2nd Workshop on Popular Economies in South Africa
LSE, 24th-25th May 2010
WORKSHOP SESSION 4
“Money and livelihoods at the margins: sociality and governance in South Africa’s informal
economy”
Author:
David Neves
Discussant: Maxim Bolt
David Neves:
In the informal sector context that I talk about - businesses are typically orientated to a whole range
of quite subtly different objectives or genealogies. I made this point about 12 months ago but I tried
to flesh it out a little more, and I think it is an important idea. I also quote James Ferguson, on a kind
of productionist thinking – his argument that we tend to use the lens of productive economic activity
and we apply it to a whole lot of things, and understand it in those terms, when in fact what a lot of
people do is fundamentally about distribution or redistribution as Eric might say.
The second of my four headline points concerns forms and patterns and dynamics around
governance and the rules for governance. I talk a little about violence. Max spoke earlier about
structural violence, and I was thinking, but what about real violence, actual violence? Often in my
experience it seems to be a core part of informal non-state forms of governance.
As a concession to the kind of rhetoric of the overall research project I also look at issues of money
and debt and the way in which formal versus informal works. I think there are resonances with
Max’s paper.
And the fourth headline finding is about quite ambiguous processes of formalization. And I try to
make the argument that formalization isn’t just about the regulation of space.
In concluding, I spoke to a few things that resonate with Lizzie’s paper: what all this says about
trajectories of development and engaging with the market. We agree they are not linear but how
might they be categorized? I think that’s a useful way to speak about some of the continuities.
MB:
David’s’ paper begins with two salient points that the informal sector in South Africa is complex and
under-theorized.
You try to emphasize that what’s required here is for us to understand the specifics of the sector,
what kind of shape it is. You highlight four objectives, both material and more widely social, and
you presents ‘resource flows’ but also investment and risk mitigation. What one comes out with
from this is the dense interconnections between formality and informality, and the diversity of the
informality itself which problematizes what the idea means.
You make the distinction that informal and formal may be problematic, and start the paper with a
theoretical consideration of the distinction. You suggest that it’s maybe only used as a rhetorical
device – sort of a quick shorthand to work from.
In conceptualizing what informality might mean, clearly there are issues here which you engage with
partly, but I’m not sure completely how formality and informality as concepts are mutually
constituted.
Workshop session 4
Page 1
One thing that you do mention is regulation. You still have informal mechanisms being used by
people strategically to guarantee a certain level of predictability to do with everyday things, but you
don’t treat so-called formal mechanisms in the same way. So formal mechanisms appear very much
to be oppressive and coercive; things to be dodged and avoided on the whole. And they tend to look
like a piece of paper, whereas I think there is maybe an argument looking at formality of some kind
of domain under the purvey of the state as being composed of officials of people with whom you
have to negotiate, and the documents they produce at times can actually be of use to your
informants.
People end up using both formal and informal means to ensure the conditions for what they want to
do, and that kind of moving between the different kinds of strategies is one way that formality and
informality as ideas are on quite a deep level mutually constitutive
As I looked through your paper and tried to identify what formality looked like to you, it appeared
mostly through change in forms of rhetoric. It’s about a piece of paper that was extremely
impersonal, and suitably squashed people rather than being used by them.
It thus appeared through the expansion of bureaucratic forms rather than engaging with the kind of
everyday structures and measures that people might have to deal with. That might partly be an issue
of methodology: that people in interviews tend to identify the remarkable rather than these daily,
often not spoken about, constraints. This interconnection between formality and informality, beyond
regulation: what I would have liked to hear more about was the structure of economic possibilities.
When you characterize the informal sector you actually give three different definitions that are
actually quite different. One is a modality which marks economic activities, and working lives are
increasingly being organized, the second is a rhetorical shorthand for the problems of inequality of
post-apartheid, economic growth and market modernity, and the third is a form of self-employment.
And clearly you are circling around something, but these three things are not the same. And a fourth
thing that I think needs to be thrown into the mix is the way people understand what they can and
can’t do as far as livelihoods go – what jobs they can get and what they can’t get.
This is coming back to Keith’s stuff of the 1970s, and work that is built on that. It sees a crucial
distinction as being that waged employment has a degree of perceived stability to it, and a degree of
regulation to it (rather than simply a modality, for example). One useful thing might be Honstrum’s
conceptualization – he worked in India. He kind of sees islands of waged employment as citadels.
He then complicates the picture in later work, but it’s a nice kind of model, with these islands of
relatively stable employment that people can’t get into.
What all this points to is trying to explore intersections. I found that another pattern could be drawn
out explicitly which was your two examples, one being rural and the other urban. And you need to
explore what that local specificity means .
I would imagine what conceptually constitutes formality and informality in each case really looked
quite different for all the various reasons that I have already listed.
This then raises a deeper issue about your opening statement: that the informal sector is most useful
as a rhetorical device. At one stage I wondered, is it
(a) a rhetorical device in the article,
(b) a tentative conceptual attempt to grasp a structural cleavage (or how much it is bridged) on the
part of people, or
(c) something even more obviously out there in the sense that we got from Lizzie’s paper, which we
can not only perceive, and act on, but talk about?
DN:
Workshop session 4
Page 2
Those are really useful remarks, thank you. There is definitely scope to tidy up the definition of
some issues. The second economy discourse serves as a rhetorical shorthand for a range of other
larger and more practical issues. I don’t think I sufficiently indicated that this is how people seem to
be using it. I am not really aligning myself with that use of it, so I can see how there is a lot of
fuzziness and veering around some of those definitions.
Some of the methodological points you made are well taken. I did use interviews quite extensively
but was also visiting interviewees over a long period of time, maybe a year. I need to be more
explicit about some of the baseline conditions and conceptions so it doesn’t look as though I’m just
emphasizing what represents a rupture. That’s a useful point.
DJ:
I liked the paper and the way that you talked about what happened over time when you went back.
And you draw out some themes that were really informative. You also spoke to some of the other
papers. But, taking up about what Mike was saying, did the people you spoke to, have a strongly
developed concept of themselves as occupying a particular realm of economic activity, or is this
whole notion of a second economy or informal economy something that has been imposed by
various other people? And the reason I ask that is to say, would people speak in the same sort of
way people spoke in Lizzy’s paper about longing to be part of that world where the state guarantees
the stability of the first economy, where they would engage with all the rules and regulatory
frameworks, but have a strong sense of being excluded from that?
And related to that, I know you have worked with social grants recently, did you get a strong sense
that those were an important part of general funding of all these other arrangements that were going
on here?
DN:
How did people conceptualize what they were doing? That’s a really interesting question because
part of the definitional problem comes from the fact that a lot of entrepreneurship/ business school
literature looks at entrepreneurs and shows how this level of almost nano-entrepreneurs engage in
forms of micro accumulation, and it applies a metric that doesn’t really work with them.
Many of these people would disavow that they were entrepreneurs, and say ‘this isn’t a business, this
is just something I’m doing’. This is just part of the ceaseless repertoire of improvisation that you
have to engage in to get by. There are a few that would say ‘we have run this business for a long
time’.
But for many people it shades into the tricks and strategies of the poor. Part of what I have done is
to take this concept of informal self employment, and to push it down as far as it would go. And I
pushed down into a realm where the livelihood of the poor starts to blur into the informal sector.
And do they understand themselves to be excluded? Yes, exclusion is definitely a register that
people would use to explain where they are at. I think it’s useful to make a distinction between how
people describe themselves with all sorts of registers and metaphors, and exclusion as an analytical
concept.
What I was saying earlier was that the scholarship around the second economy analytical exclusion
is highly problematic and starts to break down, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t see
themselves as excluded. It’s useful to make that clear.
Workshop session 4
Page 3
In terms of social grants, when we met in Cape Town you encouraged me to include my material on
social grants. But something I struggled with, and we all struggle with this, is how to cut down a
massive amount of material. I struggled with the conventions for representing empirical data. In
anthropology this data kind of gets woven into the narrative. I started to do that and it started to get
messy really fast.
Social grants – a quarter of the population receive a social grant and it’s a very reliable form of
income so it often feeds into forms of survival in terms of improvisation. So yes it is important and I
don’t think I have reflected that, and I don’t think I have used all the other material that I have.
Social grants is a different project – and you want about 10 000 words..
KH:
For my doctoral fieldwork I spent two and a half years in Ghana and I felt I was becoming more and
more expert in which I certainly was – I did surveys, was linguistically increasingly skilled, but
whenever I wrote the stuff up I only used the material that I collected in the first 12 months, which is
actually the good stuff. It read like a detective story – there were these questions I was posing and
facing a certain kind of novelty and forming hypotheses. The later period involved getting a mass of
information that I couldn’t use, so I sympathize with you .
Ghana, in 1960, had an economy larger than Indonesia’s and a per capita income that equaled South
Korea, and none of that was generated by white corporations or businesses. And the West Africans
built their own cities, they fed them, they provided transport networks – everything. So what we are
calling the informal economy there is Africans building their own cities and making them work for
themselves in the almost complete absence of capitalist enterprises.
So it’s hardly surprising that the so-called informal economy would appear to be rather less in South
Africa in a society that’s been built up around protecting the interests of mining capital and
supplying the labor and so on. I don’t think it’s an illusion to say that the informal sector is less
there.
On this question of formality and informality, and I have written a lot about it recently, but I still feel
that I’m now coming to terms with the issue that I was working on then around the early 70s,
between the 30 years of social democracy after the first world war and the neo-liberalism that came
later with the 70s as a watershed. There is no question that one would not at any other time start
from the premise, as I did, that here we have an economy which is defined by state rules.
Formality is not just a rhetorical device. It’s the notion that the state is the economy: and at that time
there were no liberal economies worth talking about. You were either a Marxist or a Keynesian, and
both believed that the only engine for development was to be found in the state apparatus.
You can’t have any social organization which is based on rules alone. In order for rules to operate
there must be content. That this is the stuff that is necessary to make the rules work, and that’s why
when unions want to stop work and not go on strike they work to rule, which is to say they don’t
observe the informal content that makes the rule structure work. So content operates in so many
different ways.
Then there is negation where you actually break the rules, and that’s a whole criminal thing, and lots
of corruption and loads of other … And finally there is what I call residue, where the second
economy comes in; which is things which are not defined by the rules at all like domesticity,
traditional peasant society – all kinds of things like that which it would be to some extent a
misnomer to incorporate into a dialectic of formal and informal.
Workshop session 4
Page 4
In my mind the second economy idea has value because it embraces stuff that the focus on the
bureaucracy and its alternatives can’t reach. I also think that the main thing we are talking about, as
I mentioned earlier, is the notion of the state being strong, and the idea of the developmental state
which in fact was quite successful in many parts of the world, but in that 30 year period was replaced
by something else as we know.
The results of privatization, deregulation and all the other armatures of neo-liberal policy at one level
can be said to have expanded the degree of informality. Certainly the world economy has become
informal to a degree that it wasn’t before. If you look at the armaments industry, drugs, piracy, grey
markets, all kinds of stuff.. it’s just enormous.
I spent some time at Wits with Eddie Webster, and guys at SWOP. Eddie was very keen to make
sure that the informal sector was just self-employment, small businesses. One of the consequences
of neo-liberalism was rampant casualisation and the removal of rules. In fact you could say that’s
what the neoliberal counter-revolution was – it’s removing these restrictions on the exploitation of
labour. So you have cleaners at Wits having their holidays removed, their guaranteed income,
having their health support, and everything else – all removed
And Eddie didn’t want to see that process of casualisation as being somehow about the informal
sector, but I think at the very least one has to examine the relationship between casualisation within
capitalist organizations and government organizations and what we are calling the informal sector.
That’s not a question. I am very stimulated by your work and other people’s work.
There was a time when people thought that anything important in an economy could be seen through
official statistics and policies, and the informal sector had the role of opening up to visibility, lots of
stuff they were not even noticing.
But at this stage, after 30 years of neo-liberalism when people say ‘African economies are 70-90%
informal’ I wonder whether one wants to continue with this baggage of formality and informality. I
think it’s a bad question to say ‘do these people see it that way?’ They never did, they never will.
This is a way to allow academics who are lackeys of the bureaucracy to pretend that they know
what’s going on but they have never been anywhere close to it.
DJ:
Just to defend myself. I was thinking about what Lizzy said in her paper. There’s a very real sense
that people felt that they wanted to be recognized and be part of a bank. They didn’t just want to be
part of some autonomous, self-organized thing in which the government says ‘you can do it yourself
– you can make just as good a bank all on your own without rules or regulations, counters or ATM
machines’.
KH:
I understood that. The really important thing is these people who never get out of the airconditioned offices and hotel rooms. The most important feature of the informal economy is this
dualism, is this notion that the world consists of what we know, and what we don’t know, and now
we’ve got this pair, we now know what we don’t know.
And that’s the most important feature: that even by labeling it in this way they can pretend that they
know what it is and what to do about it, which is not very helpful for anthropologists.
CA:
Workshop session 4
Page 5
This is a question about South Africa. You were talking about a regulatory vacuum specifically for
the taxi industry. Then in Detlev’s paper and in Ilana’s paper you were talking about conflicting laws
which is a different thing, which reminded me of Kazakhstan and Turkey. In Turkey you get more
and more rules and they all overlay each other, you never get rid of one before you put another one
in. And then you have these bargainings at the top level, you expect this kind of bargaining going
on; if you take on Statute 416 we’ll take on that particular definition the state identifies, which
means da-da-da-da. This is always going on in the background, which comes back to what you were
talking about a sort of new kind of informality as it were. That’s Turkey.
But then in Kazakhstan it’s a different thing. I don’t know if it’s because the law has gone down so
far that it is infinitely flexible. People were saying to me last year ‘the man who makes the law is
the man that stands at the other end of the government’, and it can be interpreted in any kind of way.
For the poor It’s always incredibly unclear, so you want to be in on it but nobody actually knows
what it is because it’s constantly changing, which in itself is a form of violence, to serve the poor in
that particular moment. But how it actually fits the informal into that kind of formal as well is to be
expected and to be part of it. It’s a very tense game to play
DN:
I think that is there. What would a topography of informality look like? Is the taxi industry a level
below which regulation hasn’t reached, or is it an island of informality, with violence as central to it,
in this otherwise sea of formality? I’m not sure how one would conceptualize it, but what I can say
about the taxi industry is that there have been these successive attempts at regulatory capture and
bringing it under control. Most recently a big programme to recapitalize the industry to fund new
vehicles. And even that failed. And the state is still not able to control this quite vibrant sector of the
economy that’s essentially organized along the lines very similar to the Sicilian mafia.
CA:
I cant remember who it was anymore but we were driving and this person said that she cannot stand
the taxis anymore they were unlicenced and she said that they were like pirates cruising the streets
DJ:
Keith, I was remembering you once supervised somebody at Cambridge – she wrote a PhD about the
taxi industry.
KH:
Yes, Jackie Dugard, she’s now at Wits in the Centre for Applied Legal Studies. She put a lot of
effort recently into trying to get the Constitutional Court to look at the operations of the water
companies. She did a very good study. It was a Cambridge PhD study on the taxi industry. I have
been a crook all my life so I share this perspective on the world which is that the bureaucracy is
always slower than us, they’ll never catch us because they are slow. So they keep on trying to
legalise and control the taxi industry and as soon as they lumber into some kind of attempt to
establish control the taxi industry is somewhere else. To my mind as a kind of libertarian sort of
anarchist I think it is the great thing on our side that we’re faster than they are
DJ:
In relation to what you said about the laws having only gone so far, I also came across this in
relation to the National Credit Act - an attempt to make a new law and get all this risky lending
Workshop session 4
Page 6
under control. You hear people saying ‘I don’t think that law has come to the Lowveld’, But it was
also true that it hadn’t yet come to some parts of Soweto.
And part of the reason why it hadn’t come there is because people didn’t have the necessary money
to engage with it: you had to pay to get into that particular legal regime. So even becoming part of
that involves some kind of commercial transaction which people were not able or willing to do.
KH:
I think this whole scene has changed in the last five years, and the World Bank reflects the change having spent 20 or 30 years pushing informality as a good thing, because it’s the free market and it’s
not the state.
The 80s was basically freeing up capital from political restrictions. The result is that transnational
corporations are now operating in many of these places, and the money is flowing easily in and out
which is the whole point of the exercise.
Now that they are actually running operations and not just managing money flows, they need
regulation. So I have been employed by the ILO – this is like the poacher turned gamekeeper - so I
go to the ILO and meet 34 ministers from around the world to try and figure out a way to regulate
labor given that it’s all so informal.
And I say ‘it’s all so informal because you guys destroyed the capacity of government to control
labour.’ That was the whole point. They invited me to give a keynote at a World Bank conference in
DC that was run by something that called itself PSD. I thought ‘what is PSD?’ – so I went into
Google and I got Philadelphia School for the Deaf and at the bottom it says PSD - Private Sector
Development in the World Bank.
The Breton Woods Institutions have a remit to solve global poverty, and they’re now saying that the
way to do this is to make it easier for corporations to invest in these countries - which is what Private
Sector Development operationally means.
And now the big threat is informality, so you then bring in McKinsey to go to Turkey and say ‘only
65% of VAT is being paid, if we could raise that to 90% we could reduce the VAT rate from 18% to
13%’.
So now everywhere throughout Africa the World Bank is financing conferences on how to tax these
people, how to bring them in, how to reduce the risk that they will undermine the legitimate
corporate investment that are now being made in these places.
But it has changed quite dramatically. Informality is now a bad word in these circles, because
there’s another game going on now. And what they want is, they want governments to act as
regulators, police, but they don’t want the governments to make up their own rules, because the
corporations don’t want to have to change their behaviour for every little tinpot country that has its
own regulations.
So they are using the ILO, the World Bank, the WTO, to try and create standardized corporatefriendly rules that aren’t in fact generated by these countries, but which these governments will then
implement. That’s the level of the formal/informal dialectic as it’s being played out now.
I have been asked 3 or 4 times to play a role in the standardization of international regulations.
DN:
Workshop session 4
Page 7
About that law that hasn’t come to the Lowveld – people not having money to comply – it’s about
enforcement actually. Enforcement hasn’t come to the Lowveld and that’s why the law hasn’t come
to the Lowveld; it seems to be in a lot of papers.
It’s useful to think about the way in which the state can be very much present but in some other
contexts very much absent. It’s a familiar refrain around the world, but certainly in South Africa,
there is an absence of the state.
On these matters I am quite Foucaultian - I believe in productive power. The South African state is
astoundingly good at collecting tax. SARS is this international best practice case example of how
you get your VAT revenues up, how you get everybody to pay tax.
KH:
South Africa leads the world in effective state finance - and not just that, they avoided most of the
crap from the credit boom, credit derivatives. They had effective protections in local legislation
against importing a lot of that toxicity which is one of the reasons why the Rand is appreciating.
DJ:
How has South Africa managed to gather taxes so well?
KH:
They have ways of beating people over the head – they have been practising for a long time.
IvW:
They have the best mathematicians and statisticians in SARS. My friends who have gone into those
fields are headhunted and they get paid astronomical salaries, and they work out all these statistics.
A lot of them get paid to read newspapers, to find out where there are signs of conspicuous
consumption, like Malema. That’s why he’s now under investigation
DN:
A lot of South African social policy is not made by the Department of Social Development, it’s
made by the Treasury, so there are some parts of the state that work really well. Even if there are
parts that might not. Social grants are very effective, take up rates are high, administration costs are
low, the old age pension as a global example … it depends on how you reckon it.
KH:
There’s also the fact that normative legitimacy of the state is very high in South Africa. The IRS
puts fear and trembling into everyone in the States, it is an effective coercive mechanism but it’s also
building on the notion that Americans think citizenship means pay your taxes which is not the case
in most European countries.
…………………………………………
Workshop session 4
Page 8
“Waged Entrepreneurs, Policed Informality: Work, the Regulation of Space and the Economy of the
Zimbabwean-South African Border”
Author:
Maxim Bolt
Discussant: Lizzy Hull
Maxim Bolt:
I was trying to show how different ways of making ends meet intersect with farm labour in the rather
distinctive space that is one of these border farms with resident labor; where you not only have a job
there, but your right to remain is conditional upon staying employed.
That has particular meaning in an area like the South African-Zimbabwean border where most
people are Zimbabweans and off the farms the place is cordoned with armed patrols and police
patrols who are looking for an opportunity to deport people.
I was trying to get at this informal-formal distinction, but eventually where I’m going with this is in
a sense it relates to this idea of different formalizations, but where you got one version that appears
to be quite directly mediated by employers, because on these resident farms farmers so obviously
stand between their employees and the state or higher regulatory authorities.
And then you’ve got border policing which is effectively the everyday presence of the state. You
also have the Department of Labour, and the Department of Home Affairs hanging around in the
distance, but the immediate presence is border officials and then these employers, as different ways
formalization can be experienced.
Therefore daily state regulation looks quite contradictory and unpredictable. Contradictory because
on the one hand you have Home Affairs saying ‘you are getting your permit, we’ll just delay it’. On
the other hand you have SAPS saying ‘come on go across the border – we are deporting you’.
And meanwhile what employment-related control looks like is relatively predictable and mediated
through the management, so basically having the employer standing in the way is your way to
everyday stability.
So a lot of people have come across the border from homes that are characterized by not much
everyday economic stability, because of what the Zimbabwean dollar was at the time of the
fieldwork.
The final point – I am wondering whether there is room to think about this data in terms of the fact
that for quite a lot of people the returns aren’t huge. People that are entrepreneurs aren’t making
stacks of money. I’m wondering whether what’s going on with some of these guys like shebeen
owners, is that keeping a business like this is just a way of staying on the farm.
It’s just a way to be able to make enough money to be able to live in a space where you have got
relative everyday stability and thus not have to go back to Zimbabwe.
LH:
I really enjoyed the paper. The paper is framed around a few critiques of existing literature on the
border: especially on the spatial logic.
And secondly a focus on illegal activity as being a prime informal economic activity, you changed
both of these ideas by shifting the focus from the border to the space of the farm.
Workshop session 4
Page 9
You showed the variety of ways people use money, and depend upon an intricate link to the waged
activities that people engage in on the farm. Take the example of Daniel who used to sell cannabis.
His job enables him to do this because he is in situations where he was milling around with other
guys. There are great examples of how these two things are linked together.
In highlighting these ideas – the relationship between waged work and non-waged work - is
essentially a more significant distinction in this broader context, that’s between the legal and illegal.
In order for this idea to be more convincing I think we would need to hear a little more about how
those structures of legality and illegality are set up. Your title: ‘Waged Entrepreneurs, Policed
Informality’ – we definitely heard more about the waged entrepreneurs than we do about policed
informality.
You do mention how some of the farms prevent the police from coming in to them, and you mention
how police maybe at times turn a blind eye to illegal employment, but you don’t go into all that
much detail. And presumably if the farm is this kind of pervasive spatial logic that you suggested
then the activities of the state officials would tie in with this logic.
So tell us more about that interface. I wonder whether there is a slightly too sharp distinction
between non-waged versus waged, and legal versus illegal. Because one is in the legal framework,
this does dominate, and the reason why people need these jobs is to have a legal and visible façade in
order to engage in other kinds of economic practices.
A couple of questions in relation to that would be: I was thinking about Heyman on the MexicanUSA border, you suggested a kind of willful ignoring of certain kinds of cross-border movements.
Is it almost structured into the bureaucracy such that it allows certain people to cross over? And you
suggest that one of the reasons for this is that they simply don’t have the capacity to prevent
everyone from crossing over but also that is economically necessary for a number of people to cross
over.
I wondered from that perspective whether the legal framework in that local area is – what you hint at
as this willful ignoring - is it a kind of structured thing, or is it just an inefficiency on the part of the
bureaucracy, or is it more personalized, in that maybe people know different officials? What does
that interface look like?
You describe some of the gender dynamics well - What Catherine was encouraging: to try and look
at the different scales and see how things look different from different scales. Women have these
semi-permanent positions which enable them to engage in types of economic activity that men aren’t
able to, and that creates all sorts of interdependencies between men and women. I thought that was
really interesting.
One kind of gender-related question which seems to me to be quite interesting is, do women sell
sex? That seems like a plausible form of economic activity in this kind of context and that would
shift gender dynamics to quite a great extent.
Also this idea of credit, in order to appease people that are formerly employed other people offer
generous forms of credit, or they take certain people first for a lower price. That reminded me of a
couple of things I have read … In the book Remotely Global there is a chapter on exchange where
delayed reciprocity is actually very convenient for people, which means other people have to do lots
of favors for them. Also Jane Guyer in her book looks at how status hierarchy determines different
kinds of economic exchange, and the way in which different people are prioritized according to what
she calls rank. I thought that was something else that came out of your paper.
Workshop session 4
Page 10
And finally talking about remittances back to Zimbabwe – which zoomed out to a much wider
context, which is interesting as well because it’s a contrast with this isolated place which makes it
unique place to carry out fieldwork. I wonder whether the isolation of the farm and other places
would enable quite interesting and detailed types of research on exactly what money flows are
coming into the place. You talk about money that goes out, but money that comes in is presumably
predominantly the wages of the farm workers. There are money flows entering the farm - where do
they come from? The fact of isolation has raised a whole lot of interesting research questions.
The other thing about the border: it is the identity of the Zimbabweans versus South Africans. Does
xenophobia impact on economic exchange as well?
MB:
Legality versus Illegality – it is complicated, and there is texture there but I take your point that
maybe I didn’t go into it enough. There is a significant difference.
You asked about movements and activities of state officials – there is a significant difference
between the army and the police. The army is resident. They live in garrisons along the border, one
garrison is right outside the compound. So soldiers will rotate every few weeks but while they are
there they are in the compound all the time They drink at the same shebeens as farm workers. So
they are always around. And this really changes what it means to have state presence around,
because these people are brought in by senior male workers to mediate disputes for example.
Soldiers tend to get to know particular kinds of farm workers.
What it effectively does is draw a sharp contrast between well-established workers or residents and
people who are relatively new to the area. So what you get during the harvest is suddenly hundreds
of people arriving in the area, a lot of casual work but not getting documents for quite a long time, if
at all because of these huge delays with Home Affairs.
From the soldiers’ point of view, there is a population they know and then a much wider population
which not only do they not know but have to engage with. These people continue to come onto the
farm although they have to fudge it a little bit during the harvest.
During the harvest in 2007 they fielded a football team for one of the inter-farm football matches.
They are fairly embedded - the extent to which they get to know farm workers, depending on the
status of those farm workers, and the relationship of those farm workers to particular farms.
The police on the other hand are based in Musina. They are based 60km away. They just come in
and they deport. They come in pick-up trucks and they just drive through the compound and round
people up. And they’ll bring soldiers in as scouts. They will have soldiers in the passenger seats.
Obviously that does something to the dynamics between soldiers and workers, but because some
soldiers have been there in the off-season and then they are back at the harvest, so that complicates
things again. So the permanent workers and the soldiers are simultaneously the scouts for flash raids,
and the guys who have been there at the other end hanging around.
So there is a difference between the army and police, and it’s complicated. And it does raise some
difficult questions about legality versus illegality, waged versus non-waged.
I still feel that the waged versus non-waged distinction inflects the legality-illegality in a way that’s
important to explore.
Workshop session 4
Page 11
On Heyman. Here it’s not quite the same. There is a perception among soldiers that ‘we may well
be wasting our time here – we are a long way from home, they are all coming through anyway – we
actually don’t blame them for coming through’.
And they will say things like ‘we know you are coming through just don’t cut the fence’, but then
there’s something there to record and report back. There are floodgates for streams, and when those
get broken you can’t tell how many people are coming through for example. So it gets recorded
once. The soldiers will record that as broken once, whereas if people are cutting the fence at
different points then suddenly there’s loads of people on paper coming through.
So from an army point of view it is all a bit of a waste of time. There is a ritual element, but it’s not
the ‘well we are going to let the labor get to the farms, the farmers’ estates’ attitude. From the
farmers’ perspective, on the one hand you get quite docile vulnerable labor, on the other hand, these
farms are quite big, they are quite on the radar and they are quite sensitive about it.
So the farm owner is quite keen to follow up on wages and that gets really inconvenient when people
get taken away before payday. It’s difficult to recruit when you’ve got stuff on the books that you
are trying to reconcile with farm workers when they come back ten days later through the fence
looking for their wages. So it’s actually quite inconvenient. It’s not just a neat and docile labour
force.
As far as Heyman on the border, there is a difference between the police and the army. The army are
there in garrisons. People are coming through all the time, and they are coming through with quite
human problems, like women come through pregnant, and the army’s response is ‘phone an
ambulance – this has happened’. Police coming on the scene and rounding people up is different.
The dynamics is different.
Gender – do women sell sex? It’s a real hard question to answer. I didn’t buy it! It was fairly wellknown that there were women around who were open to this suggestion of going off with soldiers
often for rations rather than money. But the difficulty is very few people would ever define
themselves as selling sex..
KH:
Selling sex isn’t a category, given the range of economic transactions that can go along with it.
FMcN:
You have survival sex and transactional sex. There is a distinction between the two.
MB:
It’s complicated where effectively the area is characterized by a population of people who are better
rooted.
KH:
There are categories based on the notion that the payment of money transforms a relationship: that’s
why selling sex has the moral connotation it does because we believe that money is an impersonal
relationship.
FMcN:
Workshop session 4
Page 12
That money can transform.
KH:
In my experience of many situations the range of transactions that go on do not put such a loaded
emphasis on the payment of money. Payment of money is part of a flow that involves many
different things. It doesn’t have the same salience.
MB:
It is relevant because in this case what’s odd about the area comes back to the fact that the spatiality
of the area is so employer-inflected on these farms. You’ve got these big resident populations
primarily of men, so what women are, or what’s factoring in when you develop relationships with
men, is not just the flow of goods but residence and having people to stand up for you. It is basically
regulated by senior men.
Remittances – does the isolation of the farm enable a detailed account of money coming in? it’s
mostly wages, but apart from that I can’t give an account because it’s not that isolated. People are
coming in and out all the time in the form of taxis and I can’t check it. It’s a good question, but the
farm is not as isolated as I make it sound in the sense that these taxis are expensive but they run
every day, even if they are empty or just picking up goods or collecting people.
Finally Zimbabweans versus South Africans on the border. It’s all Zimbabweans. Almost 95% of
black workers are Zimbabwean, even the farmers on the farms are Zimbabweans. You have a tiny
minority of South African-born people: like the foreman is South African born, farm born, Afrikaans
speaking, and there are a couple of others like that in a very small minority You have another small
category of people who are Zimbabwean-born, but they got hold of South African papers and they
are South African in the sense that they have the right papers.
But there’s a huge chunk of Zimbabwean population along the South African side of the border, and
as far as that affects the identity or dynamic, most people are very open that they are Zimbabwean.
There is Shona spoken all the time around the farm, although a lot of people are from just on the
other side of the border, where Venda is the primary language.
And occasionally, I heard the foreman getting really drunk a couple of times and staggering around
the compound ranting about Zimbabweans. He was very drunk and he didn’t do it very often for
obvious reasons.
DK:
Why is it that Zimbabweans are coming to South Africa, and now the South Africans are going
across the border and utilizing the collapsed state on the other side of the border to establish farms
there?
MB:
Who are you talking about now – Whites?
DK:
Yes or …
MB:
Workshop session 4
Page 13
There are state farms on the Zimbabwean side.
DK:
Not run by South Africans.
MB:
Actually it’s quite complicated – some white families are related across the border, so it’s not just
Black farm workers who have these cross-border networks. So there is one quite notable family on
the Zimbabwean side that is still farming. That is one of the oldest families from the Musina area.
There is another farm on the Zimbabwean side that was vacated, one of the old families was vacated
from the area.
Why wouldn’t you cross? It’s a complicated political economy on the Zimbabwean side – there is a
strong sense that ‘those poor White farmers on the other side, White farmers on the South African
side aren’t losing their land - thank God we crossed’.
DK:
Property rights – there is stability in South Africa.
MB:
Yes.
DN:
Your account of the imposition of informal, improvised forms of influx control in the form of
certification, the kind of clip art laminated badges and then made into a laminated card. That’s
wonderful because South Africa has a long history of official identity certification, so in the absence
of the or withdrawal of the state, the farmer just took that task on and they produce the kind of
marker of an identity that is sufficiently legible to the army - and that’s like the moral after-life of
influx control.
My colleague Ruth Paul has done some work on that same border, she’s documented this local
legibility: For example, if give one of those cards to a Zimbabwean farm worker, there’s a local
understanding of where he can be, so he can’t go south of a certain point. You can’t go beyond this
point because then you are an illegal refugee, but if you go north of this particular point and you
have this farmer-made ID then that’s good enough for the road. So - the local forms of legibility and
how that’s viewed by the state.
MB:
And it’s not just a band that you can’t move south of – there are farms close to Musina and then
there is a whole island of farms a few kilometers to the west, and if you are from those farms, it’s
possible that if you are caught on the border road, far enough away from the farms, they will ask
‘what are you doing here?’ Then there are of course particular sorts of police that will just round
people up
FMcN:
Workshop session 4
Page 14
Last night I watched a programme on Lagos and you made a comment about the film maker falling
in to the trap of glossing over the horrendous experience of people living there. I’m not saying
you’re doing that - but you kind of are. It’s obvious that things happening in the north are pretty
awful. From the time I was on the farm the people live in squalid conditions and the work conditions
are horrendous. And the small amounts of money they make - it’s a pitiful existence. Stability you might be trying to bring stability to it instead of instability, but it’s really desperation.
MB:
That’s an important point to make, although when you get into the permanent workforce you are
starting to get … the aristocracy of labour is pushing it, but it’s an interesting term to bring to South
African farms where you really wouldn’t think there’d be such a thing. But in that area, there is this
is a population of people who start making enough money to start accumulating. And they buy goods
and bring them into the compound.
My host – who was a senior worker, the Personnel Manager, one of the two top workers - had a
double bed, big speakers, massive TV. A lot of this is actually on credit from Musina. But the top
level workers are making R2500 a month, which is enough to start accumulating.
IvW:
And making debt.
MB:
And also making debt. Now we are getting into more complicated territory. The point is, it’s true
it’s not a nice existence, but at the top end of it you’ve got people who are not only stable, but are
able to start making something of their lives.
Another thing my host was doing, he was sending large quantities of building materials to finally get
round to building a rural home in his late 40s. That’s what he is really worried about now because
he has been working on the farm for ages. Before he was migrating to do other stuff. He was in the
army in Zimbabwe for a long time. Now he has nowhere to go. So he went on a trip back to
Zimbabwe, and took 17 sheets of metal, and those blocks with holes in for ventilators – a huge
amount of building materials. Those are accumulations.
KH:
I recommend the Nigerian blogosphere if you’re interested in reactions to that film. Nigerian
bloggers are great and that’s one of the first things that they came up with - the guy was just looking
for some romantic escapism and found people willing to supply it. Anyway, I think it’s interesting
you raised this question of how awful it is, because I was in a place in the 60s for a long time that
everybody from the outside considered impossible to live in, and yet I never got that feeling from the
people who lived there. They were all coming out of places that were worse.
The point I want to make is about massaging this Durkheimian dualism for the purposes of this
project. You talk about the longer term value of staying on the land as opposed to whatever you get
from fiddling and selling in the short term. It comes down to something I have been interested in all
my life which is: what are the conditions of movement? You can only move if you have stability.
It’s a dialectic, it’s like freedom and necessity. You can only be free if you hold certain things
constant. So I think this is a very profound human predicament that manifests itself in so many
different ways.
Workshop session 4
Page 15
Maybe it’s so obvious by now that young scholars making their names for the first time think it’s
boring, but I actually think it’s very important to develop this analysis further. But is it just being
able to stay anywhere? Is it the land and the value of working the land?
You talk about rise from nomadism, migration, and the importance of staying put at certain times,
and how you play these up against each other. It doesn’t seem to me to be surprising at all that these
informal incomes that they were generating might not be seen as the best means towards something
more important. I spent my life picking over the corpse of Parry and Bloch. My own article ‘Heads
or Tails?’, published at more or less the same time, came at it from a different point of view. I’ve
been living in Paris for 13 years and I’ve been going back to Durkheim and Mauss and especially the
Elementary Forms and this relationship to the giver and I think that this is what this project could
make more of that thread through the Parry-Bloch volume given that you’re so concerned about the
real meaning of money transactions and relationships to other stuff.
MB:
In this particular case what’s slightly strange about it is that a lot of people have come to this place
for different reasons: like their home in Zimbabwe had become unsustainable, so in some cases this
was people from along the border itself, a marginal area in Zimbabwe where people were looking for
jobs, but this is also in an area where there’s been drought which affected things. You had these huge
numbers of people coming through increasingly, having lost their jobs in Zimbabwe. They just
weren’t paid. Some teachers were not earning enough to pay transport to school.
So it’s not being in any place, but it had become a situation where you couldn’t be over there so
people headed south, looking for something. And a lot of people thought ‘we’re on our way to
somewhere like Johannesburg’, but were constantly reevaluating. They were hearing stories along
the lines of ‘it’s not great down there, it’s actually hard to get started, accommodation is expensive,
sending stuff home is more expensive’ because it’s further and the taxis cost more.
So there were various reasons why people on their way south, would just stop, or go south and then
come back, or they would end up going south.
All these different patterns, which meant it was quite a complicated place re: movement and
settlement But for those who wanted to stay, I think they were caught between north, and south, or
Johannesburg. So it ends up not just being anywhere, and not anywhere especially great either, but
something relatively sustainable. Also socially sustainable: a small bunch of people who develop a
degree of everyday sustainability through a community network. I hear this about short term
exchange and long term residence so I don’t think it is just anywhere given the unstable context of
where anywhere else might be
DJ:
I was interested in page 11 when you talk about Bozzoli and how the woman describes specifically
working in the interstices of white governed racialised spaces, i.e. domestic workers but they were
doing their thing in the backyard.
Is it right, then, that it’s not just the fact that the people on the farm you are talking about are
operating in the interstices, but that being in a place under White control actually reduces the free
flow of goods and services (that is, the market); and that’s why the position right there is a doubly
useful place to be. I guess that’s what the Bozzoli thing was about. Had they been somewhere where
there were many shops anybody could trade freely, it would’ve been different. But given the fact that
they were in these kind of spaces where there was control being exercised, this also provided
Workshop session 4
Page 16
opportunities. So I’m thinking – the same as in my paper – regulation generates opportunities.
Maybe that’s true in your case too?
And then another comment in relation to what Keith said. I got the feeling that, as in a lot of the farm
literature in South Africa – especially when the land reform debate was going on – was to show that
you need to have a place to work in order to have a place to live. The moment you drop one your
labour rights, suddenly you don’t have a place to live in any more if you are on a farm. That’s the
whole conundrum of farm living.
But your people not only need to have a place to work, and to trade in order to have a place to live,
i.e. the farm. They actually need to have a place to work and to trade and live in order to be in South
Africa, so the farms are a microcosm of South Africa in both settings. They need that place to be
just temporarily – it’s the kind of stability you keep talking about but it’s actually a very unstable
stability, is what you are saying?
MB:
Yes, absolutely.
KH:
It’s a dialectic – it’s like Simmel saying that the great thing about money is the fact that everything
else is exchanged in relation to it makes it appear to be more stable, but we know it isn’t except that
it’s always a relative thing. It’s not that these things are actually fixed in any way.
MB:
That’s very well put: not only being in the interstices but also the opportunities being created by the
fact of the limitation of who can do what. That’s absolutely true, even the basic fact that on all the
land farmed there are shops springing up everywhere – there’s double opportunity, absolutely.
Farms as a microcosm of South Africa, yes that works. As far as the other farm literature goes, it
does nevertheless need saying that this is slightly unusual. People have somewhere else in theory to
go to. At the time of fieldwork there were a number of people living in Zimbabwe - it was possible
but not desirable. It was really hard
The unstable stability is a dialectic idea which can be pushed even further … something I didn’t
mention in this paper was that how farmers are thinking about farming is changing, and on this
particular farm, as in many others, farmers are thinking less about ‘I am going be in this piece of
land forever’, and are thinking ‘well. there are land claims everywhere, therefore I’ll start thinking in
terms of trading territories, trading chunks of estate’.
So they think ‘well we have put a lot of money into the place where we are on the northern border there is no point in putting in more money in there, so to avoid paying too much for our profits in tax
we are going to use money to buy a farm on the Mozambican border which is already under a land
claim, and that will give one of our sons somewhere to go, and if the claims come through who
knows’. There’s a massive claim on the northern border but who knows what will happen there. It’s
basically a massive stretch.
But if either of them go then potentially the other one could carry on, meanwhile the one on the
Mozambican border has a ten year lag, so he can make loads of money planting sugar cane, and if
we have to sell up and we are really pushed we will still make lots of money, and they are leasing
land in Mozambique.
Workshop session 4
Page 17
So they are effectively hedging their bets and seeing themselves as land businessmen. What this
means for a permanent workforce, is that the permanence is potentially extremely impermanent, as
in they might be the most in trouble of everybody. Meanwhile, given the Zimbabwean situation at
the time of the fieldwork, people saw home through a lens, like ‘what we are doing now doesn’t
relate too much to anything – it’s just an indefinite period’.
So on the one hand you have these permanent people – but with limited permanence - where they
might go out the window as soon as the farm is sold, and by the end of the fieldwork the farm was
having the land drilled to test for the quality of the coal underneath it as another option. So the farm
might just disappear. Meanwhile the seasonal guys … permanent status, or impermanence
wondering around trying to find things to do. So the dialectic runs much further.
IvW:
My question is about stability. It seems the only measure in this paper is economic? Surely life
events have an enormous impact on it, and HIV in that area is quite high, deaths, marriages – those
kind of things don’t feature. Is it just about having some kind of stream of income and stability?
MB:
Yes … another kind of stability as far as marriage goes is the kind of stability that comes out of
relationships that develop a particular kind of permanence on the farm but nowhere else. So you get
people who go into relationships, have children and are referred to as being very robustly married,
which is why I was basically told as I did these surveys, I was told off by someone I was quite close
to – he said you can’t keep asking ‘are you single or married?’, because you are basically saying
‘are you really married?’ So you are basically pushing people unless you do it under veiled
ignorance and pretend you are stupid which is what I did.
But what there is, is ‘farm marriage’. And at Christmas people go to their other, separate marriages
back home. Some people haven’t been home for years. So there is a kind of permanence that comes
out of what the farm means in terms of marriage, as kinship networks link all the farms up, and to
villages in Zimbabwe - that also relates to a history of labour recruitment since the 1980s when the
farms basically started off.
Life events – that’s a really serious question because effectively no one really intends to die on these
farms. They know they are going to die, but they don’t want to die there.
Probably like a lot of farm dwellers in South Africa there is a graveyard for farm workers. There is
no graveyard for farm workers on these farms, you go somewhere else. People who are in the later
stages of AIDS go home. They go on permanent work leave. So even home in Zimbabwe has
become economically unstable, it’s still where you go back to when it’s all over. And there are
people like my host who are still building a house on that side- so what am I going to do if I don’t
have a job. It’s another way but it’s quite a provisional permanence
Workshop session 4
Page 18