2 nd Workshop on Popular Economies in South Africa
LSE, 24 th -25 th May 2010
“Making Music: Informal Music Production and Tenderized Performance in Venda, South
Africa.
”
Author: Fraser McNeill
Discussant: Ilana van Wyk
Fraser McNeill:
There are three papers – the first one … the band and the lead singer, and in the second one is …artist actually recording, and the third one is more about the process of tenderization and performance, so I tried to squeeze them all into one.
Ilana van Wyk :
I quite liked it. It’s a very nice texture you give to what actually happens on the ground - these artists who go around making copies and trying to get money and so on, and never really getting there, they are all just breaking even until they hit the big time. The big time is in this case always the government. Once you strike a government contract you are in the big league.
But to do that you have to scale down on the very things that got you picked - Your popularity which I think should be better developed and connect popularity with artistic integrity and political outspokenness in a sense.
You had a sense that Reggae is about politics, and there are good Reggae artists who have integrity and artistic authenticity to do that, but the moment you get your government contract you have to scale down on your lyrics and not call anything offensive, and sing about love and things that are benign.
Which brings me to questions about artistic integrity and whether that’s universal. You talk about th e apartheid guy Colbert … who said he sang politically because his beats are political or his beats are a reminder of the Reggae of Bob Marley. So for him politics was symbolic in rhythm and not in lyrics. So to a degree politics had that value attached to Reggae as a political vehicle which is actually being translated into a South African context.
And whether the listener, because the listeners don’t feature in the paper. I don’t understand why. Because they understand that. You said there was a small group of youngsters who can’t make the same connection but I was wondering why the populace, why the introduction of Reggae wasn’t always about love, and nice structure and nice beats.
And the idea of integrity. You seem to say that people who sing at these government concerts do so for very good reasons, and make money but they sell-out in a sense, and I was wondering if that is shared by the listeners or the followers of these bands … that love is less, or singing about integrity than singing about issues of government.
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My other question was on cultural capital, that if people don’t accumulate money they somehow accumulate status and whether those accumulations translate in other ways. Do people really look up to these Reggae artists. I don’t know the Venda contracts, but I know in other places I have worked the Rasta - they are not exactly looked down upon, but they are not that respected. How does that translate, what’s the measure that they can translate into people who are respected for leadership. Or what is that exactly?
Then about the middlemen
– What I loved there was this one piece about people who come for private shows, and have all these people come, and the guy hasn’t been told that there is a concert he is going to give, and then all the people come and they are really angry, and the organizer phones him up and offers … I was wondering don’t these guys see the posters being put up with their names on it?
FMcN:
They obviously do but there is no communication between the promoter and the artist.
IvW:
But then he didn’t start rallying a counter campaign saying “no I won’t”. Its so overwhelming from the promoters side that the guy doesn’t have a voice, he can’t say much or is he so doped up that he doesn’t really care?
FMcN:
The artist won’t approach the promoter. It’s the promoters responsibility to approach the artist. The longer the artist leaves it then the more chance they have of bargaining for some cash or other, so if the promoter phones the artist and says there’s half an hour to go, then the longer they leave it the more chance of getting some money.
IvW:
About the style – you said people imitate Colbert but do they become famous for the proficiency with which they imitate him, or do they become famous because the lyr ics don’t seem to add much to their fame. So what is it about the music?
FMcN:
… its part of this Bling culture – if you get publicity you can become famous. You are on the radio, and you do an interview or two, you’re in the newspaper and people talk about you – your music is everywhere so the term cultural capital I don’t know if it really works, but how else should I explain that, and there is certainly some stuff that builds up. If you don’t have this core cultural capital then they will never phone them to come do a show.
IvW:
Depending on their popularity?
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FMcN:
I ts more than just about popularity. I think its status and prestige and reputation, it’s a brand.
IvW:
Where are the girls? The followers, the girls that go for these famous guys? Is that one of the reasons why people want to be famous as well, because these are poor guys?
FMcN:
I don’t think that they are promiscuous because they are famous.
IvW:
… talks about men who have never had sexual relations because they have been poor all their lives. Its seems to me a running theme that the moment you land some money you are more likely to get those kinds of things. Does that play a role or the music, or its all about the integrity?
FMcN:
I wouldn’t say that women play a major role in this, women are arranged on the periphery and performance culture is very male dominated as well. To some extent there may be some women who take advantage here and there.
IvW:
My question about the universality of integrity, artistic integrity and authenticity that’s something that translates 100% to the Venda concept?
FMcN:
I wanted to look at a historical relationship between the way people tried to use music to resist against apartheid and how the post-apartheid government is stopping people from saying what they want to say. If you can’t say what you want to say in your song then you have lost integrity.
A lot of songs that people record and go on albums don’t then translate into the actual performance. And there seems to be a moral obligation, certainly with people I worked with – if you are a radio musician then you carry the mantle for Peter Tosh and Bob Marley for these guys that had a lot to say on politics and race.
And people like Lucky Dube are thought of as cynics – they sung about stuff that wasn’t really controversial, or had a nice record deal, drove a nice comfy car. That’s what they want. To some extent Lucky Dube was seen as Reggae-like.
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IvW:
Just the last point on apartheid music
– You mentioned briefly there was the political volk group in the 80s and 90s, which was Koos Kombuis, … these guys came against the movement which was essentially a bunch of Whites who wanted to feel that there was something out there for them, and it kind of degenerated into a good time with lots of drugs and that was it – it wasn’t a political movement in any sense. It was just an escape from the harsh realities of apartheid. So musicians themselves are reflecting that we didn’t do much in the process. I was wondering if it’s the same kind of reflection that happened here?
FMcN:
People like Koos Kombuis are interesting examples because they had the same critical volk music in Afrikaans that appealed to a very different group. Koos Kombuis has a specific audience there that’s going to buy his music and the chances of him performing at a government show are very slim.
DK:
I think you need to elaborate more on the difference between censorship under apartheid and now, and its not as if the government is giving people the opportunity. They are just removing funding for their using, so there is quite an important difference. So the government now refusing to award tenders to critical musicians is different from censorship. I am going to end up in jail for criticizing government is different than the 70s and 80s censorship. So maybe spell out the difference.
FMcN:
Like self-censorship, like news reporting, the journalists self-censor themselves because they need a job.
DK:
But there is a difference?
FMcN:
Yes there is a difference, but there is also an overlap ….
DK:
That may turn out to be a very interesting argument that I think you should spend more time one.
FMcN:
Any suggestions on what I could read on censorship of popular culture under apartheid?
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MB:
I haven’t read the book but “The Apartheid Police” is a book about censorship of written literature.
DJ:
Its by a guy called Peter McDonald – he’s at Oxford University. I have heard him talk but I haven’t read the book.
I wanted to explore similar themes but focusing more on the marketing and the commodity and how that affects the issue of censorship.
It seems to me that your paper raised some interesting questions about the relationship between protest and the kind of old-fashioned 1980s sense, which was when Reggae was a more widespread genre throughout South Africa. The state as it is now or what it was then, and the market I think there is some interesting relationship between these three. I think its inherent in your paper in some sense, and you should explore that further.
FMcN:
Explore the market for music or the market …?
DJ:
Because these people are presumably not only
– they are building up their capital in order to play in these tender shows, but also they want to be heard and listened to and consumed and their music bought. So they are partly producing commodities for sale but they are also mindful of what government institutions would or wouldn’t like them to do.
So I think they are in a three-way relationship somewhere there. When I read the paper, it felt to me quite anomalous that Reggae is so popular in this place because it was the music of the 80s when it was quite clear-cut who the enemy was. Whereas now the enemy is all around
– it’s the market, its all these processes we’ve been talking about, so the idea that you need to speak out against the state is perhaps to some degree slightly oldfashioned. That’s what the Reggae people did in the eighties and how it plays out now.
You talk about having a discussion at Franco School … I think the best thing was said by
Stewart Hall and he said “Popular culture is the grounds on which the contractions are worth, its neither pure resistance or pure accommodation, but something in between. I guess that’s what’s happening with these people – its not one or the other
FMcN:
…. people say Franco Schools are old-fashioned, and Stewart Hall is also old-fashioned to some extent.
DJ:
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All I’m saying is he drew attention to the fact that you don’t have to see it in terms of either market-ified or otherwise pure and utter resistance against the market. This thing seems to suggest that there is all kinds of compromises being made and collaborative arrangements being engaged in, which are in fact more interesting than pure resistance or pure collaboration.
FMcN:
Yes. I wouldn’t like to suggest – I don’t like the word “resistance” actually.
MB:
I have a simple ethnographic question: So these promoters who get government tenders I presume they make money out of the government tenders so there is cash behind them – why are they not buying bigger sound systems and therefore solving the problems of why either you got gigs that costs too much money or you have …
FMcN:
You presumably get enough money to hire the sound systems from the government. A computer is what you get from government. The musicians themselves get between 35-65 thousand for doing that – the promoter is going to get about R100 000 … then he has to pay the musicians, so its not worth it in terms of profit.
MB:
And then the wider question – The different themes that you raised in different parts of the paper, they could be friendly in terms of temporal scales. So you get one that looks at informal economies … so you’ve got rhythms of debt has predominantly … market, and the wider one w hich is the relationship between CDs and gigs and how they … each other. And then you could … scale - something about how musicians think about all this.
FMcN:
Yes, definitely.
KH:
I was in Jamaica for two years in the mid 80s, and I actually had a gig in Cape Town which my friends in Britain and Africa said was fine for me to attend, but the Jamaicans were really hyped about – it was actually in 1986 – the guys were out in the streets in Soweto – I had this amazing experience of how closely involved in the South African struggle the Jamaicans were.
Because this is a society where they were emancipated from slavery in 1833 and at that time they still had a White Prime Minister. In fact Marcus Gabi Jnr said South Africa and Jamaica are the only two Black societies with a White Prime Minister. So I was very interested in how and why – not just Jamaican music – why Reggae became universal. How does a local music become a universal music or how does Mozart or Beethoven produce universal music.
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And its seems to me there’s this history of having an advanced rhetoric of freedom and the persistence of it politically. The sense of waiting for emancipation for so long, and I wrote a paper called “German Idearism and Jamaican National Culture” in which I tried to explore these questions.
Why, for example, do Jamaicans dominate the North American sprint championships. They actually banned Jamaican schools from taking part in the US because they always won.
I think this dialectic of freedom and repression and the way its built up into a rhetoric – the way these people speak is unbelievable. There is 4 politicians being filmed in a public place by television live, and they make their speeches, and the Chair says “any questions from the audience”, and this little old guy grabs hold of the microphone, and instead of looking at the politicians, he looks straight at the camera, and gives this impassioned, revolutionary speech.
I think that the hardest questions for us to answer and modern Anthropology is incapable of answering are where these universal resonances of local cultures – how they are generated, where they come from, how you understand their transnational impact and so on.
I coedited C R James’ “American Civilization”, its something he wrote in New York in 1950 and its mainly about popular culture, and its about music and film, and I think his analysis is useful.
The last point I wanted to make is there is this issue of how does a movement become something else – assimilated or destroyed by bureaucracy. Bureaucracy lives off movements. Bureaucracy by itself cannot live. That’s why the World Bank is desperate for social capital, informal economy, or anything that gives the appearance of tapping into what people are really doing which it can’t really assimilate.
And that’s why all these NGOs – they are desperate to find something local that is happening, a movement, somebody occupies some land and then they say you join us and become part of our NGO and then they bureaucratize them. So this directic of bureaucracy which I think of generally as movement of which the best expression is music, dance.
Max Vega called it the rootinization of charisma which is that at a certain level what happens spontaneously if he wants to get beyond a certain level has to make some compromise with bureaucracy.
DJ:
That’s interesting but what strikes me in your paper is how unrootinized it all is in a sense. It is really teetering on the brink. The fact that they were singing on a lavatory seat seemed to represent the situation that they were continually on the edge, survival or non-survival, it may have been bureaucratized and routinized but in a very flimsy manner.
And I imagine that maybe the fact that these men because you talk about the predominantly male culture are using a thing that was incredibly popular in the 80s but is now hanging on in this minimal space on the edge of the edge of what is happening.
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And I also thought the rags to riches story - I loved the story about the guy who had to pirate his own CDs to make a living. That same kind of story was being told in the apartheid era. I remember discussion after discussion about how some big musician guy had got incredibly rich and then it all got blown and he had nothing. And often people try to pin it on the nastiness of the apartheid government, but then other people will say these guys never knew how to budget. So even back then this old story of you should look after your finances then you wouldn’t be in a impoverished position right now.
FMcN:
There are a lot of parallels between the apartheid era and the postapartheid era and that’s … can I call it legitimate that so-called leverage in society Reggae was very popular in the 80s but in some parts like Venda it is still popular, and just because its not in Johannesburg it doesn’t mean there is any less support.
IvW:
Just a question about political resistance – when you resist nowadays against the council … if you want to politically resist now you go to a service delivery protest, that’s the forum in which you do it not through Reggae
– people just may like the Reggae beat.
DN:
On the previous point about continuities between the apartheid past and the present, and the place of Reggae, and continuities between Black Diamonds and middle class – I have also been thinking about continuities in welfare relations - non-White systems of welfare that emerged midcentury and strenuous attempts at racial parity … started happening in the
1980s under the nats pre-1994, so maybe there is a more general injunction about seeing the continuities in the pre-
94 period that need … a kind of introduction to …
KH:
What is bogus is the idea that there are these big breaks in history which can only be achieved by focusing on some caricature of society or culture in isolation and then claiming that we have moved in some huge way from one to the other. Whereas all the stuff that has been excluded remains more or less the same. We achieve this appearance of revolution by being highly selective in our ideal … where history describes human social life. And I think when you jump those then you find there is much more continuity always.
RR:
I was just wondering how far the two reactions to that – the first reaction is how far the first apartheid state … levels of continuity within the state structures and how these are much more than … and then there is also the question of how far a practical political shift in terms of personnel did happen in the 90s – what the effect of that is on underlying structures. We are only just beginning to see enough about where post-apartheid South Africa is going to see what the continuities are.
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DJ:
You spoke earlier about the different things you have been investigating can you see any kind of thinking about popular economies in South Africa which is what our theme is – can you see any continuities between what these Reggae guys are doing, and the other things you have investigated, can you see anything connecting them to each other?
FMcN:
In the middle example of the actual studio and the informal way in which recording is actually done, and marketing and the way things are sold and that’s an example of what you would call an informal economy, so they tie that to more formalized ways of doing things. The funeral industry I was looking at has a similar kind of hectic but yet organized at the same time, and things happen in a haphazard way .
The people I have been looking at have a different way in the way they use language, words and they way they talk about investment, it could be something very specific in terms of money or investment in terms of traditional leadership. So its not just about money and investing - people think of it in different ways.
DJ:
Would somebody like Colbert
– would he as a person, in body have some notion that you ought to invest in structures of traditional leadership or does he look outside the mainstream of the kind that you are talking about?
FMcN:
He is very much a commoner. He is against any imposition of traditional leadership.
DJ:
So in that sense he is kind of a marginal figure at least from these currents in Venda society?
FMcN:
In that sense yes.
……………………………………………
‘“Tata ma chance”: On contingency and the Lottery in post-apartheid South Africa’
Author: Ilana van Wyk
Discussant: Detlev Krige
Ilana van Wyk:
Basically from my experience with the Gambling Commission
– they called me and asked me about my views on what is happening gambling-wise in South Africa. The set-up by
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government and the Department of Trade and Industry were getting very worried about the proliferation of gambling and the effects for the poor.
That’s when I realized that they have a conscience, and that they have to be more responsible. They set up this commission … apart from the guys who were paid by Lottery operators … So this is a bit of a reaction to the kind of …
Detlev Krige:
I think some of the things you mentioned talk about other things, and those are the things that
I’m interested in, so I’m going to be pretty biased.
For example, its quite interesting that people would talk about the right to gamble, so my question would be why has that become a part of the discourse. Why do people conceive of such a possibility – the right to gamble.
Similarly, and I also found this in my research, is the distrust of elites in the sense that the operators of the Lotto are somehow involved in either cheating people or is rigging the system, but what does that say about peoples’ attitude towards the state, towards the relationship between the economy and society, and between exploitation or class differences.
Similarly, why is that people would view gambling as legitimate, in the same way that you have the right to gamble. So its asking a question over and above what you are presenting.
How would one analyze those views if you put them into a specific context.
And then lastly, the way I understand it is your paper is a critique of some of the assumptions of the National Lottery operators, not only legislation but also the responses, and the assumptions they make about poor people, about their economic behaviour, and that you want to somehow critique those assumptions.
But are those assumptions not integral to the very way in which bureaucracy in a modern state works? Can a modern bureaucracy have different assumptions about human beings, that they are irrational, for example? So then is it a critique of Western economics or of the state?
IvW:
The right to gamble discourse, the poor constantly get to do with people who tell them what to do or what not to do, and they saw gambling as a way of making a business and so on, and they saw it another way in which they were prevented from getting money.
And they also said, when it came to asking questions about why they couldn’t play the
Lottery, they said well its because these elites are trying to keep it all to themselves again.
There’s lot of cases locally where the local councilor took development money – they had to build a clinic, and he took all the money and moved to another town.
And they saw this in a very similar light. They don’t know who exactly owns the Lottery but they know its not government. Its what they call Black Diamonds – they don’t call them tenderpreneurs – they say people like Shilowa and Tito Mboweni.
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They call them the “big dogs” – the big dogs are owning the Lottery, so they say these guys are making money and they want to keep it to themselves, and that’s why they don’t want us to participate.
In their mind the more people participate the more you use
– so there’s this big pot of money and the more people you have the more they use. That’s their conception of how the Lottery works, so they are trying to get people not to play. And so they say “we have a right to do this”.
And so they use that rights discourse, the same rights discourse they use to claim electricity and those kinds of things which are common in service delivery protests.
The distrust of elites, they have reason to - the ones that lived in townships do take money away. There is countless stories of people who stole money, so they know that these people get rich somehow. They know about Malema
– there’s a lot of talk about Malema and his quarter of a million rand watch, and they see that coming from the Lotto, so I think they have reason to distrust them.
Why they view gambling as legitimate, my paper says the legitimacy or illegitimacy of gambling is based on a perception of risk. And that perception of risk assumes quite a middle class way of life in which you only engage with people in the same situations, so you decide to go gambling and to take those extra risks, when you have a stable job and those kinds of things, you can gamble.
The people I worked with are really very poor people, and those risks are around you all the time, so when you go buy food cheaply, you take the risk that it might be rotten. That kind of thing happens all the time. So this is not particularly risky and they play with small amounts.
And they don’t hope to win the millions. That doesn’t come out. A lot of people have never won anything and I don’t think they will ever win much, so those extraordinary hopes that … talk about, I didn’t find any evidence of.
It’s the same kind of stuff that they do with other things, you have to take a chance so you try a bit here and bit there. They are all very much alike except for gambling-gambling, or the stuff they call gambling like dice which is dangerous. That is dangerous because you go to a special place and spend a lot of time there, and its anti-social in a sense and you are consumed, and you open your body to a lot more dangers than you would buying a Lotto ticket.
The paper is a criticism of the assumption that the Lottery policy people have, but it was also trying to get conceptions of what gambling was, and what it is to be poor and how you see risk in those conditions.
… a new era – people are being infected by the risky global situation and those risks and rationalities kind of informed economic behaviour. And I’m saying it doesn’t. I’m saying that risk is part of being poo r and how you live, and this is not new. And people don’t conceive of it as a new era that is any more dangerous.
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… integral to how a modern state works? What I said there is its not irrational. Its not a irrationality to gamble, to take a chance with the lottery, or to take a chance on the gambling dogs or the chickens. Its not an irrationality
– sometimes people do win and people make businesses of it.
You don’t have much choices. You don’t have a neighbor who earns R20 000 a month and has the money to pay you back immediately.
DK:
Should that not be a critique of the state of bureaucracy? That somehow bureaucracy has to make assumptions about peoples’ economic behaviour. Is it not unsurprising that the lottery people will operate within the field of policy, in some way an extension of the state that they have to make that assumption?
IvW:
I think it is unsurprising, but the point in my paper was not a critique of the state, its more of the lens through which we can look at how local people engage with risk and gambling, and how they think of gambling.
FMcN:
Gambling was illegal in the old South Africa but legal now - Its not a criticism but what kind of legacy does that have? There seems to be a perception that people can gamble in their own homes, so gambling was forced on people, and it wasn’t in popular in Venda at all. The people didn’t want it there. So what kind of legacy has that life done - It must have influenced how people gamble in South Africa?
IvW:
In one part of the paper I wrote about the people who resisted and protested against casinos being opened, and a lot of Christian movements or community movements, so a lot of people resisted and protested against the establishment of casinos in the areas.
And the protests center ed around that it’s going to be for Whites, although in theory they could mix, but the mix was basically prostitutes who could then sleep with the rich tourists who came in. And I think that informed a lot of views on casino gambling as gambling – the negative perception of it as a gambling activity, and its places where women of little moral values go.
There was a very negative perception of people who went to casinos. That and dice. So you had your gangsters playing dice, and you had your old people and your loose young women going to casinos. But they went there for reasons that were kind of dark.
RR:
So this is not only a state morality, this is a local morality?
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IvW:
Yes.
DJ:
Are you saying that there was an anti-gambling feeling in a general sense and that now playing the lotto is acceptable?
IvW:
People don’t see the Lottery as gambling. I say its since these casinos were opened in South
Africa, the locals in the vicinities of these casinos saw them as gambling dens, and places where you don’t go.
While they said that, at home they also played a million kinds of dice games. Not dice-dice but cards and those kinds of things, and that was widespread to gamble, but in their own perception playing in a casino was seen as quite negatively viewed. People who lived in the
Eastern Cape, the Transkei Wild Coast Sun, and how bad it was to go there and to be seen there.
KH:
Cambridge University more or less forced us to sign up for a consultancy register, and for a laugh I listed my expertise as gambling, and then they introduced a National Lottery, and of course everybody phoned up Cambridge University and said “who have you got?” And I ended up on News Night, Sky News, and radio.
But they all wanted me to go out and say this is basically milking the ignorant poor. They wanted me to say the chances of winning the lottery is like the chance of being run over by a bus twice in the same day.
But I wanted to push forward the notion that gambling is an integral part of a normal life for many peo ple but that wasn’t what they wanted. So I usually got them to shut up by looking at the camera and saying “if you need any help in picking your lucky numbers” …
But this question of risk – the way … use risk is completely unintellectual, because risk is something that you can calculate the probability of. But this idea that risk is stuff that’s going to come out and zap you …
And I’m very interested in what you have to say about cards and stuff. I have asked myself why do people play card games, whether at home or publicly, and what is the relationship to market society because I actually think that they are a form of socialization or adaptation to living in a market society.
What you actually do is you learn in these things, to invest and make calculations, you make partnerships and so on.
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I have also been struck by you have these kind of epidemics of card-playing - like in Britain in the 1950s, for example. Everybody was playing cards all the time.
Even in the 60s, and then you go back 30 years later, nobody is playing cards – why? So I think there’s a developmental aspect to it all.
In any case I think the lottery is completely appropriate for you to see it as a normal practice within a set of practices. And them calling it gambling is also indicated, and really taps into this middle class discourse which goes back to Margaret Thatcher’s “I am building the great enterprise culture that people make money the normal way, the Protestant way, … and if we had a lottery we would be a banana republi c”, which of course we are.
So I think its very important to defamiliarise the conceptual term as if everybody knows what gambling is and I think you do that very well actually.
Given the way people play says something about how they are relating to society or might want to. And its not as you say a question of hoping to kind of escape into a Utopian alternative. Its about how you want to sort of relate as an agent to the society you are in, and the people you are with through games of risk which really are based in many cases on quite precise calculations.
DJ:
To go back to continuities with the earlier period, I used to earn my living as a bookie clerk in a horse-racing joint – that’s what a lot of students used to do. And no Black person was allowed to belong to tattersalls, however, there were Black people standing outside and used to get certain White guys who belonged to it to take bets for them. Gambling in horse races even if you were not at the race, was an incredibly exciting affair, a very social affair and there were these ethnic minorities mixing together. Is there any sense in which playing the lottery is a private thing or do people do it in a kind of socialized way, is there something suggestible about the very experience of playing the lottery something social or is it just an individualized interaction – you go to the shop and you check on the TV who has won?
IvW:
People stand in long queues, but they don’t really interact because people will steal your numbers. I sat behind a woman and I was looking at her numbers and she got really upset.
So people don’t talk while they are in a queue. They can stand there for 2 or 3 hours and not talk, and they try and cover up their numbers and so on, or look at the screen or around them b ut they wouldn’t engage in conversations in that setting.
Where it is social is when the lottery show is on television, on Wednesday nights or Saturday nights, people will sit in front of the television with their families, and have their numbers and chec k it. That’s the only social part of it.
But actually playing, actually buying is not social at all. There is no danger involved.
Because I sometimes ask people – you can ask them for numbers on the way there but not in the queue – and you don’t give away your numbers. If someone else takes that number it
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diminishes your chances of winning. It’s also important that you don’t let other people touch your lottery card, because there is a lot of muti involved.
FMcN:
Do the people actually believe it will influence the outcome of the lotto?
IvW:
They don’t believe hard enough. That’s why I say, you know that the muti might not work. Its not a stern belief.
CA:
Do people buy in syndicates?
IvW:
No, not that I came across.
KH:
You know the Daily Mail became a mass circulation newspaper
– the first one ever in Britain by publishing the racing results. And its been credited with a massive increase in working class literacy.
RR:
You are talking about how the middle class civilized the lower classes by introducing gambling and also in the upper classes, the old discourse of the aristocrats … Is there any sense of that in South Africa?
IvW:
I spoke to Peter Collins – he is a Professor in the UK, he is very involved in the gambling, and his sense i s that the rich people don’t play the lottery as much because they have more sense. They don’t take chances because they know. I haven’t done much work on the rich or the upper classes or even middle class.
RR:
… it is in no way certain that the rich in South Africa waste their money in pyramid schemes?
IvW:
There is a lot of stories of Indians in South Africa who buy
– if there is a big roll-over – they go and they buy R200 000 worth of tickets. So there’s a lot of stories about the Indians.
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DN:
I know with the lottery there is an option where you can get the system to randomly select the numbers for you. I wonder in the lotto bureaucracy what sort of people do that because numbers that are randomly selected makes a difference, so who would use the machine and who wouldn’t?
IvW:
It’s probably a 50-50 spilt to be honest.
DN:
But quite a lot of people don’t attach a numerological significance to it?
IvW:
There are a lot of people who would use the date of the death of their mother, the da ughter’s age, and then the father’s … and they keep to those numbers, until they stop working and then they change.
But there is surprisingly a lot of people who trust the machine. They say “I’m kind of unlucky anyway, so the machine might be luckier”. That came up in my interviews of winners who had used the machine. And people will say because the lottery is chosen by a machine your chances of getting it right by another machine is sometimes higher.
Because the elite own the lottery, and they also ow n the collusion network that runs it, that’s why you have to stop buying tickets the minute before the balls are drawn so they can crook it. They can see how many people chose the same numbers, and then they don’t choose those numbers because they don’t want people to have the money. So there’s a lot of that kind of thing.
FMcN:
Is it only the South African lotto – I seem to remember people in Venda putting money on the
European lotto?
IvW:
You can do it online, but a lot of it is scam. There’s a Nigerian group …
FMcN:
This one was in a shop and the woman that sold you a lotto ticket, you could also put money on the European one - there were two separate queues for each one.
IvW:
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I haven’t found that. There was definitely an online one run by a Nigerian group, and there was a fake South African lottery website, where you could pay for lottery tickets but they had spelling mistakes on it but it was quite sophisticated the way they did it.
DJ:
I really did like the story of the old man who could n’t work out how he would fill in this budget thing – it was almost like a test, he was seeing how appropriate this would be. And it seemed to me to be a good reputation of a thing that is emerging in many of our papers the idea that people have to be taught how to do a budget properly. Clearly in this case and in many other cases that would be completely inappropriate because for one there is no separating different streams of income, there is no discretionary income versus non-discretionary income, ther e’s all this kind of mixture between formality and informality, etc.
I do remember last time Rebecca asking you whether the old guy himself how his cyclical behaviour might have been - do people gamble more when they are old, when they are young
– do they gamble as part of a family or is it just one specific man in a family that would gamble. So I don’t know if you have any more information on that?
IvW:
… 82% gamble and that’s all ages, … there wasn’t a gender or age difference. People play indepen dently in every family, so you wouldn’t play with your family. Unless you have a mother and a father … and the father and mother may ask the kids for the numbers because the kids are luckier. So you can ask them for numbers and they give you numbers, and if they win the R20 or R40 they give R2 of it to the kids.
So that’s how families play, but its mostly individuals. We are talking about families who are not necessarily related kin but people who live in the same house. And there is not a hell of a lot of competition in one household. People keep their income secret in a household
– there is so much tension especially with the grants coming in. When they get their grants the older women have to give it away and men don’t somehow.
And people keep quiet whether they have the child support grant or not or whether the father of the child pays extra support on top of that, because you might have to buy groceries with it.
So there’s lots of individual players.
The old man – he played when he had money, but anyone plays when they have money. Noone has budgeted for it.
DJ:
It seems like what you are saying in your paper in many ways
– the front-end part which is the gambling people say we need to promote responsible gambling but actually its bullshit, because these people’s whole life is a game of chance, so in a sense your paper is almost not about gambling, its about ordinary life isn’t it?
At the beginning of your paper you talk about South Africa’s lottery popularity has been ascribed to the deluded and financial illiterate millennium hopes of the desperately poor, and I
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wondered how that connected to the point in Detlev’s paper that there is a lot of delusion going on, a lot of confusion and people even if they are literate they are often deluded to the real nature of financial dealings because shops are banks, and banks are shops. Are you saying this is all about total normality and that people are financially literate but they just don’t have the means or interest in dividing up the income, or a re you more on Detlev’s side which is to say we are in a totally new era and all of a sudden things are obscure and murky?
DK:
The murkiness is produced. Banks are deliberately, to some extent blurring the distinctions between what is investment and wha t is speculation. And I’m talking about illiteracy its both a production of it and a consequence apartheid.
DJ:
But ultimately would you still be saying these people have got savvy, and they just realize life is a gamble so there is nothing particularly distinctive about the lottery.
IvW:
Yes, that’s why I spoke about the history as well, to say this has been a feature of working class.
KH:
Actually the fundamental word should be “play”. The old English pledgian means to make a bet, the word play is the same as pledge, and it means to make a bet. So life is not making the bet. Life may be chancy but making bets is a very specific activity. Its playing and it usually has some ritual demarcations on the rest of life, so I think we shouldn’t go too far and say this is just the same as ordinary life.
I also think the word gamble specifically implies that this is not serious – that gambling can’t be work, so you have work and play, work and gamble. And work is what you have to do in a civilization that says work is a value and life should be based on work, and so on. And then gambling is something that takes place outside work. Its not serious.
I think there are distinctions in these concepts between normal life and these activities. But it’s interesting that “play” means to make a bet.
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