state-owned Iron and Steel Corporation (Iscor) since the 1930s, were privatized in the late 1980s. The new transnational owner, Mittal Steel, downsized the plant and the labour force until the mid-1990s, and then closed the Pretoria West works entirely. This had serious knock-on effects on downstream industries, particularly those manufacturing armaments and munitions, which were already struggling because of the ending of the apartheid regime’s southern African wars in the 1980s. As many as 15,000 white workers in Pretoria West were left unemployed within a short period of time, which coincided with the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. Like many of his fellows, Jan tried his hand at various small business ventures in the wake of his retrenchment. But, as he told me, ‘There were just too many of us doing the same things. Every second guy started a garden service, and they ended up cutting each others’ lawns.’ Jan put his severance pay into a small hardware shop, which he tried to run with a former work partner. After several years the attempt ended in disaster, with his partner absconding and leaving Jan with the debts. He then spent five years doing intermittent odd jobs ‘of a kind I prefer not to talk about’. Whatever these jobs were, they did not help his financial situation. He lost his house in 2001 and had himself declared bankrupt the following year. His health suffered and his wife threatened to leave him. There were periods when he had to farm his three young children out to relatives because he was unable to support them. Then in 2003 he had a lucky break. A chance contact put him in touch with the manager of a bakery who was looking for a reliable electrician to repair some refrigeration equipment. Having earned his electricians’ ticket at Iscor, Jan jumped at the opportunity. After repairing the equip-

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ment successfully, he was told he would be called back in the event of future malfunctioning. Knowing that occasional jobs for one bakery would not be enough to sustain his family, he plucked up courage to ask the manager to refer him to others. Over the next few years, he acquired half a dozen more bakeries as clients, spread in a wide arc to the northwest of the city. The more his one-man business grew, the more time he had to spend on the road to reach his far-flung clients. When the hours became impossible, he was forced to give careful thought to hiring an assistant. His experience with his hardware store partner made him reluctant to involve anyone else in his new venture, but he eventually swallowed his reservations and hired a white youth just out of trade school. Within a year his doubts about the wisdom of this hiring were confirmed. He discovered that his assistant was surreptitiously undercutting him and setting up a rival business with his hard-won clients, using the vehicle and tools he provided to do so. He therefore changed employees, hiring a black man without the qualifications necessary to do the job independently. The only problem with this employee, Abel Ramotse, was that he lived in a shack in an informal settlement outside Atteridgeville, the black township in Pretoria West. He was therefore some distance away from Danville, the suburb in which Jan lived, and was difficult to contact quickly when they were called out to do repairs in the middle of the night. Jan decided to provide accommodation for Abel and his family on the property he was renting, where he would always be within instant reach. Abel’s family occupied a couple of rooms with a separate entrance at the back of Jan’s house. I first met Jan in 2006, and he soon proved very helpful in introducing me to his friends and former workmates in Danville and neighbouring suburbs. But I was also fascinated by his work-cum-domestic arrangement, which I had the opportunity to observe on numerous visits to his home. The relationship between Jan and Abel, and their respective families, was complex. Since Abel’s family was on the premises, it was logical for Jan’s wife, Susannah, to employ Abel’s wife, Refilwe, as a domestic help. The Ramotses therefore supplied the Vissers with two handlangers (literally, ‘hand extenders’), compounding the employer-employee relationship between them. On the other hand, the fact that the families lived in such close proximity meant that neither had much by way of a private life, although, as far as I could tell, each family maintained the polite fiction that it knew nothing the other had not expressly told it.

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Jan and Abel spent long working hours in each other’s company, which they often extended by drinking beer or eating together on the back porch after returning from the job. The intimacy between the men was complemented by that between their wives, who occupied the time their husbands spent relaxing in this way by chatting and drinking tea together in the kitchen. Since the young children of both families were of similar ages, they were constant companions around the house, with the boys, black and white, frequently ganging up against the girls, or the girls seeking to exclude the boys from some interesting, and secret, pursuit. There were, of course, limits to the intimacy between the families. The adults never sat down to eat a meal together inside the house, and Abel rarely entered the main part unless he was engaged in domestic repairs. Refilwe had the run of the house on account of her job, but all socializing she did with Susannah was confined to the kitchen. Although they paid the rent on the whole house, Jan and Susannah never barged into the back rooms, but always knocked and asked permission to enter before doing so. The children had much greater freedom, and darted in and out of both sides of the house without hindrance. Abel’s children spent more time in Jan’s children’s rooms, no doubt because the toys and games were better there, and they were occasionally allowed to sleep over in them, using blankets and pillows they brought from the other side. The character of these interactions sometimes turned on who was there to observe them. On my first visit to the house, I interrupted Jan and Abel drinking beers together in the backyard. Jan leapt to his feet and met me as I came round the corner of the house. He ushered me in quickly through the back door and took me to the voorkamer (the formal ‘front room’), where he gave me a beer and produced a fresh one for himself. Abel knew he was not meant to follow. Although I was allowed, after several visits, to join the two of them in the back yard, I observed the same pattern of rapid disassociation on subsequent occasions when Jan’s white friends called. At the first sign of their arrival, Abel would break off the interaction, disappear into his back rooms, and emerge after a suitable interval to start some task in the garden. None of the visitors were fooled by this. On the contrary, they understood the whole set-up between the two men and their families, and made it clear to me that they approved of it wholeheartedly. One of them whispered a telling comment when Jan and Abel were out of earshot. It was not only a ringing endorsement of the complex relationship but also a clue to its historical roots, which I explore below. ‘Kyk net vir Jan en Abel’,

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he exclaimed enthusiastically, ‘hulle boer saam’ (Just look at Jan and Abel, they’re farming together).

The Pre-Industrial Countryside Afrikaner nationalist plans to rescue the ‘poor whites’ in South African cities in the early twentieth century drew strength from a myth about the countryside. This was told and retold in the Carnegie Commission Reports and the report of the Volkskongres (People’s Conference) on the Armblankevraagstuk (Poor White Question; Du Toit 1934) in the 1930s, and in the Kerk en Stad (Church and City) Report of 1948 (Albertyn, Du Toit and Theron 1948). It was that rural Afrikaners’ aversion to other races had caused them to keep themselves separate from black people for more than two hundred years. It held that social interaction with black people had been kept to the absolute minimum consistent with rural life, and that there had been strict avoidance of any form of intimacy. The myth claimed that this characteristic of the Afrikaners had preserved them as representatives of the white race during their long sojourn in the heart of African darkness. The point of the myth was to allow Afrikaner nationalists to identify the cities – to which Afrikaners had been drawn in numbers only in the late nineteenth century – as the sites in which this age-old ‘distinctiveness’ (eiesoortigheid) first came under threat. ‘Urban poverty is a powerful force for the eradication of the dividing line between white and black’, claimed the Kerk en Stad report, ‘[because] all races live together in the slums. Urban employers are much less concerned with the maintenance of the colour line than the Afrikaners’ (Albertyn, Du Toit and Theron 1948: 46). For this reason the nationalists were obliged to step in themselves, during the depression of the 1930s, and institute measures to rescue the ‘poor whites’ from this ostensibly new fate. Like most myths, this ‘distinctiveness’ version of the past contained an element of truth. But it was a limited truth that applied mainly to the early twentieth century, when the reorganization of agriculture along capitalist lines had commenced, and it applied most directly to those white landowners who were in the process of accumulating capital. These farmers had an interest in breaking many of the old and intimate ties that had bound black and white people together in the countryside, and in reducing black people to the status of subservient wage labourers – a category distinct, and at a distance, from their white masters. This process and the resistance it induced have been explored by many historians

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(Beinart, Delius and Trapido 1986; Keegan 1986; Bradford 1987), but Charles van Onselen (1990, 1996) provided an insightful account of the kinds of relationships between black people in the white-owned countryside and those Afrikaners who were not on course to become capital-accumulating farmers, that persisted in some instances well into the twentieth century. Drawing on the oral testimony of Kas Maine and many others, Van Onselen explored the world of the small landowners, the white bywoners (tenants or squatters) and the landless ‘poor whites’ in the early twentieth century, highlighting the character of their diverse relationships with still-wealthy black sharecroppers (such as Maine himself), with black labour tenants and farm labourers, and with the transient black workers who moved across the countryside in particular seasons. The point he emphasized was that, even at this relatively late stage, blacks and whites did not face each other as two distinct and uniformly hostile categories in the rural areas, and that black people were not always in a position of utter subservience. The nature of their relationships was inflected by their diverse class positions relative to each other. Sharecroppers such as Maine had close – and sometimes quite egalitarian – relations with the undercapitalized white landowners from whom they rented land, resulting in a large part from the fact that sharecropping involved the sharing of risk between the parties involved. Given their relative wealth, moreover, people like Maine were also in a position to obtain a measure of respect and deference, by no means grudgingly given, from Afrikaner bywoners and landless ‘poor whites’. Small landowners worked side by side in the fields with their sharecroppers and tenants, and landless whites often lived amongst their black counterparts. The testimonies Van Onselen wove together were drawn from particular parts of the Transvaal countryside, especially the southwest region where the march to capitalist agriculture was relatively slow, and black sharecroppers – and indeed small landowners and white bywoners – survived for some time into the twentieth century. But the historical memories of the white residents of contemporary Pretoria West – one of the areas in which the Afrikaner Nationalists took significant steps to rescue poor whites from their ‘new’ predicament – persuade me that the kinds of relationships to which Van Onselen referred were widespread, even though they may have ended rather earlier in some other parts of the province. Many of the subjects of my field research told me that their grandparents or great grandparents – the indigent forebears who had been obliged to make their way to the cities – had been owners of small pieces of land in various parts of the Transvaal or had eked out a living on land that belonged to someone else.

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The relationship between Jan and Abel can therefore be seen as a post-industrial variant of the set of relationships with black people in which many of the forebears of Pretoria West’s present-day white residents were likely to have participated in the pre-industrial countryside. Having heard about these past relationships from the older generations, Jan’s white friends had a grasp of the logic, and the good sense, of his work and domestic arrangements. Emerging from the ruins of the industrial era in Pretoria West, Jan had managed to claw his way to a position not dissimilar to that of a small landowner in the early twentieth century. The source of the advantage he had over Abel was not, as in the earlier period, a law that restricted land ownership to white people, but the electrician’s qualification he had acquired, by virtue of being white and a beneficiary of the system of industrial job reservation, in his former working life at Iscor. Abel had the practical know-how to do the job, but was limited in his ability to do it independently. For all the intimacy between them, Abel was clearly dependent on and subordinate to Jan. Yet he told me his partnership with Jan had opened many doors – it allowed him to put to work the skills he had picked up along the way, and allowed his family to escape life in a shack settlement. Abel was philosophical about his dependence on Jan. It certainly gave Jan scope to act arbitrarily and, on occasion, disrespectfully towards him: ‘I don’t like it when he threatens to klap me (give me a smack) as if I was a young boy.’ But, on the other hand, Abel said, ‘He can’t do all the work without me. He needs me to make more money, and I’ve worked out how to keep on the right side of him. I get on pretty well with this Boer most of the time.’ When they did any first-hand research at all, commentators at the end of the 1980s limited themselves to asking white blue-collar workers questions about their attitudes to black South Africans. The answers caused Gerhard Schutte (1995) and others to wonder if their attitudes were in any way redeemable or if they would propel them to join reactionary militias, such as the Boeremag (Boer Force), in numbers sufficient to pose a real threat to post-apartheid stability. But these were false alternatives, and Jan and his fellows have followed neither. The finding that they harbour considerable antipathy towards black people in general, or in the abstract, is by no means inaccurate; but the inquiries failed to distinguish between what people such as Jan say in response to leading questions and what they actually do when faced with a concrete challenge such as making a living. In this context, Jan was as pragmatic as his rural forebears were before him, and he was not simply making the best of a bad job. Like the

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behaviour Van Onselen discussed, his behaviour towards Abel was a complex mix of friendship and aversion, and respect and disdain, and his friends understood this. I never heard any of them criticize him for being in such close proximity to a black man. As far as his friends and neighbours were concerned, Jan’s relationship with Abel was part of a laudable initiative by which he was extricating himself from the misery of retrenchment. Many wished they could follow suit, but most of them find themselves in circumstances where their new-found intimacy with black people does not permit them to occupy such a clear-cut position of control.

The Industrial City The myth about age-old distinctiveness was a useful charter for the Afrikaner nationalists’ efforts to impose segregation on the poor whites in the cities in the 1930s. By arguing that these people’s circumstances were the result of adverse social conditions rather than biological ‘degeneration’, the Carnegie Commission Reports stimulated an intensification of the endeavour to provide them with salubrious, and segregated, housing in the cities. Construction of Good Hope Model Village had commenced in Cape Town in the late 1920s, and this project received favourable reviews at the Volkskongres in Kimberley in 1934 (Du Toit 1934: 294). The example was soon followed elsewhere in Cape Town (Epping Garden Village; Teppo 2004), in Johannesburg (the suburb of Jan Hofmeyr; Parnell 1988, 1992) and in an area to the west of the city centre in Pretoria. The development in Pretoria West differed from its counterparts in Cape Town. The Garden Villages in Cape Town were built by a private philanthropic organization – the Citizens Housing League – that was concerned solely with the provision of housing. The league was not, and never became, an employer of the people it housed in decent two- and three-bedroom family accommodations on the outskirts of the city. In contrast, many of the housing schemes constructed in Pretoria West were built and owned by Iscor, the area’s largest employer. The Iscor plant in Pretoria West was opened in 1934. Management was instructed by the state to give preferential employment to indigent whites from the surrounding areas (Pretoria and Johannesburg), and to construct housing to accommodate them. Records show that the company’s managers complied rather reluctantly, establishing their own housing utility company, and building the first 400 houses in an estate they called West Park, close to the plant, in the late 1930s.1 Stressing that

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capital was in short supply, they argued that provision of housing should be the responsibility of the local municipality rather than the employer. The Pretoria City Council took on building a 700-dwelling estate nearby (Danville) in the 1940s, but Iscor’s housing company developed additional estates in the 1950s and 1960s to keep pace with the expanding plant.2 Despite its initial reluctance to house its workers, Iscor eventually created an environment for poor whites that was more in line with the Afrikaner nationalist vision of the period than the one the Citizens Housing League managed to construct in Cape Town. The league selected the poor whites to fill its Garden Villages in Cape Town very carefully. They were required to be young, formally married, in receipt of a stable income, not given to wasteful expenditure, not heavy drinkers, and living in small domestic groups that could be matched to the league’s two- and threebedroom houses. In most instances, proof that the applicants were ‘white’ lay in their manifest possession of these laudable qualities rather than in detailed inquiry into their family histories. Many more such people could presumably have been found in Cape Town’s inner-city slums, but any ambitions the league may have had in this direction were limited by its ability to borrow funds to build houses. Having selected only a small number of beneficiaries, however, the league subjected them to close supervision. Its settlements were designed to facilitate easy surveillance, and social workers were on hand to provide individual instruction in hygiene, nutrition, good housekeeping and financial management. The results of this programme were startling (Teppo 2004: 123–164). Within fifteen years of its founding there was a pronounced exodus from Epping Garden Village, particularly on the part of the first residents’ children, who had benefited to such an extent from the wholesome environment that they acquired white-collar jobs and could afford to live in lower middle-class suburbs nearby. The exodus was so large that the league had difficulty finding sufficient ‘deserving poor’ to fill its Cape Town houses by the end of the 1950s, and was obliged, thereafter, to take in people who failed to exhibit the sterling qualities demanded of the first generation. It accepted people who departed radically from its earlier criteria because the state, now under National Party government, had come to guarantee their whiteness. But it was never able to repeat its earlier success with the new residents, and its Cape Town settlements came to have an increasingly prison-like character in the second half of the twentieth century – places where white people who had failed to make the grade as good, middle-class citizens were stored out of sight. The Citizens Housing League’s programme in many respects exemplified the colonial vision of racial hierarchy. The fact that it propelled a

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select category of white people from poverty to modest white-collar affluence so rapidly appeared to confirm the idea that members of the white race were inherently superior – in need of only a brief helping hand to resume their destiny. But this was not necessarily what the Afrikaner nationalists had in mind in the 1930s and 1940s, given that the intellectuals and idealists among them were willing to supplant the notion of biological hierarchy with a proposition about the essential cultural differences between volke (nations; Gilroy 2000: 33). The idealists’ premise was that white people’s destiny was not to dominate other races in perpetuity, but rather to be a distinct nation living according to its own traditions. It would be wrong, of course, to suppose that the shift from colonial to apartheid racism in South Africa held any advantage for those whose exclusion came to be based on a presumption of otherness rather than simple inferiority. But it did have an impact on the circumstances of poor whites in cities other than Cape Town. This was particularly clear in Pretoria, where the task of uplifting poor whites fell to their employer. There is no indication that Iscor selected its Pretoria workers with the careful attention employed in Cape Town, particularly because it did not face the difficulty of distinguishing between white and coloured residents of the inner-city slums. Nor would it have been in Iscor’s interest to have instituted the elaborate measures of personalized instruction that helped the league’s first beneficiaries to make a rapid transition into the ranks of the lower middle class. The nationalist idealists’ vision of an Afrikaner volk that comprised the full array of social classes necessary to make it a self-sufficient nation made much more sense in the Transvaal cities than in Cape Town, given that there was no significant presence of coloured people in Pretoria or Johannesburg to complicate the notion that there was no stigma attached to white people being manual workers. Moreover, this vision was by no means uncongenial to Iscor’s managers. Once they had accepted the state’s instruction regarding the composition of their labour force in Pretoria West, all the measures they took regarding its opheffing (uplifting) were designed to preserve it, and ensure its reproduction, rather than to propel its members into rapid upward mobility that would have encouraged them to leave the area. Iscor began selling houses to its tenants as early as the 1940s, in order to anchor them in a blue-collar community. The large number of cases in the 1950s and 1960s when it instituted legal action against workers who were recalcitrant in paying their mortgages suggests that this endeavour may have been too ambitious, but it was of a piece with the whole array of supplementary services the company provided.3 The lavish sports and recreation facilities, the hospitals and other medical services, and the

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internal loan facilities were all intended to encourage workers to stay in the area and in Iscor’s employ. And like other companies that dominated, and came to define, their social environments (Newman 1988: 174–201), it soon devised ways of recruiting successive generations from worker families. Ex-workers told me that it was the easiest thing in the world to put in a good word for one’s sons (and increasingly, in later years, one’s daughters) and have them taken into, and paid from the outset by, one or other of Iscor’s training programmes. The ex-workers also said it was very difficult to get oneself fired from Iscor. Absenteeism or insubordination or drunkenness on the job was taken as a sign of likely domestic discord, and supervisors dispatched the company’s social workers to evaluate the causes and recommend solutions, which ranged from counselling by local dominees to free treatment for the worker or any member of his household at Iscor’s own rehabilitation centre. Today the ex-workers have mixed feelings about the largesse the company provided in the past. Many wonder if they were wise to have bought into Iscor’s old motto that all workers needed to do was to present themselves at the factory gate and ‘the company will look after the rest’. They suspect, today, that all these additional benefits were part of a zero-sum package. The fact that they were encouraged to rely on them meant, they suggest, that direct wages were lower than they would otherwise have been, and that workers were relieved of the necessity of learning to cope on their own before the Iscor plant closed. Looking back, they are similarly sceptical of the ideal the Afrikaner nationalists sought to graft onto the Iscor project in Pretoria West. The course of events in Cape Town’s poor white settlements may have served to instil in early residents the conviction that the standing they soon attained relative to the mass of poor people in the city was no more than their racial due. But the Pretoria West situation was intended to convey a much more convoluted message. Whites who worked and resided in this part of the city were to be strictly segregated from black people not as a demonstration of their inherent superiority, but so that they could assume their assigned part – at the bottom of the Afrikaner volk’s internal hierarchy – in a ‘separate but equal’ morality play. The exhortations of the nationalist ideologues of the 1940s and 1950s were full of homilies warning whites that it was wrong – not to mention sinful – to think that they could lord it over their black compatriots in perpetuity. Far better for them to accept the notion of apartheid (total separation) between black and white as a way to unlearn their prejudices and give due recognition to the cultural differences between the various ‘nations’ in South Africa.4

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The nationalists’ idealism was inscribed in the organization and spatial layout of Pretoria West. Ex-workers told me that although black people were always employed at the Iscor plant, the jobs they were allocated rendered them largely invisible to the white workers, some of whom were obliged to perform the most menial tasks on the production line as the price of this freedom. Moreover, on the principle that working-class whites should learn to look after themselves in all respects, the housing constructed in West Park, Danville and the other Pretoria West suburbs from the 1940s to the 1960s deliberately made no provision for resident servants, and no alterations or additions to the properties were allowed for as long as the occupants remained tenants of the Iscor utility company or the City Council. The nationalist idealists may have told themselves that measures such as these would restore the rural status quo ante of distance between the races, but the ‘poor whites’ subjected to them evidently found them distinctly unfamiliar and not at all to their taste. Pretoria West was, reportedly, the most difficult part of the city in which to enforce the Group Areas Act in the 1950s, because the residents were reluctant to heed the injunction that it was illegal to have black people living on their premises. The residents demanded servants – why on earth should white people who had come into steady wages have to clean their own homes or wash clothes themselves? And, in the absence of servant’s quarters, they were willing to make space to accommodate the servants they wanted in their two-, three- and four-bedroom houses. If there were ever a time when the nationalist discourse of ‘total separation’ made sense to the white residents of Pretoria West it would have been the 1970s and 1980s (by which time, of course, the discourse had been all but abandoned by the nationalist leaders themselves). This was the period – short-lived as things turned out – in which the white residents attained a measure of affluence sufficient to begin to think of themselves as ‘middle class’, along the same lines as their blue-collar counterparts in North America (Dudley 1994: 34). Two-income households with the aspirations of middle-class consumers purchased many homes that were still being offered at a substantial discount by Iscor and the City Council, and set about altering and refurbishing them beyond recognition. Along with additional rooms and swimming pools, built-in barbeques and wagon-wheel garden walls, characteristic additions of the period were the outside rooms to accommodate live-in domestic servants, who now found themselves tucked away and, when not directly engaged in sweeping their floors, rendered out of sight and mind to the employers, in line with more affluent sensibilities.

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The idealists among the Afrikaner nationalists contrived to believe that ‘total separation’ would put an end to white domination. Hence the earnest entreaty they directed to poor whites in the 1940s and 1950s to make special effort to abandon all intimate relationships with black people on the grounds that such relationships were damaging to them as well as to the people being dominated. At the time, as I have suggested, the poor whites could not see the point of the entreaty, largely because they were not yet in a position to share its premise. Their past lives in the countryside, and their experiences in the cities up to that point, had taught them that any position of superiority they might have had over the black people around them was usually provisional – subject to recurrent negotiation through a micro-politics of status competition. Lord it too blatantly over the sharecropper and the small landowner ran the risk of alienating a valuable partner – someone prepared to share the risk of farming without much capital. Lord it too blatantly over the black neighbour in the inner-city slum and the new white town dweller ran the risk of alienating someone to whom it might be necessary to turn in time of need. The ‘total separation’ put into practice in Pretoria West worked eventually to bring the beneficiaries of Iscor’s paternalistic conditions of employment to a point where the idealists’ premise began to make sense. But this was probably not achieved until the 1960s, and the security of blue-collar life in the area did not last beyond the 1980s.

The Post-Industrial City Industrial Pretoria West had been built on policies of import substitution, intended first to foster the development of a national capital base, in the case of steel manufacturing, and later to counter the effects of apartheid South Africa’s pariah status and the consequent arms embargo. When South Africa achieved political rehabilitation and rejoined the global economy in the early 1990s, Pretoria West’s main industries were rapidly rendered redundant. Thousands of the area’s white industrial workers were retrenched in the first half of the 1990s, at a time when the new government’s employment equity policies meant that they no longer had easy recourse to alternative jobs in the civil service or the armed forces (both headquartered in the capital city). Some of these workers and their families moved away in search of jobs in other parts of the country (such as at the expanding platinum mines near Rustenburg), but many have

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remained under straitened circumstances, leading the popular media to make frequent mention of the ‘return of the poor whites’ to Pretoria West. There is considerable truth to this depiction. While some of the workers who had acquired a trade in the Pretoria West industries have managed to find other industrial employment or become self-employed, many of the ordinary production-line workers have been hard hit by the fact that their limited, and very specific, on-the-job skills cannot readily be transferred to new endeavours. Numbers of these former workers have been obliged to fall back on the training they received as young conscripts in the apartheid military forces. I know a few men who have had the good fortune to gain entry to the post-apartheid defence force, albeit in ranks lower than those they held as much younger men or as civilians on short-term contracts whose job is to impart the lessons they learnt during South Africa’s ‘border wars’ to new black recruits. But most who rely on past military experience find jobs in the private security industry, either within the country or, increasingly, abroad in war-torn countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The irony is that these men have become involved in a latter-day form of the system of labour migration characteristic of apartheid-era southern Africa. Like their black counterparts of old, they sustain their households by dint of being absent from them for long periods, and undertake distant and dangerous work under quasi-military conditions in all-male company. The irony is not lost on those involved, one of whom told me, laconically, that it is now ‘ons beurt om trekarbeiders te wees’ (our turn to be migrant workers). But, as was the case for black people involved in migrant labour under the previous dispensation, the alternatives are even less attractive. I mentioned the high failure rate among Pretoria West’s small business ventures at the start of the chapter. Men who felt betrayed by the large corporation for which they had worked were attracted to the notion of self-employment. Despite initial failure, they often persisted in these shaky ventures until all their financial resources had been consumed by their efforts to achieve independence from bosses. At this juncture they were obliged to take any opportunity that presented itself, in the process dealing with various kinds of authority figures whose arbitrariness far exceeded anything they had hitherto encountered. Working in bars, nightclubs and sex shops, or as door-to-door hawkers, newspaper sellers, car guards or on-street drug sellers is unstable employment where survival depends on one’s ability to blend obsequiousness and bravado in appropriate proportions.

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For those who do not have, or lose, the stomach for such performances, one of the few options is to pass the burden of making a living to other members of the household. Significant numbers of men in Pretoria West do this, partly in recognition of the fact that there has been a pronounced feminization of income-earning opportunities in the post-industrial parts of the city. More women than men find jobs in the ‘respectable’ service sector, working as shop assistants, waitresses, receptionists and clerks. But the price of this imbalance is the housebound husband, who often takes the frustrations of his helplessness out on his income-earning wife and their children. One sign that this is a common predicament in the area is the recent emergence of the phenomenon of rooming houses, catering principally to men who have split from their families. These establishments are converted family houses, offering single rooms to men who have given their own homes to the wives and children from whom they have separated. Residents often hoped that separation from their families was no more than temporary, telling me that the rooming houses offered respite from domestic humiliation, as well as freedom to search for income through activities they would not necessarily want to advertise to their wives and children. Rumours about these activities are rife in the rooming houses. One man, who kept to himself despite his fellow residents’ attempts to draw him out, was reputed to have become a hitman, selling his services not only to the local loan sharks and drug lords but also, on occasion, to the police. It was said that his charges varied according to the severity of the punishments he meted out, which ranged from breaking limbs to final removal – guaranteed untraceable. Lower down the scale of humiliation are the married couples that enter the sex trade. Few neighbours have kind words for the husband who pimps his wife, but it is a frequent occurrence. Every evening couples walk together to the main road running through the old working-class suburbs. When customers pick the wives up in their cars, the husbands write down the vehicles’ number plates – an ostentatious warning to customers to return the wives in one piece, and with the cash their services have earned. At the bottom of Pretoria West’s post-industrial heap are those who have lost not only their jobs but also their homes, the latter repossessed by the bank or sold in pursuit of futile self-employment schemes. Some of these people find accommodation in friends’ or neighbours’ garages, but others end up in one of the homeless shelters in this part of the city. The best-known of these shelters, which is privately run, started as a facility that looked after patients who had been discharged from a nearby mental hospital. These outpatients entrusted their monthly disability grants

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to the shelter in return for bed, board and rudimentary health care (the staff ensuring that they took their prescribed medication at the correct intervals). But the shelter has been obliged to open its doors wider to cater for those who are chronically without work or home. People in receipt of state support – for instance a civil pension or a child grant – follow the same practice of handing it over in return for benefits, although those without any such subvention are not turned away if the shelter has space for them. They live in an array of wooden Wendy houses erected on the property, and are required to work for food, accommodation and pocket money by preparing meals in the kitchen or making patchwork quilts in an ill-lit attic. It is only when members of the old working class in Pretoria West have reached this parlous condition that the city’s middle-class white citizens pay them any attention. The shelter has been adopted by several diehard Afrikaner nationalist political movements, whose members – mostly professional and affluent – donate money, food and other materials for the opheffing (uplifting) of the new poor whites. Since these movements underwrite the shelter, they are in a position to dictate its admission rules, insisting that these conform to their own unflagging commitment to the old ideal of ‘total separation’. The poor-white residents have no say in this matter whatsoever, but the fact that the shelter is prevented from admitting indigent black people means that it forfeits all prospect of official assistance, because the relevant authorities in post-apartheid South Africa will not support private organizations that practise racial discrimination. Yet the present-day Afrikaner nationalist movements are small and have limited influence. They have enough to enforce a whites-only admission policy, but not enough to stop enterprising black traders selling alcohol and cocaine on credit through the shelter’s fence or arranging for those inmates who fail to pay their debts to be beaten up if they venture beyond the gate.

‘Just Like a Bywoner’ Most of the white residents of Pretoria West are now in a situation where they encounter substantial numbers of black people who are more affluent than they are, or can assert some kind of authority over them, or both. Pretoria’s former white working-class suburbs have become far more desegregated since the end of apartheid than middle-class residential areas elsewhere in the city. This followed, of course, from the mass retrenchments of the 1990s, which forced blue-collar owners in financial

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difficulties to sell, and gave opportunity to upwardly-mobile residents of nearby black townships to buy at knock-down prices. Half the homes in Danville and West Park are now owned or rented by black people who moved out of townships such as Atteridgeville when they became beneficiaries of the state’s employment equity programmes in the civil service, the military and the police, and private firms. The sign of their current success is that their new homes are usually much better maintained than those of the remaining white residents, and the cars they park in their driveways are much newer. This is true of Pieter Mans’s black neighbours. There are six houses in the short cul-de-sac where he lives in Danville, and he and his family are the only white residents in the street. In contrast to the neighbours’ homes, his is in poor repair, with a warped garden gate that is hard to open, peeling paint on the walls, and several cracked windowpanes. Pieter was one of the last production-line workers to be retrenched before the steelworks’ final closure, and he found another job in a factory making armoured vehicles soon afterwards. Since this second job ended in the early 2000s, owing to diminished demand for the factory’s product, he has been unemployed. He spent a year or more searching actively for another job on a production line, but became dispirited by his lack of success. When I encountered him, he had resigned himself to staying at home and passed responsibility for earning an income to his wife, who then worked as a cashier in a clothing store in the city centre. Despite the time on his hands, Pieter never got round to fixing the house and his wife was upset by his laxity. He explained that it was difficult to motivate himself to do anything, and he blamed himself for the cooling of his relationship with his wife, who spent much of her spare time, when not working or caring for their three teenage children, engaged in church activities. His wife had distanced herself from him some years before when he had begun to drink during the day ‘out of sheer boredom’. Although he managed to extricate himself from the hole he had been digging, he acknowledged there were many days he was tempted to start again. To counteract this, he had taken to walking up and down his short street and talking to his neighbours whenever possible. The neighbours told me that at first they had thought he was a busybody with nothing better to do than keep an eye on them, presumably to check that their behaviour did not offend his proprieties. Gradually, however, they came to realize that his attempts to engage them in conversation stemmed from loneliness, and appreciated his informal patrolling as a device for collective security. When they came home from work, Pieter gave them detailed

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accounts of any strangers who had entered the street or knocked on their doors, partly as a means to engage them in more general conversation. Pieter has come to know all the neighbours on the street quite well, but his favourites are a young black couple who are both professionals. Since the husband is a medical doctor and his wife a nurse, their standing is a cut above the other residents, and their circumstances are furthest removed from Pieter’s. Danville is their first step into the formerly white property market, and it is highly unlikely to be their last. They have, nonetheless, renovated the house they bought to a high finish, doing much of the work themselves over weekends. This gave Pieter an opportunity to offer advice and later to help out, leading to further recriminations from his wife, but also to reciprocation from the couple in the form of invitations to drop by for coffee in the late afternoons. These social occasions – always at the couples’ home, never at his – are the highlight of Pieter’s days. He says he finds it interesting to talk to such highly qualified people, is pleased he was able to help them and appreciates the fact that they recognize that he still has something to contribute to the neighbourhood. ‘If it wasn’t for them, I’d be just like a bywoner [white squatter] here’, he told me, making a sweeping gesture that took in his own home as well as the street in which he lives. Pieter is not alone in making such a deprecating self-assessment in post-industrial Pretoria West. There are thousands of former blue-collar workers who would understand his reference to the landless poor whites of the pre-industrial countryside. They had to go cap in hand to beg leave to live on someone else’s land, and their self-respect was restored, at least in part, only when their benefactors gave some recognition to their services and their worth. Because landownership was then restricted to whites, their main benefactors were, by definition, more fortunate white people, but the bywoners were quite prepared, as Van Onselen explained, to doff their hats to prosperous black sharecroppers such as Kas Maine, particularly if the latter showed any inclination to recognize that they were more than just supernumerary – people who lived in the shadow of others.

Market, Nation and Race Like most of their fellows in Pretoria West recently, Jan Visser and Pieter Mans got along much better with the black people around them than observers thought possible twenty years ago. Part of the reason for this is that people such as Jan and Pieter share certain memories of what ‘race

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relations’ were like before the advent of the industrial era, and the system of apartheid, in South African cities. These memories, passed down from forebears who lived in the pre-industrial countryside, provide them with models of how to behave towards black people in a variety of positions relative to their own. Jan Visser found himself in a position, unusual in contemporary Pretoria West, where he could reconstruct a form of relationship that had been common in the pre-industrial countryside. His dealings with Abel Ramotse were premised on the fact that his position was unquestionably dominant, because he had the resources to make their relationship possible. But he did not have enough to nullify the possibility of a partnership in which they shared the rewards and risks of their joint endeavour. Yet his behaviour was not simply a matter of calculating inputs relative to returns. The close relationship in which he and Abel were involved provided scope for intimacy and mutual respect that went beyond calculation of this kind. In contemporary Pretoria West there are many more people in Pieter Mans’s position with regard to his professional neighbours. As calling himself a bywoner suggests, he too had a historical model on which to draw, even though it had to be adapted to a new situation where there are no longer any limits to his neighbours’ upward mobility (as there were to Kas Maine’s in the early twentieth century). But this is probably what attracted him to the young couple in question. The fact that they are so obviously of higher social standing makes it easier for him to negotiate the issue of race, reaching a condition of intimacy with them that overrides the problem of who, precisely, is drawing more advantage from the relationship. The fact that he was closer to the young doctor and his wife than to his other black neighbours is no accident. There are many people in the area who are willing to pay deference to black authority, without rancour, particularly when its position is unassailable. Men who have managed to get back into the armed forces, usually at a lower rank than they held in their youth, have often made a point of telling me how well they get on with the senior black officers under whom they now serve, notwithstanding the fact that they fought on opposing sides in the 1970s and 1980s, and the officers concerned were fast-tracked to their current ranks in the 1990s. ‘Ek gun hom die rang’ (I do not begrudge him the rank), said one of them about the general for whom he works, after telling me that this officer has been very friendly to him when they are alone, inviting him to sit down in his office after hours, share a beer and exchange reminiscences about the war in Angola. ‘But you have to be careful if another general comes along’, he said,

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‘because he will ask himself why the guy you’re chatting to is being so friendly with a white troepie [soldier]. If he’s being decent to you, you must be prepared to watch his back.’ Race remains an important element in all the relationships I have discussed. Former members of the white working class in Pretoria West have clearly not undergone a miraculous conversion to a condition in which race is no longer of any concern to them. Nor, indeed, have they abandoned their prejudices against black people as a category. The people they know and respect are invariably presented as the exceptions proving the general rule. But they have managed to figure out how to deal with selected black people in ways that recognize the humanity of both parties to the relationship. Given the dire future of racial enmity predicted for them, this is no small achievement. This holds up a mirror to the conceits of their more fortunate white compatriots. Like their counterparts in other parts of the world, middle-class white South Africans are often given to proclaiming that they have now achieved the happy condition of being colour blind, and have overcome whatever racial prejudice may have afflicted them in the past (Roediger 2003). Yet they retain the power and influence, and the distance from situations they cannot control, to permit their actions to belie their words. Denying that one is prejudiced does not free one automatically from being a racist. It seems that many middle-class whites could learn a great deal from people whose circumstances often oblige how they behave to contradict what they may say. Observers at the end of the apartheid era underestimated the pragmatism and adaptability of the white working class. Part of the reason for this was that the observers had themselves internalized the myth about age-old racial distance the Afrikaner nationalist intellectuals deployed to justify the ideal of ‘total separation’ they set about imposing on the poor whites, as well as on the black majority, in the cities in the first half of the twentieth century. But the notion that separation of this kind could bring an end to racial domination was absurd, and its proponents’ vision of discrete ‘nations’ living entirely apart from – and, therefore ostensibly, in equality with – each other, was defeated not only by the important politicians and captains of industry, who never had any intention of letting so fanciful an idea stand in the way of their efforts to consolidate a base for national capital in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It was also defeated by the blue-collar workers, recently raised from their standing as poor whites, who could not see the point of the whole exercise. Removing black people into a separate world, as the Afrikaner nationalist idealists hoped to do, would have deprived the poor whites

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of the intimacy that allowed them to explore the micro-politics of power differentials that gave them self-respect and standing. The end of apartheid imposed a situation of racial intimacy on many of the white residents of Pretoria West. The examples I have given from my field research show that although these people still harbour considerable prejudice towards the black people who now live in close proximity to them, they are pragmatic enough to recognize that self-respect, and indeed mutual respect, can be achieved just as well in relationships where one does not occupy the position of power as in those where one does.

Changing Circumstances There is a further twist to Jan Visser’s story. After five years of working with Abel Ramotse, Jan was offered a job by the owner of a large company specializing in installing and maintaining air-conditioning equipment in Pretoria. The new job meant a return to the formal economy, and came with health insurance for Jan’s family, unemployment benefits and an eventual pension. It was clearly too good to turn down and Jan accepted it at the end of 2010. He moved home to be nearer his work, and got rid of Abel Ramotse and his family. His social life in his new neighbourhood changed substantially. Whereas the demands of running his own enterprise had meant that he had had little time to socialize with anyone other than Abel, he now has definite working hours, as well as predictable free time in which to link up again with old friends and make new ones. His present social life is focused on a neighbourhood pub, where he and a group of friends get together, as regular as clockwork, on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons. These friends are all middle-aged white Afrikaners and their chief delight is to stage karaoke sessions in the pub, at which they sing along to selections of Afrikaans popular music from the 1970s and 1980s. Like other suburbs in the west of Pretoria, Jan’s neighbourhood has become desegregated and his next-door neighbours on two sides are black people, working in jobs similar to those held by the members of the glee-singing group. Although he is superficially polite to his neighbours across the fence, Jan has not seen fit to invite any of them to join his friends at the pub. What inference should one draw from this abrupt change? Is it that the pragmatism displayed by members of the white working class and their apparent openness to acknowledging the humanity of the black people they encounter are nothing more than a thin veneer they dispense with as soon as their circumstances improve? If this is so, it might

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well mean that at least one segment of the former white working class will eventually revert to the distant disregard they were encouraged to display towards black people in the apartheid era. Workers such as Jan acquired skills for which there is still a ready demand in a large city such as Pretoria. It may take them a long time and much experimentation to find their way back into the formal economy, but – as Jan’s case suggests – they are likely to do so sooner or later. Will they then take advantage of this return to construct new ‘whites-only’ enclaves, animated by nostalgia for an earlier sense of identity and belonging, within the city’s changing racial landscape? The more time I spend in the pub with Jan and his friends, however, the more I realize that this is too gloomy a depiction of their disposition. The group’s genesis is complex, turning only in part on the fact that its members, numbering about thirty, are all white and Afrikaans. Another important factor they have in common is that they have all gone through a prolonged period of personal hardship in the wake of Pretoria West’s deindustrialization and the political changes of the 1990s, some because they experienced both unemployment and the uncertainties of the informal economy, others – including those in the civil service, the police and the armed forces – because they were passed over for promotion for the best part of two decades while the post-apartheid state pursued its policy of employment equity. ‘I know it had to happen’ said the group’s policewoman, who has recently been given belated promotion, ‘but it was hard to keep telling myself that it’s just my bad luck to have been one of the ones who got held back.’ In this respect, the group’s exuberance celebrates the fact that they have come through a period of despondency successfully. This, as they say, sets them apart from others in the area, both whites who have not managed to extricate themselves from their plight and blacks who have not been through this particular episode. The banal pop songs of their youth, which they often perform with more gusto than finesse, are an expression of relief that they have been given an opportunity to ‘begin again’, and certainly reflect a renewed pride in the fact of being Afrikaans. But this new pride is neither aggressive nor resentful. On the contrary, the friends have come to the collective sense that their good fortune brings with it an obligation to undertake what they call gemeenskapsdiens (community service), and they have found ways to adapt their karaoke sessions to serve this end. When they come across individuals or institutions in their suburb in need of support, they hire a local hall, put on a musical performance and invite the public to spend an evening singing, dancing and eating with them. Drinks are provided by their local pub,

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food by the pub’s chef and the performance is helped along by the fact that two of the group’s members are semi-professional musicians with locally produced, low-budget CDs to their names. Funds derived from the entrance fee and the sale of food and drink have been used, in the recent past, to assist a resident of the suburb who needed a kidney transplant but lacked medical insurance and a young man who could not afford to accompany his amateur football team on a once-in-a-lifetime tour to play in a foreign country. ‘We can’t help people in chronic need’, explained Jan, ‘but if we hear of cases in which once-off assistance can make a difference to our neighbours’ lives, we pitch in.’ Indeed, willingness to pitch in on these occasions is a condition of continued acceptance in the circle of friends, and I have seen errant members who have made too many excuses for non-participation being given the cold shoulder at the Friday and Sunday get-togethers. One should not make too much of this impromptu ‘community service’. Its impact is haphazard and it is not going to do much to address the problems people in this suburb and part of the city face. But it is interesting in several respects. It is different from the impersonal charity practised in more affluent, and still predominantly white, suburbs on the eastern side of Pretoria. The friends want to give to people known to them, to be kept abreast of the benefits that may (or may not) flow from their largesse and to have others made aware of what they have done. There is no sense in their minds that the disinterested, anonymous gift is the highest form of charity. This is undoubtedly related to the fact that their activities are neighbourhood-based, and in this regard it is noteworthy that they recognize that their suburb – housing the people for whom they are willing to stand up – is now thoroughly desegregated. Their most recent activity was to raise funds for the suburb’s primary school so that essential maintenance and refurbishment could be carried out. Their motivation was the understanding that it is ‘our’ school, and the fact that well over half its pupils are black had no bearing whatsoever on their decision to help. This suggests that people such as Jan and his friends may be coming to a new understanding of what it means to be a white Afrikaner in post-apartheid Pretoria. His return to the city’s formal economy left no scope for the intimacy of his relationship with Abel Ramotse. That kind of intimacy was specific to a context marked by his insecurity, and could not survive the radical change in his personal circumstances following his acceptance of the job he was offered in 2010. Yet he and others in his position have not necessarily reverted to the old ways. He may now be part of a whites-only circle of friends, but they are aware that the world around

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them has changed dramatically and are prepared to make changes to their self-understanding in order to fit into it. They have shaken off the conviction that Afrikaners are destined to be a nation apart, and have come to see themselves as people who can make a difference in a wider context. Perhaps their years of hardship after the fall of apartheid are the key to their continuing pragmatism. NOTES 1. State Archives, Pretoria. TPB 367 TALG44/1061 (Pretoria: Sale of Townlands by Council to Iscor Housing Utility Company); MPA 3/4/894 79/00 (Sub-Economic Housing Scheme: Iscor, Wespark, 1945–1963). 2. State Archives, Pretoria. MPA 3/4/899 79/1/2 (Additional Sub-Economic Houses, Western Townlands, Danville, 1942–1946); MPA 3/4/900 79/1/2 (National Housing Scheme, Danville, 1945–1949). 3. State Archives, Pretoria. TPD 0 82/1944 (Ex parte application: Iscor Housing Utility Company). There are many similar files, each dealing with an individual case, in the following years. 4. Arguments along these lines appeared regularly in, for instance, the pages of the Tydskrif vir Rasse Aangeleenthede (Journal of Racial Affairs) in the course of the 1950s. This was the official journal of the Suid-Afrikaanse Buro vir Rasse Aangeleenthede (South African Bureau of Racial Affairs), a Broederbondsponsored organization dominated in the 1950s by the so-called apartheid idealists.

Chapter 5

░ Negotiating Inequality The Contemporary Black Middle Classes in Salvador, Brazil DOREEN GORDON

This chapter is about the emergence of contemporary black middle classes in a country whose government has pursued a social democracy that has been challenged recently. I explore the fluctuating relationship between market, state and society through the particular experiences of this group. Brazil’s middle classes are said to be undergoing rapid expansion due to monetary stabilization, economic and industrial growth, generation of more formal employment and availability of flexible credit (The Economist, 14 February 2009, 3–4). For example, the Getúlio Vargas Foundation reported that some fifty million Brazilians have joined the middle and upper classes in the last decade (Secretariat for Social Communication 2011). Indeed, the ‘new middle classes’ have become the subject of increased attention, especially as they are concentrated in the developing world, particularly in ‘emerging economies’ such as India, China and Brazil (Davis 2010). The numbers involved are remarkable enough, but the phenomenon also has the potential to challenge the old, capitalist centres of North America and Europe. Brazil is characterized by extremely high levels of inequality that historically have been shaped by race. Researchers have noted, however, the growing presence of people of African descent in middle-income occupations such as teaching, engineering, public service and white-collar work (Burdick 1998; Figueiredo 2003; de Santana 2009). There has also been a shift in their educational achievements, opening up the job market at more qualified and higher levels, unless racial discrimination affects their chances (Hasenbalg and do Valle Silva 1991; Sansone 2003; Telles 2004). Indeed, new quantitative studies have identified an ‘elitist profile’ for racial inequality in Brazil, the sense that it is said to be more strongly felt by those in higher social positions (Soares 2000; Campante, Crespo and Leite

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2004; Santos 2005; Osario 2008). A focus on the black elite, therefore, could provide another angle from which to examine how Brazilians cope with, negotiate or resist structures of race and class in Brazil. Despite growing interest in the contemporary black middle classes, detailed information concerning their origins, economic practices, social networks and daily lives is relatively rare, with some important exceptions (Figueiredo 2003; da Silva Soares 2004; de Santana 2009). In the past, certain social types have dominated public discourse – such as upwardly mobile blacks adopting a ‘whitening’ strategy (that is, adopting the lifestyles, values and behaviours of the Euro-Brazilian elite) and distancing themselves as much as possible from blackness and their community of origin. Newer approaches to studying the black middle classes tend to prefer a quantitative approach focused on proving that race and racial discrimination still exist, even in a country that has been celebrated (both inside and outside Brazil) for its harmonious racial relations. My focus here, following the general guidelines for research on the human economy listed in the preface and introduction, is to take an ethnographic approach to what people are practically doing, how they insert themselves (and are inserted) into the economy, and how they engage with existing unequal society. I hope in this way to illuminate aspects of race and class relations in Brazil that have tended to be neglected. The people I interviewed are not simply victims of racism and inequality, but are also actively negotiating this system using a mixture of social, cultural, political and economic strategies. Race as a social principle tends to force people, especially at the bottom of the class hierarchy, into restrictive and oppressive boxes that obscure the complexity of social practice. What people do on a daily basis throws light on how they create, cope with and resist racial discrimination. Some of those I knew engaged with traditional hierarchies of race and class through a personal politics of the body that involved managing their physical appearance with a view to restyling their self-presentation. These practices have been neglected in the literature on race relations in Brazil, not least because they do not fit a current research focus on radical processes of social change. Conflicting narratives of black upward mobility abound in the media, popular culture and academia. Thus market researchers, interested in mapping out the size, income levels and consumption patterns of the ‘new’ black professional class, are inclined to identify them as consumers sustaining markets for products ranging from lifestyle magazines to cosmetics.1 Others doubt that the black middle class could match the strength and wealth of the lighter-skinned middle class. The question frequently posed is whether the black middle class can challenge the racial

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hierarchy that has traditionally limited the black population’s access to resources and opportunities in Brazil. Black middle-class activists have lately succeeded in carving out a strategic position within the state. Some see them as crucial actors in the fight to dismantle racial barriers, while others disparage their motives as being merely self-serving. Thus, a group of educated Afro-Brazilians is emerging at the same time that controversial racial quotas are being implemented in Brazilian public universities.2 It has been argued that racial quotas will only divide and indeed ‘racialize’ the Brazilian population (Fry 2005: 301–320; Maggie 2005; Fry, Maggie and Maio 2007). This could consolidate the social position of a black middle-class minority who are able to articulate their political agenda effectively at the expense of disadvantaged groups, including poor people of African descent.3 All such claims require an in-depth understanding of people’s lives. I will draw here on ethnographic material collected in Salvador, Brazil, between 2005 and 2007 when I recorded life histories from seven families whose members identified themselves, or were identified by others, as black middle class. Founded in 1549, Salvador is one of the oldest slave ports in the New World. Often referred to as the ‘Black Rome’ of Brazil and with its own vibrant cultural traditions, the city is thought to be more favourable than most places to dark-skinned people. However, the position of black people there is ambiguous, as African traditions are now appropriated by the state and celebrated as national symbols, but race and class inequality has long been described as extreme and entrenched (Pierson 1947; de Azevedo 1996 [1953]; Guimarães 2002). Nevertheless, studies of race relations have revealed that people in Salvador were not simply victims of racial discrimination – they managed to find ways of negotiating the system, using traditional pathways of mobility, taking advantage of historical ruptures and transformations, or going into new and expanding areas of work (Guimarães, Agier and Castro 1995; de Azevedo 1996 [1953]; Bacelar 1999, 2001; Figueiredo 2003; de Santana 2009). In short, they are actors in a plural economy, using a variety of different institutions for upward mobility, including the state, the market and social networks. Who then are the black middle classes in Salvador? What are their principal characteristics (occupation, income, property, education, consumption)? What kind of inequalities do they confront and how do they negotiate them? How are race and class articulated there, and by what combination of social relations, economic practices, politics and aesthetic considerations? What is the nature of black middle-class mobility? I will begin with two case studies chosen to illustrate contrasting trajectories.

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Defining the Black Middle Class My first meeting with Tarcis da Silva had been arranged for his legal office in the city centre. I had been warned that he was a very punctual man, so I got up early. My taxi headed off towards the city centre, leaving the working-class district of Liberdade behind. Unfortunately, the cab was repeatedly stalled in traffic, so I was late by the time I arrived. Tarcis’s legal practice was located in an old but well-maintained, high-rise building. I walked in and his secretary motioned me into his office. Dressed in a formal suit and tie, Tarcis looked up from behind a large wooden desk and adjusted some papers. ‘You are late’, he said, and I apologized. The office was elegant, with antique furniture, paintings, wooden bookshelves and a large glass window behind him offering a panoramic view of the Upper City and the sparkling ocean beyond. His office, strategically located on an important commercial street in the historical city centre, was some distance from his modest home in Liberdade. Tarcis was the son of a respected shoemaker with a small business on Liberdade’s main street. He, unlike most of his siblings, had a good public education and his academic interests were encouraged by his mother and maternal grandmother. He entered the Law Faculty of the Federal University of Bahia, a traditional bastion of the Euro-Brazilian elite, while working full-time and studying at night. ‘This is the kind of sacrifice poor, black people have to be willing to make if they want to become successful’, he said, while also insisting that racism had not hampered his wish to improve himself and that Brazil was a racial democracy.4 Others rejected this view, saying that Tarcis had been excluded from university social circles based on white privilege. I found out later that he was involved in one of the oldest Afro-Brazilian organizations in the city, but he clearly felt that a measure of social segregation was compatible with Brazilian racial democracy. Tarcis’s views sometimes upset members of his family, especially his stepbrother Pedro who, after completing secondary education, began working in the construction industry, eventually becoming a lower-level office manager in a well-established firm. The brothers often quarrelled. Pedro accused Tarcis of being full of pride (orgulho) and of using his knowledge to put people down. Tarcis would say that Pedro was lazy (perguiçoso), wasting time with different women when he should be a hard worker (trabalhador) for his family. Their versions of each other’s life trajectories were contradictory. Pedro said that he had been the victim of racism when he applied for the public university examinations to enter the Faculty of Medicine. He felt that he was discriminated against for coming from a

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predominantly poor and black area of the city. Tarcis often scoffed at this explanation: ‘He did not study, that’s all! Here in Bahia, black people love to party, to go out with their friends, drink and have lots of women. No other place in Brazil has so many parties and festivals as Bahia. Years later when they are still in the same place they regret the time they did not spend studying hard to achieve something. At that point, it is really ridiculous to blame your situation on racism’ (interview: 16 October 2005). This case points to several issues. First, the relationship between Tarcis and Pedro shows how race often enters into the question of social mobility for black Brazilians and involves negotiating a field of claims concerning moral personhood. Second, they both live in a working-class neighbourhood, stretching our preconceptions about what it is to be middle class. Liberdade, however, is one of the oldest working-class neighbourhoods in Salvador, where cultural organizations such as Ilê Aiyê (which is heavily funded by the federal government) articulate a strong black identity, and community activism has brought to the neighbourhood many services and amenities not available in similar areas. Several influential persons choose to live in Liberdade – such as the director of Ilê Aiyê, Vovó, who can be glimpsed by neighbours driving his Mercedes Benz – and many give their kinship and friendship ties in the neighbourhood as a reason why they continue to live there. Tarcis, however, was actually moving to the new, more modern district of Iguatemi. He was building a house there with many rooms and a pool. Yet he was careful to maintain his roots in the black community, keeping in touch with old friends and relatives, while holding frequent dinners and parties for his family. In contrast, the Teixeira family considered themselves to be long-established middle-class, privileged equals of the Euro-Brazilian elite for generations. I first met members of this family at a friend’s birthday party in a bairro fino (fine neighbourhood).5 The Teixeiras stood out in a crowd of mostly light-skinned guests. Three sisters of around the same age, they were dressed elegantly, with expensive-looking handbags and shoes, wellgroomed hair and slim bodies with smooth, brown complexions. My Brazilian friend whispered to me, ‘They are different from the common person here in Salvador. You can tell because they are bem educado. Look at how beautiful they are!’6 Amongst their friends and acquaintances, the Teixeira family was not regarded as being typical in a city where the majority of the population is poor and visibly dark skinned, and the higher social classes are symbolically linked to whiteness. According to Helena (the three sisters’ mother), her family were descendants of an original union between a slave woman and the son of a wealthy Dutch sugar-plantation owner. Their Dutch an-

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cestor subsequently married a white woman, but all of the children from the former union were well taken care of. Helena’s parents lived a comfortable life and were respected in their neighbourhood – her father was university educated, worked for a British shipping company and spoke many languages, while her mother was a teacher. Helena said that in past generations they would not have seen themselves as being black. They often referred to themselves as mulata clara (light skinned, mixed race). She recalled as a child hearing her relatives make disparaging remarks about the physical features and moral traits of dark-skinned people. Such discourses on appearance and the value of particular physical traits, no doubt possibly helped non-white elites to distance themselves from blackness (and poverty) as a strategy of avoiding racial discrimination themselves, although this did not always succeed. Helena told me that many years ago her mother, Rita, tried to enter one of Salvador’s most exclusive social clubs in an upscale area of the city. Rita had many longstanding, influential friends among the Euro-Brazilian elite who frequented the club. One of them was the prefeito (mayor) of Salvador and he wrote a letter recommending Rita as a member. Even so, the executive committee of the club rejected Rita’s application. Her friends were indignant and were convinced that Rita’s skin colour was the deciding factor. To protest the club’s decision, they immediately left it. This story reveals the character of everyday social relations in several ways. First, it indicates how personal relationships across lines of colour and class (such as friendships, kin ties) could sometimes mitigate the negative effects of having dark skin, although it did not always protect them from discrimination. Second, Rita’s friends might not perceive her or treat her as black – she had become structurally and symbolically ‘white’ by virtue of being a member of their class. Unlike previous generations, however, the younger members of the Teixeira family now claim a more politicized, black identity – challenging other members of their family to do so – even if it increases the chance of encountering discrimination. The Teixeira family once lived in high-status neighbourhoods with grand houses and many servants. They no longer have this kind of lifestyle and have fallen on harder times. However, they are not poor and have managed to slow down their descent on the social scale. Thus, they moved from a large elegant house to a smaller, more efficient and affordable apartment, but it is located in a fashionable part of the city, close to a popular swimming beach and tourist area. Through selective consumption of items of cultural value and astute social networking, the Teixeiras manage to maintain their middle-class status, thereby distinguishing themselves from a blackness that is still associated with poverty.

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What was striking about them was how they presented themselves – their dress, appearance, body language and speech. This was very clear in the case of Bruno, the Teixeira sisters’ uncle, who was very dark skinned and owned a modelling agency. He was described by friends and family as one of the hottest black models in the city. Bruno explained: ‘My mother always made sure that we were well dressed, our clothes ironed, our hair looking good before we went anywhere. We were never to go to a party uninvited, standing in a corner in shame. We were always well put together, always in good clothes’ (22 September 2006). Being well dressed, elegant and demonstrating boa educação (well educated, culturally aware, having a good upbringing) could therefore be used as markers of distinction, setting oneself apart from the dark, poor majority – as well as offsetting the risks of racial discrimination within middle-class society. In Distinction, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) suggests a model of class based on ‘capital’ movements through social space. The distribution of various forms of ‘capital’ – economic, social, cultural or symbolic – structures this social space and confers power and strength upon their holder. This model enables an analysis of the micro-politics of power and the struggle between different groups for control over the social order. In the case of the Teixeiras, education, cultural knowledge, social networks and bodily features are intimately connected and recognized as forms of symbolic capital in the negotiation of their social position. These two cases of upward and downward mobility provide a more complex picture of the black middle classes than is normally available in the media and academic literature. Attempting to define this class is never straightforward and its boundaries are notoriously fuzzy. Sociologists and economists have tended to rely heavily on income, occupation and patterns of consumption when defining the middle class. In his study of the ‘new middle classes’ in Brazil, economist Marcelo Neri identified five categories, ranging from A to E, based on calculations of household income. Class C receives the average income in society, with class D and E representing the poorer classes. Class C is said to be the category that is growing rapidly, with household income of between 1,000 reais (US $130) and 4,500 reais (US $580) a week. They typically have access to credit and durable goods, such as a television set, washing machine, video player and a car/motorbike (Neri 2008). The people I interviewed generally had salaries within the range indicated for class C, although some earned more. But income alone is not a reliable method of identifying class. Some Brazilian friends who thought of themselves as working class (de classe baixa) had jobs in the formal economy, earned middle-income salaries and were able to make their houses

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quite comfortable through improvements. Others who classified themselves as middle class (de classe média) had substantial credit card debt, lived with their parents, had multiple short-term jobs and often took the bus. Rather than revealing a stable, fixed lifestyle defined by occupation, income or consumption, the cases above show people moving unsystematically between different social levels. They also give a sense of the different strategies employed to deal with racial inequality and discrimination, including family and community ties, friendship with the light-skinned elite, getting an education and profession, asserting or denying the existence of racism in particular contexts, and paying attention to appearances. The middle classes are Janus-faced – at one moment identifying with the social system, at others going against it while identifying with poorer people (and with blackness). How do Brazilians define ‘race’? The national census collects data on race using five categories: preto (black), branco (white), pardo (brown/mixed), amarello (yellow/Asian) and indigena (native). At the same time, Brazilians classify themselves as belonging to a range of flexible groups along a spectrum of colour and other phenotypic attributes (Harris and Kottak 1963; Kottak 1983; Harris 1970; Sanjek 1971). These classifications are fluid, descriptive and situational when compared with the United States. Black activists claim that this is because some Brazilians do not want to be identified as black. In recent years, however, researchers have noted a growing tendency to assume a black label in the census (Nobles 2000; Telles 2004; Petrucelli 2007). This is related to a shift in Brazilian race politics, where blackness is now more likely to be celebrated and commitment to policies aimed at reducing racial inequality is on the rise (Htun 2004; Schwartzman 2007). Given the fluidity and ambiguous nature of race and class in Brazil, I needed a flexible approach. I lived in different neighbourhoods across the city and participated as much as I could in my informants’ daily lives. I interviewed people of different generations, gender and social class backgrounds. This allowed me to cross lines of class and skin colour, opening up a more complex, heterogeneous picture of social stratification and mobility.

Studying the Black Middle Classes Earlier studies of race relations in Salvador showed that, even under the dehumanizing conditions of slavery, some black and mixed-race individu-

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als owned property, were literate and had considerable control over their own work (de Queiŕos Mattoso 1992; Bacelar 2001). The fact of a degree of black social mobility was used to support the notion of racial democracy in Brazil. De Azevedo’s research on elites de cor (colour elites) in Salvador during the 1950s, for example, emphasized a tacit agreement between blacks, whites and coloured to keep racial prejudice at a minimum (1996 [1953]: 49). He argued that this racial harmony was the result of widespread racial mixture, which had led to an environment conducive to social mobility for Brazilian blacks. He believed that strategies of ‘whitening’ among elites de cor led to some degree of integration. As whiteness is associated with wealth, higher social status and prestige, upwardly mobile blacks could symbolically ‘whiten’ through acquiring money and education or through marrying light-skinned spouses, producing even lighter-skinned children. This account has some basis in reality and it does point to the evolution of distinct strategies of mobility without entirely convincing this reader that the race and class system was equal and democratic. Traditionally, upward mobility for a dark-skinned Brazilian meant aligning oneself with the Euro-Brazilian elite in some way – through kinship, patronage, godparent ties or adoption. Social mobility depended on making a relationship with the elite – then mostly a landowning oligarchy who, in their role as coroneis (‘colonels’, local political bosses), controlled small producers’ access to credit as well as local politics. Upwardly mobile non-whites might be criticized for distancing themselves from their community of origin. Guerreiro Ramos (1995) was very critical of this group who, he thought, shared the pathologies of the whites, especially by accepting their aesthetic values. Carl Degler (1971) proposed the famous ‘mulatto escape-hatch’ theory, when he argued that lighterskinned Brazilians could easily assimilate into white society, giving up their black identities. Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto (1952) differentiated between the old and new black elites, arguing that, while the old elite would try to pass as white, the new elite were more militant and asserted their black identity, even in the face of racial discrimination. Both the old and new black elites, however, were said to be disconnected from the large black working class and more likely to organize around class rather than race-based identities. My ethnography reveals another aspect of this story in that some upwardly mobile individuals now remain selectively involved in their community of origin. In many cases, kin support was essential to their mobility. Moreover, actions stressing one’s connections to the black community (such as sponsoring a school in a poor neighbourhood) have always been a powerful way of achieving high status and prestige in Salvador.

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Recently, studies of race relations have shifted their focus towards investigating persisting racial inequality, especially challenging the ideology of racial democracy in Brazil. Researchers have shown, on the basis of national statistics, that whites fare better than non-whites across a wide range of socio-economic indicators such as income, occupation, access to health and education (Hasenbalg 1985; Castro and Guimarães 1993; Castro and Barreto 1998; Hasenbalg and Silva 1999).7 Some more qualitative approaches have analyzed the experiences of a middle class that remains solidly black by studying black organizations (da Silva Soares 2004; Giacomini 2006), the strategies and difficulties of mobility (Figueiredo 2003; de Santana 2009) and racial discrimination (Lima 2001; Figueiredo 2002). Angela Figueiredo’s work on a sample of small business owners in Salvador has received the most recognition in Brazil. She argues that ‘the majority of the [Brazilian] black middle class is part of a first generation that does not have as much consolidated economic, social and symbolic capital as most whites in the same class position’ (2003: 92). While not discounting Figueiredo’s findings, this may be an oversimplification, especially if we consider the Teixeira family, who have belonged to high society for generations. My approach differed somewhat from Figueiredo’s. First, my interviewees worked in a range of economic sectors. This allowed for a more diverse picture of what the black middle classes are doing in Salvador than if I had concentrated on a single occupational group. Second, I explored the social networks in which black middle-class people are embedded – whereas the methodological focus before tended to be on upwardly mobile individuals. This revealed the heterogeneity of black middle-class lives: my Brazilian friends came from a spectrum of social backgrounds – both rural and urban – and had varied career trajectories. They also expressed a number of different perspectives and had different attitudes to community involvement and consumer expenditure.

Origins and Social Networks Many of the older generation among the people I knew came from rural towns in Bahia. Often they had minimal education, though a few came from families where some members once owned substantial property.8 They often migrated along networks of kinship, friendship and patronage. These networks stretch across rural and urban areas and are maintained selectively, not least at milestone events such as infant baptisms, birthdays, weddings and children’s graduations. These relationships are

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often a source of support as well as information about matters such as jobs, housing and schools. Yet the kind of ties of reciprocity and obligation that exist among rural migrants may be viewed negatively, since the drain on resources involved can impede a family’s attempt to consolidate its wealth and move up the class structure. Some were well-established, urban families. Indeed, the names of traditional families still carry weight and prestige despite the rapid socioeconomic changes that are transforming the city. A family considered to be ‘of good stock’ is often referred to as having sangue bom (good blood), meaning that it could be trusted, having contributed to their community and having proved themselves over the generations as upstanding, moral and respectable members of their society. Members of the Teixeira family were well-known educators who had brought up both related and unrelated children. The young inherited the friendship networks of their parents. This kind of cultural and social capital was vital for weathering difficult economic times, allowing them to draw on goods and services in kind to be repaid at a later date. A family’s social status might be judged in terms of how well they had integrated into the middle class through such traditional ‘whitening’ strategies as acquiring a good education and respectable profession. At the same time, involvement in the black community through religious associations such as Catholic brotherhoods and terreiros de Candomblé (Candomblé temples)9 – as well as funeral and burial societies – has traditionally generated different kinds of social prestige and connections.10

Occupation and Mobility Teaching and education were strongly represented amongst my interviewees, and has been a historically important avenue of mobility, both upwards and downwards (de Azevedo 1996 [1953]; Dávila 2005). In the Teixeira family, Dona Helena’s mother was the headmistress of a primary school, while she was herself a history teacher in a public school. Teaching is less prevalent among the younger generation, since it is thought to be poorly remunerated and has lost some of its former cachet in comparison to other types of careers. Changing patterns of mobility reflect variations over time in occupational prestige. In the past, many built respectable careers in middle-level government positions, were able to educate their children and looked forward to retirement on a liveable pension. After the labour reforms of the Vargas government in the 1930s and 1940s, public concursos (exams) became the

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normal way of acquiring a job within the expanding public sector. This degree of formality reduced the role of personal ties, social background, skin colour and contacts in securing a job, thereby creating more opportunities for black Brazilians to acquire a stable job with employment benefits (de Santana 2009). With the discovery of oil in Bahia’s hinterlands, a state-owned company was established in 1953, Petrobras, along with secondary petrochemical and metallurgical industries. This developed a new labour market for skilled workers and employed many Afro-Bahians, creating a stable black and brown working class in the city (Guimarães 1995; Bacelar 1999; de Almeida 2006). This industrial sector, however, had a lower multiplier effect on Bahia’s economy than had been predicted, and the investment it required reduced the scope for financing other types of industrial development (de Almeida 2006: 25). Since the 1990s, the public sector has contracted and salaries have deteriorated in the face of privatization, deregulation and decentralization as a result of neoliberal economic policies. Nevertheless, state bureaucracy has traditionally been a significant source of employment in Bahia and jobs there are still regarded as good. The police force and the army, historically important sectors for people of African descent, continue to be viable career options (de Azevedo 1996 [1953]; Butler 1998; Bacelar 1999, 2001). Rosa and her husband, Wesley Figueiredo, both came from humble origins in a small town of rural Bahia; they rose up the social scale through Wesley’s job as a musician in the police force. Some of their children followed a similar route – their eldest son went into the police force, while their youngest daughter works as a government administrator. More recently, the services and financial sectors have become increasingly important sources of employment in the new neighbourhoods designed for Salvador’s upwardly mobile professional middle class and for the booming tourist industry. Helena’s youngest daughter freelances as an event organizer in these areas. But service-sector jobs require intense interaction with clients and this increases the importance of boa aparência (having a good appearance). Once this meant having a more ‘European’ physical appearance (lighter skin, straightened hair, a slim body) while cultivating an air of sophistication and modernity through proper language use and personal style. Some of my informants said that it was not uncommon for employers to request photographs from job applicants, which they regarded as a racist practice. It has even been suggested that heightened anxieties about appearance in the services sector may have contributed to the increased popularity of plastic surgery (Edmonds 2007). Construction and transport are areas where black people have tended to predominate. Traditionally viewed as jobs with low prestige, some in-

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formants nevertheless experienced substantial upward social mobility in these sectors. For example, Jorge Carvalho, a businessman who migrated to Salvador as a teenager, began his working life in one of the city’s largest construction firms. He rose quickly because of his management skills. While still working, he continued his education, studying for a higher degree in economics during the evenings. Eventually, he became the managing director of this company’s business group. Two other interviewees worked as engineers at a senior administrative level in the transport industry. Some younger people were making a success out of non-traditional careers, such as in the music and cultural industries. Mauro has fashioned a career as a DJ of música black for over a decade and is now poised for a breakthrough in an industry that capitalizes on the city’s reputation as the ‘Black Rome’ of Brazil. He has recorded with bands such as Negra Cor (Black Colour), and well-known artists such as Daniela Mercury and Rebecca Mata. By combining musical traditions from Africa, the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil – including reggae, reggaethon, Afro-funk, hip hop, R&B and samba – DJ Mauro has positioned himself in the commercial mainstream of black music and culture that is currently emerging in Salvador.

Income According to previous researchers (Figueiredo 2003; de Santana 2009), middle-class people of African descent have less wealth, savings, investments and property than the more stable, lighter-skinned middle classes. Indeed, relying on cash from multiple sources of income, pooling the resources of family members and juggling debts in a variety of forms (credit cards, supermarket discount cards, bank loans) were significant financial strategies for some of the families I knew when compared with the weight placed on savings and investment traditionally associated with the middle class. ‘The black middle class basically lives on their salaries, rather than on inheritance from their family. … Part of their income is spent on helping their relatives in need’ (Figueiredo 2003: 256 [my translation]). Figueiredo (2003: 176) also stressed black businessmen’s lack of access to credit from established financial institutions, making it hard for them to maintain and expand their enterprises. Her informants claimed that interest rates on loans were a deterrent to borrowing, and that, in any case, there was no one to act as an intermediary for them. According to her, their low levels of monetary and other kinds of capital, when combined with the discriminatory attitudes they encountered, posed great

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challenges for black business, ensuring that they remained vulnerable on the margins of the middle class. People with salaries from formal employment and anyone who possessed a registered work book (Carteiro de Trabalho e Providência Social) could count on benefits such as paid sick leave, unemployment benefit and a pension. The contractual nature of construction work, for example, meant that Pedro da Silva spent periods of time unemployed; but he received unemployment payments that helped him to sustain his family. Pensions also provided some families with much-needed income – Dona Helena’s pension as a retired teacher helped to support her youngest daughter when she was unemployed. With higher salaries, some families were able to purchase better health insurance plans for themselves. In fact, private health insurance plans were a major way of defining one’s middle-class status. Other sources of state-based income were important for some families. As part of its mandate to alleviate poverty, the Lula administration prioritized expanding the purchasing power of ordinary Brazilians through increasing minimum wage and targeting social policy on the needy (Fenwick 2009: 105; cf. Hunter and Power 2007: 17). The Bolsa Família (Family Fund) and Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) were highly visible, means-tested social programmes aimed at alleviating poverty and hunger. Although they were not the first targeted social programmes in Brazil’s history, they framed more explicitly than before the idea of social security and protection as a right and a public responsibility (Fenwick 2009: 110). In practice, the distribution of the Bolsa Família programme tended to benefit the northeast, including Bahia, with almost half the recipients coming from that region (Fenwick 2009: 123), which has among the highest poverty rates in the country and a large non-white share of the population. The programme has reduced the proportion of Brazilians living below the poverty line by almost a fifth (Fenwick 2009: 126). Miranda’s niece applied for and was accepted by the Bolsa Família programme when she was living as a single parent in the interior of Bahia. She migrated to Salvador in 2006 with her two daughters and lived with Miranda for a time. Today, the two girls are in secondary school and have achieved a level of education higher than their mother.

Education Education was especially significant for the people I lived with in that it is integral to how they positioned themselves as respectable, middle-class

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people and defined themselves as Brazilian citizens. ‘Education’ for them referred not only to formal education but also to cultural ideas about proper socialization, which entailed demonstrably good manners, respect for others (respeito), being able to conduct oneself properly in public and having cultural knowledge. Indeed, informants would often assert, ‘Sem educação, não tem nada’ (without education, you have nothing). Education stood for equality in contrast to unequal particulars such as colour. Thus people of African descent could claim respectability and achieve social mobility through formal education despite prevailing currents of racial discrimination. Black children were often warned that they had to work twice as hard to achieve something. As someone said: My mother was lucky – she got a bolsa (scholarship) to send me to a private school. But there are children who don’t realize what an opportunity they have and waste it. For this reason they really need to be taught by their parents and others to understand their position in society, they need to be told the reality. You can’t spend your time socializing with rich, white students who have money. If they fail their subjects, they will be all right. The poor black student won’t get another chance. Parents need to let their children see this, rather than buying them clothes and cellular phones so they can keep up with the fashions of rich students. Their money is better spent on education and basic needs. If I see my son watching Xuxa on television, I let him know that Xuxa has a child enrolled at the Pan-American school and that while he is watching TV, she is studying and getting ahead.11 I teach my children the reality. It does not mean I take away their childhood from them, but they also need to look critically at things and realize that they are not in the same position as privileged people, and that as blacks they will have more obstacles to overcome. (Interview: 15 December 2006)

In Salvador’s competitive job market, there is a growing premium on higher levels of education, so that young people tend to be better educated than their parents and grandparents. But some parents claimed that they had access to a public education of higher quality. Since the 1980s, public education has markedly deteriorated along with the teaching profession’s loss of status owing to poor wages and working conditions, declining morale and poor learning conditions (O’Dougherty 2002; Telles 2004). Accordingly, parents who benefited from a good-quality public education at school and university now have to pay out much of their salaries for their children’s private education to give them a chance of finding a good job. Many parents were obsessed with negotiating a child’s entrance into a desired school. This involved a good deal of social networking with the

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aim of making direct contacts inside the school. There is a wide variety of such schools and they are informally ranked by the middle classes. Church schools, particularly Catholic and Baptist, have been a historically important and prestigious source of private education and some of them offer scholarships. The more modern and expensive private schools have smaller classes and some offer an international, bilingual education. Brazilian education is unusual in that the best universities are publicly funded and attended overwhelmingly by children of the elite who could afford to give them the private schooling they need to pass the entrance examinations. Children from lower class neighbourhoods, who attend increasingly demoralized public schools, generally have to attend private universities where they pay for inferior education. The people I knew often manoeuvred between private and public education at different times in their child’s school career in the hope of their children passing the public university entrance examinations. In one family, the youngest son was shifted between public and private schools until he passed the entrance examinations for the Federal University of Bahia to pursue journalism. He is now a political commentator for a prominent newspaper, living in an upscale area in Salvador. In another case, a young woman went to a private university to attend a course in Law. Her parents had to take out a loan, which their daughter would repay after finishing her education. While younger people do tend to be better educated than their parents, they also have higher expectations for job remuneration and satisfaction. They are more likely to perceive some work relations as authoritarian and to avoid what they consider degrading or humiliating conditions.

Property For my older interviewees, especially married couples, acquiring a house was extremely important and they went about it in different ways, drawing on the state, commerce and social networks. Miranda and Pedro da Silva bought their first house in the 1970s with a low-interest loan from the Caixa Economica – one of the largest government-owned financial institutions that catered mostly to a low- and middle-income clientele. The Teixeiras inherited a house – along with other property and investments – from their mother’s side of the family. They owned several apartments, which they rented out for income. Houses also reveal fine distinctions in the level of social status. It matters whether the house is self-constructed or not, whether it is rented or

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bought, and what neighbourhood it is located in. The da Silva and Figueiredo families built their own houses in socially mixed neighbourhoods, comfortable structures that could accommodate an extended family. Others bought their houses using savings and pooling the resources of several family members. Nowadays, it is more common for middle-class people to live in apartment buildings. There is a range of different kinds: the older, more traditional type; the more modern, simply built type; and super upmarket versions, replete with luxury materials, such as granite and marble. They can have pretty verandas, stylish garden patches and share public amenities such as swimming pools, party halls, sports areas and a shelter for the porter. The apartments themselves are often small, but in the eyes of some, the lack of space is compensated for by the agreeable sensation that those who live there belong to a new world: one that is modern, hygienic, privileged, stable and secure.

Consumption Some informants who lived in low-income neighbourhoods had more disposable salary and savings than others living in more high-income, fashionable areas of the city who were struggling to make ends meet and to keep up with the consumption patterns of their class. Tiago, a university student studying music who lives with his parents in a modern flat along the upscale Avenida Atlântica, once told me: There are a lot of people in this neighbourhood who are slaves to capitalism. The middle class wants to spend more and more, and accumulate more and more, only the more you spend, the less you have. There is no way of saving your money, it is a vicious cycle … credit cards, cheques, bank loans … these are things of the middle class. Sometimes we see the case of a person who prefers to have a fancy, brand-name car instead of remodelling/ redecorating his apartment. This is the thinking of the middle class: they want to show that they have a lot when in truth they do not. They want to buy this and that, but they cannot pay for it. This generates a lot of social discrimination – as much on the part of middle-class people as between the lower classes and the upper classes. It is a vicious circle and I don’t see an end unless people stop and think about their role in their communities and families, their responsibility to society and, more importantly, to themselves.

This quote highlights an important variant in how to be middle class. Tiago explicitly rejects the excesses of a neoliberal market society while

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advancing something different from the materialistic values espoused by a rising bourgeoisie. It is a critique of the particular way of being middle class associated with a modern culture of consumerism and credit, as distinct from more traditional forms of consumption and marking status. This may differentiate older and newer black middle classes, as de Aguiar Costa Pinto (1952) noted. The Teixeiras, as representatives of an older black middle class, were one of the first families on their street to acquire electricity, a fridge and a telephone. This was how they announced their status as modern Brazilian citizens. Helena remarked that, as a child, she did not notice any difference between herself and her white classmates and neighbours. But one day she was forced to confront the fact that she was viewed as different when a white playmate came over after school. After glancing at the piano, the chandeliers and luxury carpets in the living room, her young friend exclaimed, ‘My goodness, you have a house like a white person!’ At the time Helena thought, ‘What is a black person’s house supposed to look like in that case?’ The Teixeiras put more emphasis on education and cultural experience than they felt some of their neighbours did. One of Helena’s daughters found a particular neighbour ridiculous because she put her child in the most fashionable clothes instead of investing in educational and cultural activities for her child. Their own relative downward mobility (being stationary when so many were moving up) was evidently irritating. Their response was to hold ever more firmly onto a vision of education and cultural enlightenment as the foundation of a middle-class position.

Community Involvement When people moved to higher-status neighbourhoods, they tended to rely on their immediate neighbourhood less than before for social life. They would be more likely to form their own meaningful spaces spread across the city, socializing with friends and family in their own apartments; going out to restaurants, bars and places of cultural interest (museums, art galleries, theatres); watching a movie at upmarket shopping malls; spending time on university campuses; or attending private parties. Some of them, however, as we have seen went out of their way to keep up ties to their community of birth. Pedro Rocha, a highly trained engineer in charge of the city’s train service, lives in a modern apartment in Brotas (an area of the city strongly associated with the black middle class). He has fond memories of the

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neighbourhood he grew up in. His parents were solid working-class people, his father a low-level technician and his mother a minor functionary in a public school. They lived on a street with other working-class families who mostly worked on the docks or in factories. According to Pedro, this neighbourhood had a strong community spirit, a sense of cultural tradition, and the families on his street knew each other well and were active in the community. The neighbourhood had a square, with theatres, a cinema, regular festive gatherings, carnival parades, churches and a football team, providing opportunities to forge close local bonds. He now misses this aspect of community life in Brotas. He stays involved in his former neighbourhood through membership of a Baptist church, which has provided him with a base for making informal friendships and an avenue for volunteer work in the community. He describes the church as very plural with a strong presence of negros de classe alta (well-off black people), gente de baixa renda (low-income people) and operários (working-class people). Perhaps some types of associational life help to mediate class differences. Another interviewee, Livio, worked with the government as an economist and ran his own non-governmental organization (NGO), which prepared poor, black students attending public schools to take the examinations for entrance into public university. A tall dreadlocked darkskinned man in his forties, Livio lives in a modern high-rise building surrounded mostly by light-skinned residents. Through his work and black activist circle, he is in touch with powerful figures in local and national government, as well as intellectuals and activists in Latin America and the United States. His NGO is partly funded through a programme at Harvard University. His mother and siblings continue to live in the working-class district of Garibaldi. This family, however, is perceived as having a higher status because they are embedded in complex community, national and international networks that have elevated their position both in the eyes of their neighbourhood and of the city at large. Jorge Carvalho is another interesting example. He initially built a successful career in the construction industry and now lives in a luxurious penthouse flat in the upper-class neighbourhood of Graça in central Salvador. Recently he moved out of the construction industry to freelance in the fast-growing and profitable culture industry, which is heavily subsidized by the state. This sector, linked as it is to tourism, was first promoted by the governing elite in the late 1930s and highlights ‘Bahian cultural heritage’. Particular aspects of ‘black’ culture and folklore have begun to receive public resources – specifically Capoeria (an Afro-Brazilian martial art), cuisine, music and Candomblé. Although providing fresh op-

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portunities for social mobility, it appears to reproduce traditional forms of power and authority in that the newer, vibrant Afro-Brazilian cultural organizations tend to be funded and patronized by the white elite. Jorge’s connections with both the black leadership of these organizations and his former integration in white elite networks through the construction industry are considerable assets in this line of work. Moreover, Jorge formed an association of black businessmen specifically to address the lack of mentorship for black people in this area. This association attracted around fifty young people at the time, most of them from disadvantaged backgrounds. Jorge’s strategy was to focus on ‘ethnic niche markets’ – that is, markets focused on the packaging of ‘AfroBrazilian’ arts and crafts, mostly for tourists – as well as cosmetics used by dark-skinned Brazilians. There is real potential for this kind of market, since the state is increasingly willing to fund such projects through a redistribution programme aimed at poor, black communities. He claimed that his motivation for starting such an enterprise was his concern for economic democracy for black Brazilians: Power has its proper rules, and we don’t know what they are. They are constantly in motion, always changing, to maintain the process of power and the people who have it. When we [blacks] finally find out the answers, the questions have already changed. So we are always out of power’s sphere. Black people are on the whole outside these circles of economic and financial power. Because of that, we are unable to change the real structures of power that keep us in our place. We need to speak more openly about the problem of financial powerlessness or else everything will continue as before. (Interview: 10 September 2006)

Indeed, black participation in these spheres has provided some opportunities for upward mobility, while conferring social status of a certain kind. Conversely it can be problematic if one is thought to act against the interests of the black community. Túlio Santana, the director of a transport syndicate in Salvador and a member of the black movement, was once described by another black activist as a vítima do narcisismo branco (victim of white narcissism). He was accused of being a black man who had adopted white capitalist values, charging higher bus fares that would disproportionately hurt the Afro-Bahian poor. Some considered him to be a traitor of his own race, living the life of a white upper-middle-class person with his comfortable apartment, private education for his children, frequent vacations, marriage to a white professional and shopping at exclusive malls. Such a critique, regardless of how appropriate it may be, mixes an accusation of class oppression with one of race treason. Ironically, the

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movement with which he seeks to align himself rejects him. Yet another member of the black movement, Vanda Machado, a well-known educator, has a similar lifestyle in white neighbourhoods, yet she is not subject to the same slander that Túlio is. This is probably because Vanda demonstrates a deep commitment to some valued public signs of blackness, such as her involvement in Candomblé, which has received increased state recognition and support after centuries of repression. Túlio does not consider such signs to be an essential part of one’s black identity, describing this kind of positioning as ‘too radical’. Vanda apparently practices the right kind of racial-cultural politics in this black activist milieu since she has learned how to balance her political stance and various public roles.

Conclusion The rise of emerging economies such as Brazil has brought new attention to the role of the middle classes in development. This is partly because there used to be a two-class model of world society with white rich countries (the West) and poor, darker countries and regions (the rest). Now this divergent unipolar model of the world economy is shifting towards a multi-polar convergent version. I have focused here on the particular question of race, offering a case study that might allow us to compare emerging black elites in countries such as Brazil and South Africa. It is highly debatable whether these middle classes might play a revolutionary role in advancing democracy, racial equality and development within their countries, or will simply act to conserve inequality in a different form. In South Africa the black middle class belongs to the national majority, yet there is much debate about the nature of this state-made elite – sometimes referred to as ‘black diamonds’, a term reflecting the lavish lifestyle and high-end consumerism of the politically empowered elite. Some (such as Mbeki 2009) claim that these elite are more alienated than ever from the masses of poor, black people. In Brazil, blacks are not the political majority, but they have managed to carve out strategic positions within the state and in other areas of economic life. Meanwhile, the white elite have reorganized themselves, moving from a more rural base in land to industry, commerce and retail business, while maintaining their hold on the economy, politics and the media. Many of them have learnt to change with changing times, aligning themselves with new political expressions of blackness that began to emerge in Salvador in recent decades. The astute Bahian politician, Antonio Carlos Magalães, understood this well. Over the years, he moved

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towards embracing ‘Afro-Bahian’ culture, both literally and figuratively, to the point where his political campaigns were often accompanied by Candomblé priests and priestesses. This patron-client style of relationship between white elites and the majority black population reflects traditional forms of power. Yet specific avenues of mobility have also been created around strategically placed black leaders, through the community projects involving black middle-class people, for example. These, in turn, require specific responses – for example, emphasizing one’s black identity is advantageous if one is aligned with projects sponsored by the black movement and culture industry in Salvador. I have tried to show what kinds of people become involved in their communities and through what avenues. Black Brazilians, however, may also negotiate Salvador’s race and class hierarchies through less radical processes, such as through manipulating their physical appearance and self-presentation. I have indicated the kinds of racial inequality they face in their everyday lives and how they deal with this by combining different social, cultural, political, economic and aesthetic strategies. I have also identified some types of associational life that helped to mitigate class and race differences – involvement in church congregations, for example. Although my ethnography is limited in many ways to the specific context of Salvador, the material presented here throws light on the general issue of how black people experience local and international hierarchies of race, ethnicity and culture. Indeed, Salvador’s specific local system of classification carries within it echoes of a global order that has been shaped for centuries by slavery and colonial empire. What happens to black populations (including, perhaps especially, their new middle classes) in Africa and around the world poses a potentially revolutionary challenge to structures of inequality in the world at large and all of this takes place at a time of changing relations between East and West in the century to come. NOTES 1. A study conducted at the end of 1997 by the advertisement agency Grottera Comunicação indicated that Brazil’s black middle class was seven million strong, with an average monthly family income of BRL $2,000 (or roughly US $1,168.91). The purpose was to create a profile of the black consumer. For example, every month, this total population is said to spend around BRL $500 million (close to US $3 million) on non-essential products. 2. Since the end of military rule and the return to democracy in Brazil, affirmative action policies for ethnic/racial minorities, women and the handicapped in the form of quotas have been constitutional (Piovesan 2006). However, the

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5. 6. 7.

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9. 10. 11.

Doreen Gordon United Nations third conference against racism, discrimination and xenophobia held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 seems to have been the catalyst for public universities – the most prestigious in Brazil – to implement racial quotas. In 2007, more than thirty public universities implemented quotas to address racial gaps in higher-education enrolment. This has since led to a heated debate over whether these policies will create a more divided Brazil or will help to promote black social mobility. Schwartzman (2007: 943–944) suggests that new government policy on race may disproportionately benefit people with a particular class background or educational level. The idea of Brazil as racially harmonious and free of institutionalized or legalized racism is a long-standing ideology cherished by the state and ordinary Brazilians, though it has undergone serious challenges within the last thirty years with the rise of the black movement. ‘Fine neighbourhood’ refers to genteel or middle-class neighbourhoods. This means that a person is ‘well educated’ in terms of formal schooling, but also in manners, etiquette and cultural knowledge. ‘Non-whites’ are frequently defined as constituting the categories preto (black) and pardo (mixed race/brown).This is problematic, for example, in its exclusion of other racial/ethnic groups such as indigenous people. One of the factors that might have been a challenge to the consolidation of property and wealth among blacks were Brazilian laws of inheritance, which required property to be consistently divided among proceeding generations of offspring. The Bahian elite adapted to this through endogamous marriage practices. Candomblé is the name given to a set of African-derived religious beliefs and practices and is formally recognized in Brazil as a religion. For studies of religious brotherhoods and funeral societies in Salvador, see Julio Braga (1975), Russell-Wood (1974), João Reis (2003) and Kim Butler (1998). Xuxa is an extremely popular, blond and blue-eyed television presenter for children.

Chapter 6

░ Live Music in the Age of Digital Reproduction Cape Verde JULIANA BRAZ DIAS

Introduction: Global Music in Local Performances London (England), 7 October 2007 The alternative rock band Radiohead makes a surprising decision: fans are allowed to determine how much the band’s latest album is worth. An MP3 file of the album In Rainbows is available for (legal) digital download with no price tag. The Sunday Times publishes an article commenting on the occurrence. The editorial’s point is clearly stated: if musicians are giving their own products away, this can only mean there is a crisis in the record industry. The newspaper piece is sharply entitled: ‘The day the music industry died’ (Sandall 2007).

Pretoria (South Africa), 16 August 2011 It is jazz night at the Blue Room. Despite being a weekday, the place is absolutely crowded. Stylishly dressed people are chatting, flirting and drinking beer. Some watch a soccer match on TV screens around the room – until the band starts playing. A velvety male voice gives life to some songs. This is the sound of Afro Jazz, the genre that crossed the Atlantic almost a century ago and incorporated musical influences from local black people. The rhythm is captivating. Some men dance, combining gentle motions of their feet with the elegance of carefully polished shoes.

Mindelo (Cape Verde), 11 March 2006 In a restaurant facing the sea, touched by the evening breeze, a group of tourists spend some time in casual conversation. Not far from them,

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musicians interpret a few traditional songs of Cape Verde. Trying to engage with his audience, the violinist comes even closer and plays a morna while gazing at the eyes of a foreign lady. He wins the audience’s attention and starts dancing, entertaining everyone. By the end of the song, the applause grows loud. The musician thanks the audience in several languages – Portuguese, French, Italian and English – trying to establish rapport with the foreign visitors.

An Island Society in the World Economy This chapter is an attempt to connect the global music industry to musical experiences on a small scale. The alleged crisis that big record labels have been facing since the digital revolution in communications is deeply intertwined with countless small-scale musical performances around the world, challenging dichotomous understandings of the relation between recorded and live music, global and local processes. The interface between global recorded music and local musical performances is certainly a worldwide issue, from London to Pretoria, from north to south. This theme is approached here through analysis of a specific case study: music markets in Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa. The Cape Verdean musical scene is, in part, a response to the world music recording industry. As such, it reflects the ups and downs in the global business of selling sounds. Yet, musical experiences in the archipelago of Cape Verde could never be understood exclusively as a result of practices generated in contexts outside the country. The whole idea of ‘being Cape Verdean’ is closely tied to what these people understand as their ‘musical nature’. Processes of nation building in Cape Verde were always related to the meanings attributed to the songs composed, sung, played and danced to on these islands. Therefore, it is from a double point of view (with reference to both the outside market and internal national issues) that I discuss musical experiences in Cape Verde. More specifically, I introduce two kinds of events, Cape Verdean nights and tokatinas. An ethnographic approach to these events and to the people that take part in them will lead us on a journey where live music may simultaneously be perceived as a strategic economic investment and a priceless way of socializing with friends. The two events – and the connections between them – are the foundation of important national symbols, which give shape to the bestknown face of Cape Verde in the world. As Stephen Gudeman (2008) makes clear, economy is constituted by the dialectics of community and market; trade depends on mutuality and

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calculation, personal and impersonal relations, dimensions of economic life that may contradict or reinforce each other. The case of Cape Verdean music that I investigate here offers an example of the integration of this dialectical pair that stands in contrast with the southern African economies that dominate this book’s contents. I will suggest some reasons for this that hinge on the population’s small size, on its history of being unusually open to the world and especially on the island character of Cape Verdean society. At the same time my ethnography illustrates the potential of a human economy approach to illuminate the consequences of globalization for local or national society. An economy may be said to be human in two principal senses: analysis focuses on the lived experience of concrete human actors and it reaches out to world society, to the human predicament in general. World music has been made possible by the digital revolution in communications and Cape Verdeans have found a profitable niche for themselves in it. Machine technology may be perceived as the very opposite of live music, even as its nemesis. Yet Cape Verdeans have found a way of being at home in the world that combines the two in creative ways. The dialectic of local and global economy takes on a distinctive character in the case of island societies. These are open to the world as a result of their easy access to the oceans and yet their insularity gives them bounded definition as a local community. Island peoples migrate: there are more Cephalonians in New York today than in the Greek island of Cephalos; the same can be said of the small Caribbean island of Grenada. Cape Verde is an archipelago of ten islands in the Atlantic Ocean some 600 km off the coast of Africa. The national population is half a million and a few more than that live in the United States today, drawn initially to Massachusetts by whaling. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) describes the world’s first truly global industry, the hunting of whales for candle grease to light a rapidly urbanizing world in the first half of the nineteenth century. He describes in detail the whaling ships’ cosmopolitan crews, taken from islands everywhere, ‘mariners, renegades and castaways’ (James 1953), including Cape Verdeans. Before that the islands were an important staging point in the Atlantic slave trade controlled by the Portuguese. They are now a centre for tourism, with a national football team that is making a name for itself internationally, and Cape Verde has also become a distinctive player on the world music scene. Traditional African societies could be said to have supported economies whose object was the production of life embodied in human beings. Hence the importance for many of them of cattle used to secure the reproduction of kin groups through marriage. David Graeber (2011) has

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drawn attention to the idea of ‘human economies’ in this sense. Modern capitalist economies, however, have as their object the accumulation of money through the production of inanimate things for sale. But in recent decades, the fastest-growing sector of world trade has been in cultural commodities: services such as entertainment, the arts, sport, education, media, software and information services, along with explosive growth in the exchange of money itself and in the means of movement or transport. These trends make the economy more about what people do for each other (services) than the physical objects that go into making up their material livelihood. It could be said that, after the early phase of industrialization, the predominant focus of the world economy is reverting to the production of human beings. There is no limit to the stories we can tell each other or to the pleasure we can derive from watching performers excel at what they do. For many people, digitization of song, for example, comes at an unacceptable price, replacing communal experience of live performances with an alienated world of individuals glued to their headphones. Nevertheless, Africa is well placed to leapfrog the industrial phase of capitalist development from which it has hitherto been largely excluded, and in that case Cape Verde’s example may be more generally significant than it would seem at first. The chapter is structured as follows. I next trace the rise of Cape Verde as a centre for the production of world music. A detailed description follows of the two kinds of musical events that I highlight ethnographically – Cape Verdean nights and tokatinas. I then return to the issue of the relationship between recorded and live music, which might stand as a metaphor for the economic tension between global and local, impersonal and personal, and market and community. A final section explores multiple meanings in the global music market through a brief comparison with South Africa.

Cape Verde: Remote Islands with a Unique Blend of Music The genre known as ‘world music’ was introduced into the business of selling sounds during the summer of 1987 in London. A series of meetings brought together representatives of independent record labels, concert promoters, broadcasters and other people involved in the propagation in England of music produced around the world. They were especially concerned to reverse the resistance of record-store owners, who were not really open to new international products because they did not know where to put them on the shelves of their shops. Should they call this

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music ‘ethnic’, ‘folk’ or ‘international’? Clearly, they needed a category or identity for the new product. Participants in the meetings decided to create a tag that might bring together the diversity of sounds they were dealing with. In less than three years, the term ‘world music’ was already in regular use in the mainstream music industry.1 The ‘world music’ label seems, at first, to be very inclusive. Yet closer observation reveals that the category has narrow limits. Not everything fits under the label. There are quite strict criteria that define success and failure in the heterogeneous universe of world music. Timothy Taylor (1997: 6), for instance, examining the world music charts of Billboard magazine, concluded that the bestsellers were often albums featuring ‘Celtic music’ – a kind of ‘internal other’ for audiences in Europe and the United States. Despite what appears to have been the original objective in creating the ‘world music’ category, sounds produced by people from distant places (geographically and culturally) seem not to have much sales appeal. There is a careful selection of artists, one that does not take risk too far.2 Even so, this marketing strategy was crucial to launching Cape Verdean music on the world market. A tiny unknown country, Cape Verde has won international recognition through the world music scene. In February 2004, an opulent ceremony in Los Angeles marked the forty-sixth edition of the Annual Grammy Awards. Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Eminem and Metallica, among others, represented the most successful pop artists at the time. Joining them, there was a particularly remarkable voice, well known in the streets of Mindelo, but only now reaching a global audience. Voz d’Amor, a record featuring Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora, won a Grammy Award in the ‘Best World Music Album’ category. Cesária, called ‘the barefoot diva’, a woman of expressive demeanour, with golden necklaces and long fingernails, gained the spotlight in this tough business. Sitting on a park bench in Mindelo (São Vicente Island, Cape Verde) during my fieldwork, I was once chatting with a boy about his future. This unemployed young man dreamed of one day being able to migrate. He wanted to leave his small island in search of new experiences abroad. He was wondering about the smallness of his homeland, compared to the immensity of the world that waited to be unveiled. Considering his own place in the world, he said: ‘Cape Verde is not on the map, but the melody of Cesária is in the air.’ He knew very well how important music was in broadcasting his country around the world. Today, many other Cape Verdean artists have built their careers through the world music market. On its website, the world music record label Putumayo presents its collection of Cape Verdean music thus: ‘Many of us first heard about Cape Verde through the exquisite voice of Cesaria

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Evora. Over the past few years, some of the favourite songs in our collections have come from talented Cape Verdean artists. Not only are they starkly beautiful islands, but they are home to one of the world’s greatest musical treasure troves.’3 Putumayo not only presents Cape Verde and its people to the world, the record label also makes sure that a global community is established through the unlimited circulation of sounds. Cape Verdean music does not belong exclusively to Cape Verdeans. It is a musical treasure trove for humanity as a whole. Moreover, the website declares: ‘The remote Cape Verde islands offer a unique and exquisite blend of music with influences from Africa, Portugal and Brazil.’4 If the mediated character of recorded sound eliminates its spatial and temporal identity, the discourse of the record label tries to bridge the gap, preserving in words the uniqueness of the musical product that it sells. I will not discuss the reasons for Cape Verde’s success in the world music market at length here. It has both internal and external causes. On the one hand, Cape Verdean music meets a demand constructed by the mainstream music industry. As previously noted, the world music market reveals, above all, a complex negotiation of closeness and distance in search for an ‘other’ that stimulates the experience of diversity, without radically dissociating itself from known musical references. This helps to explain, in part, the success of the morna and the coladeira, musical genres made popular through Cesária Évora’s recordings. The selection of these genres is related to the market strategies outlined above. The morna seems to be the genre that best bridges closeness and distance with reference to the Western musical domain. In the mornas, guitar chords reveal sounds not so strange to Western sensibilities. However, these sounds are also combined with an ‘exotic touch’: images of tropical beaches and picturesque architecture (published on the albums’ covers), and photographs of barefoot Cesária Évora, always focusing on her idiosyncratic character. They are all strategies carefully crafted by record labels and producers to build a mosaic of musical and extra-musical elements and, finally, to shape our perception of the music and artists portrayed. On the other hand, the importance achieved by Cape Verdean music in the global music market echoes the ideas of the Cape Verdeans themselves about the songs produced in the islands. Cape Verdean musical productions do not succeed in the world music market just by responding to demands generated outside the country. Both external and internal impulses – represented by the market and the nation – guide the path followed by Cape Verdean recordings. Music has historically been perceived as a privileged way of presenting Cape Verde to the world. During fieldwork, I could engage in countless

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conversations about the relevance of Cape Verdean music for the nation. It is one of the most important national symbols, featuring in narratives constructed by members of the elite (today and during colonial times) and in popular culture. As one of the main symbols of Cape Verde, the morna has strengthened the idea of a Cape Verdean community. It feeds the islanders’ essential feeling of belonging to a nation. Cape Verdean and Portuguese intellectuals have pictured the morna as ‘the expression of a people’s soul’ (Mariano 1952). Myriad articles have been written about the morna, making it the ‘authentic’ musical genre of Cape Verde. These articles gave meaning to the morna, associating it with a whole set of values in Cape Verdean culture. I highlight some definitions found in the narratives of members of the Luso-Cape Verdean intelligentsia. The morna is described as ‘a desired breath of melancholy’ (Correia 1938: 79) and ‘Cape Verde’s dismay put into music’ (Sousa 1928). João Lopes (1968: 38) affirms that the Cape Verdean ‘responds to all aspirations and appeals of his/her soul with the morna, his/her typical music, all impregnated with melancholy and sweet nostalgia’. The articles on this musical genre emphasize a specific set of terms: love, sentiment, resignation, sadness, loneliness, melancholy, nostalgia, pain and suffering. These are all feelings that make up the semantic field of the morna and they define the image Cape Verdeans have of themselves. Emphasis on the morna as a symbol of the Cape Verdean nation may also be found in popular culture forms – especially, of course, in morna lyrics. To quote just one example, here is a translated excerpt of a morna lyric by Cape Verdean composer Fernando Quejas: MORNA, passionate muse of a thousand singers, go with no fear for the adventure, show the World your Authors, and the fascination of your posture. … Express the sweetness of morabéza [amiability] this feeling, purely African, this Cape Verdean feeling, pregnant with love and simplicity! You, the genesis of so many loves, most desired lover-muse, go, worldwide, with your praise, make your homeland be known.5

These lyrics show that the morna’s worldwide circulation is much more than a response to the global music industry. It is how ordinary Cape Verdeans actively engage with world society. It converges with Cape

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Verdeans’ recurrent claims that music is ‘the only export of Cape Verde’, that it is ‘what the country has to offer to the world’ and that music is ‘Cape Verde’s diamonds’. These comments go side by side with the country’s poverty and with all the difficulties faced by Cape Verdean people. As an ‘export product’ sold to the world and generating income, or as a gift offered to listeners from diverse places, Cape Verdean music spreads out. It is a piece of Cape Verde that circulates through major concerts, nightclubs in European cities, small bars attended by Cape Verdean migrants, and in more intimate and contemplative experiences when a record is played on the sound system of someone’s residence. Moreover, it is the most valued Cape Verdean product, according to the people themselves and to the outside world. A poor country’s image is reversed in this way; it becomes rich through the music it creates. The achievements of Cape Verdean artists in the world music market have especially influenced economic strategies inside the country – in particular investment in tourism. Live music is a fundamental part of tourists’ schedules when visiting Cape Verde. In fact, attempts to relate Cape Verdean music – and particularly the morna – to the touristic potential of Cape Verde are not new. The newspaper O Arquipélago, edited by a governmental agency, the Centre for Information and Tourism in Cape Verde (Centro de Informação e Turismo de Cabo Verde), published various articles on local tourism in the 1960s and 1970s, with the morna an ever-present reference. This is a representative example: ‘We recognize, then, a number of reasons that absolutely justify the inclusion of the archipelago of Cape Verde in our touristic plans, remembering that the average annual temperature is 23.6ºC. … In the realm of folklore, Cape Verde offers a vast field of study. The morna, for example, being a nostalgic song, expresses very well the temperament of the Cape Verdean person. It is, for sure, a suggestion for the holidays’ (Tristão 1964: 6 [my translation]). Internal demand for investment in tourism is especially significant for the island of São Vicente. The Porto Grande (Great Port), a major source of revenue for many decades, lost competitiveness in the Atlantic arena during the mid-twentieth century. Since then, São Vicente has fixed on tourism as an economic alternative. It is a local project, historically oriented and culturally meaningful, based on the image of the island as Cape Verde’s cultural capital. Moreover, the successful introduction of Cape Verdean recorded sounds on the world music scene has helped to intensify this phenomenon. Brochures published by European travel agencies always highlight the powerful presence of music in the archipelago. This was published by a

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Portuguese agency (Soltrópico Operador Turístico [SOP]) that organizes package tours to Cape Verde: Mindelo is the city of Cape Verde where conviviality, par excellence, is sought, cultivated, nurtured. Restaurants organizing Cape Verdean nights and discos full of people until early in the morning invite us for nightlife. … São Vicente is the capital of fun in Cape Verde. It is where the most famous musicians perform, being able for tourists to regularly participate in nights of Cape Verdean music. … Mindelo is the guarantee of fun every day, but especially every night of the year. (SOP 2001: 11–12 [my translation])

Music is essential to advertising the archipelago. Considered the ‘ambassador’ of Cape Verde, music makes the country known worldwide and attracts tourists to the islands. Another curious example of the close relationship between music and tourism may be found in a record by the Cape Verdean musician JeanClaude Gomes, produced in the Netherlands. On the back cover of the LP there is an advertisement: ‘To feel and savour the heat of the tropical music, SVK is the only travel agent you can trust to take you to any tropical destination. For Further Information contact…’ Cape Verdean music is reified in LPs and CDs that circulate worldwide. However, recorded sound is just part of the object of desire for music lovers. This is fully accomplished only with live experience in Cape Verde: where sound meets the ‘savour’ and the ‘heat’, where ‘conviviality, par excellence, is sought, cultivated, nurtured’. Thus, live music events in Cape Verde are not portrayed as concerts to be watched, but as experiences to be lived.

Two Musical Experiences: Cape Verdean Nights and Tokatinas Before arriving in Cape Verde, tourists are already invited to particular events, advertised in travel agencies’ promotional material: Cape Verdean nights. Taking place in restaurants, hotels and bars, these are clearly related to tourism and to marketing strategies in general. Music is monetized; musicians receive regular wages and the performance is guided by specific codes. But Cape Verdean nights are closely related to other live music events, distinguished (according to Cape Verdeans) by their ‘spontaneity’. The latter may happen any time someone feels like playing a guitar, sitting on the street curb with some friends. Examining these two kinds of performances and the people who engage in them, we may observe how different logics of musical practice are negotiated in Cape

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Verde, in an interplay between live and recorded music, local and global elements, individual and collective interests. Cape Verdean nights follow a predetermined schedule. Bars, restaurants and hotels in Mindelo reserve specific days of the week for them. Cape Verdean nights are held in the Hotel Chez Loutcha every Thursday; in the restaurant Archote on Fridays; in Nela’s on Mondays. During fieldwork, I was immediately introduced to this schedule, presented as the best way to enjoy Cape Verdean music – especially for a foreign young woman like me. International tourists, as well as members of the local elite and emigrants visiting home, usually attend these events, which are designed to offer the public a full Cape Verdean experience, with typical food and drinks, to be enjoyed to the sound of live music. The vast majority of songs played in a Cape Verdean night belong to the categories known as morna and coladeira. These two musical genres are usually performed together with some Brazilian music (especially samba) and the mazurka, a musical style of European origin, which has been incorporated into Cape Verdean tradition. These musical performances are distanced from any African heritage (most evident in other Cape Verdean musical genres, such as funaná and batuku). When examining the decoration of the venues where Cape Verdean nights are held, however, we notice exactly the opposite. The objects decorating restaurants and bars evoke a connection with the African continent. Sculptures and textiles from the west coast of Africa are coupled with the waiters’ uniforms, made of special fabrics with African motifs, creating a vague idea of ‘Africanity’. Finally, when it comes to food, the katxupa6 and other typical dishes add the ‘authentic’ tastes of Cape Verde. Cape Verdean nights appeal to the senses. Meanings are attributed to sounds as part of a much wider experience, involving the shapes and colours of the locale, the smell and taste of foods and drinks. Participating in a Cape Verdean night is not only listening to music, but enjoying all aspects of the event. I was told that musical performances of this kind were first arranged in Mindelo during the early 1970s. There is a consensus that the restaurant Calypso was the cradle of Cape Verdean nights. Ofélia Ramos, its owner, had lived many years in Senegal before starting this new business. While still living abroad, she built a house in Cape Verde to fulfil the dream of returning to her homeland. Since she had accumulated experience while working in Dakar, Ofélia decided to transform the house into a restaurant, hiring musicians to play there twice a week. Cape Verdean nights were born as part of an investment by a returned emigrant. The political context for the emergence of Cape Verdean nights was highly unstable. Cape Verde was then going through profound changes.

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The Calypso restaurant started about six months before the proclamation of national independence – an agitated period, when new ideas abounded and new projects for the nation were devised. Cape Verdean nights are thus a symbol of modernity in the islands. They are the product of an independent nation. Moreover, they may be understood as a concept developed outside the archipelago and brought home by an emigrant, together with new values and ideas associated with the experience of living abroad. The event grew stronger as Cape Verdean music achieved global recognition. It became a major attraction for foreign tourists who were already attuned to local sounds through the world music market. The ambivalence of Cape Verdean nights (the mixture of African and European elements) adds value to the business, since the event fits well into the demands of the world music market, negotiating proximity and distance. Several singers and players who performed at Calypso – Cesária Évora and Bana among others – won fame in the international music business. Early participation in Cape Verdean nights boosted their careers. They provide a platform for Cape Verdean musicians who plan professional lives abroad. Yet, the inverse is equally true. A considerable number of Cape Verdean musicians returned to their homeland after some experience of the international recording industry. Back in the islands, they developed successful careers as performers in Cape Verdean nights. Two examples of this are the musicians Malaquias Costa and Biús. Born in São Vicente, Biús went to the United States. There he gained experience by playing with other Cape Verdean musicians; but it was only after he returned home that Biús achieved major recognition. He recorded a couple of albums – Más um Coladera (1997) and Dia e Nôt (1999) – apart from contributing to CDs of various other artists. When Biús passed away in 2009, his obituaries made much of his importance as a performer in Cape Verdean nights. He was declared ‘a great entertainer’ and ‘one of the most requested artists of Mindelo nightlife’ (Morreu o músico Biús 2009). The composer Bau also reminded the public of Biús’s ability to ‘put everybody in a good mood, like no other’ (Cabo Verde de luto: Morreu o músico Biús 2009). Malaquias Costa’s life history is similar. Born in 1925, the musician used to play at the Calypso restaurant, when Cape Verdean nights started. He then took part in a number of recordings, including one of Cesária Évora’s most acclaimed albums, Miss Perfumado (nominated for a 1999 Grammy Award as Best World Music Album). He played in concerts in Portugal, Germany, Brazil, Canada and the United States. Yet he is really known in the islands as ‘the Cape Verdean–nights man’. During a ceremony in Malaquias’s honour, the luthier Luís Baptista called him a ‘show

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man’, an artist who ‘makes the audience vibrate when he is on stage’ (Dias 2011). The discourses about Malaquias and Biús seem to give priority to live over recorded music, stressing the relationship between artist and audience. A great musician is someone who ‘puts everybody in a good mood’ and ‘makes the audience vibrate’. Yet the life paths followed by these musicians show how live and recorded music are interconnected. They are both fundamental to building a successful career. Despite being a key part of Cape Verdean nights, music is not the event’s main objective. Other activities in the bar or restaurant do not wait for the music to start. Moreover, in most Cape Verdean nights there is no stage or other physical separation of the performers from the audience. Even when we focus on sound, the songs are fused together with other noises in the restaurant. This helps to bring musicians and audience closer, making the event less of a spectacle (Turner 1982; Beeman 1993). Appreciation of music as spectacle is not the main point of the Cape Verdean nights. They aim to build ‘communion’ between musicians and audience, between Cape Verdeans and foreign visitors. As announced in touristic brochures, ‘conviviality’ is nurtured there, something that cannot be found through recorded sound. The commercial character of Cape Verdean nights is also meaningful. People who attend these events always pay for it, through mandatory food consumption or a cover charge. This allows the musicians to be paid. Even though the vast majority of musicians have other sources of income, Cape Verdean nights remain an important part of their revenue. Yet the system of charging money for attendance in Cape Verdean nights also produces a new meaning for live music in Cape Verde – it acquires exchange value through a process of commodification. As a well-organized business, Cape Verdean nights can only occur on set days, with a predetermined time to start and finish. The musical performance follows a routine, repeating itself every week without major changes. This facilitates the inclusion of Cape Verdean nights in touristic itineraries, but when musicians follow a rigid schedule, playing by agreement with the entrepreneur, the performance loses ‘spontaneity’. A fundamental value of the morna, synonymous with its authenticity and quality, spontaneity is given fuller expression in another kind of event – the tokatinas. These never had the visibility of Cape Verdean nights. They are rather diffuse, and Cape Verdeans sometimes refer to them simply as ‘spontaneous music’. It should be clear that ‘spontaneity’ is subjective and is not an objective description of these events. It is, above all, part of the

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picture Cape Verdeans build around them. According to most Cape Verdeans, participation in tokatinas is always voluntary. They are never scheduled in advance; they are the result of momentary arrangements among players. Tokatinas and Cape Verdean nights are thus two contrasting types of musical performance. The latter links the archipelago’s music to modern ideals through market principles. They promote the ‘musician’ as a professional, paid regular wages and performing in a context defined by relatively rigid codes. In contrast, tokatinas take spontaneity as their core value. There is no other motivation for participating in them. What really matters is the simple desire to enjoy music and to interact with friends. Tokatinas do not occur at predetermined times and spaces. They may start in the morning and continue for the entire day, or they may only last for a couple of hours in the evening, in a small bar or on the street corner. The distinction between players and audience is completely erased. If Cape Verdean nights already tend to bring musicians and audience closer together, in tokatinas the two sides are absent. We may see, for example, a woman in the street passing by on her way to the market who suddenly stops at the corner to join a group performing a morna. Or we may find a man in a bar, entertaining himself with a guitar, turning his back to the others in clear denial of his role as a musician. Indeed, the spaces where tokatinas occur already contribute to the formation of relatively homogeneous groups, without strict demarcation of roles. Streets and bars, where friends and neighbours meet, are seen as an extension of home, providing an atmosphere of intimacy, closeness and spontaneity for interactions between members of the group. This contrast is also highlighted in popular discourse: Cape Verdean nights are described as ‘bars where consumption is required, lacking the spontaneity necessary to this form of music’ (Martins 1989: 118); whereas tokatinas are portrayed as events where ‘everything is spontaneous: people get together and play, sing and socialize’. But when we focus on the dynamics of these two types of musical experiences, the distinction becomes less sharp. There are many similarities between them, a shared repertoire being one example. Moreover, spontaneity is also a cherished value in Cape Verdean nights; they are especially appreciated whenever they include the audience’s voluntary participation in the performance. Finally, many of the actors in both kinds of events move easily between them. Usually, musicians who perform in Cape Verdean nights also spontaneously perform in the neighbourhood where they live, without expecting to be paid. The ends are non-economic, being just for the sake of taking pleasure in the music and being sociable among friends.

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How do tokatinas relate to the monetization of live music and to the ambivalence that money provokes? Manuel is a small businessman who, while living in an upmarket neighbourhood, finds it hard to keep up with the neighbours. One day he decided to offer a dinner to celebrate his wife’s birthday. He wanted the event to be really outstanding, with a musical performance. He invited his closest friends and looked for Calú, a musician whom he claimed to be his old acquaintance. Manuel asked Calú to invite a few more musicians to play at the event, promising them plenty of foods and drinks in return. Calú, who usually performs in Cape Verdean nights, spoke to his colleagues, but they decided they would only attend the event if they were paid a fee. Manuel, who could not cover the expense, was forced to cancel the event. He was surprised and disappointed. Here we see a clash between two opposite views about musical performers. The principle of ‘conviviality’, exemplified by tokatinas, is contrasted to the logic of contracts, embodied in the figure of the professional musician. There is no cultural consensus when trying to reconcile these two approaches to live music. Gregório, who also performs in Cape Verdean nights, supported Calú and his partners. Some people play the guitar in exchange for drinks, known as txorá grog (literally, ‘crying for grog’, Cape Verdean rum). Gregório rejects this completely. Musicians do not appreciate txorá grog since it bears the image of someone who must beg for a drink in a humiliating way. He himself, along with many other musicians who play in Cape Verdean nights, often accepts drinks offered by the audience in these events; but he gains in respectability by having a contract, which stipulates his rate of pay. Other Cape Verdeans were critical of musicians for now being focused on their wages. They would nostalgically recall the old times when Cape Verdean players and singers did not think of music as a business. Cesária Évora before her international fame is a case in point. Ofélia Ramos has this to say about the archipelago’s most successful artist: ‘Before she became a star, the Calypso was just like a home for Cesária. But she had one thing: she would never sing for money. She used to sing for pleasure. I have great esteem for Cesária, because she performed for many years in this venue, but Cesária still says: “Ofélia, I’m going to sing today, but you will pay me a whiskey.” Today! If I would pay her a whiskey, she would drink it’ (interview: October 2002). This statement blurs the boundaries between Cape Verdean nights and tokatinas, fusing ‘music as business’ with ‘music as pleasure’. According to Ofélia, the establishment where Cape Verdean nights were held could also be a ‘home’. Moreover, this aspect of Cesária Évora’s life history is mentioned often. Her prestige is based on the supposition that she used to sing ‘just for the fun of it’ and

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never liked being obliged to do things. This brings us back to spontaneity as a value. Perhaps we may now understand how the ‘authenticity’ of tokatinas contributes value to the world music market. These popular myths about Cesária, the barefoot diva who sings for pleasure, raise her prestige and the value of her recordings. Even though she is successful in the global music business, she is presented as someone who can be as much shaped by the social context as by calculation.

Recorded and Live Music Markets The technology of sound recording brought about a major transformation in how people experienced music. When the phonograph was introduced in 1877, it inaugurated whole new ways of composing, performing and listening to music. Habits and practices had to be adapted to the impact of technology. We can say, without risk of exaggeration, that live and recorded music have different characters: ‘When performed live, musical sound is fleeting, evanescent. Recordings, however, capture these fugitive sounds, tangibly preserving them on physical media, whether wax cylinders or plastic CDs. Once musical sound is reified – made into a thing – it becomes transportable, saleable, collectable and manipulable in ways that had never before been possible’ (Katz 2004: 5). The tangibility of sound is one of the main innovations engendered by technologies of mechanical reproduction. When preserved in recordings, sounds can reach new times and spaces, different contexts and people. After recording arrived, a person could listen to music whenever and with whomever she or he wished. Even this gigantic achievement of sound-recording technology is now once more undergoing a profound transformation. After the digital revolution of the last two decades, fugitive sound is still being captured in a physical media: silicon computer chips. Yet the tangibility of these new media is more complex, especially when consumers subscribe to cloud services, which move music from storage on a desktop or hard drive to internet-based on-demand access. The new possibilities for circulating sounds have grown exponentially as a result. Recorded music modified the relation between the artist and the audience. Listeners and performers cannot see each other – something that directly affects the communication between them. Moreover, if live performances are unique experiences, recordings are replicable ad infinitum. Finally, technologies of sound recording make it possible for sound to be manipulated – by musicians, producers, engineers and even listeners, who can now control what they hear. ‘While there have always been composer-

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performers – artists who interpret their own works – with recording we can conceive of listener-performers and listener-composers’ (Katz 2004: 47). Technologies of sound recording continue to transform musical habits and the relations among all the actors involved in these practices.7 The contrast between live and recorded music divides people. For some, the technology of sound recording allowed for unprecedented improvement of the process of making music. Removing the audience from the act of music production may allow the artist to focus more sharply, enhancing the performance. Moreover, the ability to manipulate sound through technologies such as magnetic tapes and digital recordings has made it possible to transcend human limitations (Katz 2004: 41). Recording technology has been exalted for the unlimited possibilities for circulating sounds that it brings about. This traffic of sounds, in multiple directions, reinforces the potential for our participation in a global society. If the rise of the printing press – the mechanical reproduction of writing under a capitalist system with greatly increased dissemination – was one of the main sources for nationalism (Anderson 1983), then digital reproduction of sound, the emergence of the new cultural industries and the universal circulation of music could form the basis of an imagined global community. We are certainly tempted to speculate along these lines when we look at the scope of some record labels today. For instance, on the website of Putumayo, the company’s aim is said to be ‘to introduce people to the music of the world’s cultures’, with ‘CD distribution in more than 80 countries’.8 Without dwelling on the actual inequality of world society, not to mention the less-than-egalitarian politics of music production and distribution, consumers of Putumayo records – millions of people who enjoy listening to music from ‘remote places’ – may think of themselves as world comrades, if not citizens, in an imagined global community connected through the circulation of sound. The disadvantages of new sound-recording technologies have not gone unnoticed by scholars and lay people alike. Walter Benjamin’s critique of the mechanical reproduction of works of art, written in 1936, is one of the best known of these arguments: ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ (1973: 222). Benjamin called the presence of the original, the missing element in mechanical reproduction, the ‘aura’ of the work. Mechanical reproduction takes a work of art out of its context in ritual (1973: 226). Technologies of sound recording thus remove performance from making music, impoverishing us all by the resulting loss of a unique spatial and temporal identity.

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I am not interested in arguing about which of live and recorded music is better suited to enrich the art form. We may be certain that soundrecording technology has allowed for the rise of a strong global business: the music industry. In 1999 alone, total revenues from music sales and licensing in the United States reached US $14.6 billion, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA 2010: 10). But the recording industry now seems to be facing a critical moment.9 The same report stated that revenues from music sales and licensing in the United States fell to US $7.7 billion in 2009, 47 per cent lower than a decade earlier. Countless newspaper headlines have announced the death of the music industry. For example, CNNMoney spoke of ‘music’s lost decade’ in 2010 (Goldman 2010). Many factors contribute to the crisis. Piracy and the growing popularity of digital music are certainly in the forefront (Johns 2009). From 2004 to 2009, approximately thirty billion songs were illegally downloaded on file-sharing networks (RIAA 2010: 10). Album sales are falling dramatically all over the world. This is not only because people are buying fewer CDs; they are also paying much less for each unit, compared to what they used to pay when the compact disc first arrived in the market. Constant improvement and cheapening of technology have taken us to a point when we can buy a chart CD in a supermarket for as little as US $10.10 But this is not a crisis for the consumption of music in general. The internet has exposed consumers to more music than ever before. Music is everywhere in our daily lives. The problem is that the music industry has not been able to monetize new musical practices and technologies as effectively as before. They have tried to diversify revenue streams – for instance, by licensing ringtones and music on internet radio stations. This may be a first step out of the crisis. For now, however, these measures do not seem to be enough to overcome losses caused by the decline in physical sales. What happened to live music in the meantime? When we turn the focus of our attention to this section of the music industries, the available data is significant. If people are paying less to buy a CD, the same is not true when it comes to the consumption of live music. Ticket prices for live performances are generally becoming more expensive. Robert Sandall (2007) makes an interesting calculation: ‘You could have bought Madonna’s entire catalogue for less than half what it cost to see her perform at Wembley Arena.’ He claims that records have been downgraded to the status of promotional tools, useful to sell concert tickets – where real money is made. This helps to explain why Radiohead made its album available for free digital download.

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Despite general pessimism concerning the effects of mechanical reproduction on music, sound-recording technology never actually threatened the existence of musical performances – be they massive concerts, raising millions of dollars or small-scale performances in local venues, such as the jazz night in Pretoria mentioned above. I would insist rather that recorded and live musical experiences were always tied together. If not, how can we explain the growth of live recordings in the market? The technical perfection of a recording is linked to the spontaneity and uniqueness of live performances, in an explicit attempt to bridge the gap between the two. Taking Benjamin a bit further, we could say that the mechanical (and digital) reproduction of sound does not eliminate the aura of live music. Rather, it feeds the everlasting demand for unique performances. During the twentieth century, while the potential of sound-recording technology to create a global phenomenon was first being explored, live music was preserved in local performances. In fact, the value of live music is now increasing. The crisis in the recording sector (which should not be taken as being synonymous with the music business in general) is accompanied by a boom in live music.11 Even the RIAA report attributes greater importance to performances when compared to recorded music in a passage entitled ‘The Big Concert’: ‘The anticipation. The excitement. The continuous playback of the album so you can be prepared to sing along at the top of your lungs and fist-pump the air for three straight hours. A football stadium, civic auditorium, buzzing coffeehouse or college amphitheatre. From Boston to Houston to Seattle and countless small towns in between … your best concert experiences will stay with you for a lifetime’ (2010: 4). So listening to recordings is only a preparation for the truly meaningful act: the concert. To paraphrase the guitarist of the US hardcore band Anthrax: ‘Our album is the menu; the concert is the meal’ (Sandall 2007). What is being reinstated in the music industry is the value of people, a confirmation indeed of the link between digital technology and the potential for a human economy. Recorded sound is mediated sound, while live music necessarily involves a direct relationship between people. When Karl Marx wrote his response to Adam Smith in the classical debate about the distinction between productive and unproductive labour,12 he argued that the opera singer’s performance is a service inseparable from the action of the singer. That is, as soon as the singing is over, the service perishes. He wrote this before the invention of the phonograph. I would say now that the consumption of a performance is inseparable from the artist. Live music presupposes relations between people, no matter how ephemeral these may be.

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Music as a thing (recorded albums) is losing ground to music as performance. When we focus on the human value of music, the music market turns out to be about much more than selling CDs. As pointed out in The Human Economy, the rise of the global trade in cultural commodities ‘make[s] the economy more about what people do for each other than the physical objects that go into making up their material livelihood’ (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010b: 6–7). Technology still plays an important role when we speak of ‘live music’. Millions of dollars are needed to put on a big concert. But sound-recording technology itself has experienced a shift of emphasis in the contemporary context. Music as performance places ultimate value on the uniqueness of ‘being there’. In an age of digital reproduction, the production and marketing of singular live experiences now rules. The music industry is not alone in this. The whole point of Web 2.0 is its emphasis on interaction and collaboration among people. Websites now allow users to participate as content creators. Social networking sites, blogs and video-sharing sites all emphasize the value of actively being a member in a (virtual) community. The range of personal experiences for sale is huge: from tourism to soap operas to fashion and even drugs. This trend valorizes all actions that enhance the possibility of modifying your own life through a new (saleable) experience – one that, for all its evanescence, ‘will stay with you for a lifetime’. Taking a wider perspective in this way allows us, as anthropologists, once more to address humanity as a whole; but we still need to see how these questions are lived on the ground. The interface between live and recorded music, not only the contrast between them but also how they feed each other, is best illustrated by use of ethnographic method. This is why I presented field material on the relationship between local livemusic markets and the global recording sector in the specific case of Cape Verde, where I have been carrying out research for over a decade.13 Similar analyses could have been done in almost any region of the world – from London to Pretoria. But Cape Verde may also be seen as a paradigmatic example. It represents at once success in the world music market, and a place where live music is taken seriously as a national symbol and as an economic resource for the country.

Final Act Durban (South Africa), 18 June 2011 Driving to a township on a Saturday evening, Njabulo Shabalala talks about how euphoric he felt when he performed at Carnegie Hall (New

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York) in 2007, accompanying the South African musician Shiyani Ngcobo. After Ladysmith Black Mambazo – the isicathamiya group acclaimed for collaborating with US musician Paul Simon – Njabulo and his partners were the first South Africans to step onto that famous stage. Now, the musician complains that live music seems to be disappearing from the music scene of South Africa’s townships. Kwaito and house music DJs are becoming more popular among young people. Yet this evening he is taking part in a meaningful event. A producer has decided to invest in live music performances by organizing a festival in a Durban township. Njabulo is playing there with his band. The venue for the festival is just a house extended into the yard and turned into a bar. Over three hundred people show up to take part in this musical gathering.

Multiple Meanings in the Global Music Market The world music market that took Cape Verdean and South African music into the spotlight has been criticized extensively. Many scholars argue that these musical practices and the discourses of otherness associated with them reproduce unequal relations.14 With its access to cutting-edge technologies, the recording industry (usually based in Western countries) has the power to decide on the type, direction and meaning of the traffic in sounds. For these critics, the circulation of music engendered by the world music market bears more than a passing resemblance to the pattern of exchange typical of colonial empire. The Cape Verdean case, however, complicates this picture. It shows that the introduction of African music to the global commerce in sound has multiple meanings, going beyond the rhetoric of difference produced by the music business itself. The circulation of music involves, above all, a process of commodification. But the production of non-monetary values associated with music promotes, in particular, social prestige and feelings of belonging (to a neighbourhood, a nation or even to humanity). A human economy is not incompatible with money and markets. Observing the concrete activities of ordinary Cape Verdeans – migrants and musicians alike – we can understand how insertion in the global market may also nurture intimacy, even an ability to feel ‘at home’. The resilience of live musical performances today (in Cape Verde, South Africa and many other places) shows that music is primarily about people. The whole experience of live music – sounds mixed with aromas, tastes, images and human heat – concerns relations between people. This suggests limits to the power of technology – and of those who concentrate access to it in their hands – to control musical practices worldwide.

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The interface between recorded and live music is a product of people’s actions – real people who move through both musical domains, building connections between them. When we focus on what people do, these interconnections become clear, but we also may discern alternatives for the global music market from these interactions. That market need not be just an unequal system of production and consumption of sounds. The continuing search for ‘conviviality’ reminds us that the presence of people in this system is irreplaceable. In that observation we discover the seeds of emancipation from unequal society.

NOTES 1. This description of the origin of the World Music genre is based on Philip Sweeney’s account (Taylor 1997: 2–3). 2. One exception is works in collaboration with Western musicians. For example, the first Grammy award in the category World Music, in 1991, went to the album Planet Drum, a collaboration between Mickey Hart (drummer for the Grateful Dead) and a number of other percussionists from around the world (Taylor 1997: 11). 3. ‘Putumayo – Cape Verde.’ Retrieved 26 September 2011 from http://www.putu mayo.com/cape_verde. 4. ‘Putumayo – Cape Verde.’ Retrieved 26 September 2011 from http://www.putu mayo.com/cape_verde. 5. Originally: ‘MORNA, musa ardente de mil cantores / parte sem medo da aventura / mostra ao Mundo os teus Autores / e o fascínio da tua postura. … Exprime a doçura da “morabéza” / este sentir, puro africano / este sentir cabo-verdiano / prenhe d’amôr e singeleza! / Tu, génese de tantos amores / musa-amante mais apetecida / vai, mundo fora, com teus louvores / faz tua Terra ser conhecida’ (Quejas 1998). 6. Katxupa is one of the most characteristic dishes from Cape Verde. It is prepared from crushed corn and beans, with various vegetables (sweet potato, pumpkin, cabbage etc.) and meat (chicken, beef, tuna fish etc.). 7. A thoughtful examination of all the above-mentioned traits of sound-recording technology can be found in Katz (2004: 8–47). 8. ‘Putumayo – About us.’ Retrieved 19 September 2011 from http://www.putu mayo.com/AboutUs. 9. This is particularly true in the case of the ‘big four’ record labels (Sony/BMG, Warner Music, EMI and Universal). Some argue that small independent labels are now increasing in value. 10. Actually, in one of my last purchases, I bought an album of Brazilian popular music, in a supermarket, for the amazing price of US $1. 11. See, for example, Williamson and Cloonan (2007: 314). 12. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that the labour of servants (and of ‘some of the most respectable orders in the society’) is unproductive of any value, because it does not realize itself in a material and vendible

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commodity which endures after the labour is past. He mentioned many professions to exemplify his argument, including opera singers – together with churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters, players, buffoons and musicians (Smith 2003). Later, in Theories of Surplus Value, Karl Marx criticized this assumption, affirming that labour is only productive if it creates a surplus value: ‘The designation of labour as productive has absolutely nothing to do with the definite content of the labour, with its special usefulness, or with the particular use value in which it manifests itself’ (1951: 186). According to him, the labour of a singer is not productive from the point of view of the members of the audience who pay to hear the performance. However, from the perspective of the theatre owner who hires the singer to perform, the singer is a productive worker, producing surplus value for the entrepreneur – even if the performance lasts only for an instant. 13. The objective of my first fieldwork in Cape Verde, in 1998, was to study family organization in the context of intense migration flows. The results of this research may be found in Dias (2000). During 2001 and 2002, I did extended fieldwork on Cape Verdean popular culture and social identities, which was later developed into my doctoral dissertation (Dias 2004). New investigations in 2006 and 2009 added to those ethnographic experiences. My reflections here draw on all this body of research. 14. See, for example, Erlmann (1999), Feld (2000), Born and Hesmondhalgh (2000) and Taylor (1997).

Chapter 7

░ Congo-Gauteng Congolese Migrants in South Africa SAINT JOSÉ INAKA AND JOSEPH TRAPIDO

This chapter gives an overview of migration from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to South Africa concentrating on one region, Gauteng. Our research is primarily based on ethnographic fieldwork by the authors, with additional material from the library and the press. Outside of frontier states, South Africa is the principal destination for the Congolese. Migration there is the subject of a voluminous body of literature (e.g. Gelderblom et al. 2006). Yet despite this and the large numbers of Congolese in South Africa, relatively little has been written about this migration stream. People on the move represent a striking feature of contemporary sociality (Urry 2010) and links between the DRC and South Africa will, we believe, form an important ‘south-south’ relationship in the new century. Looking at the concrete aspirations and activities of Congolese migrants, we attempt a broad overview as a basis for further investigation. Congolese migration to South Africa has the potential to develop mutually beneficial contacts between South Africa, the DRC and the broader Southern African Development Community (SADC) area. Yet the prevailing system promotes negative outcomes, penalizing and criminalizing socially useful labour at the bottom of the social scale, while rewarding and consolidating a violent rentier class at the top.

Congo-Paris and Other Literature on Congolese Migrants While Congolese migration to South Africa is relatively unstudied, Congolese migrants to other destinations have received more attention. These include the ‘Bana Lunda’ who migrated to Lunda Norte in Angola to mine diamonds in the 1990s (e.g. De Boeck 1998). Also notable are stud-

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ies of migration by youths such as the sapeurs and mikilistes from Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville (Gandoulou 1989; Gondola 1999; Trapido 2011). Most relevant here, however, is Janet MacGaffey and Rémy BazenguissaGanga’s Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (2000). With its highly accessible mix of vivid ethnography and practical theory, Congo-Paris was a model for us to aspire to. Like them, we are interested in the economy as an important modality of human activity, while investigating ‘the economic’ as embedded social facts that can only be understood in the wider texture of human life. We also believe that migration has important implications for African politics in the twentyfirst century. Our study differs from Congo-Paris in that we concentrate more on class divisions within the Congolese migrant community. The migration of Congolese to France was overwhelmingly from the Lingala-speaking west of the country. Migration to South Africa reflects the overall demography of Congo, with large numbers of migrants from both the western and eastern, Swahili-speaking parts of Congo. The difference between west and east has become an important political divide in the DRC, with easterners and especially people from the southeast province of Katanga being more favourable to the Kabila regime (Inaka forthcoming). The linguistic divide may render class tensions more acute in South Africa. There appear to be fewer spaces of contact between elite and non-elite migrants in South Africa than there were in Europe during the 1990s and 2000s, when it was common to encounter the children of senior Mobutiste cadres hanging out in local bars. This is surely related to the general pattern of geographical segregation between rich and poor that is characteristic of South Africa. In Congo-Paris the authors claim that Congolese migrants have a ‘counterhegemonic’ relationship to the powers that be – casting migrants as resisting elites both in the two Congos and in France. They draw on both Antonio Gramsci and James Scott, but MacGaffey herself in earlier work on Zaire (for example, 1987) contrasted an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, based in an expanding informal economy,1 with a parasitic state bourgeoisie whose revenues came from rent seeking or even predation. Our chapter disputes such a division; indeed rentiers – who can impose and benefit from a monopoly of or restricted access to an economic resource – are best placed to reap the informal economy’s rewards (Hyslop 2005). The state has been a crucial vector of informal economic activity in Zaire (Reno 1998). Even where ‘the state’ has been entirely replaced by smaller-scale forms of authority, it is questionable to view informal economic

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agents as emancipatory. Timothy Raeymaekers (2010) shows how Nande traders of North Kivu, a group taken by MacGaffey (1987, 1997) to epitomise the resistant entrepreneur, were themselves inexorably drawn into the same patterns of rent seeking and violence once undertaken by state elites. It cannot be denied, however, that ordinary people have turned to the informal economy to put food on the table. We propose to see the informal economy, not as an entity with a single set of implications for society, but as a mode of economic behaviour. Informality is accessed by different social groups on different terms often corresponding to class positions. Class and conflicts of interest should be integral to how we think about the informal economy. Congolese migrants have an important relationship to informality. Migrants to South Africa are far from being a homogenous social group. Their access to ‘the informal economy’ is shaped by their class position and general statements about the positive or negative potential of migration must take this into consideration.

Background The DRC is the largest member of SADC, both in terms of area and population. With its nearly seventy million potential consumers, its cultural prowess, its globally important reserves of cobalt, uranium and rare non-ferrous metals, and its vast hydroelectric potential, the DRC offers SADC a route to an optimistic future – culturally vibrant, jobs-rich, hightech, low-carbon. Yet, while it is commonplace to assert that the DRC has this huge potential, it is evident that it is not currently able to deliver on it. This distance between aspiration and the actuality can only be understood through the country’s turbulent history. In the early colonial period the Congo was marked by widespread violence, as the colonial state used ever more extreme methods to obtain commodities from the interior, above all wild rubber. Estimates of excess mortality in this period vary between three and twenty-one million (Ndaywel é Nziem 1998; Hochschild 2006; Vellut 2006; White 2011). These exactions may be seen as state-led ‘primitive accumulation’ – an act of dispossession that creates the conditions necessary for capitalism (Marx 1961 [1867]). Thus in the late colonial period the Belgian Colony was relatively industrialized and affluent, with the highest proportion of wage labourers in Sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa (Prunier 2009). However, all of this came to an end at independence.

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The Belgians and other Western powers were alarmed (and apparently surprised) that the Congolese people had voted for parties and candidates that promised economic independence from the former colonial power, and the country was immediately destabilized. The elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated by Belgian forces. Elites in the mineral-rich Katanga province tried to secede, with the tacit encouragement of Western interests; the army rebelled and the country was plunged into chaos. Mobutu Sese Seko, the head of the army, who had been on the Central intelligence Agency (CIA) payroll since before independence, took power in 1965. Maintaining close relations with Washington and from the 1970s onwards with Paris, he was able to call in favours each time his power was threatened. Mobutu was able to keep the lid on for a while, curbing inflation, reducing the deficit through a managed devaluation (Young and Turner 1985) and instituting a moderately successful nationalization of the mines in 1966.2 But by the mid-1970s the country was once again in a downward spiral, as a huge fall in copper prices, then the main export, and an ill-conceived distribution of foreign-owned property to regime cronies, took their toll. The regime limped on, and when Mobutu was finally chased from power in 1997, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was, in real terms, less than 20 per cent of what it had been at independence (Exenberger and Hartman 2013: 31) and the country owed its creditors nearly US $13 billion. Since the fall of Mobutu the country has been characterized, once again, by extreme violence. Disruption caused by the Congo wars of 1996 to 1997 and 1998 to 2002, and by the turbulent ‘peace’ that came afterwards, has led to an estimated excess mortality of 3.9 million people – more than anywhere else since the end of World War II (Coghlan et al. 2006). Most of these deaths have not been caused by direct violence, but rather relate to events that are ‘economic’ and ‘political’ as much as ‘military’. These can, to some degree, be seen as an extension of trends that were already in place before the war: the collapse of roads and infrastructure, the decline in food production, the mass migrations of a besieged peasantry (abandoning the countryside en masse because of insecurity and informal ‘taxation’ by a plethora of armed groups) and the disappearance of anything resembling a public health system. Even outside the eastern regions that have been the primary theatre of conflict, the country is extraordinarily dilapidated. There has been no census since 1984; there is no road between the country’s largest cities, Kinshasa (seven to ten million people) and Lubumbashi (around three

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million). Mbuji-Mayi, a city of several millions, has no piped water; Kinshasa suffers power cuts lasting several months a year; and most of the population has been reduced to a level of bare subsistence.

Migration, Outline Trends Given the hardship of life in the DRC – which was ranked 187th, or last, in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index (2011) – migration is an obviously attractive option. That being said, most Congolese would rather migrate north to Europe or North America than to South Africa. This preference is clearly related to the higher standard of living there, but it extends well beyond simple economic calculations. Europe and the rich north – known as mikili in Lingala – have become the focus for a highly elaborated set of myths and rituals on the part of both urban youth and various elites. Restrictive migration policies in ‘the West’, however, mean that entry into these countries is now almost impossible, even for relatively well-off Congolese. As a result, they have increasingly turned to ‘south-south’ migration, with important flows of commercial, educational and vocational migration taking place between the DRC and emerging countries – notably Brazil, Turkey, China, India and, above all, South Africa. There are no reliable figures for the number of Congolese living in South Africa. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2006 estimated that 23,000 Congolese asylum seekers and 17,000 refugees lived there, while the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants World Refugee Survey 2009 estimated the population of refugees and asylum seekers from the DRC at 33,000. Both these estimates draw on a baseline survey of 2003 (Belvedere 2003). It is obvious that this survey must have missed very large numbers of people who would be contained within a larger definition of the Congolese community living in South Africa. First, it excludes those who are not refugees or claiming asylum – students, many migrant workers, those who have become South African nationals and most members of the elite. Second, it excludes a large group of people who have overstayed their visa and any whose claim for asylum has been rejected but who continue to live on there clandestinely. Finally, it excludes those people, perhaps not numerous, who have bypassed official points of entry and live in South Africa without documentation. We now examine some factors relevant to a consideration of class among Congolese migrants to Gauteng.

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Particularities of Class in the DRC and Abroad Theories of class are often grouped into two schools: a Weberian emphasis on status and political power and a Marxist emphasis on relationship to the means of production. It is often taken as a vindication of the Weberian approach that, in states like Zaire/DRC, political power seems to have preceded economic power (Schatzberg 1980); but one could just as well argue in Marxist terms that the power of the ruling class there is based on extracting rent from the means of production. This might be linked to a third important theorist of class, Thorstein Veblen (1912). He offers another approach to class, with his emphasis on forms of conspicuous consumption among a non-productive status group of ‘predators’, a class which might be also characterized as rentiers. Our class model, with a predatory non-productive class at the top, most resembles Veblen. This essay will consider ‘money’, ‘status’ and ‘power’ where it seems appropriate. All three elements should be included in a full account of social class. For the purpose of identifying divisions within the Congolese migrant community, we propose a three-class model – a class of hustlers and survivors at the bottom similar to those Keith Hart (1973) once termed an ‘urban sub-proletariat’ (see also Davis 2006); a class of professionals, traders and moderately successful criminals in the middle; and at the top an elite class, composed of wealthy and politically well-connected individuals, who live, or spend significant periods, in South Africa, but whose livelihood is primarily guaranteed by access to rents in the DRC. Our conclusions are tentative and our terminology reflects this, referring to these groups simply as ‘the bottom’, ‘the middle’ and ‘the top’. Within these broad categories we look at particular occupational groups – e.g. security guards, professionals or criminals. The social class of migrants when they leave the DRC obviously affects the positions they occupy when they get to South Africa. However lowly the social position of Congolese migrants in South Africa may appear, they rarely come from the poorest backgrounds in the DRC. Migration everywhere requires more resources than those at the very bottom can often acquire (Durand and Massey 2006). This is true of migration to South Africa. While Congolese people often see this as a more accessible option compared with getting into the rich north, coming to South Africa from the DRC is quite expensive; at their closest the two countries are nearly 2,000 kilometres apart. Exploring class in the DRC can sometimes feel like entering a lookingglass world, where the disasters of the post-independence state have pulled ordinary social terms far away from their conventional ‘Western’ mean-

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ings (De Boeck and Plissart 2004). A wide range of professions – civil servants, schoolteachers, tax inspectors etc. – should not be seen as being especially privileged. Salaries are absurdly low compared to the cost of living; public servants are generally paid less than US $200 a month and this often comes with several months or even years of arrears. A friend of the authors, who worked for the municipal tax office in Kinshasa, received a monthly salary of US $150 and this was not paid for seven months out of twelve. Yet penury has not necessarily disrupted class hierarchies. In relative terms, professionals are still better placed than the great mass of hawkers, vegetable gardeners, peanut sellers, sweeps, sentinels, roadside cooks, moonshine brewers, drug sellers and prostitutes who struggle to wrest a living from the DRC’s urban centres. But this advantage is due, in large measure, not to their feeble salaries but to other privileges that they enjoy. One advantage is that jobs in the tax office or for the state power company can be a source of informal fees. But the most important advantages concern property and social connections. The current crop of downtrodden professionals are quite often the children of an earlier generation of professionals who came to maturity when housing was cheaper, when salaries were paid and before runaway inflation took hold. Thus a badly paid civil servant is probably in a position to live at home with his parents. He is also more likely than most to have access to circuits of migrant capital. So general impoverishment in Congo presents a counter-intuitive set of social facts – while the middle classes have been reduced to near subsistence level, those beneath them have also experienced a fall in their standard of living and relative class positions have remained similar. For migrants, the opposite may be true. A considerable improvement of their material standard of living in South Africa often coincides with downward mobility in terms of relative position and occupational class. It is not uncommon for car guards in South Africa to have been professionals with a degree in Congo. But they often earn much more in tips from South African drivers than their salary from the Congolese state. Informal and illegal economic activities often play an important role in migrants’ lives. These may be characterized as ‘survival strategies’ undertaken by people at the bottom of the heap. The various social groups relate to informality differently and the degree of choice they exercise is crucial. Those at the bottom are involved in what we call ‘forced informality’. Arriving without the money needed to regularize their situation, they are prevented by law from finding formal employment. The informal opportunities available restrict their earning potential while leaving them vulnerable in other ways. Those in the middle also rely on informal

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incomes, but they have a greater degree of choice about this. The financial capital they can draw on when entering the informal economy is greater. Doctors, engineers and others working as professionals in South Africa commonly derive significant income from illegal or unregistered businesses. But the formal economy gives them access to banking, credit, secure legal standing, regular employment etc. They often obtain their work permits, their regular status, by informal and illegal means – at a price beyond migrants who lack significant capital reserves. Those at the top live almost entirely within the formal sphere in South Africa. Yet, in the extra-legal space that is the DRC, they can plunder national resources, using South Africa as a secure place to manage their assets. We now place various empirically observed occupations within these rough-hewn categories of ‘the bottom’, ‘the middle’ and ‘the top’.

Those at the Bottom All the Congolese migrants we met at the bottom end of the social scale are claiming asylum in South Africa. Often arriving with a visitor’s permit, they claim asylum once they are admitted to the country. Asylum-seeker status has several disadvantages, especially no right to work while the claim is being processed, and most claims appear to get nowhere. Migrants in this category are condemned to ‘forced informality’, the most direct cause of their low social mobility and poverty. Other vectors of class formation, however, oblige these migrants to adopt such a status in the first place, above all capital. All the other options for remaining in South Africa, each of which leads more easily to regular status, involve money. Renewing a visitor’s permit requires substantial income, while other options carrying the possibility of working legally also require considerable resources and/or special skills (as we will see with professional migrants). Those at the bottom have no right to work, yet they must earn money to eat. Sometimes they work in purely informal occupations, as car guards, cutting hair on the street, prostitutes etc. Often, however, they work illegally for South African companies, above all in security or as bouncers and waitresses. These illegal jobs require access to forged papers. Gauteng has a reputation among the Congolese as a source of forged documents, which can be obtained with startling ease and very cheaply (see below). The forgers perform a vital role without which the lives of many Congolese at the bottom of Gauteng’s heap would be even more difficult. Their services are sometimes referred to as the ‘embassy of Yeoville’, after the Johannesburg district where many Congolese forgers live.

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Henri and Manassé are car park attendants working purely in the informal economy. They spend long hours working their pitch outside a shopping centre. On a good day they can make 200 rand, though the amount fluctuates a lot. One of their most serious problems is competition for their pitch, especially since in Gauteng car guarding is often thought of as a job for indigenous South Africans. Partly as a result, Henri and Manassé pay out a significant sum to a gangster who ensures that they retain their pitch. Both Henri and Manassé are from genuinely poor backgrounds in Kinshasa and seem less inclined than most to complain about their circumstances in Gauteng. Jean-Pierre comes from Kasai in the south-central part of the DRC. He works as a guard for various properties where large amounts of cash are stored. He lives in Yeoville, although his job takes him to other parts of Gauteng. Like many security guards, he claims to have been a soldier in the FAZ (Forces Armées Zaïroises). This appears to be true – he has photos of himself as a younger man in an officer’s uniform. Most such claims, however, are false. The job is extremely unpleasant: Jean-Pierre has to carry a pump-action shotgun and to work nights standing for long stretches without a break, always on the alert against attack. South African law on the hiring of security guards has been tightened in recent years and Jean-Pierre had to purchase a suite of false documents in order to obtain the post (see below). Saddam (a rather common name in the DRC) also works as a security guard outside a small hotel and restaurant, directing cars, dealing with drunken customers and the occasional wino. Compared with other security jobs, Saddam has it good – the premises are in a salubrious part of Pretoria, piles of cash are not kept on site and the clientele is solid in the main, middle-aged and unlikely to cause trouble. The job is not dangerous and much of the time he can sit down, but it does involve working all night, every night, except Mondays. Like everyone we met in this class, Saddam and Jean-Pierre claimed asylum when they arrived in South Africa. These claims are neither granted nor rejected, but are renewed eternally. In 2010, when the Department of Home Affairs was on strike, Saddam was fined 1,000 rand for late submission of his renewal documents. The fine was non-negotiable even though the only reason for his lateness was the prolonged strike. Saddam’s asylum-seeker status excludes him from working in the formal economy. He is relatively lucky in that his employer is a fellow Central African who does not require him to provide large numbers of documents. This contrasts with many other workers in the security sector who have to procure false documents.

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Saddam and Jean-Pierre highlight the paradoxes of social mobility between Gauteng and the DRC. Saddam worked as a schoolteacher in the DRC and has a high school diploma and teacher-training certificate. He speaks very good English and spends his spare time reading novels and detective stories, mostly in English. Jean-Pierre was in the army. For both, working as security guards in Gauteng could be classed as downward mobility. Yet Saddam’s salary as a state-employed schoolteacher in Kinshasa was less than US $50 a month, much too low to live on, while the chaos and disintegration of the Forces Armées du Zaïre made survival incredibly difficult for career soldiers. As security guards in Gauteng, Saddam and Jean Pierre are paid 2,500 to 3,000 rand a month, an average wage for full-time employees in this sector. While this is very low, it is enough to survive on. Saddam spends about 1,000 rand on food each month, buying in bulk and travelling to Johannesburg (where provisions are cheaper). When he can, he sends home 1,000 rand to his parents and/or to the mother of his child, all of whom live in Kinshasa. He pays 1,000 rand each month for rent, which buys him space in a shared room in a downtown area of Central Pretoria that is popular with migrants. Saddam’s neighbourhood also has a large floating population; there are never less than fourteen people staying in this three-bedroom flat and often many more. The block is known as Hong Kong among local Congolese, because it is so crowded. It is notorious for drug deals, and the smell of Indian hemp often wafts past as one crosses the communal balcony. When Saddam is not there, the room is used by local prostitutes. These women are, in the main, South African, but they seem well integrated into the Congolese milieu – many of them can speak passable Lingala and dance to the Congolese rumba in the bars. Some of them may be seen in intimate mobile videophone recordings, which are passed around Congolese men in the area. The flat is also home to a thriving community of cockroaches and some people who stay there suffer from a skin condition linked to parasitic insects. Rents per square metre are no cheaper than in more affluent areas nearby, but the flats are much more crowded. Rents in dilapidated downtown areas – Sunnyside in Pretoria or Yeoville and Hillbrow in Johannesburg – are appreciably higher than in poorer outlying areas, especially in the townships. Despite this, the Congolese show a marked preference for living in town. One reason is convenience, since these districts are closer to sources of money, but there are also important historical and social motives. When apartheid ended, formerly white areas like Yeoville and Sunnyside became available to mixed groups, including large influxes of migrants from other parts of Africa, so that from the beginning these

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areas was not dominated by indigenous South Africans. This was unlike the situation in the townships, which had been reserved for non-whites. This trend was strengthened by the normal pattern of ‘path dependence’ in choice of habitation (Grafmayer and Isaac 1992), whereby the more members of a community settle in an area, the more likely it is that others with social ties to them will also settle there. This is linked to a third reason why Congolese prefer these areas. Like other immigrants, they do not feel safe in the townships. These places, such as Mamelodi to East Pretoria or Alexandra next to Sandton, saw some of the worst xenophobic violence in 2008. While the inhabitants of downtown areas experienced considerable unpleasantness, no one ever felt under physical threat because of their origins.

Those in the Middle Middle-class migrants constitute a large and somewhat problematic category. Included in this group are professional migrants, by which we mean those groups – essentially health professionals and engineers – who have continued practising their professions in Gauteng. There are also a smaller number of Congolese who have found work in other middle-class occupations – accountants, bank clerks, lawyers, university lecturers – but in these cases they tend to have gone to university in South Africa and often have South African citizenship. In addition, there are a number of clandestine workers, notably smugglers and fraudsters, who are sufficiently successful to acquire a bourgeois lifestyle. There is also considerable crossover between these groups and independent businessmen. Many professionals have created businesses and many professionals and businessmen are involved in fraud and other informal and illegal activities. Professionals While many of those who migrate to Gauteng from the DRC hold university degrees, only a relatively narrow set of graduates are able to use these when living in South Africa. The two main categories are, as stated above, health professionals – above all doctors – and engineers. Unlike other graduates, these two groups have in the recent past often been able to obtain work permits for South Africa. Their legal status is thus essential to maintaining their class position once in South Africa. The routes these professionals take to obtain work permits are various. Engineers working in the mining sector were sometimes issued with work permits designed to fill skill shortages there. Other ways of obtaining papers are less straightforward. One common practice used by doctors and engineers is

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to retake their final qualifications – a practice known as kosukola diplôme, ‘to clean the degree’. This does not guarantee a work permit in itself, but it does give the professional connections that can indirectly lead to one. Hence it is not uncommon to meet engineers studying in South Africa who have in fact already graduated with long careers in the state mining sector in Congo. Spending a year or more obtaining new qualifications is of course expensive, and only available to those who have significant financial resources. Another route to a work permit is through claiming asylum. This too requires resources and connections. The procedure involves a contact in Home Affairs who can ensure that an asylum claimant is given refugee status – which grants the right to work – within a reasonably short time. We have heard that this service is arranged by corrupt lawyers, but one of our informants gave us access to a syndicate working within the department itself. The minimum fee was quoted as 4,000 to 4,500 rand for ‘normal’ applicants, although interestingly doctors were charged more for this service – a figure of 8,000 to 10,000 rand was quoted – presumably because they are considered to have a guaranteed earning potential once they get the right to work. This illustrates an important theme of our essay. Informal and illegal economies are used by all sectors of the migrant population. The classes differ in the degree of choice they exercise and the terms of access to informal economies. Whereas informality is a trap for those at the bottom, professionals like doctors and engineers are able to turn the system to their advantage. This is once again related to money. These groups come to informality with more resources to begin with. These may be financial – while doctors and engineers in Congo have a hard time, they or their families can usually assemble the money needed for a once-off effort. They are also related to earning potential – doctors and engineers could commit a significant sum to bribing officials because they are reasonably confident of finding a job once they obtain a work permit. This confidence would not be warranted for other types of graduates in South Africa. Another path to gaining work used by doctors is called Locam. This is an informal apprenticeship that many Congolese doctors go through in Gauteng, thereby easing the financial burden on individuals. Junior doctors who have qualified in the DRC, but have not yet passed the conversion exam (the ‘South African Health Professionals Council Board Exam for foreign medical practitioners’), may work illegally for a fellow countryman who has established his medical practice there. In one case, the doctor – for a fee – provided accommodation, mentoring and information about the process of becoming accepted as a doctor there.

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Doctors who migrate to South Africa retain the class position they occupied in the DRC, but they have undergone an important material improvement. Doctors working for the state in the DRC are said to earn US $300 a month on average, a salary that is often not paid. Within the private sector, salaries may be somewhat better, but there are very few positions available. Congolese doctors working in Gauteng by contrast quote an average starting salary of 25,000 rand a month. Many Congolese physicians in Gauteng own several properties and luxury cars, take European holidays etc. The presence of such a large body of Congolese medics in South Africa, combined of course with the dilapidated state of the DRC’s health infrastructure, has helped make South Africa the top destination for ‘health tourism’ by Congolese people in need of treatments that are either unavailable or considered unreliable in the DRC. Indeed, some more entrepreneurial medics have created thriving businesses linked to this health tourism. One doctor has bought several flats in and around Pretoria, which patients may rent while they wait for treatment in his clinic and where they may convalesce after they are discharged from hospital. The flats are also rented to visiting businessmen and junior doctors from the DRC who have yet to get a foothold in South Africa. In the case of engineers, the collapse of the state mining sector in the 1990s meant that most engineers working in the DRC lost their jobs. Thus migration to South Africa for them represents an improvement in their circumstances from many points of view. The first significant cohort to arrive in South Africa consisted of mining engineers who had been employed by the state copper-mining company, Gecamines. The company ceased to function in the early 1990s, a collapse that coincided with the end of apartheid, encouraging many skilled workers to leave the DRC for South Africa. We have anecdotal evidence of others such as electrical engineers, architects, computing engineers and the like working in sectors such as telecommunications, construction and manufacturing. Some engineers have created their own companies, most often in construction, bringing together plumbers, carpenters and architects, while often drawing illegally on skilled Congolese migrants from the bottom class discussed above. It has been reported to us that many Congolese engineers or technicians like to have white South African business associates, believing that this will win them more clients.3 Fraudsters and Frappeurs The various groups of Congolese fraudsters and smugglers are too large to ignore but hard to place within the class model we have proposed

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here. At the bottom end, many small forgers and people smugglers – tata ngulu, tindikeurs – are not doing well at all. At the very top one finds celebrity fraudsters who might be categorized as belonging to the elite. While their illegal activities lay them open to the threat of arrest, many of the more successful fraudsters have been able to purchase legitimate businesses, both in the DRC and in South Africa, and this justifies our placing of this occupational group in the ‘middle’ category. A frappeur (also known as maître) is someone who practices frappe, which is French for ‘strike’. In this context frappe (and its numerous synonyms, kop, mayuya etc.) indicates a semantic field roughly corresponding to the English word ‘fraud’. Typically it would include: cheque fraud (known as chekula), stealing bank account details (known as internet), counterfeiting money (a specialism of Cameroonian criminals known as feymen, but often involving Congolese) document fraud, forms of resource fraud and so on. Some of the most successful frappeurs are very well known; and several pose as successful businessmen. One of these, Nosy Muamba, was a former president of the Congolese football league. He was involved in a syndicate importing counterfeit currency into Zaire, a crime for which he was tried and found guilty in 1995. After the collapse of the Mobutu regime, he came to South Africa, where he became famous as the owner of a Johannesburg nightclub, Sankai. He was also part of a predominantly Cameroonian syndicate involved in counterfeiting. He was arrested once again and charged, and is currently serving a prison term. There is a strong association between frappe and music. Indeed, for the last thirty years the big names in Congolese popular music have received the majority of their income from various forms of praise singing for fraudsters in the diaspora. While many of these figures lived in Europe, South Africa has also played host to a significant number. One of them is Tony Kabongo, a practitioner of internet. Tony has been in open rivalry with a London-based fraudster called Zadio Kongolo who is a celebrated patron of music.4 Zadio is famous for giving the bandleader JB Mpiana a staggering amount of money during a concert in Dublin, a feat that earned him the name Zadio ‘arrêtez le temps’ (‘stop-time’) because it took so long for him to press banknote after banknote on JB’s head. At another concert, in Kinshasa, Zadio again gave large amounts and was hailed by the band with his nickname. Tony, while visiting Kinshasa for the concert, followed Zadio onto the stage and gave even more money, after which the quick-witted JB awarded him the name of Tony ‘rachetez le temps’ (‘buy-back-time’). Tony is also alleged to have flown a Ferrari from Johannesburg to Kinshasa just to use it to arrive at a concert.

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The frappeur lifestyle is extremely unstable. Indeed frappe is often linked to witchcraft, and the precipitous decline of once-wealthy frappeurs suggests to many that their occult contracts have run their course. Nevertheless, many successful frappeurs have used their money to buy properties and businesses in South Africa and the DRC. Tony Kabongo was arrested in 2010. While most of his assets were in his wife’s name, she, on becoming his ex-wife, decided not to share them with him. But he had managed to save other assets and now lives in Mbuji Mayi and owns a toilet paper factory in Kinshasa. Another famous South Africa–based frappeur, Bado Martens, ‘l’Elephant du Golf’, now owns numerous businesses in Kinshasa, including a construction company, a bakery and one of the largest printers in the city. Frappe has an ambivalent status for the Congolese in that, if pushed, most people would express the view that such activities are wrong. This view is reinforced by frappeurs’ occult associations. Like the musicians they associate with, frappeurs are perceived to be enthusiastic users of nkisi – immoral occult devices that draw on ancestral power to grant temporal success. But some fraudsters, whether resident in Europe or South Africa, have become cultural icons in Kinshasa. This iconic status is not directly related to their fraudulent activities, but is rather linked to the lifestyle that fraud supports – giving money to musicians, wearing the latest fashions from Europe and Japan, and courting famous beauties. This ambivalence contrasts with attitudes to crimes such as burglary, which are seen as being not only highly immoral, but also crass and unsophisticated. Crimes of violence are strongly associated in the Congolese mind with indigenous black South Africans – whom they see as being pointlessly violent – or with Nigerians whose ruthlessness in pursuit of their business interests Congolese criminals find it hard to condone. As one informant put it, ‘For the Nigerians it’s “you touch my woman, we can talk about it, but you touch my business – I’ll kill you”.’ Diamond smuggling and diamond fraud are mostly performed by migrants from the diamond-rich province of East Kasai. One smuggler expressed the view that the permits required by law to import diamonds to South Africa were ‘pour les colons’,5 a phrase we might translate as ‘only for the big shots’. Importers without permits obviously occupy an inferior social position to those who trade diamonds legally. But these traders should not be placed in our bottom category. Even these smaller, clandestine dealers must travel regularly between Kasai and Gauteng and smugglers often spend their money in relatively ‘bourgeois’ ways. For example, we are aware of one smuggler who also owns a boutique in Mbuji Mayi, the capital of East Kasai, which he stocks with articles pur-

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chased in Johannesburg. In this context, a form of fraud known as litraka has developed that exploits the clandestine trade in diamonds. Its practitioners form a relationship with the South African police. The dealer sells smuggled diamonds to a punter in South Africa who will then be stopped by the police and searched almost immediately after the deal. In this way both the fee and the diamonds are then recuperated by the syndicate. Sometimes persons suspected of making a deal will be reported by others to ‘their’ cops, in the hope of a windfall profit. This happened to us after drinking a beer with a well-known diamond smuggler in a Yeoville bar. As we left, the police arrived and without explanation or excuse immediately started searching us.

Those at the Top We have placed two groups within the ‘top’ class of Congolese migrants in South Africa. The first are the so-called ‘nouveaux riches’, who made money from trade links to South Africa from the 1990s. The second group, ‘the political elite’, consists of politicians who have spent significant periods in South Africa or who have kept their families in the country. Their wealth and income is predominantly based on rents accruing to their political power. There is considerable overlap between these groups – many politicians establish family members in trade, using money acquired from rents, while most traders profit from rents, in part, through the quasi-monopolies they enjoy due to their political connections. Nouveaux Riches of Katanga in Gauteng ‘Nouveaux riches’ refers here to a group of businessmen who have specialized in importing goods from South Africa into Katanga since the late 1990s: in particular, food, drink, clothes and cars. Trade between Katanga and South Africa has increased exponentially since the early 1990s. Among the first Congolese to take up this option were truck drivers involved in illicit cobalt traffic (MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000). Katanga has the world’s most important reserves of this strategic mineral, which is needed for manufacturing precision steel. Ethnic politics in Katanga eventually caused the state mining company to collapse, when thousands of skilled personnel from East Kasai were driven out in a pogrom against ‘non-autochthones’.6 In this process, more and more of the mineral was smuggled abroad. On the way back, these drivers started filling their trucks with consumer goods, primarily food and clothes, to sell in Zaire/DRC. As the trade’s profitability became clear, a class of merchants emerged – the nouveaux riches – who specialized in importing

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goods from Gauteng to Katanga. This trade took off in earnest after Laurent Kabila had taken power. The nouveaux riches do not appear to have started South African businesses. But they use South Africa as a base for hoarding assets and very often keep their families there. Given the relatively good transport links between Katanga and Gauteng, one might ask why this trade only took off in the 1990s, particularly since extensive links between them existed before independence. The Katangese themselves claim that Mobutu blocked the commerce in order to favour the west of the country. But this is unlikely – during the late Mobutu period, for example, a noticeable trade developed in second-hand cars imported to Lubumbashi from Dubai via Tanzania and Zambia, which suggests that the frontier was open much of the time (Kadima and Kalombo 1995). One nouveau riche, whose family is based in Pretoria, has become a deputy in Katanga’s regional parliament, representing the ruling party, the PPRD (Partie pour la Reconstruction et la Démocratie). Likewise, Moise Katumbi, current governor of Katanga, made large profits in the 1990s from a monopoly on importing maize meal from South Africa into neighbouring Zambia (Omasombo 2009). This was in large measure due to his political connections to the Chiluba administration in Zambia. Such exchanges between economic and political power are extremely common, we believe, and illustrate how the division between the nouveaux riches and the political elite is more nuanced than it might seem. The Political Elite There is a long tradition in the DRC of elites migrating. This takes many forms and has many motivations. One of these is the prestige gained from installing oneself and/or one’s family in wealthy countries. Residence abroad may also offer a springboard to membership in the elite. It can also act as a hedge against political instability, since those who fall from favour can sit out awkward periods in a base abroad. Many who became important in the Kabila regime, mostly from Katanga province like Kabila himself, have connections with South Africa. This is leading gradually to the formation of a network of elite connections, a power base stretching between Gauteng and Katanga. Since the late Mobutu era and especially after the end of apartheid, a number of Congolese politicians have chosen to bring their assets to South Africa. It would be interesting to know much these people actually invest in South Africa. For many, South Africa just serves as an ‘offshore’ home for gains made in the DRC. To be sure, large amounts are invested in physical assets such as property, especially in South Africa’s luxury zones. The coun-

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try is clearly a safe haven for some sections of the elite. It can also be a springboard to a political career in the DRC. South Africa has sometimes operated as a space for migrants to make contact with, and be integrated into, Congolese elites. This tendency for migration to play an important role in elite formation, already well established under Mobutu, was boosted further by Kabila senior. Although he was not consistent in this regard, Kabila seems to have considered that those who stayed in the DRC, especially residents of Kinshasa and the west, had ‘collaborated’ with the Mobutu regime. Studiously avoiding the opposition that had resisted Mobutu’s rule since the 1980s, he recruited politicians from the diaspora as a guarantee that they had not been ‘contaminated’. His son, Joseph Kabila, is a more pragmatic politician and, while a group of Katangese grands form the core of the DRC’s power elite, an increasing number of ex-Mobutistes have also been welcomed into the upper echelons of government. For them a spell in the diaspora, notably in South Africa, has been functional for their political careers, allowing them to sit out periods of displeasure and retain certain assets, while time launders their political careers. Since Kabila came to power, politicians with a South African connection have become a feature of the Congolese political landscape, with some prominent ministers regularly communicating in English, informally at least. The new English-speaking politicians were known locally as ‘diazo diazo’, a term applied more widely to politicians from the diaspora. These men – such as Augustin Katumba Mwanke, Barnabé Kikaya Bin Karubi and Bizima Kahara – were appointed to the highest political functions. All of them spent significant periods in South Africa and were close aides of and collaborators with the Kabilas. From 1991 to 1997, Augustin Katumba Mwanke worked in various South African corporations, successively Johannesburg Consolidated Investment (JCI), Bateman Minerals and Industrial Ltd, and HSBC Equator Bank of South Africa (as manager). Katumba’s wife trained as a doctor in South Africa, where she befriended a fellow student, Bizima Kahara. The latter became an important figure in the AFDL (Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération) rebellion that ousted Mobutu (Bizima is a Banyamulenge, one of a group of Congolese Tutsi who formed an important contingent in the AFDL, which was then essentially a front for the Rwandan army) and the Kahara connection served Katumba well when Laurent Kabila took power in 1997. He became a counsellor to the Congolese finance minister. In 1998, he was appointed governor of Katanga, where he developed a close relationship with Joseph Kabila (Omasombo 2009: 117). When Joseph succeeded his father as head of state in 2001,

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Katumba took his chance, becoming one of the regime’s most powerful men. Locally known as ‘le tout puissant, le président du gouvernement parallèle’ (‘the all-powerful chairman of the parallel government’), many observers cast him as Congo’s Dick Cheney, the man directing policy while Joseph races trucks. Katumba Mwanke certainly had fingers in many pies – his name was cited by the United Nations (UN) Panel of Experts as part of an ‘elite network’ involved in the illegal exploitation of the DRC’s mineral wealth (UN Panel of Experts 2001). In 2006 Katumba was elected Member of Parliament for Lubumbashi and, until his death in a plane crash in 2013, collaborated closely with the president. He held substantial assets in South Africa and was said to be close to the ANC. Recent contracts for oil exploration in Lake Victoria were awarded to two companies registered in the British Virgin Islands in the name of Khulubuse Zuma, a nephew of the South African president, and Mark Hulley, lawyer to president Zuma. This oil concession runs to billions of US dollars; and, while it is hard to confirm, this kind of Congo/South African elite integration appears to be taking place more widely. Dan Gertler, an Israeli diamond dealer who has secured many important mineral contracts in the DRC, and was a close associate of Katumba Mwanke, appears to have used a certain Mark Willcox to move some of his money (Congo Leaks 2011). Willcox also works for Mvelaphanda holdings, an investment vehicle linked to the South African minister of planning Tokyo Sexwhale (Brummer and Sole 2010). President Zuma was the first international figure to recognize the result of the 2011 DRC presidential elections, handing a comfortable victory to Kabila, despite the grave misgivings of the European Commission (2011) and the Carter Foundation (2011). A South African connection has also helped several dignitaries of the Mobutu era to crawl back into the fold. Several of Mobutu’s collaborators, who claimed asylum in South Africa in the late 1990s, have returned to the DRC thanks to connections made there. A notable example is Mbatshi Mbatsha, governor of Bas-Congo province after 2006. A native of the province, he had several important and profitable functions in the Mobutu era, including minister of works and director-general of Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer du Zaïre (the Zairian railways). With the fall of Mobutu he claimed asylum in South Africa, establishing himself in Cape Town, where he gained a diploma in conflict resolution and management from the University of Cape Town (UCT). According to rumours, he was granted South African citizenship on account of his numerous business interests in the country. He returned to the DRC to take part in the elections of 2006, when the question of his nationality7 was just one controversy surrounding his election as governor. Governors in the DRC

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are indirectly elected, that is to say that they are chosen by a vote of the regional legislature, a procedure that is notoriously open to corruption. Mbatchi Mbatcha was elected governor despite the large opposition majority in the regional assembly and his membership of RCD-Goma (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie),8 a party in the government coalition that commanded little electoral support. Protests followed, amid plausible allegations of bribery, notably in quasi-millenarian demonstrations by a religious group, the Bundu Dia Kongo. The demonstrators were armed with kola nuts and sticks shaped like weapons – which they believed would turn into grenades and guns should the need arise. In their ‘response’ to these largely peaceful demonstrations, the Police Nationale Congolaise (or perhaps the army in police uniform) killed at least a hundred people, tortured survivors, looted property and desecrated places of worship (UN 2008). As we have shown, the Congolese political elite have been able to use South Africa to bank gains made from rents. These are in turn guaranteed by violence. Almost all ruling classes rely, at some stage, on violent appropriation, but South Africa (alongside other destinations) is clearly allowing Congolese elites to enjoy the rewards of lawlessness, while reducing what in other circumstances would be the concomitant risks. Insecurity has often spurred elites to move towards stability, if only to institutionalize gains made during an initial period of primitive accumulation. While the formation of intensive networks between the South African and Congolese political elites may be unsavoury, this alliance offers the prospect of a defence against Congo’s smaller but much better-armed neighbours – above all Rwanda,9 but also Angola10 – and also against such behemoths as China and the United States, both of whom are showing a renewed interest in the Congo as mineral prices stabilize and the threat of a wider war recedes.

Conclusion We have argued that migrants provide an important element in the strategic relationship between South Africa and the DRC. South Africa is likewise a crucial space for relations between the DRC and its diaspora. While many studies focus on migrants towards the bottom of the social scale, we have presented a wider view, insisting that migration is of central importance for the middle classes and for those at the top also. These patterns of migration are affected by the relationship between informality, money and power. Informality is often presented as a level of economic activity reserved for those at the bottom of the social scale

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(Hart 2010b) and many scholars (e.g. De Soto 1989) present the challenges posed by informality – e.g. lack of property title – as a reason why the poor remain poor. We agree that economic informality plays an important role in class formation. But our study has also shown how all classes have an important relationship to economic informality. What is crucial is not whether classes are involved in the informal economy, but rather the terms on which they engage with that economy. Where those at the bottom are involved in ‘forced informality’ and are, as a result, compelled to take precarious and badly paid jobs, those in the middle are able to use informal economies to regularize their situation and to conduct profitable businesses, while retaining access to the advantages of formality – banking, credit etc. Those at the very top, who have exploited a range of political rents in the extra-legal, informal space that is the DRC, can use South Africa to ‘bank’ these gains without much let or hindrance. These individuals may, if they choose, live out their time in South Africa as upstanding members of the community, entirely within the formal sphere. We believe that this analysis represents a useful corrective to the literature on migration and informality. Rather than assuming a priori that migrants have a positive or negative role to play, we need to look at empirical evidence. Likewise, the quasi-functionalist notion of a ‘migrant community’ is highly problematic. All social groups are marked by conflict and differences of interest, and migrants are no exception in this regard. We believe that many of the restrictions placed on immigration by those in the bottom and middle categories are simply irrational, devalue the contributions of essentially honest people and probably harm the South African economy. For those as the top, it seems natural and inevitable that South African elites should see their future interests as entwined with that of the Congo, and Congolese elites could do worse than to make a strategic alliance with the South African political class. But this relationship should endeavour to move beyond the kind of extended primitive accumulation that it currently represents. The development economist Christopher Cramer (2006) has spoken of haemophiliac societies – places where the violence wrought by primitive accumulation never properly coagulates into political and social stability. It seems to us that if the Congo and South Africa wish to move beyond this haemophiliac condition, governments would do better to concentrate their efforts more on controlling flows of money (into tax havens) and less on controlling flows of people.

NOTES 1. MacGaffey herself rejects the term ‘informal economy’ for various reasons. We note that subsequent literature has not adopted her alternative usage,

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Saint José Inaka and Joseph Trapido which seem to us very close, if not identical, to the notion of an informal economy. The nationalization of the mines was successful in so far as they continued to operate productively into the 1990s, unlike most other sectors of the economy inherited at independence. The nationalization, which enshrined the independent management structure of the state mines, almost certainly protected it from the later handouts of ‘Zairianization’ undertaken in the 1970s, where foreign-owned property was simply given to well-connected individuals. The nationalization of the mines is often confused with Zairianization. Given that Zairianization happened several years later and was an unequivocal disaster, we suspect that this confusion has ideological underpinnings. Nationalization did not address the key issue of the downstream price that Zaire was getting for its copper ores and the money paid over to central government by the nationalized mining sector was misappropriated. But misappropriation would have happened under a different ownership structure as well – indeed, it would have been considerably worse. The later more-personalized forms of redistribution – in plantation agriculture for example – tended to kill the goose; in the case of mining they simply stole the eggs. It is uncertain how much this reflects the real state of the construction industry, in terms of the need for networks when winning contracts, or whether it just reflects Congolese attitudes towards white people. Zadio is immortalized by J. B. Mpiana in the songs ‘Nungu Nungu’ and ‘Zadio Kongolo’ (see Trapido 2011). For the Congolese the terms colon and coloniser have lost most connotations of colonial empire – a colon is a ‘boss’. The Luba of East Kasai were the beneficiaries of what Turner (2007) terms ‘differential modernization’ – having received greater access to mission education, they often went on to dominate the skilled professions in neighbouring Katanga. A more recent sub-text to the 1990s violence in Katanga was that natives of East Kasai were among the most implacable opponents of the Mobutu regime. Officially the DRC does not allow dual nationality. This is something of a farce as most members of the current political class hold another passport along with one from the DRC. Backed by Rwanda, this party at one time was a power broker in the DRC’s new dispensation. But a disastrous performance in the elections – where the Rwandan association did it no favours – left the party divided and weakened. It is not clear now whether the party is in opposition or government. South Africa has devoted significant troops to the UN effort to dislodge the Rwandan-backed M2F rebels in South Kivu. Rwanda’s political elite has been financially dependent on mineral flows from Congo to maintain their lifestyle and fund the army. The UK has been the largest bilateral aid donor to the Rwandan regime for over a decade. There have been frontier skirmishes with Angola in recent years. At least one and probably two of Angola’s most profitable oil-producing offshore blocks are almost certainly in Congolese territorial waters. The Angolan elite has made dark threats whenever the issue has been broached.

Chapter 8

░ Neither Nationals nor Cosmopolitans The Political Economy of Belonging for Mozambican Indians JASON SUMICH

This chapter examines the tension in Mozambique between the consolidation of an internal state-based economy and participation in a wider global economy by examining the historical role of merchants of Indian descent, primarily since independence in 1975.1 I trace the seemingly contradictory ways in which ideas of full citizenship for Mozambican Indians affect and are affected by political and economic shifts. In the early independence period, the ruling Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front) party pursued a Jacobin citizenship policy, which insisted Indians were full members of the polity. However, as the party concentrated on statebased accumulation, many Indian merchants were viewed with suspicion due to their transnational economic links and mercantile independence. While Indians were not singled out as a group and some advanced to the top of the party hierarchy, individuals, especially merchants, could face draconian punishment. Since the fall of socialism, Indian merchants, often in alliance with Frelimo, have been encouraged to use their economic networks to the utmost, yet at the same time their relationship to the body politic is becoming ever more tenuous. I look here at what people actually do as opposed to focusing on economic abstractions. As argued by Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani (2010a), the dominant economic paradigms for much of the twentieth century oscillated between the equally unwieldy and unpleasant options of unfettered ‘free markets’ or state centralism. Through tracing the relationship between the economic practices of Indians and wider political processes since 1975, I will illustrate the ‘grey’ area between these two stark extremes where much of life takes place.

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By focusing on the intersections between people, money and power, I will speak more about what capitalism actually means for at least some of Mozambique’s citizens. Indian merchants should be ‘capitalist’ exemplars when the logic of untrammelled markets allegedly rules; but the organizing principles of this case study are access to political power, transnational networks, solidarity, corruption and a version of ‘moral economy’. I will refer throughout to Mozambican Indians, but it is first necessary to point out what an imprecise term this is. Mozambicans of Indian descent, as with ‘Indians’ through the continent, come from a wide range of backgrounds, ethnicities, regions, religions and professions (Modi 2010). Despite this range of backgrounds, people of Indian descent have tended to be structurally over-represented in the mercantile sector in East Africa. This economic role has caused conflict with majority populations who often interact with African Indians through a racialized system of debt (Brennan 2012). When combined with the colonial history of Indians in Africa and a real or perceived social aloofness towards the black majority, this has often placed strain on Indians’ sense of belonging in the post-colonial period. The most infamous example of Indians’ tenuous claims to membership in independent African nations was Idi Amin’s expulsion of the entire Asian population of Uganda. While few other African governments have taken racist logic to such brutal extremes, the claim of minorities such as Indians to belong to African nations is rarely clear-cut. At first glance, Mozambique should have been the exception to this rule. The leadership of the ruling Frelimo party was determinedly multi-racial when it won independence in 1975 after an eleven-year liberation struggle against the Portuguese. During the socialist period (1975–1990) a common joke was that you could count the number of black ministers on one hand, and this was not much of an exaggeration. The party pursued a citizenship policy that was inclusive to the point of coercion; but since the fall of socialism the question of who is a ‘real’ Mozambican and what that term would mean is far from having been answered. In 2008 I was speaking to an Indian businessman, Saif, in the northern city of Nampula. Economically, Nampula is the second most important city in the country after Maputo, the capital. It is situated inland in a rich agricultural region and is the provincial capital. In addition to the city’s administrative functions, it is an important trade hub both for domestic consumption and for international products that enter Mozambique through the nearby port of Nacala and are then reshipped to central Africa. The city is home to a thriving Indian merchant community and is often referred to as the ‘Indian capital’ of Mozambique.

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Saif is from a well-known family, a leader of a prominent local mosque and a member of Frelimo since 1997. He often acts as a representative for his mosque in state functions. Saif told me about a recent party meeting he attended that was chaired by a high official who had been a famous general in the socialist period. When asked about some of the major problems facing their jurisdiction, cadres passionately denounced Mozambican Indians, describing them as parasites, exploiters, thieves, smugglers and aliens who abrogated their rights as citizens. The general put a stop to the attacks by saying that all who were born in Mozambique are equally Mozambican and the cadres were echoing the mentality of the colonial period. According to him, Frelimo had fought the revolution, in part, to put an end to this kind of racism and to create a nation that united all its inhabitants. Saif was deeply moved by the general’s intervention, but he did not feel it really put an end to anything. For him, the cadres stopped speaking out of fear of their superior, not because they agreed. Saif told me that hostility towards Indians has been increasing. It was always there, but since the end of the socialist period people were no longer afraid to express it openly. I examine here what it means to be Indian and Mozambican since the end of the coercive assimilation of the socialist period. Moreover, I will discuss a central paradox of the new political and economic system. While economic transformations have opened up opportunities for the wider population to influence the political system more directly, this has not meant an end to poverty. On the other hand, specific groups may amass wealth while, at the same time, their rights as full citizens are under threat. Post-colonial Mozambique has occupied the unenviable position of being viewed as a paragon. During the liberation struggle and early independence period, while under the leadership of the urbane Dr. Eduardo Mondlane and then the charismatic Samora Machel, Frelimo and Mozambique were beacons for the international Left. This was a movement committed to egalitarianism, social justice and ‘people power’, which had learned from the mistakes of the previous generation of nationalists and expected to achieve true independence (Dinerman 2006; Hall and Young 1997). However, Mozambique became a prime target for the machinations of apartheid South Africa against its neighbours (Minter 1994), and was soon involved in a civil war of shocking brutality that became an early example of a ‘failed state’. Since the peace of 1992, Mozambique has again become an example, this time of a successful post-war, postsocialist transition to democracy and ‘capitalism’ (Dinerman 2006; Pitcher 2006). Mozambican Indians arguably serve as the local face of contemporary ‘capitalism’. Despite the fact that they make up less than 1 per cent

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of the population, Indian-owned businesses are ubiquitous, from tiny bush shops selling soap and matches, to factories, hotels and the premier shopping mall in Maputo. If this story is as appealing as it is sometimes bewildering (especially as many of the same people who promised to bring socialism presided over the introduction of capitalism), it probably says more about the hopes, dreams and preoccupations of outsiders than social reality. Although the civil war was extremely brutal, all the other claims are more contentious. Frelimo can take credit for impressive achievements in the fields of education, health, support for African liberation struggles and a commitment to non-racialism in the early independence period. But its version of a socialist economy took the form of state-based accumulation and commitment to state farms, while neglect of independent smallholders and policies of forced villagization caused a great deal of suffering. As the war began and the economy contracted, the party’s commitment to ‘people power’ (which was already difficult to realize in practice) gave way to a more militarized hierarchical system. From 1983, Frelimo began a series of reforms in the economic system, allowing more space for the market, but as the civil war grew in intensity and the country teetered on outright economic collapse, Frelimo began to consider more drastic structural transformation. By 1989–1990, in a bid to end the war and revive the economy, Frelimo officially abandoned socialism and allowed other political parties to operate legally in a new multi-party system. For some analysts, the abandonment of socialism and the changes that followed inaugurated a ‘free market’ age (Dinerman 2006; Pitcher 2006). There were savage structural adjustment programmes and large-scale privatizations. The state abandoned many of the social welfare obligations it was still able to perform and former champions of socialism now spoke in almost messianic terms about the benefits of free enterprise, the need to form a national bourgeoisie and the redemptive qualities of foreign investment (Pitcher 2002, 2006). During this period of transformation, Indian merchants began to come to the fore. As described to me, Frelimo and Indian merchants entered a marriage of convenience after the fall of socialism, to which the merchants brought their money and transnational connections while the party provided political protection. An obvious example is Mohamed Bachier Suleman, owner of Maputo’s largest mall, leading businessman and a large contributor to the Frelimo party. He has been named as a major trafficker of heroin by the American embassy, but still operates with impunity inside Mozambique.

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It is true that Frelimo seems to have abandoned its earlier strategy of state-based accumulation. As Donald Donham (1999) has described for the Derg in Ethiopia, Frelimo once hoped that a small and determined elite could centralize production and use the profits of goods sold on the global market to build a strong industrial nation capable of overcoming ‘underdevelopment’ in a single decade. This has given way to a strategy of individual and class-based accumulation, with hopes for transforming the nation receding into the distant future. However, simply classifying the new order as ‘capitalist’ probably obscures more than it clarifies. Instead of being entirely subsumed under one abstraction (free-market capitalism) or another (state socialism), politics in Mozambique since independence (if not before) has been largely about the party trying to manage recurrent crises2 and consolidate its power through methods both within and outside of the stated ideology of the time. This is a history evident in the rather cavalier popular attitude towards the ‘global’ economic crisis that began in 2008. In reality the crisis had an ambiguous effect on Mozambique. The economy was affected by a tightening of aid (which in 2013 provided around 34.9 per cent of the national budget) and abandonment of co-financing for large-scale joint undertakings known as ‘mega projects’. How far this has been offset by recent discoveries of minerals, natural gas and oil remains to be seen. However, whenever I asked anyone about the effects of the crisis, the invariable reply would be a shrug and smile, followed by: ‘Crisis, there is always a crisis here, always has been. That is our lives; to us it is normal.’ The label of ‘capitalist’ or ‘free market’ does not do much to explain contemporary political and economic practices in Mozambique. Even a diaspora with transnational economic networks formed over centuries cannot be identified as free-floating economic agents. As Edward Simpson (2006) points out, political boundaries are fortified by social institutions and even transnational merchants are often categorized by their national origins. Despite participating in both national and global markets, Indian merchants in Mozambique are still constrained by local political power. Ironically, during the socialist period when Frelimo proscribed many activities that Indian merchants now practice, the party was zealously committed to including them in the nation. Now that certain restrictions against Indian merchants have been removed, their growing unpopularity with the wider population makes full citizenship ever more uncertain for them. This may be one of the reasons the party supports their economic activities. While groups like Mozambican Indians may be politically useful through their economic connections, they also serve

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as convenient scapegoats, allowing the inequalities of the system to be viewed through a racialized prism. Thus democracy in Mozambique has recreated the age-old strategy of allowing excluded, politically marginal pariah groups to dominate commerce. I will next discuss the shift since independence in how Mozambican Indians are categorized from being presumptively full citizens to the racially marked capitalists they are often taken to be today. I will illustrate these processes through two life histories of Mozambican Indians in Maputo and Nampula, before concluding with a discussion of how politics and economics interact in a group, which is increasingly being defined by the black majority as ‘other’.

Forms of Social Categorization since Independence As mentioned earlier, the term ‘Indian’ (or monhés, as they are more derogatorily known) refers in Mozambique to a wide variety of people of South Asian origin. These have a varied history in what has become the national territory, coming from different social groups, at different historical periods and playing very different social roles. There has been an Indian presence for centuries as a part of various Indian Ocean trade networks (Bose 2006; Metcalf 2007). This presence solidified at the end of the seventeenth century, when Indian capital began to focus more directly on East Africa. Trading bases were set up on Ilha de Moçambique and merchants began to penetrate the interior (Newitt 1995). In the later colonial period the Indian population was bolstered by farmers recruited by the authorities and by Goans who were brought to work as administrators, merchants and settlers from neighbouring British colonies (Newitt 1995; Penvenne 1995; Gupta 2009). Their relationship with the colonial state varied widely between historical periods, and Indians were generally treated as culturally and socially superior to much of the native black population (Newitt 1995). Their relations with the colonial state deteriorated in the twentieth Century, however, especially after the establishment of a quasifascist Portuguese ‘new state’ in 1932. Its policy was to increase control over the colonies by encouraging Portuguese migration and strengthening the national presence in administration and finance. Tensions grew as Portuguese settlers and Indians came into direct competition. The coming of independence, after an eleven-year war that ended in 1975, began to transform the colonial system of social categories. Frelimo’s early nationalist vision aimed to tie a unifying narrative to a spe-

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cific territory that would transform the population and produce national citizens. Like Margaret Somers (1992), I understand this narrative to be the symbolic production of a more or less compelling story (or series of interconnected stories) that helps to constitute social actors in their social world. This narrative grew from the background of much of the party leadership and provided moral legitimacy for Frelimo’s assumption of power and its attempts to restructure social relations. Rhetorically it was based on an uncompromising attitude towards patriarchy, ‘superstition’ (or ‘obscurantism’ in the party’s terms), ‘backwardness’ (rural ‘feudalism’) and ethnic, racial and regional divides, while stressing the value of education, progress, collectivism and national unity (Hall and Young 1997; West 2001; Israel 2009; West 2005). In the words of the first president, Samora Machel: ‘For the nation to live the tribe must die’ (Hall and Young 1997). This new revolutionary view of citizenship was based on a different system of categories. Certain social groups, including those who had worked in the Portuguese administration, military, or security services, and anyone who could be branded a collaborator, were inherently suspect and often treated quite brutally. But this system was based more on behaviour than ‘racial’ classification as such. Inability or unwillingness to adapt to the new society was seen as a failure of individual will. Exploitation was not seen as an expression of social relations formed by a mode of production, but rather as a manifestation of wickedness (Hall and Young 1997). Some measures enacted by the new regime adversely affected groups with ‘transnational’ ties. One of the most infamous was the so-called 24/20 decree. This ordered anyone in possession of foreign or dual citizenship to renounce immediately any other ties and apply for Mozambican citizenship, or they had twenty-four hours to leave the country and they could take twenty kilos of personal possessions with them. Indian merchants, especially the better off, often suffered during this period when commercial enterprises were seen as being inimical to socialism and to the party’s priorities of state accumulation. Many large companies were nationalized, or the government intervened heavily in their management. Those who had invested in property lost much of their savings when Frelimo nationalized private residences, although everyone was allowed to keep a primary dwelling and a holiday home. There were exceptions to all this. Some young Indians were caught up in the spirit of independence and devoted themselves to the struggle. As a middle-class Mozambican woman of Indian descent now in her forties told me, the atmosphere of the early days seemed electric and she was convinced that anything was possible.

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I was about fifteen years old when we became independent and I was tremendously excited. Things had been bad under the transitional government, but I was very hopeful for the future. Frelimo had set up neighbourhood parties throughout the city for the independence ceremonies. My mother had attended one of these parties in our neighbourhood. Others of my family, those who had done well under the old regime, stayed home. They were frightened about what would happen to them now and they did not want to be publicly humiliated. As for me, I wanted to go to Machava Stadium, where they were going to have the ceremony. I went with my sister and my aunt and uncle. When we arrived the Stadium was completely packed with people. My aunt and uncle decided to stay in the car and listen to the ceremony on the radio, but my sister and I squeezed our way in. It was amazing. At midnight, when Samora Machel gave his speech declaring independence and they raised our new flag, everyone went crazy with joy. People were completely overcome with emotion, they were crying and cheering, they could not contain themselves. They had a fireworks display and Frelimo soldiers fired their guns into the air to celebrate. My sister and I became worried, the crowd was ecstatic, and we did not want to get accidentally crushed. Some Frelimo guards saw us and helped us out, we were very small and luckily the celebrations were very well organized. We made our way back to our aunt and uncle’s car and they gave us some tea. It was an incredible night.

Moreover, nationalization was not universal; only those businesses that Frelimo felt were exploitative or had been abandoned by their owners after independence were directly taken over (Pitcher 2002). Small shops were generally left alone and Indian merchants gradually began to take over this sector during the socialist period, as many Portuguese merchants fled the country after independence. Additionally, some Indians achieved a very high rank in the party. So, while some Indians might be punished for specific activities, they were not penalized simply for being Indian. But even if social stigma was now based on behaviour, the strictures regarding permissible behaviour became increasingly severe, especially after the outbreak of civil war in 1977. The Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance) rebels gathered strength, building on foreign funding and severe peasant and regional discontent with Frelimo’s policies. As the country teetered on the verge of political and economic collapse, Frelimo enacted harsh laws in an attempt to remain in control. Independent merchants, often with transnational economic links, were suspected of having divided loyalties and of illegal profiteering, which flourished in the face of chronic shortages. Frelimo established severe punishments for many forms of what they labelled ‘economic sabotage’. In practice, Indian merchants were often

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singled out under these laws. One infamous example concerned an Indian who was convicted of being a black marketeer in 1983. His punishment was to be a public warning. Since there was no national television station before 1987, he was shot on the radio. Punishments such as public flogging were not uncommon; although the ‘enemies of the people’ punished in this way covered a wide range. As Frelimo’s control over large parts of the country veered between tenuous and non-existent, the categories of friend and enemy or citizen and other oscillated continually. Even after the war ended, Frelimo has often shifted its ideological stance in an ongoing attempt to create a new national narrative. As noted by Alice Dinerman (2006), the party has been willing to forget many of its revolutionary achievements; so perhaps it can also forget many of its crimes. Since the fall of socialism in 1990, the Indians in general, and merchants specifically, have prospered, often in close alliance with the party. Merchants have benefited from political protection and preferential access during the privatization programme, in turn allowing Frelimo to make use of the capital and transnational connections at their disposal. But allegations of corruption, racism and exploitation of the majority population have led to widespread resentment of Indian merchants, which if they are not entirely new, can now be expressed openly. As the wealth of Indians has grown, they have made important alliances with the ruling party. Yet these alliances do not fit well with the more populist logic now current in the electoral democracy, especially as Indians have become a symbol of how unjust the new system is. Party members are themselves often ambivalent. A black municipal official in Nampula, told me: ‘The problem is that Indians are just greedy exploiters. They are corrupt, they break the laws and they contribute nothing. We need to do something about this.’ While the new freedoms have opened many opportunities, the social categories are changing yet again. Negative stereotypes are now associated with Indians as a group. A frequent complaint amongst the majority population is that Indians keep themselves apart, both socially and economically. Their most common relationship with Indian merchants is to be in debt. This is the general context for two life histories that I now introduce illustrating how rising prosperity for Indians who once thought of themselves as Mozambican citizens has led to a growing insecurity as members of an unpopular minority. So the transition to a nominal democracy has freed Indians to take advantage of transnational economic links even as their relationship to the nation is becoming increasingly uncertain.

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Life Histories Naema I have known Naema and her family since I arrived in Maputo to carry out doctoral fieldwork in 2002. Since then, I have witnessed their growing prosperity, moving from a well-furnished and centrally located apartment in a slightly seedy part of town, to a large quinta (country estate) in an outlying suburb, complete with flat-screen TV, chickens in the garden and the ubiquitous four-by-four of the well-off middle classes. Naema was born in the 1960s in a northern provincial capital. Her mother is a Mozambican of Indian descent and her father was Portuguese. She was in secondary school at independence and, caught up in the euphoria of the time, she became a student activist. After graduation, she qualified as a teacher and returned to the north to aid in the construction of the new nation. There she met her husband, João, who was a soldier. João is also of Indian descent and his father had been a merchant running a ‘bush’ shop that sold matches and soap to villagers. During the liberation struggle he sided with Frelimo and was awarded a government post after liberation. João joined the party and was briefly a member of the presidential guard. The couple later moved to Maputo where Naema secured another teaching position. This was during the worst privations of the socialist period and the civil war. Naema often referred to this period as o tempo da fame (the time of hunger) and their major focus was basic survival. When Naema arrived in Maputo, her salary was inadequate for their growing family and João lacked the necessary papers to find work, so he survived by doing various odd jobs and engaging in petty trade. The line between petty trade and ‘economic sabotage’ was vague at the best of times. João was briefly imprisoned for being in possession of foreign currency (US $20), which he was using to buy milk, then largely unavailable in state stores, for his sick daughter. Their fortunes have improved considerably since the end of the war. Naema now teaches in a private institution, which pays ten times the salary of a state school. Naema has used her salary as a safety net for the family’s basic needs, while João engages in more entrepreneurial, but higher-risk strategies. He formed a company to import and supply electronic goods, making use of friends and relatives abroad, especially in South Africa. He can bring in goods far cheaper than they would be available locally. João was based in a small office, which made up the second floor of a house in the centre of town and still resembles an apartment. On a normal day in Maputo, he would spend much of his time on the phone or relaying orders to one

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or two employees, an Indian co-worker and a black empregado (servant or helper) that were usually in attendance. His business seemed to be largely based on his mobile phone, especially as he frequently travelled to South Africa to purchase stock and make deals and the phone rang constantly. João has used connections from his party and military background with prominent people within Mozambique to win tenders to supply electronics to large venues. In many ways, he operates through networks of solidarity based on ties of friendship, family and religion. This strategy is not always successful. He brought one of his nephews into the company, who promptly stole João’s entire stock. In addition to the loss of his goods, he hesitated to involve the police as this would mean turning in his nephew, perhaps causing friction with his wider family and bringing unwanted attention to himself from an institution that he regards as corrupt and ‘anti-Indian’. João can hardly be described as a ‘free-market’ entrepreneur, given that tightly bound and exclusive networks have underpinned his new prosperity. Their growing wealth has been matched by increasing alienation from the regime. Despite her husband being a party member and her eldest daughter a candidate member, Naema feels that the leadership is morally bankrupt. Frelimo is largely composed, in her words of ‘thieves and murderers’. João is also a strong critic of the government, although he remains a firm supporter of the first, socialist president, Samora Machel. Neither of them sympathizes with Renamo.3 João fought for Frelimo in the civil war and they share the common view of the opposition in Maputo, that Renamo is a party of killers and peasants. Their estrangement from the regime coincides with a growing fear of black population. The militantly non-racial revolutionary line has faded with the advent of democracy. Naema and her family now view the wider population with fear and suspicion. In many ways the term ‘black’ functions as an abstract category. While many of their primary friendships are with other Indians, they have black friends, black employees and black servants and rarely demonstrate any unease. Instead, ‘blacks’ cause fear not as individuals, but as a potentially dangerous mass, criminals, the poor, the police or anyone who could threaten the precarious foundations of their privilege. As the promise of the nationalist project fades for Naema and her family, it is replaced by a growing emphasis on Islam. They were always believers, but they have become noticeably more pious since I first met them in 2002. When speaking about Islam to me, they stress the purity and universality of the Umma, the sense of belonging to a community of believers that is, by definition, a moral oasis in a corrupt world. They are also beginning to reorient themselves to the East. After unsuccessful

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efforts to arrange for their children to attend university in South Africa or Europe, which is now a common strategy among the upwardly mobile in Maputo, they are making plans for their eldest son to study in India or Pakistan, countries they have never visited. They have also arranged a marriage between their eldest daughter and a Mozambican Indian from a prominent family who lives in Kuwait. In many ways, their growing attachment to Islam resembles their earlier attachment to the founding values of Frelimo’s nationalism. They still consider themselves to be Mozambicans, but their place in a nation that they see as being increasingly corrupt and hostile seems precarious and the purity promised by the earlier nationalist vision disappeared long ago. They now align themselves with a different vision of belonging, to the world of the Umma.

Saif I first met Saif in Nampula in 2008. While I have met his wife on a few occasions and visited his home, a large, well-appointed, two-story house in an upscale neighbourhood, I mainly met with him at his shop and did not come to know the family as well as Naema’s. Saif was born into a wealthy merchant family on the northern island of Ilha de Moçambique in the late 1940s. His father had been president of one of the larger mosques since 1928. Their relationship with the colonial state was generally good; some of his brothers even served in the Portuguese army. Independence, for them, was a major upheaval. Although Saif was generally sympathetic to the goal of liberation, his stories of the early days of independence sound like the ‘invasion of the barbarians’. He likes to recount an incident when he had to explain to a Frelimo troop commander how to use a telephone. Things were especially bad in the early days when the new government was still struggling to exert control. Since his family was wealthy and his father was well known, they were frequently a target. This happened to many Indians. According to Saif, the problem was: ‘The Indians suffered a lot because they did not have much money, but it looked like they did.’ This began to change, however, and soon the government put an end to the abuses of ill-disciplined troops. Saif respected Samora Machel; society was well organized; there was very little crime and he feels that people treated each other with respect and that moral values were higher than they are today. Materially though, it was far more difficult for Saif and his family. According to him, the problem was not necessarily ‘communism’, but that very few cadres understood what communism was supposed to be. Thus local government interventions were haphazard and chaotic, a trend that

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became far worse as the civil war (1977–1992) grew in intensity. His family had invested significantly in housing and the rents from these properties were an important part of their income. These houses were all nationalized. Additionally, shops were empty, it was difficult to import anything and making a profit was often frowned upon. In his words: ‘We were so poor we could not even receive guests, as we had nothing to offer them.’ Saif owned various small shops in rural areas that sold the few goods they could import, but some of them were then looted and burned down by rebel soldiers. Things became so bad that Saif left for Portugal for a business opportunity with a family friend in the mid-1980s, and his son still lives there. But it did not go as well abroad as he had hoped and he returned towards the end of the civil war. Like Naema and her family, Saif has become prosperous since then. His primary business is a shop that serves as a pharmacy and sells household goods on the city’s major thoroughfare. When one enters, there is a narrow interior bisected by a counter where his wife and one to two assistants wait on the customers. Near the door waits a man whose job is to carry large purchases to the customer’s car. Saif spends much of his day in a back office where he checks and resupplies stock, greets friends, contacts and family members and relays orders through a helper who is also constantly on hand to serve soft drinks, coffee or tea. He is largely insulated from day-to-day interactions with clients. Unlike some of his family members, he has not become hugely rich, largely because he disagrees with the illegal methods they used to amass their fortunes; but he now owns two shops (the primary shop in Nampula and a small shop in a peri-urban area) and a farm. He has achieved a commercial monopoly in the area near his farm after the local Frelimo leader asked him to open a shop and to take care of supplying the villagers with goods. He has earned the gratitude of the Frelimo municipal council by supplying them with chairs, donations and food for events and has assiduously cultivated relationships with the political authorities.4 He also has free access to transnational economic networks, importing goods from Portugal and throughout the Indian Ocean region. He has been a party member since 1997, briefly serving on the municipal council and he respects the party’s commitment to education and provision of basic social services. In reality he does not have much choice. As he told me, anyone trying to engage in serious economic activity needs a relationship with the party, otherwise nothing gets done. Saif is worried about the growth of corruption within Frelimo, about rising crime, with Indians often as targets, and about a general lowering of moral values across society. Despite his misgivings, he cannot support the former rebels. He does not feel Renamo could ac-

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tually run the country. Many feel that if they ever came to power, Indians would be expelled from the country. With rising hostility towards monhés, his social relationships are now centred on his mosque. This is racially mixed and open to all believers, but Indians predominate and also include many of his friends. Like Naema and her family, Saif’s unease with the general population has to do more with the fear of being a potential target of violent crime or social unrest than day-to-day interactions even though other Indians form the majority of his personal relationships. Both Naema and Saif have transnational ties and belong to a large diaspora community. Their economic, social and religious networks spread throughout Mozambique, South Africa, Portugal and the Indian Ocean. They both retain an attachment to an idea of India that they display on numerous banal occasions, from the food they eat, to the movies, TV and music they enjoy. However, both consider themselves Mozambican. It is the country they were born in, where their families live and the place they hope to end their days. Yet the social categories that once included them as full citizens of the new nation have moved on; and their visibly different economic role and growing prosperity make them a target of widespread resentment. The growing hostility of the black majority (in a general sense as opposed to personal relationships) is fully reciprocated in a vicious downward spiral of mutual resentment. Much like Saif and Naema’s family, most Indians I have met in Mozambique are members, or at least supporters, of Frelimo. Some, like Naema, once believed in what Frelimo represented. Others, like Saif, suffered more in the early days of independence. Whatever their individual history, many Indians, especially merchants, grow ever more dependent on the party for both prosperity and protection. As I was told by one Indian merchant: Renamo? They do nothing and they do not really have the capacity to do anything. They make all sorts of promises, but they could not deliver anything. The peasants and the marginal poor support Renamo because they are unable to think about the future. They just want something now regardless of the consequences. Renamo would just come in and take something and then try to sell it to somebody else. That is how Dhlakama (Renamo’s president) got his house in Maputo. Someone else had the legal title, but he just took it. We, the businessmen and the middle classes, we all vote for Frelimo. We think about the future and the peasants do not.

The party is necessary to secure property rights and guard Indian merchants from the wider population. This relationship has led to a paradox: once the state was seen as all-powerful, but the Indians held many of its functionaries in contempt, as ignorant, incompetent and corrupt; now

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the state protects the Indians, but it is capricious as well and could easily leave them to the tender mercies of the mob. Frelimo is also ambivalent towards the Indian population. In addition to the hostility of low-level cadres, even high-ranking party members, who are themselves of Indian descent, are uncertain about the loyalty of the wider Indian population to the party. One former minister (himself of Indian descent) told me: ‘Indians are with us (Frelimo) as long as we have power, but if we ever lose office, they will desert us. They are not a group we can depend on, the only way to ensure stability is to build a black bourgeoisie here.’ This attitude is mirrored by the low-level contempt in which Indians are held by many members of the new black middle and upper classes. As one young woman from a party-connected family told me: I don’t know, Indians seem like they have to show off. I mean, all these Indian families have drivers to take them everywhere. They don’t really have more money than we do. They just have to make a statement. I was at a club recently and I saw an Indian guy bump into a black guy. The black guy did not move out of the way quickly enough or something because the Indian started shoving – a fight broke out. The Indian guy called all of his friends who immediately backed him up. It did not matter what happened, but because he was fighting a black guy they all joined in. They really keep to themselves. Mulattos used to be like that a long time ago, but they mellowed and are not so aloof anymore. I think this is because Indians are insecure. This is not really their home, but they have nowhere else to go.

Therein lies of the paradox of Indian merchants’ new economic role. As long as they can secure the blessing of the party they are free to make money, but their attachment to the nation is suffering. While many do not consider Indians to be Mozambicans, as the woman said, they may have nowhere else to go.

Conclusion By tracing the evolution of the dominant social categories as they affect Mozambican Indians since independence, I have attempted to demonstrate the inadequacies of understanding power, politics and social relations by using economic abstractions like ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’ as the primary explanatory factor. Much as Frelimo has devoted itself to trying to consolidate its power and manage recurrent crises through a variety of creative means, so do many of the nation’s citizens. In Mozambique the new economy serves to entrench the power of the ruling party and to amass wealth for an embattled minority. While the economic order in

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Mozambique is characterized by gross inequality, opportunism and predatory behaviour by individuals and groups, it cannot be said to be based on the logic of self-maximizing individuals, but is supported rather by social logics of solidarity and moral economy. The latter may also serve the restricted interests of elite groups while offering little to the wider population (Hann 2010). And as noted by Chris Hann and Keith Hart (2011), the introduction of ‘capitalism’ in formerly socialist polities may also build on the logic of the previous system. In Mozambique, a party that was once dedicated to a form of state accumulation is now trying to bolster its power by engaging more directly with the world market, even if power remains in the hands of the same people. The economic networks of Mozambican Indians form an important part of this strategy. The Indians of Mozambique form a longstanding and durable diaspora community, one that is deeply enmeshed in transnational networks, even if their families have been in the country for generations. This is not surprising, considering that the territory comprising modern-day Mozambique has long been a port in Indian Ocean trade networks and later a colony of Portugal on the borders of the British Empire. Imperial systems and the Indian Ocean trading networks were both characterized by movement and the mixture of populations and cultures. As noted by Thomas Metcalf (2007), the coming of nationalism dramatically reconfigured these networks, solidifying boundaries where there was once a fluid mixture of people and ideas. In Mozambique, however, despite coercion, the early nationalist period provided a chance for Indians as well as other minorities to be incorporated into the new nation. The coming of democracy and the ‘free market’ allowed various groups more opportunity to amass wealth and exploit new economic niches. Furthermore, Mozambican Indians are by no means the only people to take advantage of the changing situation. But they are among the most visible winners and can be labelled as outsiders. So both the benefits and injustices of capitalism are increasingly a racial issue, since the black majority has its own political needs, but largely remains mired in poverty. Although Mozambican socialism was based on a coercive vision of assimilation, the current version of democracy has made the chance of assimilation much less attainable, while making internal fissures ever more prominent. Thus, for some of my informants, such as Naema, and to a lesser extent Saif, the promise of nationalism has been replaced by a growing emphasis on Islam. Here the chance to belong is transferred to a universal community of believers conceived of as an oasis of purity. Growing prosperity thus goes hand in hand with

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insecurity, while meaningful economic democracy for the black majority remains out of reach. NOTES 1. This chapter arises from larger projects I have carried out in Mozambique that focused on elite formation, democracy, nationalism and legitimacy and the relationship between the ruling party and Indian merchants. These projects are based on fieldwork I have undertaken in Maputo, the capital, from 2002 until the present and Nampula in 2008. 2. These crises include Portuguese economic sabotage after independence, foreign aggression and the civil war, the end of the cold war, economic transformation, post-war reconstruction and structural adjustment, attempts to create an elected single-party state and the growing alienation of many of the nation’s citizens from the regime to name but a few. 3. In October 2012 Renamo’s president, Alfonso Dhlakama, threatened a return to violence and set up military training camps in the party’s former stronghold of Gorongosa. This move was in response to Frelimo’s continuing refusal to reform the political system and a bid to remain the main opposition party when challenged by a splinter group, the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM). Since 2013, Dhlakama has fled his home and leads a few hundred former guerrillas in sporadic attacks on the centre and north of the country. In October 2013 Renamo officially withdrew from the peace treaty that ended the civil war. It has boycotted the 2013 municipal elections. 4. In the municipal elections of 2013 Frelimo lost control of Nampula to the MDM which broke with Renamo in 2008. Its leader, Daviz Simango, is the son of a founder of Frelimo who was executed as a counter-revolutionary soon after independence. In 2003, he won the mayoral election of Beira, Mozambique’s second city, for Renamo and later as an independent. The MDM is considered by some to offer a plausible alternative to Frelimo. It is too soon to tell, however, whether the MDM could win a national election and, if so, whether Simango’s goal is to transform the political system or just to insert himself into the existing structures of power.

Chapter 9

░ Marwari Traders between Hindu Neoliberalism and Democratic Socialism in Nepal MALLIKA SHAKYA

Having been for long a relatively isolated Himalayan kingdom, Nepal has undergone radical political change more than once in its recent history. Nepal’s feudal rulers, the Ranas, made an alliance with the British Raj from the 1850s, as a result of which they annexed lands of mixed population on Nepal’s border with India. At the same time, Marwaris from Rajasthan, members of one of the most powerful trading networks in South Asia, were invited into the new border towns from where they developed an alliance with the Nepali ruling family and the East India Company. A century later in 1961, soon after India’s independence, absolute monarchy was established in Nepal under the Shah regime with a commitment to modernize the country. The Marwaris adjusted successfully to this change, which in the 1990s led to privatization of state resources, removal of price subsidies and dismantling of barriers on international trade. This period is the context for my use of the term ‘Hindu neoliberalism’. The boom, however, was short-lived. The resulting economic downturn coincided with an armed insurgency in Nepal that gained its momentum at the turn of the century. A ‘twelve-point agreement’ signed in November 2005 between the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and an alliance of seven major political parties (SPA) formally ended the Maoist-led armed insurgency, which had claimed more than ten thousand lives over the past decade. The two sides united to confront Hindu King Gyanendra. Three years later, in 2008, Nepal officially became a secular republic, and an elected Constituent Assembly set out to write a new constitution. This initiated a national brainstorming session over a fundamental state restructuring aimed at addressing old grievances held by the peoples of the country’s periphery.

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A ‘new Nepal’ would offer rigorous affirmative action for historically marginalized peoples such as the low castes, border population and women. Indigenous ethnic groups would also be given a bigger say in government through a federalization programme. In the context of political debates about redistribution and federalism, the previous rhetoric of modernization and economic liberalism gave way to identity and class politics calling for social justice. This time the Marwari traders found it harder to avoid being identified as members of the oppressor classes by virtue of their trading monopolies (Shakya 2013). The ethnographic focus of this chapter is on the merchants of a border town, Birgunj, who were labelled ‘elite’ in this new political context. Although the Maoist insurgency was largely supported by hill peoples, the population of the flat land Tarai on the border with India (known by the umbrella term of ‘Madheshi’) challenged this Pahadi (hill) nationalism and the state restructuring programme proposed by the Maoists. An uprising of border-town groups, consisting of high- and lowcaste Hindus as well as Muslims with a wide spectrum of vocations and lifestyles ranging from priests to menial labourers, brought the nation to a standstill in the spring of 2007. The Madheshi People’s Rights Forum (MPRF), formed during the uprising, emerged as the fourth largest party in the Constituent Assembly. Two Madheshis – Ramvaran Yadav and Paramananda Jha – subsequently became the first president and deputy president of new Nepal. The rise of the Madheshis posed a new kind of dilemma for the Marwaris. Although Marwaris are also considered Madheshis by many, they had previously differentiated themselves from the other Madheshis as an elite with closer ties to the hill rulers than to the people of the borderlands. They traced their roots to Rajasthan like the hill rulers, whereas most ordinary Madheshis trace their origins to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in India. Moreover, their class status clearly set the Marwari businessmen apart from the rest of the Madheshis, who were either landowners, farmers or proletarians. So Marwari relationship to Madheshi nationalism has not been straightforward. The 2007 uprising established some Madheshis as the new political power. Large parts of the Tarai border region will likely be carved out as semi-autonomous states once the federalization project takes off. For Birgunj Marwaris, this made political alliance building trickier than ever. My concern here is with the relationship between politics and business. Nepal is particularly interesting in this respect because of its sharply contrasting modern political history in the course of which a feudal regime under the British Empire abruptly became a capitalist state in the 1950s,

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and now, since the millennium, seeks to make a transition to socialist democracy. Any such transition must be socially and economically pragmatic as well. Rulers need money and money has to accommodate power. What kinds of changes must a business elite envisage as a result of such a transition? My particular focus here is on how the Marwari traders in Birgunj have used socio-cultural activism to renegotiate their status as ethnic ‘outsiders’ who remain a minority in numbers, but have enjoyed business privileges from most previous Nepali political elites. Marwaris are known throughout south and southeast Asia for their financial and business acumen, for getting around the bureaucratic complexities of finance and for their immaculate instinct in handling business affairs, including networking and risk management. Although the most prominent Marwari business empires have been built by individuals, what sets them apart is first, their ability and willingness to pursue their business interests collectively; second, their unshaken commitment to cultural norms, as evidenced by their internalization of a charitable ethic as well as one of work; and third, their successful alliances with ruling elites wherever they live. By looking at how Marwaris have inserted themselves into the economy of Birgunj, on the border between Nepal and India, I analyze how their methods of social organization help them to build new alliances with political rulers when the equations of power are changing. Reliance on contemporary ethnography is a necessary, but not sufficient source of answers to this question. If the current regime describes itself as ‘new Nepal’, this was also the case in the 1950s. Marwari socio-cultural organization has served as a platform for developing alliances with local political elites from their arrival in the 1850s until now. Accordingly I will place two specific instances of Marwari negotiation with the Nepali state within a brief historical framework. I will also place the history of Birgunj as a major trading post for Nepal within a history of Marwari migration there. I discuss the numerous overlaps between Marwari business organization and their social and religious activism. I end with some conclusions concerning social and economic organization.

Business and Politics in Nepali History There have been several episodes of an alliance between businessmen and incumbent political rulers in Nepali history, some of which have taken an ethnic or regional form. For example, in the seventeenth century, when the Kathmandu Kingdom’s1 major source of income was trade with Tibet,

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Buddhist Newar traders had such a strong alliance with the ruling Hindu Newars that together they subjugated Tibet by means of a treaty that granted Kathmandu a monopoly over Tibet’s foreign trade and monetary supply (Snellgrove and Richardson 1968: 146; Slusser 1982: 70). This alliance between businessmen and rulers was disrupted, however, when the Shah (or Chhetri) kings from the Gorkha hills conquered the Kathmandu Valley and made it their capital of a broader Nepal kingdom in 1769. Even though the Hindu Newars were defeated militarily, the lucrative Tibet trade remained in the hands of Buddhist Newar traders who went on to develop parallel structures of trade that minimized the Chhetri state presence in Tibet (Bista 1980: 11; Rankin 2004: 90). Tibet and Nepal then fought three violent wars under the Shah dynasty. These stemmed from issues of national politics; but the disruption of the earlier trader-ruler alliance also played its part. The last of these wars was fought in the aftermath of Tibet’s (and China’s) refusal to support Nepal when it was attacked by the British East India Company in the south. Tibet’s refusal to join in showed that it retained a grudge against the Shahs for displacing the Newar alliance of Hindu rulers and Buddhist traders from the Kathmandu Valley.2 The Marwaris came to Nepal almost two centuries after what could be called the golden age of trade between Nepal and Tibet, when a landmark treaty of 1650 secured exclusive rights for Nepali traders and the Nepali state acquired a monopoly of Tibet’s money supply. In many respects, Marwari traders’ alliances with modern Nepali rulers are similar to those between Buddhist and Hindu Newars before the Conquest, even if the state’s boundaries and structures are much altered since then. It is questionable how far ‘modernization’, which in the late nineteenth century essentially meant colonial Indianization under the Rana regime, changed the nature of such alliances. This then was the context for how Marwari traders began to receive protection from the Nepali state. Jung Bahadur Rana took over from the Shah dynasty after a massacre of members of the palace court including the assassination of the prime minister. Just when the Marwaris had established themselves as a trusted local trading ally for the East India Company, he also established himself as a political ally of the British. In recognition of Jung Bahadur Rana’s unconditional loyalty, which included his eminent service during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the British gave Nepal substantial territories in the far west of the Nepal-India border, which later came to be known as the naya muluk (new nation). It was unclear from the official treaty whether this land was a British gift to the Ranas or an addition to the territories of the Nepali state. This ambiguity

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led the Ranas to invite the first cohort of Marwaris to set up businesses in the border towns. A new system of government was installed in the new territories, which among other things, opened up contracts and jobs as commercial bidders and state economic supervisors to people of Indian descent (Shakya 2013), as well as providing Marwari traders with necessary land and logistical services. Both the Ranas and the Marwaris had unequivocally established their loyalties to British colonial rule in India. But local cultural elements were as important for the making of their alliance as formal structures. Clifford Geertz’s (1980) analysis of how state symbolizes legitimized bilateral agreements between Balinese lords and Chinese traders holds for Nepal at many levels. The Ranas’ alliance with the Marwaris did not rest only on the specific bilateral agreements they spelled out in private; rather, these alliances were reinforced through all-purpose public ceremonies that invoked common ancestry and worshipped common deities. The new order they were forging had Hindu nationalism at its heart. The Ranas highlighted the Hindu character of their rule in their modernization project – the first ever constitution written in Nepal reaffirmed the caste-based varna system as the national way of living.3 The Marwaris reaffirmed their adherence to the Hindu Vaishya Dharma (merchant duty), so that funding of Hindu temples and charities for public benefit became as natural for them as spirituality and ritual performance were for the priests. Individuals were just a tiny component of the broader Marwari way of life and work; and this cosmology parallels in many ways those highlighted by David Rudner (1989) for the Natukottai Chhetiars of Tamil Nadu, by Karen Leonard (1978) for the Kayasthas of Hyderabad, John Cort (2004) for the Jains of Gujarat, and Hanna Papanek (1972) for the Memons of Pakistan. These all have in common an overlap between profit ventures and public charities, held together by commensality, conviviality and religiosity, which became in time the essential platform for both their social organization and their business networking. Barbara Harriss-White (2003) has called this phenomenon the ‘ideological backcloth’ underpinning modern corporatist projects in South Asia.

The Rise of Marwaris in the Nepal-India Border Town of Birgunj Marwaris epitomize Homo economicus for South Asia4 in that they comprise less than 0.5 per cent of the total population in both India and Nepal, yet they control over a third of businesses in each country (Zivetz 1992;

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Hardgrove 2004). Although Marwaris may be found in most towns on the Nepal-India border, Birgunj is central. Marwaris comprise about 10 per cent of the 100,000 people who live there and they control over 60 per cent of its businesses, including the transport sector which gives Birgunj its strategic significance as a trading entrepôt. Marwaris moved to Birgunj from the Indian cities and provinces on the other side of the border, setting up a series of complex negotiations between various political and business communities. Situated on the old route that connected Kathmandu with Bihar,5 Birgunj was launched in the late nineteenth century by Newar traders from Kathmandu on the initiative of the prime minister. Their authority was challenged by Marwari traders who were beginning to migrate into the region in large numbers and took a keen business interest in Birgunj. Although they were a small minority at that time and were clearly considered non-native, they had the blessing of the Rana prime ministers of Nepal. After multiple rounds of allegations and counter allegations, the Newar in charge of town planning was accused of embezzling funds and narrowly escaped capital punishment in the process. Three decades after the town plan was completed, Birgunj’s strategic significance increased when a train link was completed in 1923, connecting it with the Indian border town of Raxaul, a stop on the main line to Kolkata. Marwari trade in cloth and other consumer goods now took off with the benefit of direct transport links to India’s main trading centres. A telephone line had been installed in Birgunj in 1915. From the 1930s, the Ranas established a cluster of factories there, manufacturing products such as cotton textiles, matches, cigarettes, sugar and agricultural tools. Most of these took the form of partnerships between the Rana rulers and Marwari businessmen. The town’s population increased exponentially; its territory spread to incorporate settlements that sprang up nearby; and it was declared the administrative headquarters of its district in 1961. As Birgunj became more prominent, competition stiffened, and ethnic rivalry escalated between the Newars and Marwaris. While the Newars remained in the old bazaar, the Marwaris moved closer to the train line. The Newars were less organized, whereas the Marwari businesses founded the Cloth Merchants’ Association in 1944. Four years later, this association was expanded to become the Birgunj Merchants’ Association with the aim of representing all businessmen in Birgunj, including non-Marwaris such as the Newars. In reality, however, the Merchants’ Association remained a Marwari institution. The Federation of the Nepalese Chamber of Commerce and Industries (FNCCI) was founded in Kathmandu in 1967 under Newar leadership and it set out to build district-level chambers.

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Birgunj Marwaris proposed that the Birgunj Merchant Association could be the Birgunj wing of the FNCCI. Newars and other business groups protested and eventually a new body – the Birgunj Chamber of Commerce and Industries (BCCI) – was founded under the leadership of a Newar. The BCCI went on to elect four other non-Marwari presidents, which suggested that the Birgunj merchant community was finally embracing a multi-ethnic culture and heading for modernity. But this phase was shortlived; the Marwaris succeeded in taking control of the BCCI leadership and since 1986, all its presidents have been Marwaris.

Vaishya Dharma and Social Organization in New Nepal The present period in Nepal is defined by a historic shift from Hindu neoliberalism towards democratic socialism. Marwaris have always combined work with life conceived more broadly, and codependence with local rulers has been a consistent feature of their social practice. On this occasion they have had to renegotiate their place as a business elite just when the state has moved away from a market orientation towards class and identity politics. For example, nationwide trade union protests paralyzed several manufacturing and service industries until the owners redefined their relationship with labour. Further, movements of several marginalized ethnic and regional groups subjugated the state into negotiating a federal structure and writing a new constitution to ensure legitimacy. There is, however, growing political support for the idea that the Nepali state has been too soft on the radical armed forces and that the Maoists’ growing stature in mainstream politics jeopardizes Nepali democracy. One bone of contention is overt ethnicization of the state restructuring project and reversal of the economic liberalization programme implemented in the 1990s. Some people fear that privileging ethnicity in the federalization programme is a slippery slope to disintegration that may eventually lead to the break-up of the nation state.6 There is also a great deal of unease concerning the state’s new vision that seeks to reverse the economic liberalization of the 1990s.7 Many believe that both of these developments directly contradict the neoliberal theory that deregulated market and competitive party politics alone will ensure individual freedom and national development, entailing a teleological shift from ‘ethnicism’ to ‘modernity’. The achievements of the 2006 popular movement, namely the abolition of the centralized constitution and of neoliberal economic policy, are now represented as a communist threat masked by nominal espousal of democracy and individual freedom.

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The ideological polarization accompanying Nepal’s current political transition may be thought to imply an irreversible moment leading to an unprecedented future. But to hold this view is to underestimate the ebbs and flow of Nepali history. The very term ‘new Nepal’ has been used to describe at least two other transitions in the past.8 It tends to discount the complex historical antecedents for the present situation and the diversity of class interests involved. This is not to devalue the social, economic and political restructuring that has occurred since 2005. But I call here for a deeper analysis that takes into account the centuries-old baggage of caste and ethnicity as well as the decades of political and economic privilege that still influence the making of ‘new Nepal’. Much has changed, but some aspects remain the same. How do the Marwaris position themselves in new Nepal, and what may we infer from the changing nature of their political activism? What does this change mean for the religious and political patronage they nurtured for so many decades? What are the implications for their everyday business and social activities? I will discuss these questions in relation to two features that ordinary Marwaris consider to be central to their identity: membership of their Marwari community and conformity to a Hindu way of life. These are reflected in how Marwari social institutions evolved in the context of migration to Birgunj. One of the earliest of these institutions is the caste council or the ‘jati panchayat’. This was founded to give moral and business guidance to the community not long after the arrival of the first Marwari families in the 1880s. The Panchayat met regularly to talk about spiritual and moral ways of living as a Marwari, but it adjudicated moral and commercial disputes among Marwaris. In time, it became a platform from which to guard their social and business interests against local rivals. The idea of a Panchayat both as a moral and business council is not new. When the Marwaris took over business in the colonial capital of Kolkata during the 1930s, their Panchayat enabled them to launch enterprises in the new Bazar as a collective from its foundation, taking the local Bengalis by surprise and subsequently excluding them from the local bazaar economy and from the regional trade routes linked to it (Timberg 1978). The political effectiveness of Marwari Panchayats is attested as early as the 1790s (Dalmia 1997: 86). So the Marwari Panchayat of Birgunj was a powerful tool in their negotiations with other communities in the area. An important case in point was the Marwari capture of the modernization project of the 1950s, which involved building a modern business enclave right in the heart of the Birgunj Bazar. A Bengali migrant from Kolkata persuaded King Mahendra to grant him an interest-free loan with

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which he bought some land for development of a business district in Birgunj and divided it into plots. By this time, the Marwaris had moved to the new town of Birgunj, while the Newars remained in the old town. The Marwari Panchayat quickly mobilized all Birgunj Marwaris, persuaded them that this was an opportunity like the Kolkata Bazar and urged the Marwaris to act at once. Within a matter of months, the Marwaris put up offers, negotiated and sealed deals to purchase most of the plots – long before others had a chance to assess the prospects. When the project was completed and the Marwaris had moved in their businesses, the Bengali developer had it inspected by King Mahendra. The king embraced the development openly and waived the loan he had given. Other Marwari social institutions show their conformity to Vaishya Dharma or merchant duty.9 Most Marwaris trace their origin to a King Agrasen who founded a merchant kingdom. Two smaller Marwari sects link their conversion to Vaishya Dharma to the rise of Jainism as a rival to Hinduism. All Marwaris believe that their merchant duty is a part of their religious precepts. Most Marwaris today adopt the Vaishya Dharma of being perfectionist in their vocation for business, but also remain loyal to the Hindu deities and kings, while performing charitable acts. The first act of charity taken up by the Marwaris in Nepal was to help the ruling Ranas reconstruct Kathmandu Valley after the devastating earthquake of 1934 flattened almost all the city’s buildings. Impressed by their generosity, the Ranas assigned the Marwaris the task of building a holy cow shed10 in the temple considered holiest by Hindus in Nepal. The Marwaris not only built the shed, but also a traveller’s lodge to go with it. To commemorate this honourable act, they built similar edifices in Birgunj soon afterwards. These acts of charity were not done just for business’ sake, but they were not a free gift either. In 1936, the first manufacturing plant in Nepal – a jute mill – was established in Birgunj as a joint partnership between a Kolkata Marwari and Nepal’s prime minister of the day (Upreti 1999; Whelpton 2005). This was followed by several other plants manufacturing cigarette, sugar, matches, cotton and agricultural tools, all set up as business partnerships between the Marwaris and the Ranas. Vaishya Dharma for the Marwaris took a new turn after the Rana regime ended in 1950. After a brief stint with multi-party democracy ended in 1961, King Mahendra sought to integrate Nepal in the world, while promoting its uniqueness as a Hindu kingdom capable of accommodating other religious groups peacefully. As a result, Marwari community organizations evolved into modern platforms for Hindu nationalism. Invoking the new constitution, which gave all Nepalis the right to found associations, the Marwaris established an All Nepal Marwari Federation at

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a national conference held in an eastern border town in 1952. The leaders of the All India Marwari Convention joined this conference, along with key leaders and activists from the Bihar and Kolkata Marwari Conventions, plus prominent Marwari journalists and scholars. The conference opened with those present swearing allegiance to the Shah kings and paying homage to the martyrs of Nepal’s recent political uprising against the Rana rulers. While this reaffirmed Marwari Hindu nationalism by calling for a ban on the export of cows from the holy nation of Nepal, the conference proceeded to take up issues of common concern for the Marwari community. Thus, following the example set by the Kolkata Marwari Assembly, one of the organizers called on all Marwaris to end the ‘purdah’ (veil) custom for women. Following the murder of one of their members, the conference then demanded of the incumbent government a guarantee that Marwari lives and properties would be protected in the new Nepal.11 If Hindu nationalism was strengthened then by the institutionalized networking promoted by the Convention, both the networks and the ideology remain strong in Nepal today, despite the rise of a strong communist movement. In 1981, Marwari businessmen worked with the priests in the royal palace to organize a World Hindu Convention in Nepal (Adhikari 1994). Among them was Shankar Lal Kedia, known as a progressive Marwari who had kept his distance from temple charities, who saw it fit to organize this event as a mark of protest against the government of Nepal having recently granted permission for a Muslim conference. Several decades later, Hindu nationalism among the Marwaris remains strong, as may be seen from their continued material support for the fervent protests by Hindu nationalists when Nepal declared itself a secular republic and evicted the Shah family from the royal palace.

Negotiating Political Transition Now (and Then) Before analyzing how Birgunj Marwaris have fared in the current political transition, it is worth reflecting on how they experienced a similar process in the 1950s. The Marwaris’ rivalry with local business communities in Birgunj took a new turn when their Rana patrons were ousted from power initially by a popular uprising in 1951, which established multiparty democracy, and later by a royal takeover in 1961, which recognized the former Shah kings as the true sovereigns. As the movement gained momentum, and the fate of their Rana patrons looked uncertain, the Marwaris retreated from the town to stay with relatives on the other side of the border. They came back only after King Tribhuvan Shah returned

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from Delhi having secured a tripartite agreement with the Ranas and the Nepali Congress for handing over state power. An old Marwari leader from Birgunj told me how the Marwari Panchayat sent a message to the court of King Tribhuvan to clarify the situation. The messenger was sent back with an assurance that the Marwaris would not be punished for having earlier taken up Rana patronage and they would continue to receive favours from the Shah kings. With this assurance, the Marwaris moved back to Birgunj. These favours did not remain unchallenged. The first democratically elected government that took charge immediately after the 1951 uprising was led by the Nepali Congress. Ganesh Man Singh, a Newar leader from Kathmandu Valley and a prominent freedom fighter within the Nepali Congress, was appointed minister of industry and commerce. He then assumed a draconian mission to reform taxation. For the Birgunj Marwaris this meant that the Ministry claimed they owed the government of Nepal a large sum in tax, which must be paid off before a new tax system could be inaugurated. My informant recalled: We Marwaris resisted this tax reform mostly because we were not told how we owed the government any money. We had been paying all our dues at the tax office, as had been earlier agreed with the Rana prime ministers. That was not the point, we were told; the point was that the nation had a new government and we must do as we are told. We resisted, but soon we had all the Marwari business houses sealed off by the government with an official wax seal. The seal remained there for six months. Some local thugs were involved in this along with the Nepali Congress cadres. We tried to talk with them, but what could we do? They were the new government at that time. Ganesh Man was a Newar and we are Marwaris, so that was that. Still, as a group, we Marwaris held strongly to our position that we would not pay that money to the government treasury. In the end, we paid the amount with the provision that it would be allocated directly to the construction of a hospital in Birgunj and not kept in the government treasury. It was not the best outcome, but this is how the matter was resolved.

This first encounter with democratization in Nepal was not pleasant for the Birgunj Marwaris; but they bounced back rapidly and ran along with the new regime in the long term. A first step in this direction was when Bishwanath Rungta, my informant above, founded a Marwari Youth Forum. This institution soon became an incubating ground for future Marwari business leaders and was crucial to the expansion of Marwari activism in all spheres. This modernity project advanced significantly in the following decades. Two of the most important houses in the Birgunj Marwari community took up educational philanthropy as their cause.

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The Khetans were the largest donors for construction of an undergraduate college in Birgunj, which is named after them. A Kedia eye hospital and school were founded soon afterwards, extending subsidized services to the poor. This progress agenda was visibly on the rise after 1951, it did not displace the old Vaishya Dharma. Thus, another important house in Birgunj, the Tibdewals, more conventionally built a temple in 1970, consecrated another in 1980 while building a public marriage hall in 1976. The Marwaris’ experience with the latest transition is tied up with the rise of the Madheshis, which means people of the Tarai flatlands of which Birgunj is a part, and the drive for democratic socialism, which is a legacy of the Maoist insurgency. The political situation now facing the Marwaris may be summarized in three different ways. First, the 2006 border uprising made the Madheshis a formidable political force, which could no longer be ignored and the ambiguous nature of Marwari-Madheshi relationship had to be clarified. Second, the relative decline of the Nepali Congress and the rise of moderate and militant communist parties in national politics forced Marwari capitalists to seek alliances with groups waging a class war. Third, the national commitment to federalization and economic reforms allowed the Marwaris to assume new roles as specialists in Nepal’s economic geography and economic governance. Looking at the composition of Marwari representation in the Constituent Assembly, one may conclude that the most important shift in Marwari politics is their new alliance with the Madheshi parties. Of eleven Marwari members nominated to the Assembly, four represented the Madheshi People’s Rights Forum (MPRF) while one represented the TeraiMadhesh Lokatantrik Party (TMLP). Apart from accepting the offer of joining this lawmaking body, Marwari leaders stressed how Madheshis and Marwaris shared skin colour, were essentially Hindi speakers, subscribed to a common Hindu nationalism and shared a flatland Tarai lifestyle. One Assembly member went on to highlight their common struggle to resist discrimination against border town people: We Madheshis have long been looked down upon by the government of hill people (Pahadis). There is no end to stories about this around here, as our own people know. Let me tell you about one incident to make my point. We were young teenagers at that time, and I was a fighter. I could not accept injustice, so we would form a gang and take the matter in our own hands every time something went wrong. The government never showed any interest when the hill people humiliated us, exploited us and discriminated against us. I was once taken into police custody for one such incident, when I raised my voice. The police officer who investigated me was a Newar. He was rude to me, he did not say a word to the perpetrator; instead, he called

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me names, and I could not do anything about it. Nobody in the police station told the officer not to call Madheshis names or humiliate us. None. We are also Nepalis, you know, they should know that. Now that officer has become very senior in the police. I cannot do anything about it. Such is the nature of the hill feudal domination over Madhesh.

Six other Marwaris chose not to represent any of the Madheshi parties. Three of them chose the two leading old parties – Nepali Congress and Nepal Communist Party (UML). One remained loyal to the Sadbhavana Party, which had represented the border region before the Madheshi uprising of 2007. One represented a fringe party. One even went on to represent the Maoists just a year after a major face-off between the Maoists and the Madheshis, which took the lives of twenty-eight Maoist cadres, allegedly in a mob attack instigated by MPRF supporters (Jha 2007). One of the Marwari Constituent Assembly (CA) members was quoted as saying that the Marwaris should not be classified as Madheshi in the upcoming census. Indeed, in terms of cultural and class representation (International Crisis Group [ICG] 2007), Birgunj Marwaris had long maintained that they had more in common with the Shah and Rana rulers of the hills who also come from Rajasthan, but also with Newar traders, who, despite being their business rivals, were also fellow townsmen with whom they shared business interests. After all, Newar social organization was as ‘sophisticated’ as that of the Marwaris, it was often claimed. The Madheshis, on the other hand, were considered lower in status and some suspicion was held against them for possible links with criminal gangs (gundas) from Bihar across the border with India. The political transition was associated with heightened crime in Birgunj and with a rise in Marwaris’ experience of extortion, theft and ransom abduction. All of this gave rise to new social alignments. For example, the son of an owner of a trucking company, who had once been encircled by a Madheshi criminal gang and continued to receive extortion threats, told the extortionists who threatened to block his trucks that he would pay up as long as they did not ‘touch the truck’ since ‘what else would a merchant do to a crook than pay them? What other business can exist between the two?’ It was not that criminality was the only link connecting Marwaris to Madheshis. True, they lived apart – Madheshi landlords and tillers on their land on the outskirts of Birgunj; workers in their squatter settlements from where they commuted to work; and many others lived outside the Marwari heartland at Adarsha Nagar. It is also true that Marwari social institutions were deeply localized, as was the case with Lions and Leo clubs, which had branches only in Adarsha Nagar to which the Marwaris belonged. Other Marwari social institutions were either rooted in

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their ethnicity (such as Marwari Panchayat and temple trusts) or their vocational belonging (such as the merchants’ associations). Nevertheless, even when Madheshi institutions occasionally came near to Marwari institutions, they chose to function independently. Take the case of a pilgrims’ lodge built by a Madheshi right at the centre of a Marwari business neighbourhood. None of my respondents found it necessary to mention this building when I was mapping the charity organizations in the neighbourhood. I was later told that it had no connection with Marwari institutions and was built for Madheshis. The Madheshi-Marwari relationship is indeed complex and the state’s ethnic straitjacket ignores this complexity. This is reflected in the collective actions of those Marwaris who became CA members. The Madheshi constituency – consisting of the four Madhesh-based parties as well as the elected and nominated Madheshi members representing the mainstream parties – worked together to promote the Madheshi cause of legitimizing the identity of border towns in terms of language, ethnicity and regional autonomy. The Marwaris, on the other hand, were less moved by these causes, although they did not deny them, and their Madhesh-based CA representatives supported them periodically. More important for them was their focus on Marwari unity and vocational interests. For example, at least ten of the eleven Marwari CA members12 were part of both the informal Marwari caucus and the formal CA committee on economic restructuring, which among other things advised the constitution drafting team on the economic implications of federalization and ethnic affirmative action. In addition to fulfilling their duties within the CA, the Marwari members regularly met with the broader Marwari community and took guidance from the National Marwari Council. It was only sensible for the Marwari CA members to focus on issues of economic geography and governance since the Marwaris were ushered into the CA in the first place for their insight into how the economy worked. None of the Marwari CA members was elected by their popular constituencies; all of them were respected for their economic expertise, and they certainly met the criteria needed to fill in the ‘Madheshi quota’, which was made mandatory for all parties.

Conclusion I have shown first how an alliance between traders and rulers is necessary for maintaining social, economic and political order in Nepal as elsewhere. Second, an overlap between their social and commercial lives

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makes political alliances work for business groups. Third, my study of Marwari social organization is not best understood as a contribution to the social capital literature, which, as Desmond McNeill (2010) rightly says, only measures the degree of rational choice in a business group’s acts of charity. The flourishing sociological notion of the economy being embedded in society was introduced by Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]); but, as elaborated by Mark Granovetter (1985), this often reduces the idea to low-level networking activities, while losing sight of social developments on a broader scale. Many scholars have found such a move contestable (Zelizer 1979; Gudeman 2001); but Jens Beckert (2009) in particular has insisted that embeddedness is not a middle- or micro-level phenomenon, but a macro-social one. My ethnography has tried to capture grassroots charitable work, politics and social organization among the Marwaris of a small border town; but, following Beckert’s lead, my analysis takes off from the history of their alliances with local and national elites as well as with rival local groups in the context of the major changes gripping Nepal at this important conjuncture. One aspect of this focus on trader-ruler alliances in Nepal that deserves attention is that elements of feudalism continue to exist there, despite all the upheavals of the last half-century or more. In Weberian terms, the hereditary claims of status groups persist and this makes the politics of ethnicity and religion still highly relevant to a national politics of class struggle and democracy. We should note, however, that sweeping changes in national politics affect everybody, but especially business groups. Obviously, the trader-ruler alliance that organized pre-Conquest Nepali society involved different players from the Rana regime and colonial South Asia. But more important, the Marwari community today is clearly very different from what it was just a decade ago, and even more half a century ago when they had just arrived in Birgunj. My narrative of changing continuities is intended to draw attention to this pattern linking macro- and micro-social organization over time. This perspective throws light, first, on relations between Marwaris and other local business groups and, second, between them and local political groups. What the Marwaris and their rivals, the Newars, have in common is their business acumen and some aspects of social organization. Marwaris, however, differ from the latter especially in their external spatial networks and their internal orientation towards group collaboration. The two communities have very different relations with the ruling elites. For example, the Newars consider themselves more indigenous than the Bahun-Chhetri rulers and hence their legitimate rivals for rule, while, according to my ethnographic analysis, the Marwaris still look up to the

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Bahun-Chhetris as respectable Nepali patrons. This contrast is reinforced by the relative size of their populations, with one being a strong contender in representative politics, while the other is content with being a business ally. Further, while the messy politics at the centre makes the Newars in Birgunj more peripheral, the Marwaris’ networks on the other side of the border strengthen their control within the town. The recent focus on federalization and ethnic politics has made it necessary for the Marwaris to differentiate themselves from local Madheshis. Maoist politics saw them targeted doubly as a class and imperialist enemy, while the Newars were embraced as long-wronged indigenous capitalists. The border uprising of 2007 took place on the pretext of protecting the border population from the extremist politics of the hills; yet the Madheshi movement could not itself avoid class animosity and identification with crime. Law and order deteriorated in the border towns and the Marwaris found themselves targets of both local mafias and class grievances. They were quick to attempt to build alliances with the new elites even before their roles had become legitimate or federalization had come to a conclusion. Interestingly, the new alliance that emerged through party funding and representation in the Constituent Assembly reaffirmed the Marwaris’ status as a business group in the shape of an informal Marwari caucus to discuss the new state’s economic policies, while other groups focused on a national political debate that increasingly spoke a language of identity. Reflecting on the problem of political and economic order throughout the history of Nepal requires us to rethink the changes in state and society that have taken place, which means focusing on the forms of exchange and interdependence between various populations. As Max Weber (1978) showed, national orders are normally maintained through alliances of interest between commercial and political elites. These alliances give rise to capitalist classes in market-oriented economies or to status groups within feudal societies that legitimize hereditary claims. Part of these alliances may be destroyed, reproduced and redefined when the sociopolitical order changes. Dismantling earlier local structures often gives rise to a new round of negotiations, which may retain some characteristics of the earlier period, but at the same time necessarily incorporate changes. These changes are best seen as macro-social phenomena involving overlaps and tensions between key status groups.

NOTES 1. Kathmandu Valley consisted of three separate kingdoms and was collectively called Nepal then.

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2. ‘We Tibetans do not get involved in affairs of other countries. We had been trading and coexisting harmoniously when you attacked the Malla Kings of Kathmandu kingdom and defeated them. We did not get involved because we respect the affairs of other countries. Likewise, whatever issues with your southern neighbours, you must solve them with your own diplomacy and resources’ (Acharya 2003: 208). These statements seem ironic in that Tibet did provide financial aid to the Newar rulers in their war against King Prithvi Narayan Shah. 3. The first Rana ruler Jung Bahadur Rana had the constitution written up upon return from his much publicized grand tour to Britain and Europe where he was exposed to modern governance drawing on legal documentation. He also later took on himself the title of ‘Shree Teen Prime Minister’ pronounced partially in English when virtually no Nepalis including themselves spoke English. 4. See Timberg (1978) and Hardgrove (2004). 5. Chronicling how King Rajendra Shah moved his army camp from Kathmandu to Allau, Baburam Acharya’s history on Nepal mentions the central border towns of Inaruwa, Chhapkaiya, Bagahi, Allau, Barewa and Kalaiya, towns which are not too far from where modern Birgunj is located. 6. See P. Sharma (2008) and V. Sharma (2007). There were heated debates on the question of ethnic federalization in leading daily newspapers in Nepal and e-discussion forums run by Nepalis and Nepali diaspora abroad, which were only re-enacted in the workshops periodically organized by donor-funded and local think tanks operating in Nepal. 7. See the national budget issued in 2008 by Finance Minister Baburam Bhatterai under the first cabinet since the Constituent Assembly elections. This cabinet was led by the Communist Part of Nepal (Maoist) with a joint coalition with the Communist Party of Nepal – United Marxist Leninist (UML) and the Madheshi People’s Rights Forum (MPRF) or the party of the Madheshis from the Nepal-India border region of Terai. 8. See Joshi and Rose (1966: 103) on the 1951 transition that ended the century-long autocratic Rana regime, and Wildavsky (1972: 509) on the 1961 transition that ended the decade-long multi-party democracy that made Shah King Mahendra the executive monarch through a one-party Panchayat regime. 9. Marwaris could traditionally be Hindu or Jain. Since most of the Birgunj Marwaris were Hindu and all of the social institutions they built in Birgunj were Hindu, I focus on this aspect of Marwari social organization. 10. Cows are considered holy animals in Hinduism and killing of a cow is considered so sinful in the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal as to call for capital punishment under the penal code. 11. This is based on my ethnographic fieldwork among the Marwaris since 2001. Archives from libraries in Kathmandu and Birgunj Marwari Associations as well as personal collections of several Marwari scholars have been reviewed to verify information. 12. One CA member was not a businessman but a medical doctor and he was not part of the committee and the informal caucus.

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░ Contributors

Juliana Braz Dias is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Brasília and a research associate of the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria. Her research focuses on popular cultures in Cape Verde and South Africa. She is the co-author of África em Movimento (2012). Doreen Gordon is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. She was formerly a research fellow in the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester for ethnographic work on race and class in Salvador, Brazil. Keith Hart is International Director of the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria. He contributed the concpet of an informal economy to Development Studies and has written extensively on money. His recent books include The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (with JeanLouis Laville and Antonio David Cattani, 2010) and Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnogoraphy, Critique (with Chris Hann, 2011). Saint José Inaka is completing a master’s thesis in Industrial Sociology and Labour Studies at the University of Pretoria on Congolese migration to Pretoria. He is on study leave from his job as a public servant at Kinshasa City Hall. He worked as a freelance writer for newspapers there. He is a co-founder of the Congolese Institute of Human Rights and Congolese Coordinator of the African Youth Union (Pretoria). Detlev Krige is a senior lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Pretoria, having formerly been a post-doctoral fellow in the Human Economy Programme there. He received his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand. His current research interests include the social and solidarity economy, community and complementary currencies and exchange systems, and the new middle classes.

226

Contributors

Fraser G McNeill is a senior lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Pretoria. He was awarded a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 2007, and is the author of AIDS, Politics and Music in South Africa (2011). Busani Mpofu is a researcher at AMRI, College of Graduate Studies, University of South Africa. He has been a research fellow in the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria and was also a research associate at University College London. He has taught Economic History at the University of Zimbabwe and has published on urban housing and social histories. Mallika Shakya is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, South Asian University in Delhi, and a former fellow in the Human Economy Programme, University of Pretoria. She examined the role of cultural capital in Nepal’s industrialization, and how its industrial structure is embedded within social and political hierarchies. At the World Bank she advised Asian and African governments on international trade issues and has followed the vicissitudes of the garment industry around the world. John Sharp is emeritus professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Pretoria and South Africa Director of the Human Economy Programme. He taught at the Universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch. He has published on the mission reserves of Northern Cape Province, the Bantustan of Qwaqwa, on the white, Afrikaans-speaking inhabitants of Pretoria, and on the history of South African anthropology. Jason Sumich is a political anthropologist whose research and publications focus on Mozambique. He has worked at a number of universities including the London School of Economics and the University of Fort Hare. He has been a post-doctoral research fellow in the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria, and most recently worked at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is a member of the Norwegian Network on the Anthropology of Mobilities. Joseph Trapido obtained his PhD in Anthropology in 2010 from University College London. He is currently a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and before that he held a fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pretoria. His current research is on popular politics and elections in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

░ Index

A actions/actors, 6, 58, 62, 64, 66, 79, 91, 108, 114, 131, 141, 144, 147, 149, 179, 203 affirmative action, 40n, 63, 76, 127n, 191, 203 Africa, 1, 18, 20–21, 64, 118, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134, 138, 160 Africans, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19–22, 25, 27, 63–64, 66, 75–77, 86, 106, 108, 117–118, 120, 125, 131, 138–139, 148, 152, 174, 176 Afrikaners/Afrikaans-speaking, 12–13, 48, 68, 82, 83, 86–87, 89–92, 94, 97, 99–102, 104–5 agency/agents, 11, 46, 62, 77, 137, 153, 177 alliances, 7, 8, 9, 17–18, 62, 170, 171, 173, 181, 190–194, 201, 203–205 anthropology, 3–7, 41, 43, 61, 147 apartheid, 10–12, 42, 45, 64, 65, 75, 82–83, 92, 94, 95,100–103, 175 post-, 42–43, 47, 58, 62, 63, 77, 82, 88, 95, 97, 103–105 associations, 41, 50, 55, 63–66, 70, 74, 77–78, 116, 125, 165, 198 B Bahia, 109, 110, 115, 117, 119 banks, 8, 35, 61–62, 65–68, 71, 73–75, 78–79, 96, 158, 170, 171 Basic Commodities Supply-Side Intervention, 34 Birgunj, 191–192, 194–206 blacks, 12, 16, 36, 65, 75, 77, 82, 84, 86, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99–104, 107, 111, 113–114, 118, 124, 126, 129, 165, 174, 178, 181, 183

Brazilian, 14, 108–110, 114, 125, 127 economic empowerment, 45, 76 majority, 24, 101, 174, 178, 186, 188–189 middle class, 13–14, 59, 106–108, 109–120, 123–127, 187 relationship with whites, 86–89, 92, 94 townships, 10, 11, 84, 98 workers, 12, 32, 75 boom, 1, 2, 20, 76, 117, 146, 190 bourgeois, 7, 78, 123, 152, 161, 165, 176 Brazilians, 1, 2, 10, 13–15, 106–109, 112, 113–115, 118, 119, 121, 126, 134, 138–139, 155 Britain, British, 1, 9, 13, 56, 70, 111, 129, 132, 178, 188, 190–191, 193–194 Bulawayo, 10, 19, 20, 22, 23, 27––32, 33, 37, 38 bureaucracy, 8, 15, 16, 20, 38, 39, 78, 117 businesses, 7, 8, 18, 25, 26, 29, 32–33, 43, 46, 48, 52, 59, 119, 125–126, 130, 132, 139–140, 143, 145, 148, 158, 161, 163, 164, 165, 169, 171, 176, 180, 185, 191–192, 194–205 C Cape Town, 46, 74, 89–92, 169 Cape Verde, 2, 10, 14–15, 129–142, 147–148 capital, 7–8, 11, 13–15, 46, 62, 67, 86– 87, 94, 101, 112, 115, 118, 157–158, 178 capitalism, 5, 8–9, 13, 34, 38, 62–63, 66, 68, 153, 174, 175, 187–189 capitalists, 8, 10, 14, 16, 62, 86–87, 132, 144, 177, 191, 205,

228

Index

charity, 13, 104, 198, 203, 204 China, Chinese, 1, 106, 155, 170, 194 citizens, 7, 11, 15, 16, 17, 21, 23, 36–37, 62–64, 79, 82, 89–90, 97, 120, 123, 144, 161, 169, 173–175, 177–179, 181, 186–187 class, 2, 7, 9–15, 17, 20, 23, 32, 44, 68, 76, 78, 87, 90–91, 106–108, 110–112, 122–124, 126–127, 151–153, 155, 156–158, 161, 163, 166, 170, 171, 177, 191, 196, 197, 201, 204–205 colonialism, 10, 16, 22–24, 27, 32, 37, 39, 64, 90–91, 127, 148, 153–154, 174–175, 178, 184, 193, 194. See also empires commerce, 9, 21, 121, 126, 148, 167, 178 commodities, 2, 15, 22, 34–35, 61, 132, 147, 153 commoditization, 53, 140, 148 comparative method, 2–4 Congo. See Democratic Republic of Congo constituent assembly (Nepal), 190, 191, 202, 205 consumption, 14, 21, 48, 61, 65, 76–77, 93, 107, 111–113, 115, 122–123, 126, 143–146, 149, 153, 156, 166, 195 contracts, 78, 95, 117, 142, 165, 169, 194 countryside, 9, 25, 86–88, 94, 99, 100. See also rural credit, 33, 61–63, 65–66, 70, 73–74, 97, 106, 112, 114, 118, 123, 176 crimes, 22, 26, 42, 62, 151, 156,165, 181, 183, 185, 186, 202, 205 crisis, 1–2, 7, 13, 15, 17, 20, 31, 33–35, 38, 41, 46, 49, 57–59, 129–130, 145–146, 177 culture, 3, 37, 164, 07, 123–124, 127,135, 196 currency, 13, 24, 33, 56, 61, 164, 182 D debt, 57, 75, 87, 97, 113, 118, 174, 181 Democratic Republic of Congo, 2, 10–11, 15, 16, 151–158, 160–166, 168, 170–171

democracy, 9, 58, 64, 67, 75, 83, 126, 175, 178, 181, 183, 188, 196, 198–199, 204 development, 3–4, 7, 10, 16, 19, 20–21, 22, 27, 32, 34, 42, 117, 126, 132, 196, 198 dialectics, 5, 130–131 digital recordings, 129–131, 143–144, 146–147 distribution, 46, 112, 119, 144, 154 Durban, 72, 74, 77, 147, 148 E economics, 5–7, 24–26, 112 economy, 1–16, 19–25, 31, 33, 35–37, 39, 54, 59, 62, 65, 79, 82, 107–108, 130, 132, 147, 152, 173, 176, 177, 187, 192, 197, 203, 204. See also formal economy; human economy; informal economy; moral economy; national economy; political economy; world economy education, 11, 12, 14, 31, 71–72, 76, 106, 109, 112–116, 119–121, 123, 125, 179, 185 elites, 11–12, 15–16, 18, 35, 48, 63–64, 66–67, 69, 71, 75–77, 83, 111, 114, 124–127, 135, 138, 152–153, 155–156, 164, 166–168, 170, 177, 188, 192, 196, 204–205 embedded, 6, 18, 43, 115, 124, 152, 204 empires, 3, 9, 13, 45, 192. See also colonialism employment, 11, 12, 15, 20–21, 23–27, 32–33, 36–38, 39, 52, 55, 68–70, 76, 82, 89, 93–95, 98, 103, 106, 117, 119, 157–158, 160, 163. See also selfemployment; unemployment empowerment, 12, 22, 35–36, 75 engagement, 3–4, 19, 25, 41–43, 51–52, 57–58, 85, 93, 98, 99, 107, 130, 134, 135, 137, 160, 164, 168, 171, 185 English language, 41, 51, 52, 57, 130, 160, 164,168 enterprises, 10, 12, 21, 26, 39, 48, 62, 66, 72, 102, 118, 125, 176, 179, 197

Index ethnography, 2–4, 6–8, 10, 15, 41, 43–44, 58, 62, 66–67, 114, 107–108, 127, 130–131, 147, 151–152, 191–192, 204 Europeans, 1, 9–10, 15, 38, 77, 106, 117, 133, 136, 138, 152, 155, 164, 165, 184 Évora, Cesária, 133, 134, 139, 142 exclusion, 11, 13, 72, 91 F feudalism, 9, 17–18, 179, 191, 204–205 financialization, 61, 62, 66, 72, 77, 79 formal economy, 21–23, 25, 32, 38, 75, 78, 102–104, 112, 158, 159 sector, 20, 23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 37, 38, 39 See also informal economy formality, 5–6, 8, 15–16, 19–20, 22, 25, 29, 32, 41, 43, 62, 64–68, 70, 72–73, 77–79, 158, 171, 194 free market, 7, 8, 16, 48, 173, 177, 183, 188 freedom, 17, 36, 75, 79 85, 93, 96, 176, 181, 196 Frelimo, 16–17, 173–187 funerals, 11, 43, 45, 46, 48–51, 57–59 future, the, 37, 49, 58, 68, 74, 84, 101, 153, 171, 177, 197 G Gauteng, 15, 151, 155, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167 Germany, 1, 5, 139 global (crisis, markets), 1, 2, 7, 15, 20, 24, 42, 61–62, 79, 94, 130–132, 134, 144–145, 148, 173, 177 global South, 2, 7, 9, 10, 15, 18, 61 globalization, 1, 7, 61, 131 governments, 7, 8, 10, 14, 17, 20, 22–26, 32, 36–40, 45–47, 62, 64, 66, 76, 90, 94, 106, 124, 168, 171, 179, 191, 194, 199, 200, 201. See also state Graeber, David, 62, 63, 79 grants, 11, 43, 96, 97 H Hart, Keith, 20, 156, 173, 188

229

HIV/AIDS, 11, 41, 43, 47, 48, 49, 58 hope, 8, 19, 21, 24, 39, 63, 96, 101, 121, 166, 177 homeland, 41, 42, 48, 49, 50, 133, 138, 139 household(s), 5, 9, 52, 55, 63–65, 67–69, 71–72, 92–93, 95, 96, 112, 185 human, 3, 4, 5, 7, 13, 15, 20, 36, 61, 62, 68, 79, 131, 132, 147, 152 human economy, 3, 4, 10, 15, 19, 22, 39, 54, 58, 107, 131, 146–148 programme, 2, 3, 7, 10 humanity/humanitarian, 3, 4, 13, 55, 57, 101, 102, 134, 147 I illegality, 16, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 44, 47, 64, 93, 145, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 169, 180, 185. See also legality impersonality, 8, 22, 25, 78, 104, 131, 132 independence, 21–24, 70, 95, 139, 153, 154, 156, 167, 173–180, 187, 190 India, 1, 17, 18, 106, 155, 184, 186, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195 Indians, 1, 10, 16, 17, 18, 160, 173, 174, 175, 178–189, 194, 195 indigenization, 22, 35–36 individuals, 6, 8, 14, 23, 28, 36, 37, 73, 79, 90, 103, 114, 115, 132, 138, 156, 162, 171, 173, 177, 179, 183, 186, 188, 192, 194, 196 Industrial Revolution, 70, 72 industry, 1, 10, 13, 16, 29, 101, 109, 124–125 industrialization, 6, 8, 24, 38, 132 inequality, 41, 68, 76, 106, 107, 108, 113, 115, 126, 127, 144, 188 informal economy, 8, 10, 11, 15, 19, 20, 23–27, 30, 32, 33, 38, 39, 103, 152, 153, 158, 159, 171 sector(s), 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 31, 37, 38, 39 informality, 11, 19, 20–25, 27, 29, 31–32, 34, 37, 39, 41, 43, 48, 67, 78, 84, 124, 153–154, 157–158, 161–162, 170, 171

230

Index

institutions, 4, 19, 26, 32, 35, 37, 61–62, 64–65, 77, 79, 103, 108, 118, 121, 177, 182–183 interests, 8, 9, 11, 19, 20, 23, 65, 66, 67, 78, 79, 86, 91, 107, 118, 121, 125, 138, 153, 154, 165, 169, 170, 171, 188, 192, 195, 197, 202, 203, 205 International Labour Organization, 20, 21 International Monetary Fund, 2, 61 investment, 10, 34, 35, 44, 57, 64–65, 67, 74, 117, 118, 121, 130, 136, 138, 169, 176 Islam (Muslim), 17, 183, 184, 188, 191, 197 J Johannesburg, 12, 15, 16, 54, 62, 63, 64, 67, 69, 75, 77, 89, 91, 158, 160, 164, 166, 168 K Kathmandu, 192–193, 195, 198, 200 kings, 42, 190, 193, 198–200 Kinshasa, 152, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 164, 165, 168 kinship, 47, 68, 110, 114, 115 L labour, 6, 9, 23, 24, 31, 38, 39, 64, 84, 87, 91, 95, 116, 146, 151, 196 labourers, 1, 42, 86, 87, 153, 191. See also workers labour market, 20, 64, 82, 117 land, 9, 21, 32, 87, 88, 126, 193 landlord(s), 8, 70, 202 laws, 3, 8, 22, 23, 24, 26, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 77, 88, 157, 159, 165, 180, 181 legality, 16, 22, 32, 78, 91, 109, 158, 161. See also illegality liberalism 5, 7, 13, 17, 191 literature, 3, 14, 61, 67, 78, 107, 112, 151, 171, 204 life, 3, 5, 7–8, 15, 19–20, 25–26, 30, 42, 47, 58–59, 61, 62, 68, 72, 75, 78, 79, 84, 86, 88, 94, 98, 99, 104, 107, 108, 111, 113–115, 118, 122–125, 127, 131,

139–40, 142, 147, 152, 155, 157–159, 165,173, 177–178, 184, 185, 190, 194, 196–197, 199, 202 history, 11, 108, 139, 142, 178, 181, 182 social, 12, 15, 102, 123 trajectory, 13, 14, 109 M Madheshis, 191, 201–203, 205 management, 8, 26, 29, 49, 57, 89, 90, 179, 192 manufactures, 10, 25, 29, 33–36, 51, 83, 94, 163, 166, 195–196, 198 Maoist, 2, 17, 190, 191, 196, 201, 202, 205 Maputo, 174176, 178, 182, 183, 184 Marwari(s), 17, 18, 190–206 Marx, Karl, 9, 146, 150n12 media, 1, 15, 95, 107, 112, 126, 132, 143 merchants, 9, 166, 180, 181, 182, 184, 191, 196, 198, 202 middle class, 1, 12, 13, 14, 32, 69, 77, 90, 93, 97, 101, 106, 110, 111–119, 122, 125, 161, 162, 170. See also under black migrants/migration, 1, 10–11, 14–16, 20–21, 25, 42, 63, 95, 115–116, 118–119, 131, 133, 136, 148, 151–156, 161, 163, 168, 170–171, 192, 195, 197 mobility, 10–12, 14, 45, 68–69, 72, 77, 91, 98, 100, 107–108, 110–117, 120, 123, 125, 127, 157, 158, 160, 184 monarchy, 17–18, 190 money, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 17, 30, 31, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61–68, 70, 72–79, 88, 97, 114, 120, 132, 140, 142, 145, 148, 157, 158, 160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 170, 174, 176, 184, 187, 192, 193 moral economy, 64, 174, 188 movements, 2, 6, 10, 14, 66, 68, 78, 97, 112, 125, 126, 127, 175, 196, 199, 205 Mozambique, 2, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 173–178, 183, 186–189 music, 129–130,132–136, 145–149. See also world music

Index mutuality, 62–63, 66–67,77, 79, 130 N Nampula, 174, 178, 181, 184–185 nations, 3, 13, 17, 18, 26, 35, 38, 82, 91, 92, 101, 105, 130, 134, 135, 139, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181, 182, 184, 186, 187, 188, 191, 196, 199 national economy, 24, 29, 64 nationalism, 35, 144, 184, 188, 191, 194, 198, 199, 201 neoliberalism, 8, 12, 16, 38, 42, 47, 62, 117, 122, 190, 196 Nepal, 10, 15, 17, 18, 190–206 networks, 18, 35, 43, 47, 57, 64, 68, 107, 108, 111, 112, 115, 116, 120, 121, 124, 125, 145, 147, 167, 169, 170, 173, 174, 177, 178, 183, 185, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 199, 204 Newars, 193, 195–196, 198, 204–205 nineteenth century, 1, 8, 86, 131, 193, 195 non-governmental organization, 42, 124 North America, 10, 93, 106, 155 P patronage, 36, 72, 114, 115, 197, 200 personal (behaviour, conduct), 8, 14, 66, 77, 103–104, 107, 111, 117–118, 131–132, 147, 179, 186 Polanyi, Karl, 5, 6, 204 political economy, 2, 11, 42, 68, 173 politics/politicians, 2, 7, 8, 13–14, 40, 101, 126, 156, 166–168, 174, 177, 191 Portuguese, 14, 16, 130–131, 135, 137, 174, 178–180, 182, 184 post-apartheid. See under apartheid post-colonial, 10, 22–23, 174 poverty, 11, 14, 20, 25, 26, 30, 31, 35, 36, 55, 86, 91, 111, 119, 136, 158, 175, 188 power, 3, 9, 11, 26, 34, 38, 42, 55, 72, 78, 101, 102, 112, 119, 125, 127, 148, 154, 155, 156, 157, 165, 167, 168, 170, 174, 177, 179, 186, 187, 188, 192, 199, 200. See also politics

231

practices, 8, 13, 16, 20, 36, 61, 62, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 94, 97, 107, 108, 109, 117, 119, 126, 130, 137, 143, 144, 145, 148, 161, 162, 164, 174, 177, 188, 196 pragmatism, 17, 26, 49, 59, 88, 102, 168, 192 Pretoria, 4, 12, 15, 82, 89, 91, 97, 102, 103, 104, 129, 130, 146, 147, 159, 160, 163, 167 primitive accumulation, 11, 16, 153, 170, 171 private, 8, 9, 28, 84, 89, 97, 98, 119, 120, 121, 123, 179 sector, 24, 25, 33, 37, 39, 163 production, 25, 34, 64, 70, 93, 95, 98, 131, 132, 144, 147, 148, 149, 154, 156, 179 property, 9, 12, 29, 48, 71, 84, 97, 99, 114, 115, 118, 121, 154, 157, 167, 170, 179, 186 public, 8, 9, 21, 22, 26, 39, 55, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 75, 106, 107, 108 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 126, 154, 194, 201 R race, 11, 13, 14, 68, 82, 86, 91, 93, 99, 100, 101, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 114, 115, 125, 126, 127 racial democracy, 13, 109, 114, 115 racial discrimination, 97, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 114, 115, 120 reciprocity, 6, 77, 79, 116 Reconstruction and Development Programme, 51, 66 redistribution, 6, 125, 191 regions, 2–3, 6, 11, 13, 29, 41, 42, 48– 49, 51, 58, 87, 119, 126, 147, 151, 154, 167, 170, 174, 179–180, 185, 191–192, 195–197, 202–203 reproduction, 41, 46, 48, 49, 57, 58, 59, 61, 79, 91, 129, 131, 144 research, 3, 4, 13, 17, 43, 44, 50, 52, 65, 67, 87, 88, 102, 106, 107, 113, 114, 115, 118, 147, 151 revolutions, 2, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 126–127, 175, 179, 181, 183

232

Index

rich people, 34, 55, 59, 75, 126, 136, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 165, 174. See also wealth Rome, 9, 108, 118 rulers, 7, 17, 18, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 202, 203, 204 rural (areas, people), 10, 11, 12, 14, 21, 25, 32, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 51, 54, 58, 59, 86, 87, 88, 93, 115, 116, 117, 126, 185

98, 103, 106, 108, 117, 119, 121, 124, 125, 126, 152, 153, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 166, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 200, 203, 205. See also governments state socialism, 7, 177 Stokvels, 12, 64–68, 71, 76 structural adjustment programmes, 2, 20, 22, 24–26, 29, 176

S Salvador, 10, 13, 106, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127 São Vicente, 133, 136–137, 139 savings, 12, 57, 58, 62–67, 70, 72–75, 78–79, 118, 122, 179 self-employment, 12, 23, 25–27, 32, 39, 95–96 slavery, 13, 108, 110, 113, 127, 131 social democracy, 7, 13, 106. See also Democracy socialism, 7, 16, 17, 173, 174, 176, 179, 181, 187, 188, 192, 196, 201 social status, 116, 119, 120, 123, 124 society, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 15, 19, 22, 37, 40, 49, 58, 59, 63, 66, 67, 79, 106, 107, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120, 122, 130, 131, 149, 153, 179, 184, 185, 204, 205. See also world society solidarity, 61–63, 66, 174, 183, 188 sound-recording, 143, 144, 146–147 South Africa, 1, 2, 10–16, 41–43, 48, 56–59, 62–68, 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 126, 129, 132, 147, 148, 151–171, 175, 182, 183, 184, 186 South Asia, 2, 10, 17, 178, 190, 194, 204 Southern Africa, 2, 10, 13, 17, 29, 43, 49, 83, 95, 131, 151 Soweto, 12, 61, 62, 63, 68–71, 73–76, 78 space, 4, 7, 21, 54, 64, 73, 78, 93, 97, 112, 122, 144, 158, 160, 168, 170, 171, 17S states, 2, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19–26, 34–39, 42, 43, 44, 56, 59, 63, 64, 66, 73, 78, 79, 83, 90, 91, 97,

T tax, 11, 25, 26, 28, 38, 61, 154, 157, 200 tourism, 2, 10, 124, 131, 136, 137, 147, 163 towns, 9, 10, 21, 25, 27, 43, 51, 94, 115, 117, 146, 160, 182, 190, 191, 194, 195, 198–199, 201–205 townships, 10–12, 16, 27–30, 62–64, 65, 69–70, 74, 84, 98, 147–148, 160–161 trade, 9, 13, 17–18, 23, 29, 34, 38, 52, 61, 65, 70, 84, 95, 96, 130–132, 147, 156, 166–167, 174, 178, 182, 188, 190, 192–193, 195–197 traders, 16, 23, 27, 30–31, 38, 56, 97, 153, 156, 165–166, 191–195, 202–204 traditions, 3, 91, 108, 118, 124 transnational (economy, networks), 83, 173, 174, 176–177, 179–181, 185–186, 188 twentieth century, 1–3, 6, 22, 27, 82, 86–88, 90, 100–101, 136, 146, 173, 178 U underdevelopment, 20, 177 unemployment, 20, 22–26, 29–39, 42, 62, 70, 83, 98, 102–103, 119. See also employment unequality, 11, 13, 19, 107, 148, 149. See also inequality United States of America, 1, 9, 14, 113, 118, 124, 131, 133, 139, 145, 170 universal, 3, 4, 5, 22, 144, 180, 188 urban (environment, people), 10, 14, 19, 20–26, 32–35, 37, 39, 43, 54, 62–64, 66, 77, 78, 86, 115–116, 155–157, 175, 185

Index V Vaishya Dharma (merchant duty), 194, 196, 198, 204–205 Veblen, Thorstein, 5, 156 Venda, 11, 12, 41–51, 53, 54, 55, 58 W wages, 6, 11–12, 25, 31, 64–65, 69, 70, 86, 92, 93, 119–120, 137, 141–142, 153, 160 wealth, 8, 16, 18, 45, 47–49, 53, 59, 71, 75–76, 107, 110, 114, 116, 118, 166, 169, 175, 181, 183, 187–188 Weber, Max, 5, 156, 204–205 welfare, 5, 11, 13, 28, 33, 38, 42, 43, 47, 56, 176 West, the, 2, 13, 126–127, 134, 154–156 whites, 10, 12–13, 24, 27, 32, 35, 48, 62, 64, 68–69, 75, 77, 82–95, 97–99,

233

101–104, 106, 109– 111, 113–116, 119, 123, 125–127, 160, 163 workers, 8, 12, 25, 29, 32, 36, 55, 64, 65, 68, 70, 75, 82, 83, 87, 88, 90–95, 98–99, 101, 103, 109, 117, 155, 159, 161, 163, 183, 202. See also labourers working-class, 10, 12, 14, 63–65, 69, 70–71, 74, 93, 96–97, 109, 110, 124 World Bank, 2, 24, 61 world economy, 1, 8, 14, 94, 126, 130, 131, 173 world music, 130–134, 136, 139, 143, 147–148, 149n1, 149n2 world society, 4, 61, 126, 131, 135, 144 Zaire, 152, 156, 164, 166. See also Democratic Republic of Congo Zimbabwe, 2, 10, 11, 16, 22, 19–39, 42