2nd Workshop on Popular Economies in South Africa
LSE, 24th-25th May 2010
WORKSHOP SESSION 2
“Money-go-round: personal economies of wealth, aspiration and indebtedness”
Author:
Deborah James
Discussant: Catherine Alexander
Catherine Alexander:
I am going to take the different themes that run through it. One is the different ideas of morality, and
whether kin, or neighbourhood groups behind the individual, are there or not there.
The first thing that caught my eye was your point that statistics have changed from being a tool of the
state to control the population or to rule the population. The other thing I was wondering about is if
there are assessments of credit worthiness and how people actually do that, which suggests a different
take on what counts as a good debt and a good debtor.
I suppose a good debtor from the point of view of the lender isn’t somebody who pays off the debt, but
somebody who has a long-term debt and pays interest regularly to yield a steady income stream in the
long-term.
I am thinking, in relation to citizenship and the active citizen, if one could think of the responsible
citizen as a responsible debtor citizen.
Moving on to thinking about time. There is a long term relationship between lender and borrower. But
there are other matters where time becomes important, like with the big life-cycle events. Are big
public outlays demanded? Where time, morality and kin come together is here. If you are letting the
side down by not putting on a good show then you will bust a gut to make sure that you do everything
possible. In Central Asia it is almost impossible to get married without a big ceremony, young men
work and work to earn enough money. Even if they are utterly impoverished afterwards and start
married life with no money, this is considered worth it. And likewise with funerals. Would it be
interesting to think about life lived on credit, sacrificing the present for the future, so that one’s
children can have a better chance? There is that idea of time too. If on the other hand you start
borrowing to gratify present needs and consumer essentials, then you get locked into a long-term debt
economy in a different way.
Different forms of time as well. We have the long term vs the short term. Even the word farsightedness. Seasonality – are there fluctuations in income? This might be truer in the case of rural
dwellers. But there might also be other fluctuations, with people buying things, then redeeming them
for money at places like Cash Converters. There is an interesting way of looking at household
economies: on the one hand spending money on high-cost items like hifi’s might be seen as profligate,
but it might serve as an investment in the longer term if you cash it in at Cash Converters. That is a sort
of ‘saving while spending’ approach – and gives a different take on what people are buying. In Turkey,
people bought gold for specifically this reason.
The sorts of expenditures that people are incurring debt because of seem to be to do with long term
social reproduction.
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Thinking about words you use: sensible, prudent as opposed to profligacy, etc. Are these consistent, or
are the same kinds of behaviour viewed in conflicting ways at different times? The theme .. people
would spend large amounts of money on clothes, which both enabled them to look right but also might
help them in getting a job.
The morality here, in terms of good debt and bad debt, seems to be linked to what was being bought,
whether it was for a child or somebody else, and the length of time over which the cost was being
repaid.
The last thing relates to community and individuals. You mentioned the loneliness of being
stigmatized. What is going on behind this? You talk about the vigilantes trying to prevent houses being
repossessed or sold. How do patterns of debt and borrowing fit in with patterns of sharing within or
between households? Would you go to a family member first, or would you definitely not? Do relatives
provide collateral? Do people try to play the system by getting their sisters, etc. to pay? Are family
assets combined or distinguished? On p 9 there is someone going back to the family when they are in
trouble – is this common? Family, vigilante, etc – surely these depend on whether one is thinking of
individuals or households, or borrowing networks. Looking at the intersections of these domains could
be worthwhile.
DJ:
I guess some of the things you are asking about relating to longer term strategies and households and
the interconnections are things I have been finding it difficult to establish. Part of the reason for that is
because I have been investigating in two different settings, an urban one and a rural one. In the urban
setting I have been partly trying to get to local level issues of how families get into debt and don’t get
into debt, but also trying to explore narratives that I heard from debt counselors who will tell you very
particular kinds of stories. So a lot of the evidence I got is anecdotal rather than being the intensive
long-term perspective that you get from classic fieldwork - I might not be able to answer all the
questions that you are asking.
The point about assessing credit worthiness, what is good credit and do banks assess credit worthiness,
etc. The story seems to be that at a certain point the banks weren’t bothering to do that at all. They were
throwing credit at anyone who could pick it up. This seems to have been a relatively short period, a
moment between when the banks started doing this - although they didn’t target the poor people living
in the sticks - and when the regulator tried to crack down on credit with the National Credit Act. This is
a typically South African phenomenon – ‘things are going wrong, let’s make a law to fix this’, South
Africa has been like that for the past 200 years – they place a huge amount of trust in law to sort things
out which other remedies cannot fix. And of course the moment that happens it generates other knockon effects that nobody saw. The point I make in the paper is that one of the things that did was to
generate further opportunities for income accrual across the board, and usually by foul means.
But with the recession, suddenly nobody could get credit, so there has definitely been a dip which I
don’t talk about in the paper. Between my last visit last Easter and the one this Easter, I found things
had changed.
On the question of ‘good debt’ – I think there is a definite sense of middle-class values that do come in
here, things like ‘if you can get a house, this would be the right thing to invest in’, but then it gets beset
by all these problems which I mention in the paper, to the extent that people wanting to invest in a
house, nonetheless depend for their income on other people selling their houses. The fact that there are
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certain kinds of properties that are then ring-fenced effectively, makes it very problematic to get a
steady flow of income into one’s account which one would then use to incur one of those good debts.
Because everyone is depending on everybody else in this narrowly defined circuitry of income.
And that to some degree has to do with the apartheid era. It’s got to do with the fact of state provision
of housing. These houses in the national mind turned into something which should belong to families
and should never be alienated from them. It’s similar to ideas about rural land - it is ‘our entitlement
and we should get it back’. And that creates a sticking point, preventing the kinds of flows of income
that people might be requiring in order to go into a good debt, and get themselves stable.
Because unless you have an income from the state, or income from industry (but those are increasingly
less available), you have to rely on all these other kinds of scams as a means of making a living, in
order to make that aspirational connection into becoming a member of the proper so-called middle
class who can then invest in those kinds of things.
The idea about the responsible debt of citizens would be an interesting one to pursue. So far I haven’t
come across ideas about that, but I have come across a lot of people talking about ‘investment’, and it’s
come up in a few other papers in this workshop. For example, one woman who is a state employee and
has quite a high-up job, saying ‘my mother had no idea what investment was and I do’, whereas she
really makes financial-style investments. So alternative visions about investment that might have
existed in a previous period are somewhat put aside by people in this aspirational upwardly-mobile
situation. She is adhereing to the formal idea of what investment ought to be.
The thing about the big public outlays: yes, that is very important. What I heard from people in a rural
setting – middle-class, teachers, civil servants – was a very normative vision, that getting married is a
very important thing. Not only laying on a wedding but also paying bride wealth. You should never
borrow from the bank or anyone else in order to do this, because the very process of getting married
involves being indebted to the wife-giver, and the proper thing to do this is spend your whole lifetime
paying them off - you should not just pay a big sum of money to your in-laws. However that kind of
normative vision, I found to be transgressed everywhere I looked. I came across a very poor guy who
was in debt counseling. As the debt counselor pointed out, this is the kind of guy that should never be
in debt counseling because he should never have been extended any credit at all.
But he had been given a loan by African Bank and another loan by someone else, and an informal loan
here and there. And he had borrowed money to pay bride price. And he was involved in a savings club
in order to generate enough income to have a wedding (because those are two separate things).
There are radio shows in which people say ‘we really need to become more modern and stop paying
bride price’ because the moment you get married, you and your wife together are thousands of rand in
debt, so you start your life out with vast debt. Not too different from couples in England right now.
The question about insurance being used for life-cycle events: yes, certainly for funerals there are a
whole variety of different forms. You will find people who have a proper insurance policy plus they
belong to five different burial societies – one to help bury their wife’s people, one to help their people,
one because the neighborhood expects it and another one to bring groceries for funerals. There is an
amazing proliferation of these informal savings clubs that go alongside these bigger more formal
insurance policies. How best to think of these in terms of informal and formal?
The point about buying stuff so that you can then pawn it, is a very interesting one. I haven’t managed
to find out much about that but I know that there are a lot of Cash Converter shops everywhere you
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look. It may well be a specific thing people do in order to invest later on or in order to save, however
the problem is most of the things people tend to buy aren’t just cash purchases, or certainly the people
who are in trouble that I talk about in the paper, will usually already be in debt in order to buy one of
those items. So simply going to the Cash Converter is not going to solve your problem.
The point you made about time and morality being interlinked is all very useful and interesting to
consider. The point about the profligacy narrative versus the prudent sage wise person –they seem to go
together: you can’t say ‘there’s a profligate family, there’s a sage family’. People will talk about
profligacy, but if you look at their own finances they will be profligate in some areas and prudent in
others. I am writing against this survey culture which you get in South Africa: people do market
research producing surveys year after year, Finmark Trust is a good example. They will say ‘this is
what it looks like through the nation, in each of the 9 provinces’. They do telephonic interviews to get
this kind of data, so it is hard to know how accurate it is. There you get the sense that you got the
prudent people and the others, but in fact often people are doing both. There isn’t a dichotomy.
One final point about family members, what I gathered there is that it’s generally regarded as a bad
idea to go to a family member or a friend, and the reason for that is that it will spoil the relationship.
This is why often you will be forced to go and borrow money from somebody who is not in a close
relationship with you. However that generates further problems, because then you end up indebted to
the money lender but at least you haven’t besmirched your own circle of kin or friendships by
borrowing.
MB:
What I found interesting is what you raise about what it means to invest for the long-term. There’s a
very expansive and broad definition - especially on page 8 where you talk about what it means to be
rapidly upwardly mobile. There seems to be a distinction being made between what counts as
investment and what counts as consumption. As far as another blurring goes - towards the end when
you talk about stokvels, where you have to incrementally put in more or if you borrow from the stokvel
and have to pay interest, is there any analytical mileage in drawing on the ‘incremental gift’ literature,
where you have to top the last input? Finally you talk about the strategies concerned with ‘reckless
lending’. There’s a kind of moral tone to the debate that suggests that there’s something odd about
telling consumers to stop rather than providers. What I’m suggesting is that its exactly the opposite
moral valence to what you get from the literature on material consumption, where the suggestion is that
supply should be the thing to be stopped rather than demand.
DJ:
I’m saying the same thing. I’m saying its seems interesting that the only response is for everybody to
say ‘reign in and stop buying things with money you don’t have’.
MB:
In the literature on undocumented migrants, and on consumption, the moral valence is to say that the
demand has to stop. For example, an undocumented Mexican labourer in the States says ‘how can you
expect the supply at the border to be punished rather than the farmers’ demand? The only way this is
going to be dealt with fairly is to attack the demand, i.e. the farmers’. Similarly, how can you expect
changes in consumption of particular kinds of ethical food to change by passing laws on how it is
produced, it has to be about the people who prepared to buy. What’s interesting about your example is
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you are suggesting the opposite moral valence: that there is something wrong with attacking the
demand rather than the supply.
FMcN:
I was in Pretoria a couple of months ago, and I picked up a leaflet from the street, from a guy called Dr
Zondi, and one of the expert things Dr Zondi could cure was debt, and it was framed very much in
terms of a sickness or an illness. It’s quite easy to dismiss these things but I found it important and a lot
of people think about debt in terms of energy flows and sickness caused by certain things and therefore
healed by certain things as well. Debt is very much like the ancestors – you can’t see it but it
profoundly impacts on your daily life. So you mentioned you did speak to traditional healers about
debt and they said ‘it’s inborn’ which is quite convenient for them because they can introduce various
charms to protect against it or to heal it. So I wondered why you passed over that very quickly – is it
not that important in the way people deal with and think about debt?
KH:
I think this is a great opportunity to go back to your ancestors in this establishment, and revive the
argument about money and the morality of exchange. They are warming over Durkheim’s Elementary
Forms, saying that you have the everyday, and the unknown and the extraordinary, which in the end,
Durkheim says, is the reproduction of society. And we have to convert ordinary monetized exchange
into something that looks to the long-term.
What I always thought was interesting about this, and to some extent attacked, is that they are dealing
with small-scale societies in which money does not mark social relations as it does in capitalist
societies. In other words, capitalist societies have developed a very strong opposition between relations
marked by money payment and relations that are not. Under those circumstances it becomes a lot more
difficult to see how money might be laundered as it were for long-term purposes.
I was thinking also of this notion of prudence and inprudentia. There is a strong distinction in Greek
between a kind of narrow rationality, instrumental rationality Weber called it, and the long-term, the
big stuff, that has the kind of rationality that goes beyond what individuals can think of as being in their
interest. But it somehow has to be connected which I think is related to magic, and so on. The point
about prudentia is that it was a negative – see Oscar Wilde ‘someone who knows the price of
everything and the value of nothing’, and then prudence in the bourgeoisie revolution kind of took on
this educational and positive sense. What I’m suggesting here is that I would like to see – it’s clear that
there probably has been, at least in the short run, a shift towards prudentia in that sense, or instrumental
rationality, investment conceived of as making money, as opposed to investment as making sure that
the things that secure life in the long-term are being fed by the money circuiting in some way.
DJ:
That is true, and that is something that I do want to bring in. But I think it’s a very real force telling
people to think like this. I wouldn’t say its only the market research, advertising type surveys, although
I do think there is a definite ‘feedback loop’ there. I owe a lot to Detlev who did a paper about the
‘black diamonds’ earlier on, about the ambivalence people feel about being categorized in this way, at
the same time buying into it and replicating these forms of behaviour. I find quite a lot of people - and
that’s why I said at the beginning ‘there is no such thing as a common man’ - who did not fit into the
categories at all, and did not think that being flashy or going into status displays was important.
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Indeed you could even think of these people as post-bourgeois, because some of them have left behind
all that stuff and are moving onto an ideology I had when I was 20, when you say ‘damn these status
markers’ and want to walk around in tatty jeans instead. People in that kind of position felt quite
pressurized and in many cases, especially two which I didn’t have time to talk about in detail, were
thinking that the only way out of this was to avoid marriage altogether, because they were going to get
hugely into debt, and they were going to be subjected to these pressures: particular kinds of social
pressures which were not in fact very positive ones. It didn’t have that nice feeling that you were part
of some warm family relationships. On the contrary, you were going to be screwed by your in-laws into
spending money you don’t have. So I feel that there is a strong sense in which certain people have been
pressured by that, and probably the only way out of it is to disconnect, and to some degree disconnect
from social relationships that you got pressured by.
IvW:
Are people moving their debts around? I have come across a few people who have long-term lending
and borrowing, and every now and again they would move their debt to someone else, to just quickly
pay off. There was this one guy called Mohamed, he would charge very high interest – and sometimes
people would say they want to take a break and borrow from someone else to pay Mohamed. So they
take a break from Mohamed and they go back after a year or so. Have you come across people looking
for more beneficial rates?
DJ:
I haven’t come across that particularly, but it does seem a very difficult calculus: if the interest rates are
so high, how would you even manage to take a break from Mohamed? To pay him off before you went
to another one, or kind of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul?
IvW:
Yes. People said they were tired of Mohamed. He is a huge burden in their lives. And yet they go to
someone else and have the same relationship – but they do want a break. Mohamed doesn’t mind,
because he ends up getting his money either way.
DJ:
Is he one of these people who charge 50%?
IvW:
Yes, or even more. Depending on how poor you are. He is a burden on their lives. And they can’t go
past his house without being pressured to pay.
DN:
On the subject of interest rates, Darryl Collins did work on Financial Diaries in South Africa – that
particular text does comparative work with Nigeria and Bangladesh, and interest rates that looked very
high on paper are often - accommodations are struck, and deals are cut, and you might pay back
slightly less than the going interest rate.
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KH:
It’s much more systematic than that. The interest rate is a function of the default rate. When people
talk about usurious interest rates in slums around the world… when I worked in England in the 60s
people were charging 50% a month. [DJ: That is the going rate among big South African lenders too]
But the fact is that the percentage of payment was minimal.
DN:
She also makes a point in the text that we work these things out per month or per annum. The interest
rates are annualized, but in fact the periods for which money is borrowed is quite short – two or three
weeks – so a three-week loan if you annualize that, that looks like a very high interest rate for 12
months. But she suggested that it’s far more complex, and our metrics often don’t capture how the
interest is used.
KH:
This is one of my favorite points: in many cases what the creditor wants is to have a large number of
people owing him a debt that he can then call on for services.
DJ:
In the particular case of the guys who take your ATM cards it’s actually been in a sense financialised –
it is like another garnishee order. If a borrower takes your ATM card and your ID card, they don’t
really run any risk and they only do this with people who are getting a regular state salary, so they are
not having to negotiate interest rates and they are not having to call in services instead of payment.
They simply go at the end of the month and they draw out the money that they are owed, and at that
point you have to borrow some more because you don’t have enough money in your account to get you
through to the end of the next month. And interestingly that seems to obviate some of the arguments
which say there is a very low repayment rate. Certain money lenders make quite sure about repayment
rates, and these are the big money lenders, I know there are some small-scale ones, but the big ones do
in fact just secure their loan by taking your ATM card.
KH:
There is a movie called “In Debt We Trust”. Have you seen that?
DJ:
Yes - we were at the same workshop together when they played that movie. There is that guy, that
specialist American who talks about how people got so indebted.
……………………………………………..
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Becoming middle class in Durban: kinship, mobility and consumption - (no paper circulated)
Author:
Sophie Chevalier
Discussant: Deborah James
Sophie Chevalier
I will present some material here from ongoing research. I started the project in 2008, and it was far
from full-time, so I didn’t spend so much time as you did in the field.
The financial contacts was the French Institute of South Africa. I was contacted by Renault, the car
company. They left South Africa during the apartheid period and now they wanted to come back into
the market and they don’t know what’s happening or which cars to sell, so they were looking for a
French person who was working on the African middle-class.
That was the point of departure of my research. I had to do it quickly because they paid me for one
year. I was starting to do fieldwork in a country I hardly know nothing except that I was familiar with a
lot of topics I was working on: material culture, consumption, circulation of foods, and kinship.
My strength was to bring comparative perspective to this project, but not knowledge of the country or
the people. I had to go to African households and my interviews were quite successful because I
managed to go into people’s homes. I also did interviews with marketers to see how marketers view
South African society – especially to this ‘new African middle class’. I did my research and interviews
in Durban. I also did interviews in shopping centers in order to know more about consumption and
what people buy, where they buy and what sort of commodities.
So I started to develop some contacts with householders and did interviews with people moving from
townships to the new areas in Durban. And especially in Pinetown, I met a network of people who
knew each other from Umlazi, so I was introduced first to Sipho and he introduced me to his friends. It
was quite interesting to see these people who put their resources together, like immigrants in a new
country, except they were clear that they were exercising their rights to be in this area, but said that
they did not know quite how to get on there. So they helped each other. I was introduced into this kind
of setting.
I will outline the findings of my research. My first step was to try to pin down some definition of
African middle class through media discourses and interviews with marketers. What struck me with
marketers is how poor the categories are, because beyond some income measures or racial categories,
they cannot describe differences in society, or regional differences. I would imagine that South Africa
is a big country so if you are trying to sell goods there are big contrasts, and that there would be some
regional differences recognized by those who try to sell cars or clothes and so on. But they could not
answer – there is no regional difference. There is only Black, White, or middle-class and poor. There
are no sophisticated categories like you find among other marketers of capitalist society.
When I was reading articles in the newspaper it seemed to me there were two elements constitutive of
this social class: spatial mobility and consumption practices. I was struck by the fact that consumption
was so important to define this group.
And even - because marketers created a new term which is Black Diamonds - a bit for me like a new
social urban type. For me this Black Diamond and all the data around this term show the difficulties in
articulating race and class in South Africa. Because people use the term, but they don’t feel
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comfortable, and people don’t want to be called ‘Black Diamonds’, they want to be called not even
‘middle-class’, they want to be called ‘professional class’ to reflect their professional activities. So
there was a lot of discussion in the media and also with my informants about this kind of term. And
also, this focus on consumption, and also the social economic situation, which were particular to South
Africa, strike me as similar to what happened in Europe and America in late 19th and early 20th century
with the birth of mass consumption and also its extension through the lower middle class.
And I was thinking how to describe consumption practices to this African middle class, how it fits
Veblen’s description in 1899 of the nouveau riche in America, and it was also associated with political
alienation. And you find that again and again in the discourse, that people are so focusing on
consumption, they don’t think anymore about political activity or that there are poor people in the
country, and so on.
And also, as mentioned in Deborah’s paper, I noticed a strongly pedagogical approach to consumer
education, a focus on ‘how to manage your budget’ in magazines and TV programmes and so on, and
that was also very well described for America and for Europe by Strasser et al, and Henize
(Refs: S. Strasser, C. MCGovern and M. Judt (ed.) 1999, Getting and Spending : European and
American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, CUP.
A. R. Heinze, 1992, Adapting the Abundance. Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption and the Search
for American Identity, NY, Columbia University Press).
So again you have the impression of the same entry into mass consumption society and there’s the
same element - the pedagogical approach.
When I was speaking to my informants, about their consumer practices, where they are buying, and so
on, somebody told me - and I think it’s really true - that ‘we are not self confident consumers’. Because
the marketers will say ‘they are only going for very flashy trademarks’, and people say ‘Yes, we
choose brands we are familiar with. Because this is what we always see around us – and we need to
start somehow.’ The people I interviewed were over 40-45. So I was discussing that with Renault
research, because Renault want to use the fact that they left the country during the apartheid period like
an ad, and I said ‘OK, forget it, people don’t care about that.’ People said ‘yes, we should care about
that. But in fact we don’t’.
I was also interested in how people built their previous interiors and home décor. I was struck by the
prevalence given to technical objects, i.e. dishwashers which are often very sophisticated and
expensive, by contrast with the interiors which, for me, lack investment if I compare them with what I
see not only in Europe but also White people in South Africa. So it raised the question of the aesthetics
of everyday life (de Certeau), I was interested in how people exercise their identity through material
consumption. There is this link to a society of mass consumption - and alienation, like the way the
middle class was described by sociologists like Bourdieu as an alienated class because they just focus
on mass commodities and mass consumption.
My African informant, I was very surprised when I visited his house, and at the same time I was
interested in some discourse which questions the authenticity of the African-ness of this social group,
because of the way they approach material consumption. Even in the foreign press. I read, in a French
newspaper, something really weird in my opinion, by some guy a so-called “leftie” – he interviewed a
guy who was living in South Africa, and he said ‘will the country ever become African? Blacks drive
Mercedes, and walk into the offices of international consultants. This is a White lifestyle’ - so in
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French newspapers there is really a question of whether these people are African or not. Of course it’s
also expressed by these insulting terms like “coconuts” and so on.
And the idea is that mobility must mean exchanging Black for White values. So this is an interesting
question around consumption in middle class.
If I consider this African middle class’ access to mass consumption in a comparative historical
perspective, it’s obvious that the consumer behaviour of the new middle class, is a way of asserting
national and local identities through consumption.
So I think this African middle class, by its consumption practices, tries to insert itself into the national
society, and also more globally - because they attach a lot of importance to consuming foreign
products. And they really know very well where it comes from that they can say this kind of car, this
kind of object is produced in such and such a country, and this expresses certain values.
I recently read a book of an historian, about Jewish immigrants in the US at the end of the 19th century;
he made the point that they became active consumers in order to be integrated quickly into American
society. The way to be integrated in a capitalist society, that’s why consumption is so important, is to
participate very actively in these consumption practices. And I think it’s one of the elements of this
African middle class. Also I think it’s linked to visibility – which we discussed earlier in relation to
formal banking. You become visible in society because you are able to have such and such an object, to
drive such and such a car.
The other aspect of the research was the idea of sharing the same space of consumption, so I tried to do
some observation and interviews in malls and shopping centres, where of course people didn’t go
before but have newly started to go.
And I was also interested to know where people go to do their shopping, and I discovered quickly that
they carry on going to the townships for specific goods, especially for meat, and for hairdressers.
Somehow they have much more complex shopping practices than White people, because they don’t
only go to the mall or shopping centre, they also maintain links to the township. They also go to the
township to visit their kin, and to give them food or money. I found it interesting that they focus on
going to the township for meat, it echoed some research I did on French people who are also very
particular about where they buy their meat – they would go right across town to buy their meat. It was
the same with my Zulu informants.
And I did an interview with people who were running the shopping centre, and shopkeepers, to see how
these malls and shopping centre try to accommodate these new clients. Both in terms of shops and also
what they sell; whether some commodities would attract some kind of shoppers others not, and whether
certain values were important for White shoppers and not that important for African shoppers. For me
it would be important to observe and interview in the shared public spaces with people who go to these
places. For example, when I was doing observation at the Musgrave shopping centre, I observed that all
kinds of people are going to this shopping centre, but they don’t share the same space at the same
moment because they don’t go at the same moment. The White middle class don’t come across the
African or Indian middle class so much – I just sat on a bench and observed this.
The direction I am taking with my research: I decided to take a more historical point of view. I had
thought of these people as the new middle class … so I started going through the archives at the Killie
Campbell Africana library, especially the life-stories collected in the 70s from people who were then
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called middle class in the Black community. This made me add a long-term perspective to my research.
It showed that the rise of this class was gradual rather than instantaneous. I am interested to see which
kind of resources you need to become middle-class.
I wanted to find out about – I say “arbitrage” in French - do you pay the lobola first for the wedding or
do you buy a new car? I had interesting discussions with my informants – do you help your family? or
do you take some distance from them, because you want to change houses, or go on holiday and so on?
So I think it’s quite an interesting transformation of the kinship relationships in this middle class.
DJ
I was very interested that you decided to take a historical point of view because a lot of this discourse
does tend to make this a completely new phenomenon that it must’ve arisen in 1994. Most people I
tried to speak to who roughly correspond to the same group, most of the people I met were either
working for the government or the local municipality, what I did notice is that just about all of them
had actually been middle class for about two generations. Most of them had a father and mother that
were teachers, and had already been members of the Methodist church, or one of the mainstream
churches. So this so-called quickly upwardly mobile class - I didn’t find that. I found more gradual
histories. And also the thing about suddenly engaging in commodities, the thing that strikes me, after
listening to Debbie Posel;s lecture– she mentioned Smuts Ngonyama’s remark ‘we didn’t fight
apartheid so we could be poor’ so we all started to buy things like mad. But families I have spoken to
have very long histories of consumer goods being bought, often on hire purchase, and often in a fairly
low key way, buying furniture one at a time, first the wardrobe then the bed, then the table, paying off
each of them in turn. So it’s not that it just happened all of a sudden.
Another point: the stuff on the jazz age music of the 1950s shows that the urban middle class in that
period were identifying with the transnational image of slick, consumerist, modern people and using
Black Jazz as a model, as one sees in Drum magazine. So that’s an interesting predecessor to this.
A point about the class distinction or the class name - I have just seen an interesting film made by Peter
Alexander who is at the University of Johannesburg, its called “Phakati, Soweto’s middling class”. In
this film they go to all kinds of people, ranging from a rich woman who lives in Soweto but started a
school, right through to a woman who lives in a shack area right on the edge of Soweto. And they all
call themselves middle-class. And what they said in discussion is ‘they are middling class’. They are
not totally destitute but they are not elite. Presumably the people you are talking about are different
from that. They probably want to show they are not middling, or nondescript, they want to become
something much more than that. The notion of middle class seems to be an different one from what we
might think of it, maybe having quite negative connotations.
Sakkie Niehaus points to the fact that you cannot use class terminology at all to describe people in this
kind of chaotic situation. The people you are interviewing – the fact that they have various relatives
back in Umlazi that they are paying money to makes one question: who is middle class? The guy
earning the money, or his relatives receiving the money. How exactly do you put them into categories,
other than using these very crude LSMs generated by market researchers.
I liked your comparison with the nouveau riche in America, and your idea of them not being selfconfident consumers
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I wondered whether this concept of competition had come up at all? I have noticed it among some
people but usually more lower middle class – this idea that you have to have what other people have or
they will see you to be lacking in some way.
DN:
I am just fascinated by what you told Renault. Did you tell Renault the kind of car you must sell is
Mercedes Benz?
SC:
They cannot do as good as the Germans – they don’t want to do a shitty car like the Chinese or Indians,
they want to try to produce some middle range car, and they want to open a factory near Jo’burg to do
this kind of car. And they also needed to know how the family or the kin was organized, and whether to
produce big family cars – like the Renault espace - or small ones. It seems it would be better to have
smaller ones, and give each person his own car!
DN:
Some of the market research, the LSM stuff is a bit clumsy, there’s all kinds of stuff around
psychographics. There’s a sinisterly named company in Cape Town called the CIA, Consumer Insight
Agency, and they have very elaborate typologies, archetypes, and profiles. It’s almost ethnographic which I don’t think it is. There is a lot of energy put in.
IvW:
My question is about the aesthetics you talked about. People seem to have exactly the same thing, they
buy that horrible two-seater couch, the one-seater couch, the wall unit, the room divider, and they have
that same golden baroque frame with plastic flowers and so on. How do people talk about that? When I
talked to them they said ‘well it’s the only thing you can buy from Joshua Doore with extended credit’.
So it’s exactly what they’d buy 20 years ago – and the firm is all owned by the same guy – so you don’t
have a lot of choice in what you can buy.
SC:
Yes, the market doesn’t offer a big variety of stuff, but I think its true there are a lot of similarities.
What struck me also they had a wall fixture like you find at the airport with some representation of
African women. The first idea is not the individualization of the interior – the first step is to build up
the interior not consciously similar to other people. It’s a bit like a competition with a car. In my
network in Pinetown, Sipho had a Mercedes, so his friend will buy a BMW, because they discuss
together what they want to buy - like a car, they will discuss which is the best trademark, or which
magazine.
KH:
It’s the lack of individuality and the absence of dissent. The importance of marking dissent, origins and
so on, which are personal - certainly in France even more than in Britain.
RR:
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If you read Monica Hunter’s work about East London, 70 years ago, talking about the ways people
were using those horrible things ..there is a most un-anthropological comment about aesthetics. This is
something which has been there in East London since the 1930s. And to come back to what Deborah
was saying, I’m convinced that to get into this class you had to be well positioned in 1994. In a sense
it’s the people who benefited from the enormous increase in apartheid university education, Blacks ..
who moved into the professional class.
KH:
Wits has got 70% Black students already in a very short time, and they can do that because Soweto is
next door and the Black middle class has been building up high class education for decades.
RR:
In 1950 there were 250 Black university students and in 1980 there were 20 000.
FMcN:
I did my research in the former homeland of Venda which is unfortunately quite far from KwaZuluNatal, but there is a perception in KwaZulu-Natal there has been an increase in the conspicuous
consumption of women as a commodity recently. There seems to be a very public polygamy which has
been led by Zuma and then there’s a trickle down effect, taking on women as a sign of status, climbing
up the class ranks. Have you come across that?
SC:
No, at least not openly polygamous. But it’s true – as described by Veblen - that the women show off
with their clothes the wealth of the couple. That’s important.
IvW
I knew a man in Durban North
KH:
What Sophie found was significant extended families, linked to Aids. People did not choose to say
anything about that.
SC:
It also influences the economic resources and consumption practices when you have to welcome 3 or 4
children from your family members. There is also an arbitrage between kin solidarity and the upwardly
mobility of this class or this group.
DJ:
The thesis by Carolyn Stauffer is interesting on these transfers. And there seems to be a discourse
especially about people who have moved out of Soweto into the suburbs of Johannesburg: ‘They are
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all there and they just came back for the weekend, and there is nothing in the fridge because they can’t
afford to eat: they are buying all this stuff but they don’t have any food, it’s like a sham. And some
people are quite critical of this kind of group for being a sham – having all this stuff but no
nourishment. Did you come across that at all?
FMcN:
They have a car but they can’t afford to put petrol in it.
SC:
They have to feed lots of people so I don’t think you have a household of ten people and have the
fridge empty.
MB:
You set up this strong dichotomy between very conservative consumption, with people always buying
the same thing, and more innovatory kind of people who buy brands that are previously unfamiliar. I
am just wondering whether there are patterns to relatively conservative innovation to do around
competition and status? I am reading a journalistic book about crime in SA, there is a passage in it
describing a promotion for a new Johnny Walker; Johnny Walker represents that there si a very
particular style to how people are being persuaded to consume. Bring in a new item that is almost the
same as the last one, but with a very particular tweak which adds something – and makes it different
from all the rest.
Are there particular patterns to innovation here?
SC:
I don’t think they follow the market in a very meticulous manner. Yes they discuss the differences, and
they are quite aware of the small elements that make a distinction between one brand and another.
LH:
I just want to pick up on that quite racist discourse whether it’s African or not, in French magazines.
This prompted me to think of the Comaroffs’ recent book Ethnicity Inc… which described the massive
commoditization of culture in a way from what had previously been done, chiefdoms congealing into
corporations and whole so-called tribal groups are expressing their identity through the selling of their
patented product. I wondered whether the selling of culture and the selling of ethnicity or identity was
prominent, and whether in the absence of manufacturing and the shift from general to service economy
whether the consumption of culture, music, art and these kinds of items have become more prominent
than they used to?
SC:
I think probably music and film, but they are not looking for art craft which will be expressing some
kind of Zulu identity or whatever. They are not very much consuming some kind of leisure, like game
parks and stuff like that. They go on holiday but they don’t go to visit a monument. But Cape Town is a
high point for people from Durban - I don’t know why.
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