South Africa's liberation, marked by the first democratic elections of 1994, ushered in an unprecedented expansion of large-scale redistributive arrangements. In the post-apartheid period, the collection of money into a central fund administered anonymously and bureaucratically has gained social and political importance, particularly for poor and lower-middle-class Africans. This is most evident in a rapid expansion of government social assistance—from 1997 to 2006 the number of beneficiaries of social grants increased from three to almost eleven million, and today at least a quarter of South African households receive welfare payments. Social assistance “has been the fastest-growing category of government expenditure since 2001, and now amounts to R70 billion [almost US$7 billion in 2006] a year, about 3.4 percent of gross domestic product.” The centrality of redistribution is clear in current debates over the establishment of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) for all South Africans. Political liberation has also brought an increase in redistribution through development projects such as the National Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) grants.
This study examines the consequences of the rapid and unprecedented expansion of insurances for the poor in South Africa. Over the last ten years, South African insurance companies established a myriad of policies in order to incorporate the previously excluded, mostly African, poor and lower middle classes. While poverty, violence and AIDS put state institutions and social relations under pressure, insurances enable people to manage risks in hitherto unthinkable ways. The article examines the development of this new regime of risk as a Janus head, after the Roman god of opening and closing. At the heart of access to insurance were the incongruencies that were caused by the ‘translation’ of risk into the seemingly neutral concept of costs and the inability of brokers and intermediary organizations to navigate these translations successfully. Access to insurance – here not defined as having an insurance policy but as making a successful claim when confronted with the insured risk – was fraught with the contradictions of complex high-tech bureaucracies and the poor's social networks.
Mutuality is at the heart of the continued violence and inequality in South Africa. This historical and anthropological analysis of Cape Town's taxi associations reveals how mutuality has become strongly connected with violence and economic marginalization. The breakdown of apartheid led to new mutualities along the rural–urban divide, which resulted in taxi wars between ‘urban insiders’ and ‘rural outsiders’. After liberation from apartheid, mutuality within Cape Town's taxi associations became a central issue in government policy and commercial interests, which contributed to taxi associations becoming mafia-like organizations. This analysis reveals that taxi owners today find themselves in a trickle-up economy characterized by: violent and shifting mutualities; the embrace of illegality and informality as being vital to doing business; and strong economic intervention by the state.
African communities are witnessing a perplexing proliferation of diverse arrangements of mutual security that draw upon old and new solidarities and inventively merge market logic with reciprocal forms of distribution and sharing. The dynamics of such voluntary arrangements and their broader social impacts emerge as increasingly important topics of study. The changing nature of global economies poses challenging questions about the novel relationships between state and market, and the potential of human agency to find alternatives to address growing inequalities. This collection focuses on local institutions of mutual security as alternative – yet also interdependent – forms of distribution that have become particularly relevant in the current era of global financialization and the changing dynamics between private and public social spheres. Various voluntary associations and informal economic networks, financial mutuals and savings/credit groups are becoming central in regulating access to resources and defining patterns of association in African communities. The articles in this themed part-issue explore these social security networks and organizations, concentrating on their ambiguous potential to empower the marginal as well as to contribute to social strife and political conflict. Ethnographic cases from diverse parts of Africa illustrate the impacts of the environments of uncertainty on the emergence of novel forms of association. The contributions suggest that contemporary mutual help arrangements should be seen as being central to the emergence of new social spaces and power configurations in such settings, revealing a broader social dynamic of globalization.
This article explores crucial decisions made by Sylvia, a Xhosa woman living in the townships of Cape Town, during a period of approximately thirty years. These decisions involved large sums of money and had important consequences for her own life, for those of her son and grandchild, and for the relationships she had with her first and second husbands and in-laws. Sylvia's decisions continued to be influenced by gendered ways of belonging to ancestors and descendants but also show important changes in connecting wealth and people. The wealth-in-people approach offers important insights into how Sylvia's decisions are guided by power and control over people as well as by prestige. However, it also becomes evident that the wealth-in-people approach does not sufficiently explain or theorize the agency of people. By drawing on the philosophical notion of practical rationality as a complementary analytical perspective, I explore agency in relation to aspirations and the acquisition of new open-ended values. The perspective offered by practical rationality increases our understanding of how individual decisions, especially complex decisions around money, are made because of their transformative potential and the aspiration to cultivate oneself.Drawing on Miers and Kopytoff (1977), Guyer explores the connections between self-realization, the meaning of exchange, and different political and economic hierarchies in equatorial Africa (Guyer 1993; see also Guyer 1995). Using museum collections and archival records, she analyzes how material objects in precapitalist equatorial Africa constituted personal qualities. The way objects circulated within transactional systems was part of gaining rights-in-people, often the ability to mobilize them to particular acts or to lay claim to their loyalty. These rights-in-people could then be mobilized for economic or political purposes. The wealth-in-people approach highlights that these purposes can be individual pursuits as well as collective-particularly kinship-pursuits. Such pursuits were not (only) material but also forms of self-realization that shaped personhood. This approach shows how regimes or systems of circulation increase people's status and respectability and have far-reaching implications for power dynamics within and between communities. Guyer concludes that wealth-in-people offers important insights into the "contingent cultural and political process by which, in both capitalist and non-capitalist economies, some things and some people may be realized as assets" (1993, 261; see also Guyer 1995;Guyer and Belinga 1995). By carefully examining museum collections and archival records, the wealth-in-people approach offers a comprehensive analysis of how people in precapitalist West Africa established connections between material wealth, possibilities for political mobilization, and the valuation of people.Within the wealth-in-people approach, self-realization refers to the building of personhood. It shows how people try to gain status and prestige by how they are situated...
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