South Africa found itself on the front pages of the world’s press in 2012 when police shot and killed 34 platinum miners during a strike by rock-drillers at the Marikana mine. It soon emerged that one factor underlying the episode, which had long been of concern to the African National Congress (ANC) government, was an ‘epidemic’ of indebtedness. Speaking of credit providers’ ‘outright preying on the vulnerabilities of low income and working people’, the minister of Trade and Industry undertook to implement more controls in order to check such activities: proof that the stringent efforts already made since South Africa’s democratic transition to regulate and control the lending of money at interest had proved inadequate. What has become clear in the wake of the killings is that the Marikana episode was at least partly about a deeper economic disenfranchisement. The experience of debt is profoundly connected to the domain of wage labour and migrancy, as miners struggle to sustain new economic expectations and insecurities on already overstretched pay packets. Although the extending of access to formal credit facilities, denied to black South Africans under apartheid, has played a central role in including them financially, it brings with it, particularly for lower-wage workers, a very ‘precarious’ kind of ‘liberation’.1
Making this doubly burdensome for such miners is the fact that waged workers in the 2000s must support a wider range of kinsmen than previously and that many, rather than being permanent employees, are subcontracted on lower wages.2 Mineworkers, formerly benefiting from greater levels of security and unionisation than other areas of wage labour, are now finding their livelihoods increasingly precarious and overstretched. Added to these features are creditors’ techniques for collecting repayments (often of borderline legality). Deductions are made in two ways. Banks, furniture and appliance retailers and microlenders often use (and abuse) the practice of ‘garnishee’ or emoluments attachment orders,3 while informal moneylenders (mashonisas) keep borrowers’ ATM (automated teller machine) cards and use these to withdraw funds with interest (typically 50 per cent per month) at month end when they are paid. This means that many mineworkers simply have nothing left to live on.
Possible sources of credit have proliferated. A migrant, previously excluded from many credit sources by South Africa’s system of ‘credit apartheid’, is now able to borrow from banks, buy a car with vehicle finance and appliances on hire purchase, and hold store cards from several retailers. Lenders offer enticing packages of short-term loans, which promise to offset high fees with free mobile phone airtime and discount vouchers for retail outlets and bus companies.4 Very few checks are made on income or credit worthiness, despite efforts made to curb ‘reckless lending’, such as when – effective from 2007 – the National Credit Act was passed. Migrants, like other consumers, also have access to micro-loans, both legal/formal and illegal/ informal. Often, they borrow from the latter in order to pay back the former.
But the means by which debts are collected have become more streamlined. The system of mine labour recruitment through The Employment Bureau of Africa (Teba), coupled with the way domestic space was policed in the hostel compound in an earlier period, relied on a hi-tech infrastructure for identification and surveillance, which fused employment identification with financial identification. This laid the ground for identification and control of employees’ financial lives, which the National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM’s) own Ubank is well placed to exploit. More broadly, advanced and ambitious computerised systems aimed at enabling identification, cashing in social grants, buying and banking, have played a part in transforming what were previously distinct streams of finance into one single flow.5 Technologies of collection have thus become streamlined, allowing lenders, both formal and informal, to reach into borrowers’ bank accounts, often leaving them no place to hide.
These changes affect how migrants use their money; how widely they are required to redistribute it; how much of it they are able to save and whether their outgoing expenses exceed their income. This chapter explores such changes against the backdrop of earlier practices, while also pointing to some areas of continuity. On the one hand, indebtedness appears to have soared as the means to borrow have become increasingly formalised. On the other hand, indebtedness – alongside systems of saving and other ‘portfolios of the poor’ – has been in evidence, in different forms, for decades.6
Figure 17.1
Deborah James
FNB (First National Bank) is one of the ‘big four’ banks 2013
Collection of the author
Credit apartheid: A historical perspective
Borrowing, and its gradual channelling and restriction, began with the system of labour migration itself. First, both had roots in South Africa’s patterns of racialised land ownership and exclusion. The enactment of draconian laws in 1913 and 1936 set aside most productive farmland for white farmer/owners, while such farmers’ preferential access to credit secured their success.7 For the black cultivator/pastoralists living in these areas, increasing restrictions on their time, and decreasing access to the market and to credit, caused many to join the ranks of those seeking work on the mines and in industry, as well as inducing them – eventually – to leave these farming areas for the reserves (later ‘homelands’). Second, those who continued to rely (in part) on cultivation or pastoralism, whether in white farming areas or in the reserves/‘homelands’, became accustomed to borrowing from nearby traders or store-owners or buying on credit from them.8 Such traders were not necessarily exploitative; indeed they were ‘often sympathetic’ to their black customers, themselves being ‘emigrants from societies dominated by peasant economies’.9 While in certain areas these retailers belonged to the established white settler constituency, in others they were ethnically marginal merchants– predominantly Gujarati-speakers from the Punjab and Jewish refugees from Russia and its borderlands – who sold (and lent) to black customers in areas where most white people did not venture.10 As time went by, some traders’ enterprises remained as small ‘native’ trading stores, combining such sympathy with profit in a fine balance. Others expanded their businesses to become large retailers.11 From the 1920s onwards, but increasingly so more recently, these retailers took to selling their goods on hire purchase.12
Figure 17.2
Deborah James
Members of a women’s saving club with some of their catering equipment
2009
Collection of the author
While there may not have been a purposefully exploitative motive on the part of traders who sold on credit, some elements in settler society did profit by linking the lending of money with labour recruitment. Traders’ selling ‘on tick’ to black cultivators has long had the potential to drive these clients into migrant wage labour.13 In some cases, this indebtedness was deliberately exploited. In Pondoland, before 1913, a system existed whereby rural cultivators were induced into work contracts, or tempted to leave employment in one sector in favour of another, by local traders doubling up as semi-formal recruitment agents, who gave ‘cattle advances’ against these migrants’ future earnings.14 In Bechuanaland (now Botswana), a British protectorate at the time, the relationship between wage advances and labour procurement was even more direct. Agents recruiting for the South African mines ‘induced’ locals to enter into contracts by paying them wages in advance, thus automatically indebting them.15 These arrangements were open to abuse on both sides, with agents often extending such large advances that the borrower ‘remained in debt even after having worked for several months’ and borrowers often accepting advances from several agents at the same time, with no intention of honouring their debts to any of them.16 To counteract such practices, which might have led to unsustainable levels of debt for borrowers and to the collapse of agents’ enterprises, regulatory measures were put in place by the colonial authorities. Cattle advances, although enabling rural patriarchs to control the wages of young men, were seen by officials as exploitative and eventually abolished.17 Such regulatory measures did not, however, result in migrants’ getting free access to their earnings. Instead, a system developed of deferring part or all of miners’ pay, rather than giving it to them at the work site.18 The authorities feared that cash received immediately would be too readily spent or diverted from ‘legitimate’ uses (primarily the payment of various colonial government taxes and levies), or might even encourage migrants to neglect or desert their families. The reliance on such measures, in which migrant earnings were subject to various forms of external or social control, rather than being individually ‘owned’ by workers themselves, proved to be long-lived.
Attempts to regulate both the excesses of capitalism and the excessive spending of migrants represent, albeit with a strong dose of paternalism, just another version of something that wage workers based in rural areas have practised for decades. Alongside the distorted credit arrangements that migrants (despite such regulation) continue to be able to access, especially buying items on hire purchase, there has been a tendency for migrants to save their income from immediate consumption by ring-fencing it. Paradoxically, the seemingly exploitative credit arrangements offered by traders, appliance store-owners and retailers have often been used by migrants themselves to their own advantage. Paying off an item of furniture or putting money in a fixed deposit can serve as a means to keep money aside from the claims of the wider family; turning it into a ‘socialised asset’ by putting it into a savings club can make it available to a wider group, but reserve it for specific ends, rather than letting it be frittered away on ill-considered expenditure.
Figure 17.3
David Goldblatt
Concession store proprietor (seated) and assistant, Rose Deep, Germiston. October 1966
David Goldblatt, Courtesy of the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town.
Banking and saving: Work cycles, life cycles and marital arrangements
What characterises contemporary migrants’ experience of finance is creditors’ ready access to their money. Allowing them to recoup repayments by direct debit or garnishee orders makes for an uninterrupted financial flow, offering no privacy or protection to the migrant/ borrower. Failing to acknowledge this, concerted efforts to ‘bank the unbanked’ have been justified by pointing to the benefits offered by formal financial services to those at the bottom of the pyramid.19 But migrants in need of systems for saving and transmitting money have long been aware of and made use of these services.
Probably starting soon after labour migration itself, migrants have invested money in savings clubs. Founding and becoming members of what are known locally as stokvels, itimiti or megodišano – South African variants of a worldwide phenomenon – workers have grouped together to put aside some of their wages for specific purposes. Among sePedi- and isiNdebele-speakers, for example, groupings of men, mostly from the same villages, formed rotating credit clubs on the mines or, less formally, collected money to help return migrants’ bodies home for burial.20 Starting in a later period, after female migrancy began in earnest, women’s clubs enabled members to pool their savings and gave each a turn to receive a payout.21 Women used the enforced savings system explicitly as a means of disciplining themselves not to use money in other ways. More recently, men and women have used some clubs as a means to buy ‘big ticket items’, such as appliances, while others lend money at interest, in an attempt to make the clubs’ money grow.22 Alongside other arrangements, and themselves increasingly acquiring a formal and more strongly ‘financialised’ aspect, these clubs have been one among many means of managing money.23
The use of bank accounts, although a more recent phenomenon, has also served as a means of judiciously storing and managing money. For men now retired who worked on the mines or in industry, selective use of savings or transmission facilities was common. A miner was given a payslip at month end, which he would submit to the ‘time office’, exchanging it for cash. In some cases, a miner might deposit his pay into a building society account in order to put it aside, later drawing this out to buy telegraph orders from the post office, which were sent home and which his wife could redeem at her local post office.24 In other cases, trusted drivers of minibus taxis were relied upon to repatriate earnings. Bank accounts were often used for saving, notably to hinder rather than enable an easy flow of money, or were opened and closed again as workers moved from one job to another or from rural to urban areas and back again. Sometimes the opening of a new account and the closing of an old one accompanied the switch from one spouse to another, or reflected the domestic distrust that went along with more stable – albeit conflicted – relationships. Bank accounts were single- rather than multiple-use, often deployed for the way they blocked, rather than enabled, the ready flow of money.
The use of bank accounts was combined with other arrangements, which were intricate and required considerable skill and powers of recall to manipulate and manage. A recent project in which people were asked to keep ‘financial diaries’ revealed that households were using a complex portfolio of arrangements to manage their finances.25 People with large numbers of commitments to kin or spouses sometimes strategised to make their money inaccessible to these dependants by putting it into fixed deposits, arranging with their employers to help them commit to enforced savings practices, putting money aside with a retailer in the lay-by system (making a deposit on an item in the expectation of paying the rest of the price within a set time period or forfeiting the deposit) or by paying instalments for furniture on hire purchase.26
Migrant labourers’ use of the banks thus reflected various marital, spatial and educational discontinuities. Countering the strategic character of these patchy arrangements, however, increasing numbers of employers during the 1990s required that wages or salaries be paid into bank accounts.27 In the course of that decade, the Department of Social Welfare, attempting to enable regularity of payment, similarly encouraged pension and grant recipients to open accounts.28 Where banking had previously been a means to keep income streams separate and to avoid certain social obligations while fulfilling others, it increasingly began to enable the unimpeded flow of money into the account at month end and out of it again. Wages paid directly into employees’ bank accounts enable them to ‘borrow without collateral’ or ‘use their expected wages as a collateral substitute’.29 What were wealth stores have gradually become wealth conduits, enabling creditors of all kinds to reclaim their advances.
Borrowing: Furniture on hire purchase
Investing in items of furniture and appliances, both to embellish their houses and as an investment in a fixed asset where other forms of property were disallowed, was a key aspect of the black South African experience, especially from the 1950s onwards. Pioneered in urban areas by town-dwellers seeking respectability, the practice readily spread to rural areas.30 Where migrants had initially taken a conservative approach to investment in property and the purchase of material goods, often consolidating the wealth of the homestead by buying cattle, those migrating more recently have tended to favour the purchase-on-credit of household furnishings.31 A bride’s parents often provided an item of furniture as part of her trousseau, later investing in further items, paying each off in turn, with the eventual aim of equipping all rooms in the house. Although interest rates were and remain high, typically more than doubling the price, many householders have kept up their repayments in a prudent fashion.32 Furniture purchase thus contributed to a ritualised life-course, as well as involving aspirations to sophistication and modernity. It has exposed householders to gradually increasing expenditure and expanding credit access over time. Providing a means of ‘saving’ money by making it unavailable for other things, it could also, however, when unregulated, lead to unsustainable levels of debt.
The high price and the two-year period between delivery of the goods and the final repayment gave this credit system its mixture of different styles. There was meticulous record-keeping and mailing out of invoices in brown envelopes to remind purchasers of what they still owed, but trust was also important: the social and geographical distance between retailers and their customers in villages made the business reliant on intermediaries and lent it a personalised dimension. Considerable profits could be made by targeting low-paid black migrants, but relying on these buyers, with their low earnings and – in some cases – reluctance to keep up repayments, also exposed smaller retailers to financial risk. The high costs of hire purchase compensated for defaults and helped to pay for repossession operations. Success in making money in this sector (despite these problems) attracted much competition, which made business-owners increasingly determined to increase their profit margins over those of their rivals, while simultaneously reducing what they paid to employees and agents.33
Customers who might have fallen on hard times, when handed reminders of payment due, often threw them away or hid them under the bed, only to endure the shame of having items repossessed. The alternative – showing that ‘trust’ was often honoured more in the breach than in the observance – was that some clients entered into ‘scams’ with agents or paid them bribes to depart.34 From the customers’ perspective, these forms of collusion were one way to escape the high interest rates charged. But such efforts did not necessarily make matters easier for customers. One such agent in an Mpumalanga village, despite having been fired by the retailer for crooked practice, continued to travel around to prospective customers, taking advantage of villagers’ ignorance of his dismissal and continuing to pocket the deposits they were paying in expectation that their furniture would be delivered. The errant agent later left the area to go into hiding in order to escape their wrath once villagers discovered his trickery.35
By the early 2000s, despite banks’ efforts to abolish credit apartheid by extending financial formalisation to all sectors of society, this furniture hire purchase system still remained in place to some degree. Increasingly since the 1990s, however, migrant consumers have been getting into hock to clothing retailers via store cards and to micro-lenders instead of, or as well as, to furniture retailers. Those buying appliances often now do so using micro-loans rather than procuring credit from the furniture stores themselves on hire purchase. Indeed, many of these retailers – such as members of the JD group – have recently branched out into financial services and micro-lending as an equally or more profitable aspect of the business. Lending has become increasingly financialised and customers’ being banked means less risk to the lenders.
Borrowing: Informal moneylenders
Alongside these other arrangements, informal moneylending has long been practised in the villages where migrants come from, just as they have in urban areas. Not all accounts of this practice depict the lenders (mashonisas) as violent ‘loan sharks’, however.36 The structural factors that limit householders’ options to borrow from the formal sector at reasonable rates often incline them instead towards such lenders, who may even lend more cheaply than formal lenders do.37 The fact that many neighbourhood lenders have personal connections to their clients plays a role in capping the interest rate. Loans are intended to be repaid at month end, but lenders often extend the loan without calculating an accompanying escalation of the interest rate. Doing so would make repayment increasingly difficult for borrowers, give the lender a reputation for unfairness, increase the chances that violence be used against him and prompt complaints to the authorities. In the ‘business model’ of such moneylenders, community-mindedness and careful calculation thus converge.38
Becoming more widespread in the 1980s, illegal moneylending with interest began to proliferate in earnest from the mid-1990s onwards.39 In some rural areas, it was said to be white farmers who started lending money to their employees in the late 1980s, with farm foremen or indunas inserting themselves as agents and charging extra for the service. Via a sort of informal apprenticeship system, such agents themselves often became moneylenders, eventually acquiring new agents in turn: as in the case of furniture selling, it was the close connection to borrower communities that gave these intermediaries the edge. The rate of interest gradually escalated to 50 per cent per month, where it remains for larger moneylenders.
This kind of moneylending also began to resemble its more financialised equivalent in the new micro-lending sector, especially because lenders would require borrowers to hand over their ATM cards (a practice outlawed at the end of the 1990s, but which continues apace). Typically, borrowers, shorter of money than previously, then borrow again, once again voluntarily yielding up their ATM cards. This results in a kind of debt-bondage cycle, embodied by the term sekôlôtô (from the Afrikaans skuld; debt), often called ‘working for mashonisa’. When borrowers nonetheless tried to escape by cancelling their ATM cards at the bank and applying for new ones, lenders, aware that it is impossible to get a new ATM card without an identity (ID) book, retaliate by asking to keep borrowers’ ID books as well. Many people have been driven simply to abandon their bank accounts and to open new ones: a practice that became endemic and was often repeated as creditors continued to pursue them from one account to the next.
Many borrowers do not distinguish the registered (and more formal) micro-lenders from the unregistered (and illegal) informal moneylenders or loan sharks: they use the same word – mashonisa – to describe both. While small-scale moneylending with a more neighbourly feel certainly remains in place, its more streamlined variety – with all the unsustainability that it implies – seems to be on the increase. The proliferation of such lenders, added to other possible credit sources, seems by many accounts to have led to a veritable storm of moneylending.
Banking the unbanked at the mines
The idea of expanding financial access to those at the bottom of the pyramid suggests an apparently universal ideal of economic and social mobility, but we have tried to highlight how it takes on very specific local forms as it grafts onto pre-existing social, political and economic relations. It draws in and relies on the energies and resources of local actors and agencies as much as on multinational players, such as global banks. Among those included are some unexpected actors, alongside those we would normally expect to see looking to profit from this increasing financialisation of borrowing and indebtedness. Most striking among these is the NUM itself.
Testimonies of low-paid migrant miners, such as those at Marikana, show that their lending and indebtedness, unlike that of many other newly included South Africans, such as the ‘new middle class’, is not so much a matter of pursuing mobility and the fulfilment of aspirations. Rather, it arises out of their attempts simply to get by and to support increasing numbers of dependants at a distance. Nevertheless, this cohort has proved a lucrative target for formal lenders seeking to ‘bank the unbanked’. Among these, the NUM has turned its focus to a new programme of support and services for members, including its Ubank (formerly Teba Bank, established in 1976 for mineworkers’ savings, as a continuation of the kind of initiative that earlier found expression in ‘deferred pay’).40 Broadly speaking, this reflects a shift from a register of collective action and worker solidarity to the promotion of individual self-actualisation and economic empowerment, in line with the national corporate-sponsored discourse of patriotic capitalism. Established by the NUM’s fully financialised investment arm, in partnership with the Chamber of Mines, Ubank has become one of the largest sources of credit to mineworkers, aimed at offering a legitimate alternative to local mashonisas and an array of financial products from payday loans through small enterprise start-up loans to mortgages. ‘Our vision is to be the workers’ bank of South Africa,’ Ubank’s then chief executive, Mark Williams, announced in 2010, as the bank made a bid to augment its existing 500 000 clients.41 Initially dubbed the ‘workers bank’ as an ethical counterweight to the ‘big four’ corporate banks that were cashing in on lending to the poor, Ubank’s ‘moral highground’ has itself become rather more precarious, as rank-and-file NUM membership have ended up being more the generators of profit than the recipients.42
The images projected in Ubank advertising embody the core virtues/values of upward mobility, youth, and entrepreneurial vigour. This aesthetic is at odds with the reality of life both underground and in the shacks of the squatter camps around the Marikana platinum mines. It fails to capture the fact that the ubiquity of easy credit can create new vulnerabilities under the banner of empowerment. This is particularly the case for the poorest-paid mineworkers and subcontractors, for whom the repayment of an unsecured payday loan of a significant portion of the value of their net pay is virtually impossible.43 One rock-driller at the gold mines said he finds payday ‘the most miserable day’ and used the term ‘daylight robbery’ to describe the recovery of debts directly from his account.44
Rock-drillers, now an underclass of mineworkers, have thus been excluded from the post-apartheid promise/compromise of mobility. Deemed an anachronism, a reminder of the old South Africa who does not fit the storyline of the new one, the rock-driller has been expunged from the narrative of citizens pursuing the dream of upward mobility.45 This narrative denies the material reality of modern migrant life: if a miner is supporting a family in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal or Lesotho, the living-out allowance of around R1 800 is enough to afford to rent only a cheap shack in the squatter camps. This is especially the case in and around Rustenburg, where the platinum boom between 2004 and 2008 led to a massive inflation in the property market of more than 100 per cent and a substantial shortage of low-cost housing. The living-out allowance, rather than purely a demonstration of the progressive ‘corporate social responsibility’ of mining companies and their commitment to the autonomy of their employers, is itself an act of externalisation.46 As one migrant miner said:
In the past the mine would supply a concrete ‘bed’ and meals. Workers could send home to the rural areas most of their pay ... [Now] on our small wages we have to pay for our own beds and meals. Many workers now have two families here and back home.47
Aimed at rectifying the situation, housing initiatives simultaneously attempt financial education and bottom-of-the-pyramid investment and represent the rallying point for a new social struggle as the emblem of economic exclusion in post-apartheid South Africa. Over the past decade, the major mining companies have invested resources in upgrading hostel accommodation for migrant miners, restyling them as ‘single accommodation villages’ to erase the legacy of the era of compounded labour.48 But, while hostels are improved and less crowded, much less progress has been made in the provision of family housing to low-wage mineworkers (promised as far back as 1944 by the mining industry).49 The prevailing structure of accommodation provided to lower-ranking employees was that a resident was ‘expected to live as a “bachelor”’ within the confines of the hostel’ until he went on leave and returns “home” to visit his family’.50 Since the late 1990s, the numbers of miners opting to live outside the paternalistic confines of the hostels has multiplied, even though the living-out allowance provided by mining companies (to permanent employees only and not the rising numbers of sub-contractors) is too little to support a family, let alone multiple dependants. Despite the costs of living out, for many, the choice was simple: ‘Eighty per cent, I think live outside the hostels and many are in the informal settlements … if you live outside the hostels … you have your space. You have freedom,’ said Prosper Masinga, a shop steward at the platinum mines.
In order to counteract this defection of employees to the informal settlements, some mining companies have sought a solution not in the extension of company-owned family accommodation (available for the most part only to manager-level employees), but rather in the market; in this case, the burgeoning market for low-cost housing construction and mortgage facilities. Anglo American Platinum, for example, has expressed its commitment to addressing the deep structural reliance on migrant labour, by launching a low-cost, new home ownership scheme to enable lower-ranking employees on lower wages to buy a family house.51 Celebrated among advocates as vehicles for democratising the housing market, providing financial security, agency and education to the poor, such schemes often fail to account for the widespread experience of foreclosure in the so-called ‘subprime’ mortgage sector around the world. In the context of rising job insecurity in the mining industry and the precarious nature of migrant life, employer-provided mortgages are likely to increase the vulnerability of low-wage workers under the banner of delivering financial security and social cohesion. Ultimately, if schemes such as Anglo Platinum’s were to succeed, mining companies would recoup more in interest paid on mortgages over a long period of time than it cost them to build the housing, not only externalising the costs of providing and building housing for migrant employees onto workers themselves, but profiting from it. As Benchmarks puts it: ‘Does this represent an investment by Anglo Platinum in the community, or is it a community investment in Anglo Platinum?’52
Large-scale retrenchments in the platinum industry (which bore the brunt of formal job losses since 2009) have left many mineworkers with little or no income with which to support numerous dependants, let alone repay debts. These were a result of the global financial crisis, with its shift from surging metals prices and huge corporate profits between 2004 and 2005, to the plummeting profits and global financial crisis thereafter. These global forces have shaped the micro-financial experience of hope, expectation and indebtedness for miners and migrants at the so-called coalface of the recession.
Despite this, migrants are still drawn in their thousands to the vast industrial complexes and sprawling conurbations of South Africa’s mining centres, such as the western limb of the platinum belt (Rustenburg-Marikana-Brits), in search of economic opportunities in the mines or on the fringes of the mine economy. Family commitments at the mines, and the lack of formal or informal job opportunities in their places of origin, keep many miners in place, even after they are retrenched: ‘returning home’ often becomes impossible. With the abrupt contraction of the mine economy following the 2009 recession, shaft closures, reductions in operations and large-scale retrenchments, many former miners and new migrants find themselves competing with thousands of others for hard-won yet even more insecure positions in retail, domestic service, or most commonly, security (which has now outstripped mining as the country’s biggest employer in terms of sector).
The experience of migrancy by the rock-drillers of Marikana, then, differs in important respects from that of earlier migrants. It is not only that miners’ range of dependants has increased and their access to credit has widened, while their means of repaying it – under the insecure conditions of contract labour and ongoing retrenchments – have shrunk. It is also that the mining companies no longer provide board and lodging: the role of compounds has declined and miners are left to find their own accommodation and food, using scarce resources in a setting of soaring prices. There is a sharp disparity between the promises of upward mobility through financial inclusion and the increasing precariousness within the migrant workforce, as new forms of economic vulnerability combine with much older legacies of disenfranchisement in the mine economy, unsettling the stark dichotomy between job and no job.53
Conclusion
Migrant life has long required a careful balancing of responsibilities. Often thought of as caught between two geographical worlds and two divergent systems (although these, of course, are inextricably intertwined), migrants travel to earn a wage in a capitalist economy, while finding ways to husband their resources and to honour obligations and reciprocities that arise in a seemingly less-than-capitalist context. Techniques used to keep wages aside and beyond migrants’ control have not only been deployed by various agents – rural patriarchs, traders, government authorities, appliance retailers – but also at times eagerly embraced by migrants themselves, in the knowledge that these resources will need to be guarded for the upkeep of home, for future retirement or the costs associated with death and burial. However, if credit has a positive aspect in that it allows a migrant to ‘borrow speculative resources from his/her own future and transform them into concrete resources to be used in the present’,54 the interests of those who extend such loans cannot necessarily be assumed to be benevolent. In South Africa, where the ‘advantage to creditor’ principle has long been in evidence,55 there are signs that an increasingly financialised capitalism has irrevocably transformed the landscape within which migrants make their calculations about family obligations and the life that is to come.
Notes
1. F Barchiesi, Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011).
2. J Crush, T Ulicki, T Tseane and E Jansen van Veuren, ‘Undermining Labour: The Rise of Sub-Contracting in South African Gold Mines’, Journal of Southern African Studies 27.1 (2001), 5–31. In 2011 almost one-third of Lonmin’s workforce was subcontractors – that is, 9 131 full-time contractors of a total workforce of 33 046. Equally, while Anglo Platinum drastically reduced its use of subcontractors from 14 014 in 2009 to 5 513 in 2012, this may well reflect (and therefore veil) mass retrenchments at the Anglo Platinum mines in the wake of the financial crisis in 2009 and 2010. Benchmarks Foundation, ‘Communities in the Platinum Minefields: A Review of Platinum Mining in the Bojanala District of the North West Province: A Participatory Action Research (PAR) Approach), August 2012, available at http://www.benchmarks.org.za/research/rustenburg_review_policy_gap_final_aug_2012.pdf.
3. F Haupt and H Coetzee, ‘The Emoluments Attachment Order and the Employer’, in Employee Financial Wellness: A Corporate Social Responsibility, ed. E Crous, 81–92. If the creditor presents the employer with a garnishee order, the employer is obliged to pay the debtor’s salary straight to the creditor, enabling the lender to take a (substantial) portion of the monthly pay before the employee receives it. (Pretoria: GTZ , 2008), 81–92.
4. M Fisher-French, ‘Teba Gives Birth to Ubank’, Mail & Guardian, 7 October 2010.
5. K Breckenridge, ‘The Biometric State: The Promise and Peril of Digital Government in the New South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 31.2 (2005), 272–273.
6. D Collins, J Morduch, S Rutherford and O Ruthven, Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
7. W Beinart and P Delius, ‘Introduction’, in Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa, 1850–1930, eds. W Beinart, P Delius and S Trapido (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1986), 29–30; R Morrell, ‘Competition and Cooperation in Middelburg 1900–1930’, in Putting a Plough, eds. Beinart, Delius and Trapido, 379–380.
8. D Krige, ‘Power, Identity and Agency at Work in the Popular Economies of Soweto and Black Johannesburg’, DPhil dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2011, 137, available at http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/10143; C van Onselen, The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894–1985 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), 253; D Whelan, ‘Trading Lives: The Commercial, Social and Political Communities of the Zululand Trading Store’, PhD dissertation, University of London, London, 2011, 88–89, 93–94.
9. Van Onselen, Seed Is Mine, 186.
10. W Beinart, ‘Settler Accumulation in East Griqualand from the Demise of the Griqua to the Natives Land Act’, in Putting a Plough, eds. Beinart, Delius and Trapido, 266–267; J Roth, ‘Spoilt for Choice: Financial Services in an African Township’, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 2004, 62; Whelan, ‘Trading Lives’; M Kaplan, Jewish Roots in the South African Economy (Cape Town: C Struik, 1986); Van Onselen, Seed Is Mine, 80, 93, 113, 186; AG Cobley, Class and Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 43; Krige, ‘Power’, 137.
11. Kaplan, Jewish Roots, 327.
12. Ibid., 167; RE Phillips, The Bantu in the City: A Study of Cultural Adjustment on the Witwatersrand (Alice: The Lovedale Press, 1938), 40–41.
13. R Hourwhich (1999: 36), cited in Whelan, ‘Trading Lives’, 94.
14. W Beinart, ‘European Traders and the Mpondo Paramountcy, 1878–1886’, Journal of African History 20.4 (1979), 471–486.
15. I Schapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 108.
16. Ibid., 109; Beinart, ‘European Traders’, 209.
17. Beinart, ‘European Traders’.
18. Schapera, Migrant Labour, 106–107; R First, Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner, Proletarian and Peasant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983).
19. CK Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits (New Delhi: Wharton School Publishing, 2004); Krige, ‘Power’, 142; D Porteous with E Hazelhurst, Banking on Change: Democratising Finance in South Africa, 1994–2004 and Beyond (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2004), 4–6.
20. P Delius, A Lion Amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan Press; Portsmouth: Heinemann; Oxford: James Currey, 1996).
21. D James, Songs of the Women Migrants: Performance and Identity in South Africa (Edinburgh: International African Institute, Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 60; AK Mager and M Mulaudzi, ‘Popular Responses to Apartheid: 1948–c.1975’, in The Cambridge History of South Africa, Vol 2, eds. R Ross, AK Mager and B Nasson (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012), 308.
22. E Bähre, Money and Violence: Financial Self-Help Groups in a South African Township (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
23. D Krige, ‘Letting Money Work for Us: Self-Organisation and Financialization From Below in an All-Male Savings Club in Soweto’, in People, Money and Power in The Economic Crisis, eds. K Hart and J Sharp (New York: Berghahn, forthcoming).
24. D James (forthcoming), Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014).
25. D Collins, ‘Debt and Household Finance: Evidence from the Financial Diaries’, Development Southern Africa 25.4 (2008), 469–479; Collins et al., Portfolios.
26. Krige, ‘Power’, 137; Roth, ‘Spoilt for Choice’, 72.
27. Porteous with Hazelhurst, Banking, 77, 81.
28. Breckenridge, ‘Biometric State’, 267–282.
29. Roth, ‘Spoilt for Choice’, 78.
30. Krige, ‘Power’, 138, 172.
31. J Ferguson, ‘The Cultural Topography of Wealth: Commodity Paths and the Structure of Property in Rural Lesotho’, American Anthropologist 94.1 (1992), 55–73.
32. M Schreiner, DH Graham, M Cortes Font-Cuberta, G Coetzee and N Vink, ‘Racial Discrimination in Hire/ Purchase Lending in Apartheid South Africa’, paper presented at Agricultural and Applied Economics Association meeting, Toronto, Canada, 1997.
33. M Tlali, Muriel at Metropolitan (Reading: Addison Wesley, 1988), 26, 30, 116.
34. D Cohen, People Who Have Stolen from Me: Rough Justice in the New South Africa (London: St Martin’s Press, 2004), 42–46; Tlali, Muriel, 82–83.
35. James, Money from Nothing.
36. Krige, ‘Power’; Roth, ‘Spoilt for Choice’; PQ Siyongwana, ‘Informal Moneylenders in the Limpopo, Gauteng and Eastern Cape Provinces of South Africa’, Development Southern Africa 21.5 (2004), 861–866.
37. Roth, ‘Spoilt for choice’, 52.
38. Krige, ‘Power’, 154–158.
39. Siyongwana, ‘Informal Moneylenders’, 861–866.
40. Schapera, Migrant Labour, 106–107.
41. A Crotty, ‘Ubank Branch Shut at Lonmin’s Marikana Hostel’, Business Report, 16 October 2012.
42. G Verhoef, ‘Concentration and Competition: The Changing Landscape of the Banking Sector in South Africa, 1970–2007’, South African Journal of Economic History 24.2 (2009), 157–197.
43. ‘In accordance with the national credit regulations, a maximum of R1 257.50 in interest and fees can be charged on a short-term loan of R1 000 – that is more than 25% a month, or 300% if annualised’. L Steyn, ‘Marikana Miners in Debt Sinkhole’, Mail & Guardian, 7 September 2012.
44. Cited in D Smith, ‘Anglo American Sheds 15,000 Jobs as Profits are Hit by Falling Metals Prices’, The Guardian, 31 July 2009.
45. D Rajak, In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011).
46. Ibid.
47. Quoted in S Mapaila, ‘A Marikana Story That Isn’t Being Told’, Umsebenzi Online, 2012, available at http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=3736#one.
48. Anglo Platinum, Annual Report 2008, Volume 2: Sustainable Development Report (Johannesburg: Anglo Platinum, 2008).
49. ‘They take heart too, for Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, one of the great men of the mines, has also said that it need not be so. For here is a chance, he says, to try out the experiment of settled labour, in villages, not compounds, where a man can live with his wife and children.’ A Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1948), 148.
50. M Ramphele, A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), 20.
51. Benchmarks Foundation, Communities.
52. Ibid., 54.
53. F Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombassa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 181.
54. G Peebles, ‘The Anthropology of Credit and Debt’, Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010), 226.
55. A Boraine and M Roestoff, ‘Fresh Start Procedures for Consumer Debtors in South African Bankruptcy Law’, International Insolvency Review 11.1 (2002), 4.