“We are celebrating our salaries”: On contingency and
gambling in post-apartheid South Africa
Ilana van Wyk
ESRC Project, 18 June 2009, London
Formal gambling
As a relative latecomer to the global lottery industry, the South African government
launched a National Lottery in March 2000 and relaxed its strict anti-gambling laws. It
was a move that proved very popular with South Africans as they spent more than R2.7
billion on Lottery tickets within the first eight months of its launch. This figure
currently hovers around the R4 billion mark per year (National Lotteries Board Annual
Reports 2006, 2007, 2008). To date, Gidani, the official Lottery operator, has granted
7459 vendors licences to sell lottery tickets nation-wide. People can buy lottery tickets
at their local corner shops, supermarkets and post offices or over the Internet while the
Lottery’s game shows on television attract large audiences. Apart from the proliferation
of Lottery vendors and players, many “gambling shops” and casinos also started to dot
the South African urban and semi-urban landscape.
This presented a marked shift in the place that formal gambling occupied in the
daily lives of most South Africans. Before the relaxation of the gambling laws in 19971,
the only form of legal gambling allowed in South Africa was horse racing while casinos
were relegated to the former homelands and ‘independent’ states such as Swaziland2.
Such casinos became liminal places of leisure where the harsh structural racism and
control of the apartheid state was somewhat suspended. At the casinos, black and white
people gambled, drank imported liquor, watched notorious striptease shows and
partook in the sex industry operating around these places without the interference of
apartheid police (Crush and Welling 1983). In the parlance of the Calvinistic apartheid
state, the casinos on its borders were “palaces of sin”3 and presented a threat to its rule.
Consequently, many of its intelligence gathering activities centred on these casinos and
1
The groundwork for this radical legal turnabout on gambling was laid in 1997 when the Lotteries Act
(No. 57 of 1997) was passed in parliament.
2
Although the 1965 Gambling Act prohibited gambling in South Africa proper, the Self Governing
Territories Constitution Act of 1971 allowed homeland authorities to legalise gambling in order to
attract capital (Brand 1999). The leaders of Transkei, Ciskei, Bopthutaswana, and Venda all proceeded
to legalize casinos in their territories (Hughey & Mobilia 1997).
3
A play on the famous Palace at the Sun City resort in the former Bophuthatswana.
1
their patrons.
At the end of apartheid, the future of the homeland casinos and gambling in
South Africa generally was uncertain. The 1996 Constitution repealed the 1965
Gambling Act and opened the way for local entrepreneurs to construct an informal
gambling industry throughout South Africa (Fisher and Schreuder 1994). Slot machines
and blackjack tables appeared in bars, card clubs opened in the cities while non-profit
organisations offered bingo and scratch cards. Pressure from religious and community
groups, gambling entrepreneurs and political leaders began to build for the state to put
forward a unitary national policy (Sallaz nd). To this end, the state appointed two
committees, the 1992 Howard Commission and 1995 Weinhard Commission to make
recommendations concerning a national gambling industry. Both of the committees
approved such an industry on the grounds that it would generate jobs4, stimulate other
industries and lead to economic growth, develop human capital and that, through
taxation, gambling would raise state revenue. The only negative effect that the two
committees identified was that personal savings and consumer spending on other goods
would suffer as individuals decided to gamble away their discretionary income.
The Minister of Trade and Industry at the time, Alec Erwin, summed up the two
commissions’ recommendations shortly after the launch of the Lottery and said that:
[t]he National Lottery exists in order to generate resources for government to
support national development and social upliftment through disbursements to
Good Causes, Arts and Culture, Sports and Recreation, the RDP
[Reconstruction and Development Plan] and other miscellaneous beneficiaries.
In addition to this, the Lottery is a means for direct personal empowerment and
persons from age eighteen and above stand a chance to win prizes ranging up to
millions. The National Lottery is therefore a tool for progress, advancement and
personal growth (National Lottery Media Centre; August 17, 2001).
However, despite the government and its ministers’ support for the lottery as a
means to generate money for the poor and as a tool of “personal empowerment”, it has
on more than one occasion defined the national lottery as “too risky” for the poor to
participate in (National Assembly, 25/09/2002; Anon 2003). In this regard, the lottery’s
aim of channelling disposable income from the upper and middle-classes to the
"poorest of the poor" have been unsuccessfully realised as most gamblers live below
the official poverty line (Collins 2000; Sallaz nd). Various interest groups have
4
The committees calculated that 100,000 new jobs could be created in this labour-intensive service
industry
2
expressed their concern about this trend (Hooper-Box 2003). For the most part, this
concern has been framed in terms of the unrestrained and “irresponsible” spending on
lottery tickets and other forms of gambling by the destitute. Such concerns were born
out in November 2002 when South African newspapers reported on the arrest of eleven
young women at a newly erected rural casino. The women were apprehended and
allegedly charged for gambling with their child support grants. According to the
journalists, the police arrested the women on “social welfare” grounds and for the
misallocation of state funding. The newspapers also voiced the “local community’s”
outrage at the women’s brazen behaviour and concern for the neglected children
involved. In my own research into the matter, I couldn’t find court cases relating to the
arrests and no laws regulating the spending of child support grants by its beneficiaries
(Interview, Chris Oct2008).
On their part, poor people have contested these constructions and insisted on
their “rights” to participate in the national lottery and to go to legal casinos. Many of
my interviewees were adamant that powerful people were conspiring to exclude them
from these forms of gambling because they wanted to keep the winnings to themselves.
In support of the poor, Mr Humphrey Khoza, the chief executive of South Africa’s first
lottery operator Uthingo, claimed that every South African has a human right to play
the Lottery and that a call for the restriction of gambling to the upper and middle
classes was unconstitutional (September 26, 2003).
Informal Gambling
Unrestrained and ‘risky’ gambling amongst the poor in South Africa is, however, not
confined to the Lottery and to legal casinos. Informal gambling is widespread,
multiform and plays a significant part of daily life in most informal settlements. In
Cape Town’s townships, where I’ve been doing research during the last seven months,
groups of men regularly play dice in the shebeens and on street corners, while women
play large sums of money on umjiqka, a card game similar to ‘snap’ where each player
bets on the outcome of every upturned card. Just before Christmas, the stakes in
umjiqka games in Kayalitsha increase significantly as women gamble feverishly to
secure a big pot of money for home improvements, gifts, drinks and festive foods.
Some women bet up to R500 per card.
A plethora of other card games draw enthusiastic crowds to the intimate spaces
of people’s living rooms and back yards over weekends. Some of these games were
3
played with matchsticks for relatively small stakes, like a plate of food at the nearest
shisa nyama (informal stall that sells barbequed meat) or a couple of beers. Participants
in these games said that they liked to play cards in order to relax, to while away the
time and to prevent boredom. Other games had much higher stakes. The “BEE’s” (rich
black men) in the township are well known for the enormous stakes at their card games.
It was widely rumoured that the owner of Mzoli’s, a famous shebeen frequented by
European tourists (amongst a string of other businesses) liked to put R100 000 on the
table. Prospective gambling partners have to equal his bet in order to join the game. My
interviewees claimed that millions of Rands were won and lost in these games and that
the participants showed up under heavy guard as they carried the sacks of cash into the
venue. No one knew where these games were played but quite a few of my
interviewees claimed to know a “security” that guarded the men while the game was in
progress.
Schoolteachers often complain that primary school children from as young as
seven play “spin” (betting on head/ tails as coin is tossed) during classes. Apart from
the distraction this offers in lessons, many children lose their lunch money in this way.
High school children continue to play spin but often move on to faster, higher-stake
dice games, often in the presence of more experienced older men outside the school
gates (cf. Reynolds 1989: 56, 98, 168). Here, young children would often join the
onlookers and would make relentless fun of the losers. Enterprising high school
students would form secret partnerships in these games and would help each other
during the game, preferably without the other participants’ knowledge. In order to
participate in these dice games, the children would pilfer small amounts of cash from
the change they would get whenever their parents sent them to the local spaza shops.
Older children would also rob younger ones of their lunch money for this purpose.
Stokvels, usually geared to promoting informal savings, also regularly organise
prize draws, bucket games (where the participants have to flip a coin into a cup placed
at the bottom of a water-filled 20 gallon drum) and raffles while bands of young fahfee
runners collect the numbers their customers dreamt up at night on a daily basis.
Sometimes, these young men deliver scratch cards on their rounds as an additional
service. Local supermarkets, spaza shops and other businesses also frequently advertise
prize draws and try to attract new customers with large jackpots and attractive prizes.
Every local newspaper also offers their readers the opportunity to win money, cars,
4
vacations and consumer goods through their scratch cards and through expensive SMS
competitions.
The ubiquity of cellphones in the townships has expanded the reach of gambling
operators and placed gambling opportunities literally in the hands of anyone with a
cellphone. Thus almost every one of my interviewees had entered Vodacom’s
competition to win a BMW and continue to SMS their nine letters into the operator’s
weekly R1 million draw, at R2.50 per entry. They also spend considerable sums of
money on entering other SMS competitions like the Childrens’ Trust’s “Winikaya”
(R7.50 per entry) competition and on television game shows where the SMSes cost up
to R25 per entry. In the wake of these SMS competitions, a plethora of cellphone
advertising businesses have sprung up to offer customers the opportunity to play
simulated roulette, one-arm jack and scratch-card type games, often with offers of real
prize money (often ‘paid out’ as airtime credits). These cellphone games are however
not confined to cellphone operators and gaming businesses. ‘Respectable’ businesses
have also turned to raffles and lottery-type competitions in their bid to attract
customers. First National Bank, for instance, ran a SMS campaign which offered its
customers the opportunity to win a “million-a-month”5.
Anthropological research
Despite its pervasive nature and visibility, both historically (Campbell Archivesmissionaries, Shepstone, Bantu affairs dept) and in the present, very little
anthropological research exists on gambling in South Africa (and elsewhere, see
Malaby 2003). Where anthropologists have mentioned it in their ethnographies, their
references are often fleeting. In Mayer (1971:188)’s Townsmen or Tribesmen, he
mentions dice playing once and only with reference to the pastimes of gangs and
tsotsis. Pamela Reynolds (1989: 56, 57, 98, 168) mentions gambling as among the top
nine things that children amuse themselves with in Crossroads. She asserts that these
card and gambling games help children to classify and order the environment in the
face of the loss of traditional ways of doing so (Reynolds 1989: 86). Schapera (1969)
described gambling in the context of the disruptive influence of a money economy
among the Kgatla while countless others refer to gambling as a male pastime in
The National Lottery Board has taken the Children’s Trust, Vodacom and FNB to court for running
illegal lotteries. They were successful in shutting down Vodacom’s BMW and the FNB “million-amonth” competition but lost their appeal against the “Winikaya” competition (National Lottery Board
2008: 6).
5
5
shebeens, in migrant hostels and in places where black men congregate (e.g Niehaus;
Ramphele; Ross 1999:55). For the most part, the literature treats gambling as a deprived
leisure activity outside of the ‘real’ economic sphere to which marginalised people turn in the
face of the loss of more traditional, predictable economic pastimes. Overall, gambling is
depicted as a symptom of South Africa’s large-scale structural inequalities (even evidenced
among children) and of the ravages that its “racial capitalism” wrought on its victims. Apart
from this, gambling has largely been treated as something of little theoretical import.
Against this tradition, the Comaroffs (1997; 1999; 2000: 318-328) described
gambling as a cornerstone of what they’ve termed “millennial capitalism”; a new stage
in capitalism where an increased climate of risk is coupled with magical notions about
the production of value. As such, both the state (with its Lottery) and regular people
who risk enormous amount of money on gambling and economic pursuits with
uncertain outcomes, partake in an occult economy where they deploy “magical means
for material ends”. However, in this macro-economic perspective, the agency of
individual gamblers is subsumed in an overwhelming new economic logic while
gambling itself is transformed into both a symptom and driver of an economic system
(which Castro aptly described as “casino capitalism”).
This paucity of social research on gambling in South Africa has not gone
unnoticed amongst economists and a new breed of risk managers that have sprung up to
combat the assumed irresponsible gambling patterns and general erratic economic
behaviour of the poor. In an article in the Business Day, Professor Don Ross (2008)
derided the scanty social research on gambling; “Until very recently, social and
behavioural scientists didn’t know very much at all about problem gambling. They have
no idea what caused it… They didn’t even have reliable estimates, in any country, as to
what proportion of the general population of active gamblers, have gambling
problems”. Professor Ross, based at the School of Economics in Cape Town, heads the
National Centre for the Study of Gambling in South Africa (NCSG), which acts as the
National Responsible Gambling Programme’s research arm. The NRGP was created in
2000 as a public/private sector initiative and is exceptionally well funded (most casinos
in SA voluntarily pay them 0.01% of their takings). They are a powerful policy
advisory body to the National Gambling Board6 and have been instrumental in the
6
The National Gambling Board was established in 1996 in terms of the National Gambling Act, Act
No 33 of 1996 to oversee “matters relating to casinos, gambling, betting and wagering and [to promote]
uniform norms and standards in relation to gambling throughout South Africa”. This act was repealed
on 01 November 2004 by the National Gambling Act, 2004, (Act No 7 of 2004). The SA Advisory
6
introduction of new curriculum components in South Africa’s schools, most notably
units on the dangers of gambling and on the probabilities of winning. Apart from their
focus on traditional economic analyses and large-scale questionnaire-style research, the
group have also branched out to studies of cognition. Most recently, Prof Ross’ team
published a book called “Midbrain Mutiny: The Picoeconomics and Neuroeconomics
of Disordered Gambling” (2008) which traces gambling disorders to neuroscientific
bases.
Educating the irresponsible
In its emphases and scope, the NCSG/ NRGP shares many characteristics with Finmark
Trust7, an independent trust devoted to “make financial markets work for the poor in
Africa” through research and policy development (Finmark Trust 2008: 1-16). Both
organisations study their respective ‘problem’ areas from an economic and
psychological perspective, explaining (mainly) African people’s behaviour in terms of
excessive desires, pathology or ignorance (cf. interviews Oct 2008; Finmark Trust
conference report 2008; Finmark Trust 2008; Collins & Barr 2001; Collins 2003). Their
remedies for excessive gambling (in the case of NRGP) and an inability to access or
optimise participation in financial markets (Finmark Trust) are remarkably similar and
focus almost exclusively on “financial literacy” education.
Thus Finmark trust advises its many corporate clients to spend millions of
Rands on workshops and printed booklets to educate their presumably financially
illiterate clients. The resultant booklets have titles such as “Managing your money”
(ABSA), “The self-help guide for eezi financial planning for South Africans” (African
Bank), “The self-help approach to consumer problems whereby [sic] incorporated
personal budgeting and money management (Telkom, African Bank, Spar), “Bubomian activity booklet”8, all centred on teaching people how to budget their money. The
implicit assumption in all of these is that once the poor learned to budget, save and use
financial products, i.e. when they become “responsible consumers”, their lives would
dramatically change. Ignorance thus lies at the basis of poverty and debt spirals. In their
Council on Responsible Gambling (SAACREG), a national forum and policy advisory body created by
the National Gambling Board oversees the NRPG.
7
Funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID)
8
This interest in financial education was not spontaneous but has its roots in the Credit Act, which
forced financial institutions to spend 0.2% of their income after tax on educating their clientele.
7
2008 conference, South Africa’s “culture of immediate gratification” was also blamed
as a problem that had to be rectified- with more education.
Similarly, the NRGP has focused their energies on financial education projects
for high school learners, teachers, adult beneficiaries of social grants and pensioners. In
these projects, they “alert the public to the myths and facts about gambling activities of
all kinds”. Their training manuals and workshops encourage people to “wise up to
responsible gambling”, and encourage “Seniors [to] play smart”, and pupils to “Taking
Risks Wisely”. In these projects, the main starting point is that people gamble
"irresponsibly" because they are ignorant of their chances of winning and because they
don’t know how to budget their monthly income effectively, i.e. they don’t gamble with
their discretionary incomes.
Why economists are wrong about economics
Based on seven months of research in Cape Town and another eighteen months in
Durban, I contend that the NRGP and Finmark Trust had very flimsy grasps of the
‘economic’ lives and motivations of those they wanted to educate, assuming ignorance
and excessive (new) greed as prime economic movers. The work of both research
bodies and that of the Comaroffs fit into a general tendency in social science to view
chaotic disruptions and the vagaries of life as inherently troubling or anxiety-producing
(Malaby 2003: 8 see e.g. Beck 1986, 1992; Giddens 1991). This tendency has valorised
risk management and statistical reasoning as formalised solutions to the possibility of
the unexpected (Hacking 1990). As Malaby (2003: 8) noted for the Greek case, this
tendency coexists with a propensity to attribute a worldview of paralysing fatalism to
those who don’t use the concept of risk.
In my research application for this project, I suggested that for my Zuluspeaking informants at least, the concept of chance was unfamiliar. And instead of a
paralysing fatalism, I indicated that my informants were constantly trying to manipulate
the outcomes of the ‘chances’ they were taking. I hoped to study their gambling
behaviour as particular form of risk-taking, culturally inflected. I wrote,
My proposed research tries to understand the popularity and technologies of the
lottery in Durban not in terms of fatal mass ecstasies but in terms of Zulu
society’s distinctive conception of causation and risk. During my previous
research among Zulu-speaking women [in Maputaland and Born Again
churchgoers in Durban] I found that they conceived of risk in terms of personal
8
causation. These women believed that their economic success was influenced by
the degree to which they could harness a universal neutral power [ or God in the
case of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God] and effectively block the
workings of witches and jealous relatives [or demons]. Control of the spiritual
world was made manifest in the material world while risk was intimately tied to
power and morality. Fortune and misfortune were continuously manipulated
while the notion of “things just happening” was quite foreign.
And to a certain extent, these observations have been borne out in Cape Town’s
townships where people were similarly buying muthi to swing the dice, to win the
Lottery and to make them “lucky”. There were also many rumours about people who
used witchcraft to diminish other people’s luck or to steal their money/ winnings. Thus
one of my interviewees, an unemployed man in his mid-30s, once spent R750 on muthi
for the Lottery (and R5 on his ticket) while his friend, a gardener, spends R350 every
four weeks on ingwaro to strengthen his dice playing. Despite the general assertion that
there is no guarantee that such muthi would work (and no money-back policy), large
numbers of people avail themselves of the services of the iqhirgha for ‘luck’. In dice
and card games around Khayalitsha, players consequently carefully scrutinise their
competitors for evidence of muthi-use and many a game has ended in bloodshed due to
suspected or proven use of strong muthi. Dice-playing in particular is widely accepted
as the most dangerous game, with many a player stabbed or shot. My interviewees
often said that this was because one couldn’t trust dice players because the majority of
them were gangsters and tsotsis, even when they knew the players and could name their
(respectable) occupations.
In the course of the past seven months, it has become clear that I needed to
rethink my initial focus and assumptions as much of it was informed by Protestant,
Western notions of the self and of economic motivations. Contrary to the Comaroffs’
assertions9 that people in South Africa were suddenly subject to endless new
(neoliberal) desires, there is considerable historical evidence to the contrary. This
evidence shows that people’s desires for expensive consumer goods such as BMWs,
designer clothes and large mansions are not recent. Missionaries, traders and colonists
have long complained about the natives’ “vulgar” emphasis on material goods, their
9
And other authors using neoliberalism as a determining trope of economic action.
9
disproportionate greed and their tasteless displays of individual fortunes (Bryant
1966; Etherington 2002: 422-439; Guy 1983; Kotzé 1950; Simensen 1986: 82-100).
Referring to the historical records, I am not claiming some form of uncomplicated
continuation of indigenous economic motivations from precolonial to present times. I
also don’t claim that there is some essential avaricious African-ness that survived
colonialism, apartheid and neoliberalism intact or that people cannot escape the
dictates of their cultural materialism. My point is just that there is nothing new about
people wanting things that we essential assume are out of their economic reach. I
further assert that we have overlooked this rather mundane fact because our economic
analyses are still mired in what Sahlins (1996: 395-415) referred to as a Western,
“bourgeoisified”, Judeo-Christian cosmology and that this cosmology bedevils our
attempts to study economic behaviour cross-culturally (see also Parry & Bloch 1989).
According to Sahlins (1996), this cosmology is based on the pleasure-pain
principle of action, the idea that an irresistible and egotistical human nature underlies
social action, that society represents order and that human suffering has providential
value. Thus, current studies of economic behaviour in Southern Africa rely heavily on
explanations of how fallen and needy individuals, motivated by an overwhelming
need for modern things outside their reach, come together in cooperative organization
(cf. Sahlins 1996: 395-399; 415). Here I need only mention the work on development
and new Pentecostal churches (Van Dijk, Meyer). However, if we look at the Durban
and Cape Town cases, the search for material goods and health in these areas were not
driven by people’s new or modern rapacious greed for things forever beyond their
powers. The historical evidence puts paid to the notion that neoliberalism cultivated
and shaped a taste for modern consumer items.
Furthermore, the things in themselves were not the sole objective of my
interviewees’ gambling, their religious pragmatism in the case of prosperity gospel
churches or their ‘vulgar’ materialism. Rather, my interviewees in both locations were
convinced that their problems were symptomatic of a spiritual blockage in the flow of
power or blessings from God or the ancestors and that its manifestation as poverty,
illness or unhappiness was arbitrary (cf. Ashforth 2001: 218). People then measured
the effectiveness of any church or healer based on their ability to restore and maintain
the flow of blessings into a person’s life. Problems were merely manifestations of a
general condition of being “unlucky” or bewitched. Without these blockages my
interviewees asserted that they would be fabulously wealthy, healthy, attractive and
10
popular. As such, new consumer goods or health were not additional blessings to an
imagined ‘baseline’ life, but fundamentally part of its construction.
This sentiment of an intended life of abundance ruined by witchcraft and evil
spirits is also historically well recorded in Southern Africa (Bryant 1966; Ngubane
1977: 1-29; Crais) and differs significantly from the Western Judeo-Christian
emphasis on the Fall and man’s consequent deprivation (cf. Sahlins 1996: 395-399).
People were thus not motivated to join prosperity gospel churches, to consult “luck”
sangomas or gamble in order to amass things outside of their reach but to restore
them (cf. Ngubane 1977: 1-29). In this regard, many of my interviewees were
convinced that they could “win the Lottery without a ticket” (as one of my
interviewees asserted) if they could get rid of the witchcraft and other evil forces that
blocked their way.
But it is not just the motivations of their subjects that economic theories get
wrong- the western subject-centred discourse of the market also portrays the
unexplained gambling and excessive spending behaviours of people in terms of a
competition of individual desires and will, making desire the “constitutive feature of
modern subjectivity” (Margolis 2001 on depictions of Anglo-American alcoholics at
the turn of the 20th century). However, in the South African context, the possession
and witchcraft narratives of gamblers reveal the limits of desire and suggest the need
for a non-psychological and non-contractual way of thinking about the self. As such,
bewitched gamblers are often not defined by the depth of their desires but by their
permeability.
In this regard, many of my interviewees described “problem gamblers” (as
NRGP defined them) as victims of witchcraft or of the overwhelming powers of other
players who used strong muthi in their vicinity. My interviewees seldom concentrated
on the gambler’s obsessive behaviour or his wilful actions. Instead, they often used a
particular person’s disastrous gambling behaviour as a starting point for a long
explanation of witchcraft more broadly. Thus Eirie spoke about a local middle-aged
man who would refuse to leave the dice game, not even to eat or relieve himself, for
days on end. The poor man’s wife and children had to constantly carry food to the
spot where the men played while his little son had to empty the glass bottles he
urinated in. Apart from this hardship, the family was also plagued by unexplained
illnesses and deaths while the man’s once-successful shisa-nyama business was
virtually bankrupt within a week “for no reason”. Some township residents also saw
11
strange lights outside the accursed family’s shack. The man’s gambling then was
caused by the same witchcraft that destroyed the rest of his family and, Eirie mused,
would probably consume the poor man totally.
Being in the vicinity of someone who used strong muthi was equally
dangerous. The dice players I spoke to often admitted that they would only join a
game once they convinced themselves that their potential fellow players were not
using muthi, even if they were using it themselves. They were especially careful of
men who touched their pockets or who shouted too loudly- certain evidence that the
suspected player was activating the ingwaro muthi by spitting it out of their mouths.
The problem, many of my interviewees complained, was that people who used strong
muthi were also invincible and undetectable. Thus it was often only once you were
“caught” in a game that you realised that a player had unusually “strong dice”. There
are many stories of people zombified by such games, driven to bankruptcy and unable
to move until the witch sated his appetite. A few of my interviewees were lucky
enough to escape such situations and described the strong pull they felt at the time and
the superhuman strength it required to break free. Two of them never played dice
again.
Apart from the potential to lose all their money, these players also declared
that those with strong dice were notorious for attracting bad spirits. In quite a few
games, these spirits caused people to stab others in fits of unexplainable rage. Victims
of such stabbings, my interviewees insisted, always died, no matter where they were
stabbed or with what force. ‘Spirit-stabbings’ then could be differentiated from
regular stabbings not only by their fatality rates but also by the increased incidence of
evil spirits chasing people in the vicinity of the fatal stabbing after the incident. Eirie
was present at one dice game where a man died and insisted that it was a spirit
stabbing because the dice was very erratic and often fell in such a way that no one
could decide which of its sides were facing up.
Some of my interviewees, especially the ones that went to prosperity gospel
churches such as the UCKG and the Assemblies of God, also described how people
infected by demons were forced to gamble their money away. My friends explained
that the demon “took over” its host’s body in such moments and that the host was
therefore often unaware of its presence. Of my interviewees who had gone through
this experience and who had been exorcised, almost all remarked that they couldn’t
remember anything about the time when the demons presumably resided in them.
12
From the nexus of a body, the demons were then said to not only block the flow of
God’s blessings into the unfortunate person’s life but also to actively force them into
destructive behaviour.
It is in the context of my interviewees’ permeable bodies that the weaknesses
of the economic theories that inform the NRPG’s rehabilitation programmes and
causative explanations are highlighted. In an interview with one of the NRPG
researchers, he referred to indigenous explanations of excessive gambling (and my
research more generally) as a form of mysticism. He further asserted that the NRPG
was not into the business of “belief” and that they preferred to find more rational
explanations for problem gambling. He was especially excited about the “cuttingedge” cognitive studies Prof Ross was doing. In this regard, Ross (2008) predicted
that his research will one day lead to the development of a “pill for problem
gamblers”. In the meantime, problem gamblers in South Africa proved to be very
resistant to current therapies- more so (said Prof Ross) than drug addicts. Problem
gambling was thus reduced to a psychological disease of inappropriate economic
impulse control.
About risk
At the heart of Finmark Trust’s budgeting exercises, the government’s alarm over
poor people’s irresponsible spending and the NRPG’s definition and treatment of
problem gamblers is a very peculiar conception of risk. Finmark Trust’s budgeting
tools assume that with the careful, predictable and measured allocation of a set
income, an individual can not only be isolated from risk but can also extend that
protection into the future through savings. Similarly, the NRPG and the government
measure problem gamblers in terms of the ways in which people misallocate a stable
income by using money that should rightly have gone to predictable expenses. In
these conceptions, there is the assumption of a rational subject that decides to engage
with risk in highly contained situations. Such considerations however don’t take into
account that life is indeterminate and unpredictable, and that these indeterminacies
pervade all aspects of life (cf. Malaby 2003). Such considerations also doesn’t allow
for the infiltration of social indeterminacies into strictly economic ones.
In practice, or more concretely in fieldwork, the abstractions of economics
proper raise interesting methodological and analytical issues. Most of my
interviewees did not have a predictable income while their expenses were similarly
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flexible. I took the budgeting exercise booklets that I collected at Finmark Trust’s
conference to a few of my interviewees. All of them were perplexed (and some of
them very amused) by the supposed fixed expenses that these booklets listed. The
booklets uniformly listed rent, food, electricity, water and transport as fixed expenses.
The pointlessness of these budgeting booklets for people living in the
townships was quickly evident. For instance, an old man I interviewed worried that he
wouldn’t know what to fill in on the budgeting page as he got his house from the
government for free and has illegal connections to a nearby electricity pylon. He
didn’t pay for water and only used public transport when he went into town. These
trips were seldom planned and often entailed visits to insurance brokers, lawyers and
funeral houses in the wake of deaths in his family. These deaths were naturally
seldom predictable. He couldn’t even guess at the amount of money he needed for
food per month as fights in his family often meant that he had to take in and feed
varying numbers of his daughters and their children. Some of them brought food and
left sacks of “Sasko Sam and Iwisa” while others just “brought their stomachs”.
He had a similarly hard time deciding on his monthly income. Although the
old man received a pension, he insisted that he didn’t always get the same money
from the post office because the security guard, who ushered people past those
waiting in the queue to the clerk, constantly changed his mind about the amount he
would charge for his ‘services’. The old man knew that he was paying a bribe but
insisted that if he didn’t, he would be at the post office for days on end because
“nowadays everyone here has pensions”. In this regard, he reckoned the bribe as part
of the income because, as he reasoned, without it, he would not get anything – he
feared that the post office would run out of money by the end of the queue (something
that apparently happened often in the past). He was also not sure that his pension
would be paid out and was hesitant to write it down as a fixed income. Four months
previously, the clerk at the post office informed him that there was no pension for
him. The young man couldn’t tell him why his pension was stopped but suggested
that he go to the police station. There, the old man found out that he was officially
dead. He suspected that someone in Home Affairs sold his passport to a Somalian
kwere-kwere because he was an “old man and those people wanted money”. In any
case, his pension was restored after two months of wrangles with the police, Home
Affairs and the post office.
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During that time, the man relied on the goodwill of his neighbours, the
kindness of a white woman in town in whose garden he worked in when he was
younger and on a loan from a local mashonisa from whom he often borrowed money.
“Luckily she understood about the ID10” and lent him the money anyway. She
explained that she had a good feeling about the old man’s chances of being declared
alive again- and that once he received his pension again, he would pay her back. In
these circumstances, the old man didn’t begrudge her the slightly higher interest she
charged him and considered himself “lucky”. The loan’s interest alone stood at 150%
of the original amount borrowed after the two month wait for the Home Affairs office.
Like his pension, the old man didn’t want to include his income from the
stokvel because he didn’t trust that its two new members would pay their dues and
suspected that the stokvel might collapse. As further evidence of this imminent
collapse, he mentioned that they had a huge fall-out recently when some of the funds
went missing. It turned out that the bank fees were “eating that money” and that no
one was to blame.
No amount of budgeting could have helped the old man hedge against the
social and economic indeterminacies that plagued his life. In a context of high
unemployment, corruption and extended family obligations, theories on economic
behaviour’s strangely abstract separation of economic and social issues and their
insistence on stability was thus not only informed by Western Christian traditions but
also had little bearing on the behaviour they tried to predict and control.
An emphasis on risk then perpetuates rational choice theories and reproduces
the problems inherent in the western tradition. So the first shift in my research then
would be away from an analysis of the risks that my interviewees take to the
indeterminacies that they engage with on a daily basis. As such, my research on
gambling will not only look at the material and social stakes in the ‘formalised’
context of gambling, but also at the broader exigencies of their experience. This
would give me a better understanding of what is at stake for social actors on a shifting
ground and how they engage and account for unpredictabilities. An emphasis on
unpredictability more broadly would also steer my analysis away from a troubling
instrumentality (which plagues the Comaroffs’ work on occult technologies). As such,
my initial research proposal suggested that gamblers who used muthi and other means
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Mashonisas insist on keeping the ID books of their customers as collateral even after the practice was
outlawed.
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to strengthen their luck might consider their gambling “not a leisure pursuit” but as “a
legitimate economic activity”, on par with other formal economic activities. I.e. that
once they controlled (or felt they controlled) the risk inherent in gambling, the Lottery
for instance would become as risk-free as other economic pursuits. However, if one
takes the case of the old man seriously, one would have to accept that all economic
activities were highly unpredictable.
An emphasis on unpredictability more broadly would also give new meaning
to the countless stories that circulated in the townships of both Durban and Cape
Town about the Lottery and its pay-outs. In this regard, I have come across countless
people who insisted that the Lottery was ‘rigged’ and that its wealthy owners tried to
make as few people as possible win so that they could keep the money. My
interviewees insisted that it was unnatural for only one or two people to win the
jackpot when millions bought tickets for every draw. (evidence of local notions of
probabilities). The lottery owners were said to manage this by checking all the
numbers that people chose for that draw on the computer in the minute between the
closing of ticket machine sales and when the live draw starts on television. If one
takes into account the unpredictability of life for those who told these stories, the
rumours become largely divested of their symbolic and referential content as they
relate to the experience of daily life. Thus township residents are used to rich
politicians and their cronies diverting township development money to their own
pockets, to BEE’s who refuse to share their riches with their families and to
computers containing personal information that are used to defraud them (like the old
man’s pension story and his wrangles with life insurance companies that refuse to pay
out). The Lottery rumours are thus not symbols of but likely tales about the workings
of capital. A move away from the symbolic interpretation of black South Africans’
supposedly erroneous economic theories, which basically assumes naïve ignorance
would also pave the way to an understanding of the deeply cynical and ironic
conversational styles that they adopt towards the working of the rich.
On celebrating our salaries
My final point relates to something which I feel none of our theories even touch onand that is the deep joy, thrill and sense of complete freedom that many of my
interviewees experienced when they gambled (and lost) or recklessly spent their last
money (which is quite often given that few of them received a fixed salary). In this
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regard, psychologists often refer to problem gambling as an “escape” activity. They
then explain addictive gambling in terms of the attractions that an escape from daily
life’s predictability held. Gambling in the wider literature is also often singled out as a
thrill-seeking activity. Again, the assumption of stable incomes and risk-averse
decision-makers loom large in such depictions.
But what do we make theoretically of the behaviour of a large portion of my
interviewees who, in the parlance of one young woman, were “celebrating their
salaries”? She was referring to friends of hers who, upon being paid for their
participation in the elections by the IEC, spent everything in one night. None of them
felt remorse for their ‘irresponsible’ behaviour (headaches apart) while their families
did not reprove them for the “celebrations”. Granted, the election officers who took
their windfalls home were popular with their dependants. But what I want to get at
here is a widespread matter-of-fact acceptance that people sometimes celebrated
financial windfalls by blowing it all immediately.
How would one translate that into the dry, Protestant, predictable and rational
language of economics? Do we need a new language to talk about the sensual aspects
of money? I don’t know the answer to these questions yet but suspect that they might
give me a better theoretical handle on the analysis of people’s gambling and their
engagement with uncertainty- perhaps free from the straightjacket of economic
theory’s moral opprobrium.
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