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Chapter One the Popular Economies of Soweto and Black Johannesburg In CHAPTER ONE THE POPULAR ECONOMIES OF SOWETO AND BLACK JOHANNESBURG IN PERSPECTIVE 1.1 The research problematique “Soweto is a metaphor for black life in South Africa.” Aggrey Klaaste (2004:123) This thesis investigates a number of practices, processes, relationships, actors and institutions prevalent in the residential areas that form part of Johannesburg that is known as Soweto, all of which have in common the exchange, hoarding, spending and risking of cash money. It describes the actual flows of monies between actors and institutions while also inquiring into the social meanings of the flows of such monies between actors and social groups and institutions. The relationships of indebtedness that result from such flows, the savings and credit practices and institutions which direct such flows of monies, and the processes of consumption and games of chance which I describe here, are analysed in this thesis in the context of what I call the ‘popular economies’ of Soweto and Black Johannesburg.1 By popular economies I denote a field of patterned yet changing ‘economic’ relationships, processes and practices that stresses the historically structured yet open-ended flows of money in the context of the shifting dynamics of everyday life. The notion of popular economies is employed here in an effort to move beyond the conventional distinctions between formal/informal economies and legal/illegal economies so as to explore the moral or normative dimensions of such money flows, especially in relation to historically constructed ideas about the state, legality, power, social class, identity and social legitimacy. As such the concept popular economies allows me, as an ethnographer, to take seriously questions of material and social reproduction, identity (in the 1 In this thesis - as in any study of South Africa - an obligatory note on racial terminology is called for. This is not only because our society is a highy racialised society or because racial terminology is used by the state to track transformation and redress. It is also because it shapes behaviour and has become an important register of identity and reality. In this thesis I will refer to people by the traditional categories of ‘African’, ‘Coloured’, ‘White’ and ‘Indian’ given how these classficiations were used by the state to produce different experiences. I use the term ‘African’ in the main when writing about the past while using the term ‘black’ when referring to Africans in the present (but they are also used interchangeably). When I quote from materials from the period under discussion I will use older terms like ‘Native’ which were used in that context. 1 registers of class, gender and race) and meaning in understanding behaviour patterned around the exchange, risking, spending and hoarding of monies. This means that the notion popular economy is informed by both materialist and idealist definitions of the economy.2 Such a conception of the ‘popular economies’ allows me to brings into one view aspects of social and economic life that are usually kept separate (by either disciplinary boundaries, the demands of positivist legal discourse or state policies). This does not mean that the concepts of race, class and gender are unimportant when considering the shape and dynamics of the popular economies. These three axes of inquiry are important tools in understanding the political economy of contemporary Soweto and Johannesburg, the urban forms which have developed over the past century (Parnell 1997) as well as to recognise some of the cultural forms including the ‘cultures of resistance’ and subcultures that have developed in response. Given my reluctance to draw too neat a boundary between the domains of the political and the economic and the religious, they are also important in understanding the popular economies of Soweto. But these concepts are more than analytical tools or explanatory concepts: they are also crucial registers of identity in the voices of many Sowetans. As such they are also crucial markers of identity and feature prominently in the multiple views and narratives that many Sowetans hold and articulate about themselves as a social group, the neighbourhood in which they live as a social order of a particular kind, their ‘economic’ practices, and the relationship between economic practices, social networks, political structures and religious discourses – as well as how they are used in producing legitimacy. In this thesis economic behaviour that shapes the flows of monies is not seen as reducible to the logic implied in the assumption that all actors consistently try and maximise their own interests and so only at the expense of other actors. This assumption may be feasible in certain social and structural conditions - and certain markets - and for the purpose of building certain models, but it must not be assumed to be universally applicable (or universally desirable). Such a framing of the context of my research through the use of the notion popular economies tries to avoid both the 2 Anthropologist Richard Wilk’s recent definition of the economy as “the relationships between human beings and the human-produced world of objects, ideas, and images” (Wilk 2007:36) is more idealist than Gregory and Altman’s (1989:1) definition of ‘the economy’ as the social relations human groups establish in order to control production, consumption, and the circulation of food, clothing and shelter. In other words, it is not only the materialities of everyday life that shapes economic processes and practies but also ideas, normative evaluations of such materialities, and questions of identity and community. 2 economism and methodological individualism that characterises some contemporary writings in the fields of economic and urban anthropology. It is important, I believe, to offer representations of economic life that are not completely determined by our world’s current predominant form of political organisation (the nation-state and by implication methodological nationalism), nor by our world’s current predominant form of economic organisation (capitalism and by implication its ideological imperatives). This means that I agree with David Graeber when he suggests that at the heart of the project of anthropology is the acceptance that the world system is one that is human- made, in-the-making and that anthropologists should do more than merely reflect it: they should also imagine it and act upon it (Graeber 2007). In the same way that ‘history from below’ tries to capture something about the fundamental yet elusive voice and agency of marginalised and underground peoples, so the notion of popular economies in this thesis is employed with the aim of offering a critique of some of the established assumptions about economic life that developed and continues to flourish in industrial and post-industrial metropolitan centres and in our ‘bodies of law and jurisprudence’. In the following chapters, then, I describe the sociological organisation and micro dynamics that shape certain practices and relationships in the popular economies in the neighbourhoods of contemporary Soweto. Moreover, I put forward an interpretive analysis of the shape and dynamics of the popular economies by placing such practices, instutions and relationships in the context of the larger history of Johannesburg. I explore the ways in which the contemporary popular economies can be understood in relation to past practices. And how such past practices and social class dynamics were in turn shaped by Johannesburg’s particular path of capitalist development, the process of urbanisation and labour migration and the policies and practices of racist segregation which developed under colonialism and apartheid. In addition to taking into account the ways in which this larger history has shaped the sociological conditions of the lives of people who live in Soweto, I also take seriously questions of racial and class and gender identities in explaining some of the features of contemporary popular economies. Not everything I present in this thesis, or the experiences I shared during fieldwork, can be easily situated and analysed with reference to structural histories of racial capitalism (class exploitation and racist subjugation) and gendered oppression. This point my Sowetan interlocutors consistently 3 remarked upon in our discussions, in addition to my own efforts of trying to make sense of some aspects of everyday life. The notion ‘Black Johannesburg’, used in some of the literature on Johannesburg, is invoked in this thesis in order to emphasise the role of history and identity (blackness) in understanding aspects of the contemporary popular economies of Soweto; it alludes to a historical identity invoked in this thesis. Whereas my primary research was limited to Sowetan and Johannesburg, I do believe that some of my findings can be situated into a broader historical context (time) and indeed a broader regional one (space). More specifically, which actors and institutions and processes will I be describing here? What are the main themes that will flow from these descriptions and analyses? What is the significance of this research? Firstly, I investigate the figure and practice of the small-scale neighbourhood township moneylender and the relations of indebtedness that are established and performed through the provision of small amounts of emergency cash credit to neighbours and friends. I then describe and analyse several aspects of the practice of such informal neighbourhood lenders that operate parallel
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