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Ethnos
Journal of Anthropology
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20
Becoming a Debtor to Eat: The Transformation of
Food Sharing in Namibia
Michael Schnegg
To cite this article: Michael Schnegg (2021): Becoming a Debtor to Eat: The Transformation of
Food Sharing in Namibia, Ethnos, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.1887913
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.1887913
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UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
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Published online: 16 Feb 2021.
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Becoming a Debtor to Eat: The Transformation of Food
Sharing in Namibia
Michael Schnegg
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universität Hamburg, Germany
ABSTRACT
This article explores why people in Namibia go into debt to eat. Until recently, food
sharing practices were maintained by social relationships in which everyone owed
everyone else. This made sense, as needs would rotate evenly. However, in recent
decades, and largely through state employment and social grants, the political
economy has changed. Now, needs are distributed unequally. This article explores
how the movement of resources through time and space is altered via the
mechanism of credit/debt. The haves have become merchants and refer the have-
nots to credit books in their recently opened village stores. This has two effects: for
one, today the entire community owes only a very small number of people. Food
transfers no longer crosscut groups but manifest them. Secondly, credits do not
fully replace existing social relationships and enable sharing in other situations,
mostly around meals, which also suggests continuity in shifting forms.
KEYWORDS Food sharing; debt; social networks; colonialism; Namibia
By sharing food, we pool the risk of being left with nothing, and through food we
create, reinforce, and renew social bonds. Research among hunter-gathers in sub-
Saharan Africa normally describes this in the following scene: a man comes home
from a successful hunt and joins the group of people with whom he lives. He is
expected to share the largest part of his prey with his neighbours, so he gives. Soon,
a woman returns and offers roots, fruit, and leaves. They all sit around the fire, talk,
and eat. In a relatively small social group such as this, all members of the community
give and receive from time to time and their social relationships are maintained by the
willing debt everyone has with everyone else.
If we trust the ethnography of the German missionary Heinrich Vedder, food sharing
was similar among the Damara people (ǂNūkhoen) in northwestern Namibia when he
and the German colonisers arrived at the end of the nineteenth century (Vedder
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduc-
tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
CONTACT Michael Schnegg michael.schnegg@uni-hamburg.de
ETHNOS
https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.1887913
1923a;1923b).
1
Indeed, his ethnography served Karl Polanyi as the blueprint for the
description of ‘redistribution’, one of the three modes of exchange he introduced in
The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1944:53).
2
At the time of German colonisation,
most Damara people were hunter-gatherers and lived lives saturated with mobility in
the abundant, albeit arid environment. There was no nation-state, little or no standar-
dised money, and only selected goods were exchanged with other ethnic groups.
A couple of months ago, I arrived at one of the communities the missionary
described at the beginning of the twentieth century. I, too, sat around a fire. Meat
was still important, so to honour my presence, Charles, my assistant and friend of
many years, asked me if I would like to have some.
3
‘Sure,’I replied. Charles sent
his son to the shop next door to get one of the pre-packaged one-kilo plastic bags of
antelope meat the shop owner bought from a neighbouring hunting farm. When his
son asked if he had any money, Charles said, ‘No. Surude-re!’
Surude is a relatively new word in Fransfontein, but it is heard frequently in the
streets. Borrowed from the German Schuld, it means debt (Haacke 2002: 126). The
shop owner maintains a credit book for Charles and his wife’s purchases.
4
The shop
owner, a government employee from Walvis Bay, Namibia’s wealthy port town,
adds the cost of the packaged meat to Charles’s long-account debt. While we were
still getting meat from the neighbours, in the end, only Charles and his wife were in
debt. This debt has a concrete number attached to it and must be paid back.
The aim of this article is to explore and to explain how economic resources, mostly
food, travel through time and space via the mechanism of credit/debt, which has
changed significantly since the early colonial period. By changed, I do not mean to
say that food sharing has transformed from one form into another but that sharing
practices have become more diverse and blurred. The above situation already indicates
this. Charles sent his son to buy meat on credit (surude), which he shared with me.
These observations have led me into questioning, in this article, how food sharing
has transformed, why these changes have occurred, and what the corresponding
social consequences are. To answer these questions, I develop an analytical framework
that combines the anthropological analysis of debt and exchange with network theory.
Theorising Debt in Social Relationships
In his seminal essay Marcel Mauss argued that gift-giving is less innocent than typically
assumed (Mauss 1923). In short, he proposes that giving changes the relationship
between the two parties involved. Those that receive are expected to give back, and
therefore gifts create debt. Gifts put the receiver in a subordinate position, which,
the argument follows, might have motivated the giving in the first place. The circula-
tion of goods initiated to reduce those debts becomes an institution, a complete social
fact, in Durkheim’s terms. It links actors –and their futures –and forms cohesiveness
in groups (Caillé 2000; Graeber 2001; Widlok 2016).
In African societies, the exchange of people (through marriage) and food both
create debt and cohesion in social groups. For sub-Saharan Africa, Kuper has shown
how marriage and bridewealth structure the exchanges of pastoral and agricultural
2M. SCHNEGG
products between wife-takers and wife-givers (Kuper 1982;2016). Since marriage pay-
ments are never made once and for all, a debt remains after the wedding celebration
ends. This creates a cycle of exchanges, which links families through time and space
and maintains the social order in and between groups (Krige & Comaroff1981;
Shipton 2007; Pauli & van Dijk 2016). While agreeing that marriage creates these
relationships between groups, Meillassoux has shown that debts must not be balanced
and can result in class-like structures in the pre-capitalistic world (Meillassoux 1981).
The other significant domain where exchange creates debt is that of food, and the
literature has shown that people give food with some expectation of receiving back
(Cashdan 1990; Schnegg 2015). While there is an agreement that food exchanges
create responsibilities, the processes are less clear. In his comparative analysis of
exchange in African hunter-gatherer societies, Woodburn has shown that debts
hardly accumulate as long as goods are returned ‘immediately’. Only ‘delaying’
giving back results in lasting debt and –eventually –stratification in society (Wood-
burn 1982). In subsequent works, Woodburn and others further elaborated that in
many egalitarian societies sharing is not only immediate but also on demand. After
a successful kill, the hunter has little control over who receives what. What they
seem to own and share at first sight is actually much more a collective good (Bliege
Bird & Bird 1997; Schnegg 2016). If this is so, food sharing can hardly create lasting
debts between the parties involved (Peterson 1993; Woodburn 1998; Gregory 2012;
Widlok 2013;2016; Schnegg 2016).
In recent years, many ethnographers have pointed to the new forms that debt takes.
They show the rising importance of institutionalised money lenders, including banks,
NGOs, state agencies, private companies, and informal microlending, and the depen-
dencies they create (Peebles 2010; Shipton 2010; Bähre 2011; Graeber 2011;Han2011;
Guérin et al.2012; Guérin 2014; Villarreal 2014; James 2014b;2020; Laws 2019). In
relation to sub-Saharan Africa, the work of James stands out. In her ethnography
she shows how lower-middle-class households in South Africa became indebted
when apartheid left them without property, savings, inheritance, or adequate salaries.
With capitalism and democracy requiring monetary participation, many households –
especially those that had regular wages –went into debt to meet the steadily rising
needs (James 2014a;2014b).
These aspirations not only include more recent consumer goods (e.g. cars, TVs, fur-
niture, etc.) but long-standing social institutions like marriage and weddings as well
(Pauli 2019). At the same time, the new means of acquisition transforms these
goods. In the past, for example, lobola payments were made when daughters
married, and the family itself received something in exchange. Today, institutionalised
moneylenders borrow resources to finalise bridewealth payments which changes the
meaning of the institution itself (James 2014a;2017). In a similar vein, Solway has
described how marriage rituals that once continued over decades have collapsed
into a narrow time frame. The transformation from ‘slow’to ‘fast’marriages interrupts
the slow social embedding marriage used to entail (Solway 2016).
The two ways of instigating debt –social exchange and money lending –differ sig-
nificantly in regard to their social formations and effects (Peebles 2010; Graeber 2011;
ETHNOS 3
James 2012). Bloch & Parry (1989: 24) have referred to the social and monetary
exchanges as short-term (amoral) and long-term (moral) transfers. Moreover, both
forms typically coexist as ‘two related but separate transactional orders’which
allows people to translate relationships from one regime into the other (Bloch &
Parry 1989). This is also what is happening with marriage payments, when, for
example, lobola is refinanced through credits, or, when marriages are ‘short’(James
2014a; Solway 2016).
The opening vignette already indicates that something comparable is occurring
with food. For one thing, people go into debt to eat; furthermore, Charles also uses
the food acquired also to share with me. Through food, we can further explore the
transformation of debt in African societies and grasp the wider social consequences
this development creates.
Conceptual Approach, the Social Structure of Debt
To facilitate my comparison of debt over time, I extend Mauss’s analysis conceptually
and methodologically. Mauss contrasted the ethnographic evidence he could find with
Malinowski, Boas, Krämer, Thurnwald, and many more (Mauss 1923). While this
allowed him to contrast cases, it did not provide a rigid methodological framework
to compare debt in social relationships across space and time (Schnegg & Lowe
2020). To facilitate the development of such a comparative approach, I mobilise
network thinking as a conceptual guide.
Over the last few decades, social network analysis has grown into a theoretical and
methodological field to analyse social relationships and the networks they form (Gran-
ovetter 1985; Wasserman & Faust 1994; Schnegg 2018). For the case of food sharing
this means exploring who gives to whom, and what larger structures the resulting net-
works form (Ziker & Schnegg 2005). From these networks of giving and taking we will
be able to see how debt, inscribed in relationships, is distributed across society.
To study the social structure of debt comparatively, two aspects of debt are
especially important. First, with Mauss, we will want to know whether debt is balanced
out or not. I refer to this structural principle as the symmetry of debt. Second, I propose
to explore how debt is distributed among all social actors in the community. I refer to
this as the degree of centralisation of debt. Network theory provides straightforward
concepts with which to assess both. A relationship is symmetrical if it goes both
ways, or, if you will, if a debt that was created through one transaction is balanced
out at a later stage. It is asymmetrical if it goes only one way.
5
The centralisation of
a network refers to the degree to which the ties of a network concentrate on only a
few creditors. Empirically this entails exploring whether all the people involved owe
each other in similar ways, or whether all owe a few actors who in return give to
the rest of the community.
Combined with my ethnography, the network perspective provides a framework to
show how the transformation in the larger economy changes the modes of exchange.
However, before proceeding with the analysis, some words on the political economy
and the ethnography are in order.
4M. SCHNEGG
Money from the Namibian State
Since the early twentieth century, when Vedder observed the sharing of meat and veld
fruits in the field, Namibia’s economy and the role of the state has changed drastically.
Three developments are particularly important for food sharing. First, money and
markets have become part of the everyday. Second, the state has become the most
important employer in the national economy. Third, inequality within Namibian
society has drastically increased. Let me briefly explain all three.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the German colonial state forced the indi-
genous population into its growing capitalist economy. In doing so it significantly
restricted the amount of land available to indigenous groups (Schnegg et al. 2013; Sul-
livan & Ganuses 2020). The best farmland was given to settlers of European descent,
and the indigenous population was forced to live in areas much too small for survival
using their extensive livelihood strategies such as hunting and gathering and pastoral-
ism. Because people could hardly make a living from their established livelihoods
anymore, they were forced to buy the sugar, maize meal, and other goods the
German traders brought. To survive in the changing economy, money became a neces-
sity, and selling one’s labour became a means to access it. Furthermore, the colonial
state introduced a set of seemingly absurd taxes in the hinterlands such as taxes for
grazing and taxes for dogs, to name but two (Gordon 2007). These levies further
obliged indigenous people to sell their labour or the product of their work (e.g.
milk, meat, vegetables) in the growing capitalistic economy. The colonial capitalist
economy and the entire political system was built on commercial cattle farms. As in
other parts of the world, both policies –creating resource scarcity, and taxation –
assured the necessary indigenous workforce for the farms.
Almost a century and a half later, global markets and money permeate economic
behaviour in Fransfontein in manifold ways. Ellerines, a South African furnishing
company, brings sofas and cupboards by pickup trucks to middle-class homes
almost every week (for similar observations see, Laws 2019). Cellphones produced
in Asia are for sale in Khorixas, the nearby town. And the small shops in Fransfontein
provide groceries that include maize meal from the US, cooking oil from Malaysia, and
sugar from Germany, to name a few of many connections to the global economy. To
pay for those goods, people work on commercial farms or, more recently, teach in local
schools or work elsewhere in the growing government sector. Moreover, as in other
countries in this part of the world, significant state transfers and social grants fuel
the local economy (Bähre 2011; Ferguson 2015).
The second major transformation in the political economy concerns the role of the
state in the national economy. Starting during the South African occupation, the gov-
ernment has become the most important employer in Namibia. Government employ-
ees were mostly teachers, or worked in hospitals, school hostels, or the ministries. With
Namibia’s independence in 1990 the public sector again grew significantly. This led to
a number of developments that are not unique to Namibia but which characterise
several newly independent countries on the continent. In South-Africa, for example,
employees in the government sector soon formed a significant part of the emerging
ETHNOS 5
black middle class (Southall 2004). The same state employment also providing the col-
lateral for loans that James describes (James 2014b). In Malawi, civil servants in urban
and peri-urban areas deeply intertwine the state and local society through their salaries
and the economic opportunities this creates (Anders 2009). In Namibia, with indepen-
dence the state removed the racial criteria from the ‘old age pension payments’, a dis-
criminatory scheme that began during South African colonial (Bähre 2011: 381). Since
then, all men and women aged 60 and above, regardless of race, get a fixed amount of
cash every month. The pension payments are only sufficient to maintain the house-
hold’s basic needs. However, they have, as Bähre (2011: 382) argues convincingly,
led to a situation in which many households now rely on the elderly to generate
income. In addition to that, through the employment of teachers and other govern-
ment employees and by raising their salaries, the state created a local economic elite
(Pauli 2019). Often, they became hubs around which many households revolve for
their cash needs.
The third transformation is partly a result of the first two and concerns the distri-
bution of wealth in rural communities. The ǂNūkhoen used to be a largely egalitarian
society in which economic differences were small, but in recent decades, wealth
inequality has increased significantly (Pauli 2019). At a funeral I attended in Fransfon-
tein a few months ago, some of the attendants arrived in 50,000 euro SUVs, while
others parked their donkey carts next to them. Some people take vacations in
Europe and the US, but the majority in Fransfontein have never paid to stay overnight
anywhere.
Being in Fransfontein
Fransfontein is a community of roughly 250 households in arid northwestern Namibia.
The communal lands surrounding Fransfontein are dotted with small settlements in
which people live pastoral lives in the arid environment (Schnegg 2019). Most inhabi-
tants of the area consider themselves ǂNūkhoen (also called Damara in the literature
and by other social groups).
In Fransfontein, only the emerging middle class –mostly teachers and public ser-
vants –can count on steady income. In addition to those incomes from wage
labour, the ‘old age pension payment’increased from 130 Namibian dollars (N$) to
N$1,300 during the past 15 years (2004–2019).
6
On the day of the month when
wages and old age pensions are paid, people purchase the most basic staples –maize
meal, tea, and sugar –in quantities expected to last for the next month. For a household
of five, a typical first shopping trip would include 50 kg of maize, 5 kg of sugar, and a
box of tea. After the basic supplies are purchased, the remaining money is used to buy
other basic goods, including tobacco, soap, and deodorant. In addition, school fees are
paid, the health clinic may be visited, and people engage in other activities as their
financial resources allow. Those purchases can be made in 14 small stores in Fransfon-
tein, each of which offer between 20 and 100 products –the most basic daily supplies.
7
In Fransfontein, approximately two-thirds of the households have at least one
member who receives a pension payment. This is not because the population is so
6M. SCHNEGG
old but because households group around pensioners and the money they provide.
8
On the day pensioners receive their pay, referred to as Kairakhoen pais (old people’s
pay), the atmosphere in Fransfontein turns festive. People living in the hinterlands
hitch their donkeys to their carts. In Fransfontein, where the money is paid out, the
donkey carts linger in the shade of trees, waiting for people to finish their errands.
After money has been received, the outstanding debts have been paid, and shopping
is complete, the local bars are often bustling. There are few distractions in the sparsely
populated area, so people enjoy spending time with a beer among their kith and kin.
However, this spending is short-lived. Even those who receive regular pension pay-
ments and wages or salaries often spend their money within the first few days after
receiving it. After that, other means are needed if cash is short.
Ifirst experienced the festive atmosphere around payday in 2003 when I lived with
my wife and colleague, Julia Pauli, and our 2-year-old daughter for over a year in
Fransfontein. Some of the data and the experiences I report in this article were col-
lected then. From then on, I continued to return to Fransfontein regularly and for
shorter visits. Now I own a small hut and some livestock myself and am not perceived
simply as an outsider anymore. Over those years, I have also learned the language
spoken by the people, Khoekhoegowab, and manage daily conversations quite well.
As a neighbour and member of the community, I take part in many of the practices
I describe here.
In addition to participant observation, I have conducted interviews about the mean-
ings and practices of food sharing since our first stay in 2003. Besides informal talks, I
have tackled a wide range of themes in semi-structured interviews, including the origin
and history of sharing, the rules and taboos that apply, the ways sharing is remembered
as an experience from early childhood, and the general circumstances under which
sharing takes place.
To better understand the social structures that emerge from sharing food, in 2004 I
conducted a survey of 62 households. During 10 days in March, we interviewed 43
households in Fransfontein and 19 in two farming communities of the surrounding
hinterland.
9
The households in Fransfontein were chosen on the basis of almost one
year of ethnographic work with the aim of capturing variation in and heterogeneity
of sharing in the population. For the two communal settlements surrounding Frans-
fontein, all households were interviewed. Each morning we visited the households
and questioned the female head about the transfers the household had engaged in
during the last 24 h.
As I came to Fransfontein again and again, I began to realise how things were
changing. On the one hand, I noticed that people seldom came to ask at each other’s
houses anymore to express the demand for food, a practice that had been so widespread
in the past. Moreover, many people complained that they had a debt at one of the
stores, a debt that placed additional economic burdens on them. Taking note of both
changes, I began wondering whether and how those two processes were related.
To capture this, in 2019 I replicated the study we had done in 2004. Once again, I
sampled 44 households in Fransfontein and 17 on the neighbouring farms. By now, the
community had grown significantly and I decided to interview all households in a
ETHNOS 7
particular neighbourhood. The neighbourhoods were selected to be ethnically and
economically heterogeneous so as to represent the larger community rather well. In
contrast to the initial survey in 2004, I repeated the data collection only on three con-
secutive days.
10
This was much easier logistically. In addition, the analysis of the 2004
data had shown that sharing patterns remained stable over the days. All in all, I am
confident that my long-term participation in the community combined with the quan-
titative surveys and open-ended interviews facilitated an adequately complex picture of
the social changes that took place.
Demanding a Share
It was late morning when we came to Olga’s hut. Olga, an elder pastoralist, had just
released her small stock to graze in the open pastures that surrounded her home.
She kindled the fire to prepare some maize meal (called porridge in this part of the
world) and tea. When she saw me, she smiled. ‘You again, Michael. Did I still not
answer all the questions you have?’‘No, there is something else,’I replied. We sat
down to talk. The water in the kettle started simmering, indicating that it was about
to boil. Olga went into the hut and came back with two cups for tea. ‘There is no
sugar,’she said. She called her grandson, who lived with her in the rural hinterlands.
‘Here, take this cup!’she said, sending him to the neighbour’s house to ask for some
sugar. Soon, the boy returned and put the cup full of sugar in front of us. She
poured some out, and then poured the tea. What we could not see was that he had
approached the neighbour’s house demanding, Au te re sugur-e,‘give me some
sugar’. When they gave him the sugar, he did not say thanks.
When I started working in Fransfontein in 2003, people distinguished three major
food transactions: augu,māgu, and |goragu.
11
The most common, augu, describes situ-
ations like the one above. The word au derives from the Afrikaans word ou, which
means ‘to give’. As with a number of Afrikaans and German words, it was introduced
into Khoekhoegowab during colonial rule, and its meaning changed.
12
Today, the
usage in Khoekhoegowab entails the assumption that a transaction is initiated by
the one who wants and who is therefore likely to receive. Augu fits very well with
what Peterson has referred to as demand sharing more generally (Peterson 1993)
and with what Widlok and Laws describe among the Haiǁom and Ju|’hoansi in
Namibia (Widlok 1999;2013;2016; Laws 2019).
Augu is only practiced with certain goods and in certain situations. Most impor-
tantly, if one needs or sees a basic good like sugar or maize meal, one has the right
to demand a fair share. Fair here implies enough to meet one’s immediate pleasure
or need. Access to the good is regulated through group membership and not
through private ownership. Although at some point the good was bought in a shop,
it is much better conceived as a collective property to which members of the social
group have access rights. In short, if you have something, you must share it with
those who belong. The only way to avoid an augu demand is to hide. If it is known
that one has some good that others need, the social costs of not giving would be
much too high (Schnegg 2016).
8M. SCHNEGG
In 2004, 62 people in Fransfontein engaged in 1,087 augu transactions during the
10-day period, which means almost two transactions a day. The list of the food
items transferred (Table 1) makes very clear that people exchange basic food goods,
mostly sugar, maize meal, and tea.
Being members of the community ourselves, my family and I were asked almost
every day if we could give some sugar, tea, or other goods from Table 1. I initially
understood this to be the locals’attitude towards the rich anthropologists from the
North, but I soon learned that it actually applied to anyone in the community. Learn-
ing to give was easier for me. It took much longer to learn how to demand. For
example, seeing someone with dried meat (biltong), anyone would demand a share.
How could one not want a piece of something delicious and rare? I like biltong too.
And yet in the beginning, I often thought that unlike others, I could go to the super-
market to buy some. Why should I demand a share of something that is worth much
more for those who do not have access to this alternative? It took me time to learn that
demanding a share as the rich white man is not rude, but the opposite. By asking, I
expressed that I wanted to belong. This behaviour, which took me some time to
learn, is commonplace among the local middle class and the elite. Like me at a later
stage, they ask their share if the poor occasionally have some desirable good.
All in all, the demand sharing I observed in the beginning of the millennium shows
marked differences from the redistribution Vedder described as a model case about a
hundred years before. Three changes are significant for my argument: first, the trans-
action is now initiated by those who are in need. Second, the group in which sharing
takes place is larger than before and includes immediate neighbours and people from
adjunct communities. And third, the demand for increasingly diverse food now refers
to goods that were initially bought and which were part of the market economy
(Schnegg 2015;2016). How can this be explained?
Table 1. Distribution of goods transacted over a period of 10 days in 2004 (N= 1087).
Items Frequency Percentage
Milk 125 11.9
Sugar 124 11.8
Coffee/Tea 109 10.4
Tobacco 93 8.8
Firewood 81 7.7
Meat 75 7.1
Maize meal 52 4.9
Spices 41 3.9
Bread 35 3.3
Vegetables 33 3.1
Money 32 3.0
Salt 31 2.9
Snuff30 2.9
Cooking oil 28 2.7
Medicine 26 2.5
Tools/Repair 26 2.5
Other food items 23 2.2
Others 123
Total 1,087 100
ETHNOS 9
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the German colonisers began forcefully
taking most of the land from indigenous communities. With much less land to use,
indigenous people could not so easily maintain their livelihoods (Schnegg et al.
2013; Sullivan & Ganuses 2020). At the same time, and to compensate for this, the
colonial system introduced new goods including sugar, maize meal, and tea in north-
western Namibia. Many of the goods listed in Table 1 share this history. To obtain
those, people needed to sell their products or, more importantly, their labour in the
colonial capitalist economy. This created needs and aspirations for consumer goods,
including maize meal, sugar, and tea, which began to substitute for meat and fruits
as the staple foods. Increasingly, money became necessary to access food. At the
same time, people often found themselves with insufficient cash and hence could
not provide themselves with those staples in the short term. They started to make
demands of those who had those goods. Iron, a man born around 1920, explained
this to me as we talked about the transition from redistribution to demand sharing
in 2005.
When we were young, this was different. There was none of this au te re, au te re, (give me this,
give me that). The people would just give. If my grandfather would come home at the end of the
day, he would bring something for the family. We would share. Things changed when money
came in. Now the people would have all these things and their friends would seethis. They also
wanted to have. This is when things changed.
Whereas the transformation from redistribution to demand sharing changed some
aspects of the social institution, others remained similar or the same. In the introduc-
tion I referred to symmetry and centralisation as two central aspects of how debt is
located in social networks and relationships. Let us turn to symmetry first. As with
redistribution, all people in Fransfontein are still givers and receivers at some point
in time. So, while demanding creates a debt, those debts remain more or less symmetri-
cal. You demand today, I demand tomorrow. Looking at all relationships over the 10-
day period, about 44 per cent were reciprocated; that is, they went both ways. As I have
shown elsewhere, this level of symmetry is much higher than expected by chance and
thus refers to a salient characteristic of the social network itself (Schnegg 2015).
Moreover, augu relationships are embedded in other exchanges –including the
sharing of labour, kinship, land, and water –which balances out the relationship
between any two people. Therefore, while all giving and taking creates some form of
debt, an exact measurement is often neither considered nor applied. Whereas people
might refer to someone as a person who owes something to them, no one knows
exactly how much this is. The balance is deliberately kept fuzzy and open, and it main-
tains the relationship.
Let us turn to centralisation. The degree of centralisation in a network describes the
number of ties that concentrate on only a few individuals. In the case of demand
sharing, we can distinguish between networks in which most members of the commu-
nity turn to the few who are better off, and networks in which all members turn to one
another with similar frequencies. In the former case, the centralisation of debt would
be very high; in the latter it would be very low. The analysis of the distribution for all
10 M. SCHNEGG
augu transaction in 2004 shows that the level of centralisation is very low compared to
similar networks of this type (Schnegg 2006). This indicates that all members of the
community owe each other, not just the few who are wealthier. However, this is begin-
ning to change.
Becoming a Debtor to Eat
Almost 15 years after the visit I reported above, I approached Olga’s house again. Her
hut had been renewed every year after each rainy season. Even though the materials
had been replaced gradually, it still looked the same: walls made of sticks and mud,
a simple cement floor, and corrugated irons as a roof. ‘You are still around,’Olga
said while she rose from the shadow in which she had rested. ‘No, I am back. Can
we chat?’‘Of course, let me get something to drink.’She called the girl playing in
the back. ‘Go to the shop to get some Coke.’I realised that it was already the
middle of the month, when people typically have used up all their cash. I wanted to
be polite. ‘Do you have money or shall I go with her?’I asked. ‘Do not worry, I will
pay later,’she replied, while the girl went to the shop her neighbour maintains.
Sharing had changed. While Olga still shared the drink with me in the same hospi-
table and amicable manner she had shared the tea in 2003, she got the Coke from a
neighbours’shop where she had credit –not, as with the sugar few years ago, from
her neighbour with whom she reciprocated. In Fransfontein and beyond, this form of
buying on credit in local shops is called surude. As mentioned above, surude is a
direct borrowing from the German word Schuld (debt). Borrowing a German word to
express owing someone something materially in a debt that needs to be paid pack in
an agreed amount and at an agreed time indicates that the concept has not existed for
too long. To better understand whether and how sharing has changed and if buying
on credit (surude) is replacing demand sharing (augu) systematically, I interviewed 61
households that listed 134 transactions which were referred to as surude or augu.
The distribution of transactions in Table 2 makes two things clear. First, the impor-
tance of augu has drastically decreased. While people engaged in almost two augu trans-
actions every day in 2004, 15 years later this number had dropped to one transaction
every two days.
13
Moreover, the types of goods shared did not drastically change.
To the extent that augu has decreased, surude has gained salience. More than half as
many goods are bought on credit as are shared on demand. Importantly, those are the
same goods. And, as I will show in detail below, it is not only that the same things are
now exchanged differently. The exchanges also take place with the same people –
neighbours, kin, and friends from the community. If the same relationships are
bearing a very different sort of transaction (surude), if is likely that these new trans-
actions are reconfiguring the social structure of the community.
But who are the people who give out goods today? There are 14 shops in Fransfon-
tein. Some of them operate out of the owner’s house, often literally through the
window, and sell the most salient everyday items: basic food, tobacco, soap, toiletries,
writing materials, and the like –rarely more than 50 items or so. Others are shacks,
roughly assembled in the yards of those who operate them from zinc plates bought
ETHNOS 11
when the money was there and business spirits were high. Still others are more stable
structures of brick and cement that reflect more detailed plans. All shops are owned by
the better-off. Their owners need not only access to capital to buy stocking, but also
access to a car to supply them regularly. In the vast majority of cases, more than 70
per cent, the part-time merchants receive a paycheck from the government. They
work for the public school, the Namibian post, the Namibian water supply, the tra-
ditional authorities, the town council, the health clinic and so forth.
Of the 14 shops in Fransfontein, 11 offer credit. They keep credit books to note the
exact amounts their customers have not paid. They document by hand how much a
customer owes in standard school notebooks, the same ones used for almost all
writing in the community. Shop owners typically keep one book for each customer,
and each item they take on credit is noted accurately. In Fransfontein, trust is low.
Once a customer pays back an amount, it is scratched out: paid.
To better understand the amount and the structure of debt in the community, I
asked the owners for permission to inspect their credit books. Fortunately, all 11
shops agreed, which enabled me to reconstruct the complete network of debt relation-
ships. These books reveal that the people in Fransfontein owe in total about N$122,000
for food. Because some shop owners give out credit more readily than others, the debt
relationships tend to concentrate on specific individuals. Roughly 30 per cent of this
debt is to one the merchants. An additional 20 per cent goes to the next largest creditor.
In both cases, the owner and their families are well-respected people in the community.
And, they both work for the government. In total they maintain more than 100 credi-
tor relationships. That is, one-third of the households in the community have become
their debtors to eat.
Table 2. Distribution of goods transacted over a period of 3 days in 2019 (N= 134).
Transaction augu surude Total
Sugar 26 13 39
Maize meal 17 8 25
Cooking oil 7 5 12
Cool drink 1 1
Meat 2 9 11
Tea 8 3 11
Soup 4 3 7
Bread 1 1
Salt 10 10
Onion 2 1 3
Spice 1 1
Fish can 1 1
Butter 2 2
Yeast 1 1 2
Mayonnaise 1 1
Coffee 1 1
Jabula (alcoholic drink) 1 1
Potatoes 1 1 2
Rice 1 1
Baking powder 1 1
Oros (cookies) 1 1
Total 85 49 134
12 M. SCHNEGG
According to the community council, Fransfontein has 250 households with 600
adults living there. If we consider the N$122,000 as total debt, this would come to
roughly N$200 of debt per capita. By law, a day labourer must be paid about N
$70 per day in Namibia, although it is often much less in reality. Thus, the
amount each household of the community owes equals about three days’worth of
work.HowdoesthiscomparetocountrieslikeEuropeortheU.S.?InGermany,
for example, households owe on average 2,300 euro in consumer credit and make
about 4,500 Euro a month before taxes –and hence on average owe about 10
days’worth of work.
14
So, while the debt in Fransfontein is still comparably low,
one has to keep in mind that most people there do not have a steady income
when comparing the two. Thus, it may take a labourer a month or so to get three
days of paid work.
I have introduced the symmetry and the centralisation of relationships as two con-
cepts that reveal how the location and distribution of debt in the community has
changed. Augu, which balances out quickly and is decentralised, remains a factor in
social life. Surude creates a different structure of debt. For one thing, all relationships
are asymmetrical. One household gives and the other owes. At least within this
domain, the relationship will never be reciprocal. Moreover, the quality of the relation-
ship has changed. While the debt was deliberately open and fuzzy in the past, it must
now have an amount that can be paid back. Once the debt is paid, the debtor–creditor
relationship comes to an end. Another difference in the structure of the debt is that
with surude, the network of debt is highly centralised. As I have shown, two of the
14 shops in the community lend money in the form of food credit to more than
one-third of the community. Before I discuss how this has changed the social structure
of the community, I will briefly explore how surude emerged.
Making Markets for Money
During the last 15 years, the amount of cash in the economy has significantly increased.
On the one hand, the number of people who are employed in the public sector has
grown –and so have their salaries. While a teacher made about N$2,500 a month in
the beginning of the year 2000, the salaries are about N$10,000 a month today.
During the past 15 years, the prices of the most basic goods like sugar, maize, and
tea have increased by a factor of two. Even if we factor this out, the salaries have
still doubled. The same can be said about the pension payments. In 2004 a pensioner
would get N$130; in 2019, N$1,300. If we consider the same inflation rate again, the
pensioner’s buying power has also increased by a factor of five.
Those numbers show to what extent the amount of money circulating in the local
economy has increased. Since the nearest town with a supermarket and a clothing store
is about 25 kilometres away, a significant part of residents’earnings is spent in Frans-
fontein. There is no public transportation and those without cars have to wait for a lift,
which they have to pay for. This adds N$50 to the cost of the trip to any shopping
outside of Fransfontein. This geographical isolation supports the increase in the
number of shops in Fransfontein.
ETHNOS 13
In Fransfontein, money is a volatile resource and most people spend cash in the first
few days after receiving it. This is not only true for the farm workers and pensioners
who make less than N$1,500 a month, but also for teachers and other governmental
employees who earn up to 10 times as much. I know many who do not have a
single cent left a week after they get paid. When cash is short, shops also compete
for customers, as Rosalia explained to me. Rosalia is a relatively new shop owner
who operates a store from her yard. In the past few years, she has become the most
important creditor in the community. When her husband became head of an impor-
tant government institution in a nearby town, they both thought about how they could
invest some of the additional income. And Rosalia was also looking for a new project
and a new social role. Like all shops in Fransfontein, Rosalia offers credit for free. This
differs from what Laws report for another areas in Namibia, Tsumkwe, where up to 100
per cent interest is charged, and this largely contributes in establishing social categories
and groups (Laws 2019). In Fransfontein, customers do not pay any interest for buying
food on credit; however, they do if they borrow money. When I asked why, Rosalia
explained: ‘Well, we do this because otherwise people cannot buy.’When I asked
her how she made sure they would actually pay her back, and if it was difficult to
run after kith and kin for the owed money, she said, ‘No, not at all. This is business.
You must be able to separate.’Even though their shop has relatively few products
(around 50 or so), Rosalia consistently carries more than N$40,000 in credit to
people in the community. As her credit books indicate, many of them have not paid
for years. So, is it really that easy to separate personal relationship from business trans-
action? And, is it only an economic transaction being made? On both sides? As we will
see below, this embeddedness of relationships has consequences for the social structure
of the community, far beyond the economic domain.
While those who give credit compete for customers and for ways to profit from the
money they have, there is also another side to the relationship: those who seek. Why do
they no longer demand from their neighbours? Why don’t they reciprocate without
money involved, as they did in the past? When this topic came up with Magdalena,
a woman in her mid-40s who maintains her family with occasional jobs, she replied,
Today, it is not like in the past anymore. Then, everyone had to ask. We were all poor. Today,
many people can just go to the shops. They buy their things there. Then you feel bad if you ask
them all the time. This is why this is going down.
As her answer indicates, the availability of regular income to some leads to the (self-
)stigmatisation of those without regular access to cash.
The availability of money, increasing stratification, and rising aspirations explain
the salience credits have obtained, but what are the consequences of credit’s increased
salience?
Reconfiguring Relationships
As we have seen, surude workswiththesamegoodsandamongthesamepeopleas
other types of exchange. Because of this, surude is reconfiguring relationships and
14 M. SCHNEGG
likely to change the social structure of the community. Where could this lead?
When I asked Tina about the debt she had and the extent to which surude had
changed her relationships, she replied, ‘Youalwaysaskthosepeoplewhereyou
feel comfortable –where you have a good communication to start with. Then
you know that they will accept it and you do not feel bad.’When I probed
further and asked her how it feels to meet such a person in the street or in
church, she explained,
If it is the first time, you feel fine. The people know that you do not have employment and they
are aware of how difficult it is to pay back. They knew this when they gave credit to you. Only
when you cannot pay over longer periods of time do you start feeling bad. Then, you sneak out,
you try to hide. You try not to meet on the streets to avoid being ashamed.
The reconfiguration she describes is less drastic than what Laws reports for Tsumkwe,
where creditor–debtor relationships are often conflict-laden, even violent. One impor-
tant difference, however, seems to be that for Ju|’hoansi informal credits contribute to
making social groups that have an ethnic dimension too (in ‘true’and ‘other’people)
(Laws 2019). This is not yet the case in Fransfontein, where the reconfiguration con-
cerns individual relationships.
Let us shift sides again. While some shop owners complained to me about how
difficult it was to literally ‘chase after their money’,theyalsorealisedthattheir
lending transformed their position in the community. As Sarah explained, ‘So
many people are poor. What can I do? I have to support them so that they also
have something to eat.’In doing so, she became a patron in the community’s
network of relationships. At the same time, she also expresses that they are still
one community. In the end, however, these dynamics are likely to lead to a situation
where the emerging class differences, significantly fuelled by the state, are manifested
socially, probably comparable to what Laws observes (Laws 2019). Through surude,
people borrow resources from their own futures (Peebles 2010). To the extent that
thisisso,somepeopleinFransfonteinarebeginningtoaccumulatethefutureof
the community.
However, surude not only replaces existing social forms, including augu; at the same
time it also enables other types of sharing. In the interview situations I report, my
interlocutors shared meat or a coke with me. I have previously referred to this practice
as |goragu.|Goragu describes situations when food is prepared, typically on the open
fire, and then jointly consumed. Sometimes this happens by invitation, but most
often it results from people roaming around and looking (and smelling) where there
might be something in the pot (for similar observations see, Widlok 1999; Laws
2019). This is especially prevalent in the community of Fransfontein itself, where
the walking distances are short and it is easy to know what others have, do, and
prepare. Since many ingredients are bought on credit today, monetary dept maintains
these sharing relationships as well. To some extent, the same can be said for augu. Even
through people demand much less than in the past, what they eventually get has often
been bought on credit. Through credit, then, sharing practices are not only replaced
but also maintained, albeit in new ways.
ETHNOS 15
Conclusion
When the German missionary Vedder wrote the ethnographic reports that found their
way into Polanyi’sThe Great Transformation, sharing meant redistributing goods,
including meat and fruits. Sharing established a relationship in which the amount
owed was not defined. This made it impossible to end a relationship –that is, to
‘pay offthe balance’,as some would say in financial terms today. Since then, food
sharing has changed.
In the first stage, the colonial state created scarcity. In the local economy, goods like
sugar and tea were new. And they were rare. Unlike fruit from the field, only money
could buy them, and in order to get money, people needed to sell their labour first. In a
social environment, where basic goods like food and water are perceived as belonging
to all, people transferred this sharing norm to the ‘new’goods and demanded their
share. Augu emerged.
It is not known under what conditions this kind of demand sharing, first described
by Peterson (1993), developed comparatively. To my knowledge, almost all well-
known examples refer to societies in which people used to live primarily as hunters
and gatherers and who were then to some degree drawn into the capitalist market
economy. In societies in which equality was highly valued, demanding became a
social form after capitalism established inequality and scarcity (Peterson 1993;
Gregory 2012; Widlok 2013;2016; Schnegg 2016; Laws 2019). Thus, the case I
report might represent a larger development in which markets transform redistribu-
tion into demand sharing.
In Fransfontein, demand sharing, augu, persists in the community; most people
were still givers and receivers concurrently. Thus, while the ways people related to
one another became different in network terms, the social structure of debt had only
slightly changed. The network ties were still symmetrical, and the centralisation of
debt was low –everyone owed everyone else pretty much the same on reciprocal terms.
With the progress of the colonial project, social differentiation continued to
increase and people started owning more and more different things depending on
their access to governmental salaries. As a consequence, some people today have a
lot while others do not know how they will get their next meal. Because the few
haves are not willing to share all the time, the majority of the community are going
into monetary debt to eat. With this, the quality of the debt that has always been
part of social relationships has changed. Debt is now quantified with a number and
a date. It has become conscious to both sides, and it structures the relationship
beyond the obvious economic dependency: on one side of the tie is patronage; on
the other, shame. When people meet in the street, they see not only their neighbour
or their aunt –with the associated feelings –but their lender as well. Moreover, the
social structure of debt has changed significantly. A few households have become
the hubs in centralised network of relationships. They own not only cars, but the
debt (i.e. future?) of the community as well. Food sharing, the indispensable com-
ponent of the past egalitarian society, no longer crosscuts social groups. On the con-
trary, in some respects, food sharing manifests them.
16 M. SCHNEGG
Creditor–debtor relationships have emerged in many parts of the world, and in
many epochs (Guérin 2014; Guérin & Venkatasubramanian 2020). For example,
research on the emergence of credit markets in European countries in the nineteenth
century has shown that credit is often established between the wealthier urban popu-
lation and peasants in the rural hinterlands (Pfister 2017). Moreover, the relationships
rarely span distances greater than 20 kilometres (Hoffman et al. 1992). Both have to do
with the fact that stratification occurred largely between the urban and the rural world.
While these creditor–debtor relationships underpin this uneven divide, they effect the
internal structure of rural communities to a much lesser degree.
The situation is different in Namibia today. A significant amount of stratification
has developed within rural communities. Anthropologists generally agree that the
introduction of money and markets causes this (Gudeman 2001; Hann & Hart
2011). I agree that markets played a key role in this change, too, but I have also
shown that the role of the state is much more important for the recent transformation
we observe in Namibia, and beyond. Across Southern Africa, the state provides salaries
and welfare in the hinterlands, and largely fuelled the economic stratification we
observe (Southall 2004; Anders 2009; James 2014b; Ferguson 2015).
Because some members of the community are now doing sufficiently well, they have
a little something to invest. Instead of meeting the demands of their kith and kin
through augu, the haves now refer the have-nots to the credit books in their recently
built shops. While this has led to an overall decline in demand sharing, it also enables
sharing situations too. When food is shared at meals, the ingredients are often bought
on credit in the village shops. Through this, surude not only replaces existing social
forms but also enables others. While some configurations are new, there is also conti-
nuity, albeit in shifting forms.
Notes
1. ǂNūkhoen translates literally as ‘black people’. The people gave this name to themselves in their
language, Khoekhoegowab.Khoekhoegowab is a language of the Khoe-Kwadi family with four
(primary) click sounds (ǂ,palatal; ǁ, lateral; ǀ, dental; !, alveolar) that function like other conso-
nants. Khoe-Kwadi languages belong to the southern African non-Bantu languages with click
phonemes that, although not forming a single linguistic unit, are conventionally subsumed
under a cover term ‘Khoisan’(Güldemann and Fehn 2014: 2pp).
2. Polanyi took the description from the summary Thurnwald provided in his comparative
volume on economic anthropology (Thurnwald 1932). In this, Thurnwald referred to the
work of the German missionary Vedder, who had lived among the ‘Bergdama’in Deutsch Süd-
westafrika (Namibia) since the beginning of the twentieth century (Vedder 1923a;1923b).
3. Names are pseudonyms.
4. Laws reports comparable practices of buying food on credit among Ju|’hoansi communities,
and I will contrast them with my observations in later sections (Laws 2019).
5. Put more formally, the symmetry indicates the proportion of relationships that are reciprocal,
i.e. Num(X
ij
> 0 and X
ji
> 0)/Num(X
ij
>0 or X
ji
> 0).
6. In 2019 one euro exchanged for N$16.5, in 2004 for N$8.1 (https://www.oanda.com). I will
show later on how the local inflation rate developed during the same time.
7. Over the past 15 years, the number of vendors has increased significantly from five to fourteen,
indicating some of the changes on which I report.
ETHNOS 17
8. For comparable observations in South Afrika see Bähre (2011: 382)
9. Our research team consisted of myself, Julia Pauli (as co-principal investigator), Francois
Dawids, Valery Somses, and Jorries Seibeb.
10. The data were collected by myself and Melitta Ortner.
11. Māgu fits much better into the exchange model that dominated the anthropological literature
for so long. Giving is an intentional act in which the item exchanged changes status from the
property of the giver to the property of the receiver. |gora means to put apart. |goragu typically
describes a situation in which something prepared at the house is shared, as with tea made or
food cooked.
12. Unfortunately, I lack the data to provide a detailed analysis whether and how the borrowing of
au and Schuld (in surude) indicates the kind of ‘colonization of consciousness’that Comaroff
and Comaroffhave shown so convincingly in relation to ‘work’(e.g. as bereka and tiro) among
the Tshidi Tswana in South Africa (Comaroff& Comaroff1987;1989).
13. Over the period of three days, the 61 households exchanged 85 goods through augu, that is, .46
transactions a day.
14. Assuming that people work 20 days per month. Sources: Statistisches Bundesamt, https://www.
destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Einkommen-Konsum-Lebensbedingungen/
Einkommen-Einnahmen-Ausgaben/Tabellen/deutschland-lwr.html
Acknowledgement
Without the continuous support of numerous people and communities in Kunene, this research
would not have been possible. I thank all of them for being-in-their-world with me. Julia Pauli,
Patrick Neveling, Christian Strümpell, Inga Sievert, and Coral O’Brian have offered critical and extre-
mely constructive comments to earlier drafts of this article. The results presented here are a product of
the LINGS research projects (Local Institutions in Globalized Societies, http://lings-net.de/). I am also
grateful to the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for their continuous and generous financial
support.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number SCHN 1103].
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