Money and Violence: Financial Self-Help Groups in a South African Township (review)

This study aims at unraveling the everyday practices of cooperative savings groups (referred to as "mutuals") among Xhosa migrants in an informal settlement on the Cape Town periphery. Through a sustained ethnography of these mutuals, Bähre attempts to understand how the mainly women members struggled to sustain financial and social security in South Africa between 1995 and 1998. By examining the relationships between the members of these financial mutuals and individuals able to access valued state resources (such as housing), he situates these social organizations firmly within the sociopolitical landscape of early postapartheid South Africa.

While apparently private and personal, individuals' motives for establishing and sustaining such groups are instead informed by the interplay between their control over social and cultural capital, and by wider structural constraints (in employment, affordable education, basic housing, and formal financial resources). Struggles over existing scarce resources (such as limited plots, state housing, and access to loans) inform local conflicts between "Big Men or Women" (positioned as powerful interlocutors between the state and the local community) and ordinary local residents. Such conflicts (often life-threatening) that emerge in the political realm extend also to affect conflict over the rules that govern financial mutuals.

Yet there are powerful tensions between those lived realities and the ideology of mutuals. Bähre reads social relations within the financial mutuals through Xhosa notions of personhood embodied in abakhaya (those of one home)—emphasizing relations of harmony, mutual assistance, and security among urban migrants as they manage the flow of money. Despite members' attempts to discursively reinforce the idea of harmony and equality associated with abakhaya, the unequal power relations among them continue to exist and often lead to cruel acts of exclusion, and even violence. Such unequal power relations among the members serve as a cautionary note to the tendency of development theorists to romanticize the empowerment potential of mutuals for the poor.

Bähre's focus on money flows as a means to tell the narrative of South Africa in transition and the fragile social networks as experienced by those on the periphery is insightful and instructive. However, his claim that Xhosa migrate to the squatter camps of Cape Town only for money is exaggerated. He draws heavily on the body of literature on financial mutuals as a means of poverty alleviation, but he fails to take account of three other sources that would have allowed greater nuance, specifically a gendered reading of the migration and of mutuals. Anthropological literature on the gendered aspects of rural–urban migration in southern Africa might have given him greater insight into the reasons that women in particular migrate to the city. Literature dealing with the gendered impact of pass laws on the feminization of informal settlements in Cape Town explain the gendered character of survival strategies in these areas. More important, Bähre could have taken account of the literature on poor women's credit cooperatives. While he notes that the members of the mutuals are mainly women, he does not ask why this was so, and how this gendered shift has given new meanings to the term abakhaya. Catherine Higgs's historical study of women's self-help organizations in the Eastern Cape would have provided a much needed historical context for this study ("Zenzele: African Women's Self-help Organisations in South Africa, 1927–1998," African Studies Review 47, 3 [2004]). Margaret Snyder's study of Ugandan women as economic actors would have provided him with comparative insight into how gender blind financial policies tend to exclude women's particular financial strategies (Women in African Economies: From Burning Sun to Boardroom [Fountain Publishers, 2000]).

The strength of this book lies in Bähre's portrayal of poor people's—and particularly poor women's—struggles as economic actors and his emphasis on their attempts to mitigate their impoverishment within a context of everyday violence. His willingness...