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© 1997-2002 Wim van Binsbergen*
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van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, ‘Mary’s room: A case study on becoming a consumer in Botswana, Francistown’, in: Fardon, R., van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & van Dijk, R., 1999, eds., Modernity on a shoestring: Dimensions of globalization, consumption and development in Africa and beyond: Based on an EIDOS conference held at The Hague 13-16 March 1997, Leiden/London: EIDOS [ European Interuniversity Development Opportunities Study group ] , pp. 179-206
© 1997-2002 Wim van Binsbergen[1]
Introduction
This paper seeks
to make a contribution to the growing field of the ethnography of
consumption and consumerism in countries of the ‘South’ (cf.
Appadurai 1986; Baudrillard 1968, 1970; Burke 1990; Friedman
1994; Miller 1987, 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c). My strategy is not
to focus on a localized set of people, their practices, objects
and meanings, but to present in the form of a narrative the
emergent patterns of consumerism in one southern African town,
Francistown, arranged around the personal experiences of a young
woman, Mary, whom we shall follow on her path from village girl
to incipient urban consumer. Mary is an entirely historical
person; her life, as I describe it, is based on first-hand
participant observation and interviews that extended over more
than five years. In other words, the time-honoured extended case
method has provided my main methodological inspiration.
As my argument develops, I shall touch on the aesthetics of
manufactured objects in consumerism, although I have little so
say about the equally important topic of the desire they
may inspire in the would-be consumer. I shall gloss over the
macro-economics which set the stage for Francistown around 1990.
Focusing merely on one person’s experiences, I can hardly dwell
on the proliferation of distinctions and tastes, the association
of particular configurations of these traits with emerging social
groupings etc., except to the extent to which our protagonist
herself progresses through a very limited number of identities
and reference groups in the course of the few years that my
argument spans. Instead, my ethnography has a fairly conservative
social anthropological slant, stressing social relational factors
over symbolism and aesthetics. No doubt this is one of its
shortcomings, although my ethnographic intuition tells me it is
only when we manage to situate emerging consumers in their total
social situation that can we hope to capture, at the subjective
and anecdotal level, the factors which make them into consumers.
And I hasten to admit that, given the great extent to which the
making of consumers is an expression of global movements which
are largely independent of the consciousness of actors in the
periphery, like Mary, such an ethnographic approach needs to be
complemented by more structural, global analysis in terms of
globalization, macro-economics, and the aesthetics of the
manufactured object.
Whatever the considerable shortcomings of my case study of Mary,
it is clear that one can get this amount of biographical and
personal detail only for a handful of people. The extended case
is not meant to present an exemplary case, for at this level of
specificity every person in a society is unique. Its purpose[2]
is not even to present a typical case, but to bring out the
structure, dynamics, contradictions and conflicts inherent in the
social process which constitutes society. In much the same way as
the structure of a landscape can be brought out (if only
partially) by any itinerary in that landscape, regardless of the
personality of the traveller and even of the unusual nature of
the itinerary.
In fact, beyond Mary’s case I have collected a wealth of
quantitative material on the topic, through participant
observation in people’s homes as well as through an intensive
sample survey conducted among 200 adult Francistonians. However,
before we can interpret this more comprehensive material
convincingly, we need an appreciation of the social and symbolic
processes involved, and of the actors’ dilemmas and choices,
down which path the following argument is a step.
Francistown
Founded more
than a hundred years ago, Francistown (cf. Kerven 1976, Schapera
1971, Tapela 1976) -- named after one of the region’s first
gold concessionaires -- is among the older inland towns in
southern Africa north of the Limpopo river. Until Botswana’s
independence (1966) it could pretend to have largely remained a
White company town, dominated by the Tati company which had
quickly expanded its original gold mining activities into cattle
ranging (turning most of the African inhabitants of the Tati,
later North-East, district into tenants or squatters on Tati
Company land), and wholesale and retail trade. For the latter
activities, Francistown was the obvious centre, as a railhead
situated on the northbound railroad which connects South Africa
with Zimbabwe, Zambia and Congo.
This strategic geographical position also made Francistown the
focal point in the movement of migrant mining labour between the
countries in the north, and the South African Witwatersrand. The
district’s male population tended to keep itself aloof from the
town, and the Ikalanga language of the surrounding countryside
never became the town’s lingua franca; the national Setswana is
used instead. However, catering to the needs (food, beer, company
-- with varying degrees of permanency and propriety) especially
of returning, relatively affluent migrants became a standard
(although far from universal) episode in the careers of the
district’s women (cf. Cooper n.d., Kerven 1979, Larsson 1989,
Procek 1993, Tsimako 1980). Many returning migrants actually
settled in the town and its peri-urban villages, never to see
their northern homes again.
As a result, rather like Lobatse (but unlike most other Botswana
settlements of comparable size which until very recently have
mainly been tribal[3] capitals), Francistown
emphatically displayed distinct traits of southern African
urbanism early in its history. Let us list some of these traits:
?
By contrast to a relatively weak informal sector (whose products,
incidentally, often fail to meet the standards of urban taste)
the formal employment sector is well developed; here, the South
African and Tati Company’s racial, authoritarian and monopolist
models, by which contemporary management styles have been
informed, ensure that labour--management relations are tense,
workers’ identification with employers’ interests limited,
and litigation through the state’s Labour Office frequent.
?
The same sense of under-communication and unease has spilled over
into other domains of Francistown society wherever African
individuals face formal organizations, for instance: education,
the interaction between clients and civil servants at
bureaucratic counters, and especially African buyers in White-
and Indian-owned retail shops.
?
The retail trade is all the more important because, with the
relative discontinuity -- not absence -- characteristic of social
and economic ties between Francistown and the surrounding rural
areas, and the virtual absence of urban horticulture, most of the
food consumed by African Francistonians does not come from rural
subsistence production but is purchased in the town’s formal
sector; of course, this is a common situation both in urban
southern Africa and, increasingly so, throughout urban Africa.
?
There is considerable ethnic animosity between Ikalanga-speaking
Kalanga and Tswana-speaking Khurutshe (the town’s two ‘host’
groups), on the one hand, and many other Tswana and
Ndebele-speaking groups from more distant parts, on the other
(cf. van Binsbergen 1994, 1995).
?
There exist a multitude of formal bars and informal shebeens,[4]
a mushrooming of independent churches and political parties, and
an emergent multiplicity of life styles along class lines.
?
Fashionable codes of self-display through dress, hairstyle and
make-up, extend further into the expressive domain through
consumption of mechanic and electronic ‘modern’ music (mostly
of South African urban African provenance).
?
The public African culture of Francistown has always been a
migrants’ and ‘modern’ culture, in which rural and historic
elements -- far from being totally absent -- are mainly admitted
in a fragmented and decontextualized manner, in secluded,
intimate contexts away from the public gaze and from the town
centre. Thus, accomplished historic housing embellished with
verandas/kitchens (Tswana lolwapa, Ikalanga nsha)
half secluded by a low mud fence, and with pictorial decorations
on the walls, can be found only in Francistown’s peripheral
squatments, and today are even explicitly prohibited from formal
residential areas; standardized inter-ethnic joking and historic
songs can be heard only in private shebeens, when the hour is
late and alcohol consumption has greatly lowered thresholds of
inhibition; the Kalanga people’s involvement, in town as in the
village, in the Mwali cult is a public secret that cannot be
discussed with non-cult members; the town’s rich cultic and
therapeutic services catering for individual needs beyond
Christianity are likewise completely unmarked in the public
space, and may go unnoticed from the town centre, although in the
lower-class townships they occasionally manifest themselves in
nocturnal drumming and furtive uniformed processions.
Before 1966, the African population of Francistown consisted
mainly of tens of thousands of squatters, without title to the
land on which their (typically neo-traditional, thatched) houses
stood. Very few had access to the town’s many large plots with
European-style houses, occupied by White and Indian company
employees and civil servants. Independence put an end to
residential segregation along racial lines (although de facto
segregation along class lines continues). What few obstacles to
African squatting had existed, were removed, resulting in a
further influx of urban migrants. Around 1980, however, the
Ministry of Lands and Local Government obtained World Bank funds
for the complete rationalization of the town’s housing
situation, by thinning the existing squatments and by greatly
expanding the town’s residential space under the Self-Help
Housing Agency (SHHA) project (Republic of Botswana
1983b). This enabled many thousands of Francistown’s low-income
families to build their own houses (with a minimum of two rooms)
according to strictly enforced government specifications, on the
basis of an interest-free loan, and on a 20 by 20 metre plot to
which a 99 year lease was obtained, provided it was developed as
stipulated, and the monthly levy of P8.25 (US$5) was paid
regularly. However, recognizing that SHHA plots meant wealth on a
big scale, the allocation of such plots was to a minor extent
diverted towards the middle and higher income strata;
additionally, many of the intended beneficiaries of the scheme
used the opportunity to acquire more than one plot per nuclear
family, and exploited the spare plot as a means of entry into the
extremely lucrative urban markets both for rented accommodation
and, even, (since with a minor additional investment freehold
title to a SHHA plot can be obtained) for the sale of real
estate.
Francistown went through an economic boom after Independence. It
became a wholesale market for Zimbabwe and Zambia, up to 1980
benefited from the nearby Zimbabwe war of liberation and, until
around 1990, was a centre of the sanctions-dodging industry
within the South Africa-- Botswana--Swaziland customs union. The
town attracted major industrial projects, like the Francistown
abattoir and the Sowa Pan soda ash plant, which were the basis
for all sorts of multiplier effects, and it saw a dramatic
expansion of its governmental, medical, educational, banking and
retail sectors. Such expansion was in line with Botswana’s
exceptional performance as a viable African growth economy, based
on diamond and meat exports, and sustained by ‘good governance’,
including an uninterrupted multi-party democracy from the time of
independence, an impeccable human rights record, and a steady
trickle down of national income to benefit -- and co-opt the
electoral support of -- the masses in terms of medical and
educational facilities. Francistown’s formal sector labour
market grew considerably. Owing to the local work force’s
propensity to labour conflicts, local managements have tended to
favour female labour, even for jobs such a bricklaying and
digging trenches. Partly[5] because of the town’s
history of migrant labour, Francistown women are often heads of
single-parent households, sole providers for their children, and
highly proletarianized (lacking effective and viable rural
economic ties), which situation renders these women relatively
reliable and submissive in urban employment.
Under these circumstances, Francistown was largely able to absorb
the massive recent influx of migrants from rural Botswana,
especially those from the agricultural (as distinct from
pastoral) region within a radius of roughly 100 kilometers
dispelled from their villages (by the collapse of their
agricultural system which had resulted from shifts in both
climatic and market conditions).
Because of both this recent influx, and the insecurity of African
residence during the colonial period, the African population of
Francistown today comprises far fewer born urbanites than one
might expect in such a relatively old town. Among adults, the
median period of urban residence is slightly more than ten years.
A majority of adults were born and grew up in a village, coming
to town only in late adolescence or even later. Thus Francistown
presents the paradox of an established, fully-fledged structure
of urbanism, to which its many recently immigrated inhabitants
are yet adjusting as a new thing.
SHHA housing as
a focus of consumption
Francistown’s
boom was not to last, although the kind of individual and
collective misery habitual in most other African countries so far
remains a distant prospect, which one hopes will never be
reached. Around 1990, several new shopping malls, with large
supermarkets and smaller shops and boutiques surplus to any
requirement, had emerged in order to compete with and replace the
colonial-looking White and Indian retail emporia along the town
centre’s two main streets. By the mid-1990s these new malls
already had empty premises and showed signs of dilapidation. No
further SHHA plots were given out after the early 1990s.
However, the SHHA heritage has completely altered the atmosphere
of the town. The teeming, cosy and shady squatments have largely
given way to sprawling new residential areas, of fairly uniform,
but healthy and solid houses. Their, usually unplastered, walls
of grey concrete bricks, ragged cemented joints between the brick
courses, and regulation metal window frames, with ironical rows
of small brick toilet buildings at the back, inspire a sense, if
not of beauty, nonetheless of accomplishment and pride on the
part of their occupants or owner-occupants.
The SHHA house is the main, eminently tangible, symbol of the
low-income Francistonian[6] proudly turned into a
modern consumer. Its minimalist aesthetic (the enforced product
of the construction material market and governmental building
regulations, rationalized under the tyranny of arithmetic and
geometry), seldom invites further architectural embellishment on
the part of its obedient and submissive owner--builder, who knows
that his SHHA certificate (proudly framed and displayed in many
SHHA houses) depends on unhesitating compliance with municipal
rules.
Under these
circumstances, the owners’ pride is mixed with a measure of
estrangement at being forced, by the (ideally) blind bureaucratic
logic of SHHA, to accept ethnic strangers and enemies as their
nearest neighbours, and submit, in their sanitary habits, to
embarrassing levels of conspicuousness. Under the gaze of
strangers it is necessary to leave the house, cross the backyard
and open the noisy toilet door made of corrugated iron, all the
while carrying toilet paper -- one of the principal items of
consumption in Francistown -- or shreds of newspaper which cannot
be left in the toilet for fear of theft. While this is a common
enough urban routine throughout south-central and southern
Africa, it is totally at variance with habits in, for instance,
Kalanga villages. However, even in the villages, residential
plots have now been demarcated into neat 40 by 40 meter units,
albeit village neighbours are usually kinsmen; here, toilets are
considered alien and unnecessary, although the alternative, the
bush, is receding and thinning at an increasing rate. And how
does one cook on a wood fire, if custom frowns on lighting one
inside a permanent, closed house, but SHHA regulations
simultaneously forbid the construction of a ‘traditional’
kitchen, or any other ‘traditional structure’, on the plot?
Our nearest neighbours in the Somerset East Extension SHHA
residential area -- whose yard was largely occupied by the
wonderfully preserved corpse of a fairly new Mercedes lorry
driven without proper lubrication and, judging by this, were no
paupers by any standard -- did not know how to negotiate this
problem, and in the rainy season could often be seen, desperately
braving the wind and the rain, cooking out in the open.
Fig. 3. SHHA Housing, Francistown.
Is it generally
true that village-derived models are not allowed to endow urban
private space with much historically-anchored meaning? If so,
then how do Francistonians make sense of these lasting monuments
of the 1980s boom, their SHHA houses? Clearly, part of the answer
is: by filling them with furniture and other consumer durables,
thus transforming their empty concrete space into a space of
ideals, models, and personal endeavour and achievement along the
lines stipulated by these models. How do they manage to do this
when their formal sector income barely caters for food, clothing
and payment of the SHHA levy and loan, or rent if one is not a
SHHA plot-owner? These are some of the questions to which Mary’s
extended case suggests provisional answers.
Mary’s
tribulations
Mary, a young
Kalanga woman whose Tswana[7] name is Dikeledi, is
nearly nineteen years old when, heavily pregnant with her first
child, she comes within the scope of our research in early 1989.
She rents a room on the plot at the back of the SHHA plot we are
renting ourselves. Her sullen face, free of make-up, her
ungroomed hair and the big calloused feet which poke out from her
cheap sandals, betray the village girl she then still is. Seeking
to live up to her imminent motherhood, she has bought a simple
black hat and wears it, but since she has not yet decided whether
she can afford to keep it, or must sell it at a small profit, she
prefers to wear the hat still protected by its original
cellophane wrapping. In Francistown at the time such attire is
neither nor invites ridicule. The packaged hat is emblematic of
the liminal stage at which we encounter Mary in her developing
attitude towards manufactured objects from the market -- in her
trajectory of becoming an urban consumer.
Born and raised in one of the villages which make up the rural
community of Tutume, a hundred kilometres northwest of
Francistown, Mary was barely seventeen when she first came to
Francistown. Here she found employment cooking and washing
clothes for the bachelor soldiers at the Francistown barracks.
Before long she entered into a relationship with one of them,
George, and found herself pregnant. The soldier was soon
transferred to Gaborone, later to be enlisted in an international
SADCC peace-keeping force in Angola. With his permanent,
well-paid position he would have made an excellent provider, but
the question of marriage scarcely arose, and he is never sued for
damages; for even in democratic, human-rights conscious,
Botswana, people have reason to fear taking soldiers to court.
Moreover, Mary claims that she still loves him, although it will
be years before she sees him again.
Mary is a bright and determined, but also a socially wounded,
girl, who is conscious of carrying a considerable burden of
kinship-generated personal conflict. At the age of twelve, in the
total ignorance of sexuality standard among Kalanga girls of that
age, she was raped by a stranger in the outlying fields of Tutume
while herding goats; the offender was brought to trial, and the
experience apparently has not left a major scar on Mary’s
psyche. A few years later, when her breasts were fully developed,
another stranger squeezed one of them with such sadistic violence
as she left a village shop, that it became permanently, if only
slightly, deformed, a fact of which Mary is conscious and
embarrassed. But her real burden concerns not strangers, but
close kinsmen, and not physical rape and assault, but social
rejection. Her father TaLawrence, a die-hard traditionalist,
lives with a later wife and many small children on a large
homestead in Tutume, surrounded by the considerable homesteads of
Mary’s two oldest half-brothers. Her mother, MaDikeledi, lives
one kilometre away, alone and unsupported by her ex-husband, on a
plot adjacent to that of her own brothers, who do not support her
either. Arthritis of the hip joints has made her a permanent
cripple, unfit for agricultural work. Mary is her oldest
daughter, followed by a son, Ngalano, who is Mary’s junior by
three years. Mary did well at primary school, but her father was
not prepared to contribute the modest amount education costs in
Botswana today, and she had to leave school early. With the
continuing drought, their fields barely yield enough to survive
on, their handful of goats hardly help, and Mary’s going to
town is meant to support her mother and brother financially. Her
only other urban experience, and single other travelling
experience, has been a few day’s visit to her mother’s
brother, Present, who is employed as a car mechanic in Botswana’s
capital city, Gaborone, 430 kilometres south of Francistown.
Mary’s sole, initial contact in Francistown is her mother’s
sister, MaJulia, an enterprising lady who, together with her
husband, has managed to acquire and develop an SHHA plot in the
Satellite South residential area. When the construction work is
finished (TaJulia is a professional bricklayer) the plot boasts a
four-roomed house, a small general retail store, and several
rooms to let. There is no place for Mary here, and while slaving
at the barracks during the day, she has to sleep in a little
grass shelter she has built in one of the few surviving squatter
areas. The rains are heavy in 1988 and, like most other houses
there, the shelter is swept away by the flooding Tati river. For
a short while the event appears to be a blessing in disguise,
since as a ‘victim of flooding’ Mary immediately qualifies
for allocation of an SHHA plot, for which other people have been
on the waiting list for years. Since the SHHA largely (on paper,
even exclusively) caters for the lower income groups, women are
as prominent among the scheme’s beneficiaries as they are in
the Francistown labour market, and it is not exceptional for a
single girl in her early twenties to build and possess her own
SHHA house. But what does peasant girl Mary know, at this stage,
of urban economic strategies? Her aunt knows far better, and it
is decided that Mary’s plot in the new SHHA area called
Somerset East Extension will be registered under her aunt’s
name -- the developed plot in Satellite South already being owned
by TaJulia. While aunt and uncle lose no time building the two
rooms and the toilet that confirm their legal status as SHHA
tenants, Mary sits out her pregnancy in a nearby rented room,
under the smoke of the new Nyangabgwe hospital where she will
deliver her child. With great optimism she names her Tatayaone,
‘Daddy will see you’. Immediately after her discharge from
hospital she and the baby move back to her mother’s village,
taking everything she has managed to buy on her salary: her iron
bed frame, a blanket, a few items of clothing, her still-wrapped
hat, and a small, informal-sector manufactured dresser (a
cupboard with a sliding glass door) to display her two unmatching
teacups.
Diagram 1. Genealogy.
In Botswana, a
woman’s post-partum period is considered a ritual confinement
during which, in her status as motsetsi,[8] she
is supposed to concentrate entirely on her baby, grow fat, and
refrain from productive or sexual activities. In practice,
however, Mary uses her confinement to restore the productive
pride and competence which had lain fallow during her year and a
half in town. Leaving the baby in her mother’s care, Mary
single-handedly builds a pole-and-dagga, thatched house for
herself. Next, and with great gusto, she prepares the fields in
autumn, and she insists on ploughing them herself with the oxen
she borrows from her maternal uncles. Only once does she visit
her father’s nearby homestead, where she is made to feel an
unwelcome stranger.
However, this relatively idyllic episode comes to an end. Even
when used with the greatest possible economy (which then, and for
several years to come, means for Mary two meals daily, consisting
of plain meal porridge, usually without vegetable relish let
alone meat), her town-earned money is finally depleted, and she
moves back to Francistown so as to earn money for her dependants:
her mother, whose arthritis is now being treated, at considerable
cost in the way of sacrificial meals, by St John’s Apostolic
church (a local Independent church); for Tatayaone, whose clothes
and nappies use up a lot of costly detergent; and for Ngalano,
who is still unemployed.
Mary’s aunt’s Somerset East Extension plot, formerly Mary’s
own, now has four separate rooms and, as a great favour, Mary is
allowed to rent one of them, two by three meters square, for P40
per month, undercutting the current market price by P10. The
other plots are rented to young people who are working or
studying in Francistown; they are total strangers to Mary, from
different regions and ethnic groups, but she gets on with them
and exchanges the small services of minding, borrowing, and
fixing usual among co-tenants. A Tutume home-boy, a distant
cousin of Mary’s in his late twenties, lives next-door, where
he is operating a branch of her mother’s church, which Mary
joins. As a sturdy peasant girl, Mary has no difficulty finding
employment digging trenches at the Dumela industrial site north
of Francistown. Working conditions under the South African White
foremen are anachronistically authoritarian, no toilets are
provided on the site and, after a few months, she is fired
together with her fellow-worker when the two women are found to
have distanced themselves in order to urinate. Trembling with
rage she appeals to me, her sometime neighbour, and on my
recommendation she finds a job with a White lady friend of ours
who runs Tswana Weaving, a factory producing ornamental
rugs with a work force consisting entirely of African women. Many
of these women have a level of education similar to Mary’s, but
some completed junior secondary school (Form II) or continued
even further.
The fruits of
security, or becoming a consumer
The security of
this employment position, the relative benevolence of the company’s
managerial attitudes, the on-the-job training, the emphasis on
leisurely bodily care[9] manifest in the
hilarious collective shower with which the young women conclude
every working day, the day-to-day exposure to subtle strategies
of beautifying through make-up, hair-styling, choice of clothing
-- all these circumstances combine to effect a metamorphosis in
Mary, both as a young woman and as a consumer (cf. Pfau 1991).
She discovers that it is largely through consumption -- along the
lines stipulated by her reference group of work mates -- that she
is able to construct herself as a woman in ways undreamt of in
her Tutume girlhood. The management considers her too much of a
peasant to become a fully-fledged weaver, with the keen sense of
colour nuances and total control over the woof this requires;
instead she is given the job of threading the looms, to prepare
them for the weavers. She takes great pride in this leisurely,
but essential, job. She thoroughly enjoys -- and makes herself
highly dependent on -- her all-female shop-floor environment of:
gossip, small quarrels, shared food at lunch-times, competition
over smart clothing and correctly pronounced, richly expressed
Setswana, the brief improvised sketches in which management is
secretly imitated and ridiculed, the sisterly assistance rendered
and received in bodily grooming, the shower routine with its
great reassurance of other girls’ nudity. Her calloused hands
and feet soften, she learns to scorn the hard physical work in
which she took pride only a year earlier, she learns to use cheap
body lotion after every bath, comes to insist on the use of
toilet paper and disposable menstrual pads (instead of improvised
thick wads of toilet paper grabbed at the factory toilets),
becomes expert at the names, prices and directions-for-use of
hair-styling products. Impeccably white ‘takkies’ (sport
shoes) replace her sandals. The once cherished hat, with or
without wrapping, is now recognized to have been impossibly
un-smart. She gradually joins the ranks of women who can
negotiate the unpaved town roads without visible signs of mud or
dust on their clothing or shoes -- the same category (and it
appears to be the majority of women in Francistown) who (except
at the greatest possible discomfort, none of which is simulated
either) cannot make the short crossing, from their homes in the
suburbs to the town centre, even on the briefest and most
necessary shopping trip, without first going through an hour of
head-to-toe grooming: protective magic in the face of a
fundamentally inimical urban environment, as I have interpreted
this institution elsewhere (van Binsbergen 1993).
Budgetary
adjustments
Mary’s budgeting
pattern soon undergoes radical changes. She tries to remain true
to her original intention of supporting her child, mother and
brother with her Francistown-earned money, but this
kinship-based, altruistic goal has to compete in an unequal
struggle with her other goals, all of which relate to her desire
to define herself as a person, as a woman, among her new
reference group of urban work mates and, to a lesser degree,
fellow urban tenants. She is still bitter about her aunt’s real
estate strategies, which she now sees through. Her aunt’s
unkind words, when Mary complained how little support she
received in her parlous situation, keep turning over in her mind,
‘You, Dikeledi, you are nothing, and you will never amount to
anything.’ For the first time, Mary allows herself consciously
to resent her father’s failure to support her materially or
show her any moral commitment; he let her down when he could have
chosen to spare her the humiliation and hardship of her first
adult years. While she feels compassion for her crippled mother,
she realizes that, by taking Tatayaone into her care, her mother
has taken hostage Mary’s continuing obligation to support her
financially; it takes P30 a month simply to feed Tatayaone and
her grandmother, and an extra P30 would be needed if the child is
‘to learn singing’, that is go to the village nursery school.
But such an outlay is made virtually impossible by the consistent
refusal of Tatayaone’s father to pay anything towards her
upkeep, and Mary still fears to take him to court, on the same
grounds that she never pressed for damages when he made her
pregnant.[10] Mary feels uneasy
about the cost of her mother’s church rituals. And although for
several years Mary has had a Francistown lover, who is himself an
established Christian church leader, she feels equally uneasy
about her own experiences in the, unusually secretive and
compelling, urban branch of her church: ‘If I am not even
allowed to speak to my own mother about the things that happen in
this church, I feel as if I am being forced, as if I am no longer
a person.’ Local commentators suggested the unspeakable
transactions inside the church may have been of a sexual nature;
they may also have bordered on sorcery (on this aspect of
Francistown churches, cf. van Binsbergen 1993). However, having
lived near the church for some time and knowing several of its
members fairly well, my informed opinion is that the activities
were harmless, though mentally oppressive, secrecy being imposed
by the church leadership merely as a cohesive strategy.
Nonetheless, although Mary soon stops going to St John’s, she
continues to abide by the Independent church’s admonitions
against alcohol, smoking and discotheques, thus rejecting a large
category of potential consumption -- to the great benefit of her
time and finances.
So while Mary started out with what appeared to be a strong and
competent, rural-orientated identity, fully conversant with the
productive and reproductive tasks defined for her in a village
setting, what propels her to divert much of her income away from
her proclaimed rural target, and to become a consuming urbanite,
is the conflictive character of her village-orientated ties as
these concern both the domain of kinship and, to a lesser extent,
organized Christian religion. What happens to her is not so much
the result of resocialization, the implantation of a new
personality orientation but, rather more simply, the tentative
adoption of a new, socially negotiable identity by means of new
aspirations based on the selection of a different reference group
(urban work mates and co-tenants); once this happens, learning
the roles of the ‘modern’, ‘urban’ ‘consumer’ is
apparently neither difficult, nor protracted.
Fig. 4. Licensed vending stalls in the Somerset East Extension residential area, Francistown, 1989.
Of course, it is
inherent in the structure of the market that the skills and
attitudes required to be a recognizable, successful consumer
should be picked up overnight. The structure of the market has
different niches so as to accommodate consumers of various levels
of accomplishment. Mary has continued to be intimidated by
shopping in the large supermarkets lest she is discovered to be a
mere peasant, misbehaving at the counters or making a fool of
herself before the cashiers -- as on the day when, shopping for
children’s shoes, she asked in impeccable Botswana English ‘Where
is the friend of this one’, holding up one of a pair of
shoes; the smug Form II shop assistant could not help giggling at
this, ‘Friend? Friend!’. But, usually, Mary can also find the
few items of accomplished modern consumption (e.g. shampoos,
sanitary pads, toothpaste, body lotion, toilet paper, soap bars,
even shoes) that have become indispensable to her, in more
familiar and less formal outlets, such as vending stalls within
her residential area. Another alternative venue is offered by
surviving colonial-style emporia which have catered for African
tastes for decades; their names (Haskins and the Tati
Company Store) are household words in every Francistown home,
and they can afford to be a bit cheaper, thanks to the tight,
insultingly blunt and invasive, security system to which their
all-African non-elite clientele submit, as if their compliance
had the nature of self-evident and natural law.
Mary’s gradual
budgetary diversion has taken a number of forms. Most generally,
Mary has turned her experiences over the past few years into an
explicit career ideal. She will show the world, and especially
her aunt (and her father?), that she too can be an independent
career woman deserving a fat salary and social esteem -- she
wants to be a teacher, or better still, a fully qualified, State
Registered Nurse. Still in her early twenties, and given the
low-threshold and subsidized educational policy of Botswana, it
is not yet entirely out of the question for her to start a
secondary school education. As a first step, she enrols in
evening classes as a Grade Six primary school student; two years
later she completes Grade Seven, and she does enter secondary
school. School fees amount to P30 per term. Even adult students
attending evening classes are required to wear school uniform
and, despite the additional expenditure, Mary grabs this
opportunity to embody her newly achieved status of primary school
student, which she wears with eager pride rather than any
embarrassment. Her weekday evenings are fully occupied. When she
returns to her room around half past nine, it is only to sleep.
What little social life she has is restricted to weekends, which
is also the time when she has to do her laundry and tidy her
room. Gradually she begins to resent the long marches between her
room, the factory, and the school (cf. Fig. 7 below) and, on this
account, as well as for security reasons, she begins to take
taxis (at P1 a ride) at least to return home from school in the
evenings. There is little time for socializing before and after
classes, and her fellow-students do not become a reference group
in the way her work mates have.
Fig. 7. Francistown workers return home from work.
Besides this
definition of a career goal, and the attendant expenditure on
education, Mary treads the paths of two budgetary strategies
greatly favoured by Francistown’s incipient consumers: rotating
credit (motshelo), and the instalment plan.
Motshelo:
rotating riches out of pooled poverty
It is among work
mates and former work mates that Mary finds a few young women
whom she can trust sufficiently to enter into a motshelo,
or rotating credit arrangement. As is usual in Francistown, these
informal groups involve fewer than a handful of people, and
scarcely deserve the name ‘association’ which is current in
the international literature. The motshelo arrangement in
question initially involved only one woman besides Mary; later
there were two. Every month each participant contributes a fixed
sum (P50) to a common pool, all of which is taken by one of them;
the following month another participant benefits, and so on. The
arrangement amounts to the forced saving of sums rather larger
than one can easily afford, during most months, in exchange for
much larger sums than one could ever command on the basis of
monthly income, once in so many month as the motshelo has
members. In those months when she has to contribute and not
benefit, the motshelo is an additional reason for Mary not
to allow herself any luxury, and to make do on porridge without
relish day after day. But, in her lucky months, the motshelo
is the basis for the purchase of consumer durables: the school
uniform, another dress (not from a shop but from a woman peddling
dresses among her work mates -- for many Francistown women such
peddling is an accepted way of augmenting income), a large basin
for bathing and laundry, one large towel, and a single-burner,
portable gas stove (which greatly reduces the time she has to
spend preparing her meals in the morning and between work and
school, and allows her to cook inside her room instead of on the
house’s central veranda on a slow charcoal stove, which is
moreover prone to malfunction when humidity is high). Occasional
items of clothing and shoes are still bought for Tatayaone,
MaDikeledi and Ngalano, and money is sent to Tutume for their
daily consumption, but the intervals between such
kinship-orientated expenditures become longer and longer, and the
amounts less and less generous.
Mary’s room
With her newly
acquired consumer goods, Mary does far more than merely economize
on her time budget and increase her bodily comforts, she engages
in something rather unexpected: she uses the goods from the urban
world of consumption to transform the concrete box of her two by
three metre rented room (symbol of her suffering under
village-oriented kinship dynamics -- for we know that the entire
plot, of which she rents only part, was hers until her kinsmen
cheated her of it) into a living space that has been rendered
meaningful largely in terms of the village life-world in which
she grew up. Through manufactured objects, and the practices
involving them, Mary strictly and consistently divides her living
space in three bounded domains:
?
the kitchen, furthest from the door, and marked by the gas stove;
?
the bathroom, nearest to the door, and marked by the basin;
?
the bedroom, consisting entirely of the bed, along the room’s
long northwest wall which was not occupied by the kitchen and
bathroom functions.
On the face of it
-- in her observation of apparently self-imposed and arbitrary
rules -- Mary’s dwelling in her room seems like playing at
house. But in the absolute boundaries which she imposes on
herself by the way she disposes manufactured objects in space --
never allowing a bathing towel, food or a plate to touch the bed,
never permitting a kitchen towel to cross the invisible boundary
into the imaginary bathroom space, never permitting her clothes
to roam into the kitchen space, or her school bag to sit on the
‘bathroom’ floor -- she is able, creatively and selectively,
to imitate the rural functional space. Using the manufactured
items of consumption as markers of function and of meaning, she
imposes upon her room the structure of the TaLawrence homestead:
with its three main functions of dwelling/ bedroom, kitchen, and
unmarked spot for bathing and urinating.
The one missing function, that of the granary, marks the urban
room as a place not of production but only of consumption only;
Mary keeps her monthly bag of mealie meal (her main and usually
only item of food consumption) in her ‘kitchen’ space, just
as, in the village, small quantities of meal are kept in the nsha
once they have been taken out of the granary and pounded.
Diagram 2. TaLawrence’s
Kalanga homestead.
Perhaps it is a
little surprising[11] to witness this
bricolage of familar, old meanings and new objects in the process
of learning to be a consumer. Yet, it seems to me, that the most
striking aspect of the bricolage is that Mary does not
nostalgically emulate a rural world; instead, she creates a new,
no longer conceptually localized, alternative of her own; and
this creation came about after she had, first, been rejected by
her village environment, and then, deliberately left it behind
and set herself new goals formulated for a wider and more
universalized world. This sense of urban and consumptive
innovation, rather than rural nostalgia, was manifested most
evidently in the crowning piece of Mary’s budgetary
reallocation: the purchase, during the second year of her
employment at Tswana Weaving, of a modern, costly (P350)
wardrobe on the instalment plan.
The instalment
plan: beyond motshelo
Francistown boasts
two major department stores specializing in the sale of
European-style furniture for an African clientele: Furniture
Mart, and Town Talk. That the goods are specifically
intended for the African sector of the furniture market is clear
from their relatively low net prices (even if these are largely
hypothetical, see below), dated designs, the poor quality of raw
materials used, and their being sold -- either preferably or
exclusively -- on the instalment plan. The management of these
shops does not even bother to display the cash prices of their
merchandise, only the instalment terms per month and the number
of months required to fulfil them. The fact that the aggregate
interest payable under such instalment plans tends to be usurious
does not immediately meet the eye. As a combined result of the
poor educational facilities and standards in Botswana before
independence, the emphasis on quantitative rather than
qualitative educational improvement since then, and the
introduction of cheap portable calculators in the 1970s, few
Batswana today are adept at mental arithmetic, and fewer still
penetrate the mysteries of compound interest. The shop assistants
strongly discourage any customer who might prefer to pay cash;
this not only shows that the assistants’ income depends on
bonuses when making a sale, but also makes one wonder whether
company profits do not derive primarily not from selling goods
but from acting as loan-sharks to their customers.[12] Under the terms of the instalment plan, goods can
be reclaimed by the company on any occasion that arrears are
incurred on the monthly payments, and many have been the cases
when goods have been repossessed in the final month after which
the instalment plan would have been completed.
I know of only one case, involving my research assistant Mr
Edward Mpoloka when, on the grounds of trespass, a customer did
succeed in having the repossession of his goods declared illegal
by the Francistown Magistrate’s Court. When he failed to make
the single outstanding payment on his instalment plan, Town
Talk used intimidation to repossess a lounge suite at Mr
Mpoloka’s rented council house, while he was away at work. The
goods were subsequently restored to the owner, who hastened to
borrow money to pay the final instalment. Town Talk’s
van can be seen day after day travelling the roads of
Francistown, and it is detested by the urban population for its
notorious practice of collecting, through repossession, almost as
much furniture as it delivers.
Like so much in the Botswana modern economy, the instalment
system originated in South Africa where, for many decades it has
been a routine element of White and Indian exploitation of
African consumptive aspirations. Miriam Tlali’s novel Muriel,
based on the author’s experience for years as clerk in such a
company, offers an illuminating description of the manipulative
marketing and financial techniques involved.
Fig. 8. Town Talk of Francistown.
The instalment plan
offered by these firms might seem like a routinized,
depersonalized motshelo system: unable to save first and
buy later, people commit themselves to a binding, regular,
obligation to surrender substantial sums of money; in exchange,
they enjoy benefits they could never reap outside such a scheme.
In both cases, the arrangement protects individuals from
intervening claims on their money: hedonistic expenditure on
drink and sex, yielding to the competing claims of expenditure
within the household budget and, particularly, the demands of
close urban and rural relatives, who can be told that the money
is genuinely committed, effectively already spent. Both motshelo
and the instalment plan involve building the individual person
(and the nuclear family headed by that person) at the expense of
both short-term sensuous gratification, and long-term kin
obligations. Both also involve a particular transformation of the
person’s sense of time: a combined sense of deferred
gratification and long-term obligation resulting in the
repetition, at fixed intervals, of fixed financial sacrifices and
leading to a redeeming result -- a negative cult which is bound
to generate meanings eminently at home in the contexts of
capitalism and Calvinism. But here the similarity ends. The two
systems are very differently sanctioned: motshelo is
regulated by threats of social disgrace and the rupture of close
relationships of trust, supported by the remote possibility of
suing a failing motshelo partner before one of Francistown’s
two Urban Customary Courts; part of the underlying social model
resembles the generalized reciprocity that is ideally
characteristic of close kin relationships -- albeit motshelo
partners are typically non-kin. In the case of the instalment
plan, however, failure to meet the instalments simply results in
the repossession of one’s goods (often after the payments made
on them have exceeded the goods’ market value).
Hire-purchase,
rather than rotating credit, might more justly have been called motshelo
(i.e. ‘deferment’, but also ‘lottery’). The chances of
goods never being acquired -- and of the money invested in them
being annihilated through repossession -- are far higher than the
corresponding risk of motshelo partners failing to pay
their turn. This despite the fact that monthly contributions to motshelo
tend to be higher than those made on instalment plans (although
this depends, of course, on the value of the item purchased). It
is common for people to join motshelo schemes which take
between a quarter and a half of their monthly income; even
usurious furniture companies would refuse the risk involved in
financing creditors who would need to devote so high a percentage
of their income to repayments. As a final point of contrast, motshelo
might be portrayed as a middle-of-the-road strategy; the lump sum
that members command when their turn comes around may well be
used for individual or nuclear family consumption, but it is also
potentially available to meet kinship obligations, in the way of
funerals, hospital bills, school fees etc. However, the
instalment plan (if brought to a successful conclusion) is
invariably and exclusively a means for individuals to accumulate
durable material items.
All these budgetary considerations might give the impression that
the main reason for buyers taking on instalment plans is their
temporary or structural lack of ready cash. However, in ways
altogether typical of the cultural dimension of consumerism, more
is involved. Significantly, the major furniture outlets prefer
not to deal with customers who can afford to pay cash: the
instalment plan is not just a financial technique, it is a
central institution of southern African consumer culture. In all
probability, its centrality derives from the effects I mentioned
earlier: of building the person of the consumer, competing with
their kinship obligations, and hence weakening kinship ties, and
transforming the sense of time. The buyers at these stores are,
additionally, the prisoners of an local aesthetics which leaves
no alternative but to buy at the formal-sector, usurious
furniture outlets. Similar furniture -- often both superior in
quality, and cheaper in price even than that at theoretical net
cost in Town Talk and Furniture Mart -- is locally
made in Francistown in small workshops owned by the socially
stigmatized, Shona-speaking Zezuru immigrant community from
Zimbabwe. But, for aspiring consumers from the Francistown lower-
and middle-classes, it is simply a disgrace to buy there and,
once bought, the items would be impossible to resell even at a
great loss. Although they admirably serve the utilitarian purpose
of supporting the domestic ergonomics of human bodies (as all
well-made furniture does), the informal-sector products are
devoid of all positive symbolic value as defined by taste.
However, from the late 1980s there has been an alternative to the
consumerist exploitation of the two main furnishing firms: Rudy’s,
a new yet emporium-like department store established opposite
Francistown’s New Mall. Its German-born owner prefers cash
sales, arranges instalment loans commensurate with current bank
rates, and has become the hero of the would-be consumerist
classes of the town. His being White, as well as the formal
appearance of his store, ensure that his merchandise is not
affected by the negative connotations which put the Zezuru’s
stock beyond the pale. It was through Rudy’s that Mary
realized her dream of purchasing a modern wardrobe on the
instalment plan.
This move can truly be said to have crowned her endeavours on the
path to becoming an urban consumer. The wardrobe is the one
function that is not foreshadowed in the historic Kalanga village
space, and that is the very reason why she has to have one. Nor
can she afford to be the laughing-stock of her work mates and
co-tenants, and buy mere Zezuru imitations of ‘real’
furniture. There is no way back to the pole-and-dagga house she
proudly built with her own hands only three years before. On her
income of barely P200 a month, she has to explore the world and
assimilate its global taste. She does so by acquiring a plywood
wardrobe answering to the third-hand, imitative aesthetics of the
European middle-class of the 1950s. Yet Mary’s room is
not just about taking refuge from the village in the town, and
totally embracing urban and global ways. Mary is involved in an
intense and highly idiosyncratic process of personal bricolage.
At this more personal level, her retreat to town is primarily a
retreat into herself. She draws the narrow walls of her room,
even if merely rented in the house that was supposed to be her
own, nearer and nearer around herself in a search for protection
and identity. And this miniature private space is then endowed
with meaning, not exclusively by reference to global patterns of
signification but by projecting, upon that commodified urban
space, time-honoured rural distinctions which define the
functionality of dwelling space in terms of the construed,
physiological requirements of the human body. As a new consumer
in a global world, Mary embellishes her room with selected
patterns of signification from her rural home, but she knows that
henceforth home is only to be found in the little space she has
created herself, from scratch.
Conclusion
In this paper I
have explored some aspects of the transition from African village
life -- with its characteristically very low levels of commodity
consumption -- to urban life with its vastly increased levels of
commodity consumption. My method has involved a longitudinal case
study, following one young woman for more than five years in
present-day Botswana. The basis for the application of this
method was established during a year of fieldwork in Francistown
(1998--99) and followed by shorter visits, once or twice yearly,
that renewed and adapted urban and urban-rural networks of
relationships and communication (which included our protagonist
but were by no means restricted to her).
However specific, even unique, Mary’s story, its general
significance suggests a model with wide applicability in Africa
today: a model for the transition from village lifestyle to urban
patterns of individual commodity consumerism. The principal
variables of this model can be made explicit by contrasting two
ideal-typical situations in contemporary Africa -- the village
and the town -- and by indicating how Tutume, as a village, and
Francistown, as a town deviate, from these ideal types. In many
respects, Mary’s is simply a story about her relatively
successful migration to town, undergoing in the process a
detachment from rural productive activities (proletarianization
in other words) and a reorientation towards an urban lifestyle
(urbanization in other words).
The Tutume village Mary hails from is a fairly standard
present-day African village environment: it displays a more or
less viable kinship system, and serves as a seat of specific
local meaning (e.g. kinship support, autonomous productive
accomplishments, maternity confinement, signification of space
and time). Female identity there is primarily defined by
reference to local values (kinship, personal productive and
reproductive activities), and not by commodity-based grooming of
the female body by reference to cosmopolitan values. Yet, even in
the village, cosmopolitan meanings are now being proffered by
formal organizations (the school, clinic or church) related to
those in more or less distant towns. There is increasing local
dependence on monetarized commodity consumption (school,
pre-school, clothing, detergent) and, given the paucity of local
cash sources, this means that local kinship obligations can no
longer be met locally but dispel their providers to town. As a
result, village-based meaning faces increasing difficulty in
competing effectively with monetarized town-based values; gone
forth in order to honour a village-based obligation to support
one’s kin, the migrant worker may well be drawn into a domain
of urban consumption that implicates values incompatible with
those of kinship. Meanwhile, kin support -- albeit at a distinct
price, which may readily be expressed in cash terms -- enables
the most likely providers to leave their dependants in the care
of relatives, thus freeing themselves for full-time urban
employment.
To this pattern, familiar from many parts of sub-Saharan Africa
today, we have to add features specific to time and place (early
1990s, Tutume village, northeastern Botswana) such as: a
declining ecosystem, easy communications with town and, in
opposition to Botswana’s dominant Tswana ethnic and linguistic
identity, strong Kalanga ethnic and linguistic identity. To judge
by the details of Mary’s story, the Kalanga kinship system has
taken a form which is little accommodating to women, especially
as (ex-)wives and as daughters. More generally, Tutume belongs to
a rural social environment in which the integrity of the female
body is frequently assaulted by strangers. In combination with
economic push factors, these features may be leading, especially
for women, to more or less permanent urbanization, and to a
shedding of ethnic particularism in favour of the national,
ethnically unmarked, ‘Botswana’ culture. All of this may
amount to an explanation of why, in Botswana, urbanizing
individuals -- especially women -- become fully-fledged
consumers; but at least it helps us to understand why so little
in the way of attachment to the social and cultural life of the
village prevents them from doing so.
In many other respects the urban world into which Mary
progressively enters is typical of modern African town-life. It
displays the familiar interplay between formal and informal
sector markets for labour and commodities, a high degree of
ethnic and linguistic pluralism, and a relative dominance of
formal organizations. The last foster a general awareness of
formal-sector career models, which the young urbanites especially
seek to emulate. Kinship appears to offer an urban reception
structure for recent migrants that patterns urban--rural
relations; however, ready alternatives to kinship are offered by
urban churches and by the urban workplace, each providing a
non-kinship, urban reception structure and reference group which
may, however, superficially be cast in the idiom of fictive
kinship. Commonly men and women do not follow the same
trajectories in urbanization. The town, while largely destructive
of rural-based social placement, is the site of a proliferation
of new forms of social placement in class terms, depending on
capital formation and on socio-economic distinction. It is,
therefore, imperative upon the town-dweller to display a
distinctive lifestyle as articulated through commodity
consumption and achievement in the urban market of housing and
rented accommodation. Such consumption is instigated and
facilitated by a highly visible and expanding retail trade,
including low-threshold outlets catering for incipient,
inexperienced and insolvent consumers. The complex of urban
consumerism is sustained by an openness to international and
global models of commodity consumption, as they are locally
represented through the media (radio, television, glossy
magazines) and through other means of communication (mail order
catalogues, shop windows). Even for the less affluent urbanite,
rotating credit and hire-purchase arrangements make possible
substantial capital expenditure, most of which is directed to
commodity consumption. These social and economic factors combine
to foster a retreat into a model of identity as self-realization,
dependent on strictly individual consumption activities and
correlated with increasing evasion of kinship obligations.
To these general features, Francistown of the early 1990s added
the following specifics: an expanding labour market (it was a
veritable boom town), a high capacity to absorb immigrant labour,
and conflictual labour relations favouring women employees. This
made for a well-established formal sector, promoting individual
cash earnings and expenditure, and allowing especially the
all-female workplace to emerge as a stable, closely-knit,
personal reference group. SHHA (self-help housing) had become a
major venue of capital formation for both individuals and nuclear
families; the uneasy relations between Africans and formal
organizations, however, made the successful operation of
lucrative municipal institutions (such as SHHA) dependent on
urban skill and experience. The relative security of the urban
labour market produced a high level of proletarianization, in
other words: established urbanites no longer depended on their
rural background; therefore, they could afford to use the idiom
of kinship not as a supportive structure, redistributing
accumulated resources for the benefit of poorer kin, but (by the
travesty of an urban reception structure for rural kinsmen) as an
exploitative structure for the benefit of already richer kin.
Given the gendered historical response to modernity (Kalanga
women accommodated male strangers in town, while Kalanga men
tended to keep aloof from town) it is understandable that, in
Francistown’s public situations, Kalanga ethnic and linguistic
identity has yielded to Botswana’s dominant Tswana ethnic and
linguistic identity; this already indicates that, especially for
women, falling back on a kin-based urban reception structure is
not the most likely option in early urbanization -- they would
rather explore the alternatives of the church and the workplace.
In this gender-specific context, it is no surprise that the
consumption of commodities devoted to grooming the female body
became a major source and focal point of socially negotiable
identity. But Francistown women tended not to stop at that but to
continue accumulating commodities beyond the requirements of
bodily grooming. They were able to do so by virtue of combining
extreme austerity in basic consumption (food and shelter) with
relatively secure and abundant formal-sector employment. Indeed,
even the accumulation of such commodities as items of clothing,
furniture, and kitchen utensils is only part of a more
comprehensive project to increasingly defining personal identity
in terms of available models of modernity and success. Hence the
eager utilization of urban educational services which, in
Botswana, are affordable and can be combined with full-time,
formal-sector employment, making a career in the formal-sector a
realistic aspiration even for educationally disadvantaged young
adults.
If this summarizes the formal, static structure which Mary
encounters as an adolescent girl, her progress from village girl
to urban consumer can be understood in terms of the dynamics of
her serial movement back and forth between the specific niches
available to her within this structure in the village and the
town. But in alternating between them, Mary simultaneously
changes these niches, adapting them to her evolving needs and her
evolving self-identity. Far from being a merely oscillatory
movement between the apparently fixed and stable positions
defined by the juxtaposition of town and village, the historicity
of Mary’s progress effects subtle but accumulative changes in
her successive situations and in her responses to them. Returning
to Tutume after her first spell in Francistown, she is no longer
the same girl but a young mother and, much as she reembraces the
value-generating reproductive and productive roles of the village
environment, she is soon propelled back to town in order to be a
provider. In town, the exploitation to which she is subjected by
her kinsmen no longer paralyses her but -- converging with the
challenges and promises extended by the new reference group in
her all-female workplace -- reinforces a role model of success in
her, turning her into a highly efficient worker, student and
consumer at the same time.
From one point of view, Mary’s becoming an urban consumer is an
attempt to enchant her exile in an urban life-world with patterns
of signification largely derived from her rural home; from
another perspective, however, Mary’s progress amounts to a
sustained flight forward from her village childhood and girlhood.
Beyond such facile and partisan juxtapositions, her story is not
even merely about her becoming an urban consumer, but about the
gradual unfolding of her potential to invest awareness,
acceptance and ultimately self-identity in the anatomical and
physiological details of her female body, brought to reproduce
without love or support, scarred and starved and denied basic
comforts throughout most of the period we have followed her, but
in the end sheltered by an urban room rendered tolerably
comfortable and meaningful by her own efforts -- and thus
increasingly clad in freedom, dignity, and hope.
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[1] Anthropological
field-work in Francistown (mainly in and from a SHHA residential
area) and surrounding rural areas was conducted between November
1988 and November 1989, and during shorter visits, once or twice
a year from 1990 to 1994. I am indebted to the Ministry of Lands,
Local Government and Housing, Republic of Botswana, and its
Applied Research Unit, for accommodating and facilitating my
research, and to the African Studies Centre, Leiden, for
institutional and financial support. My greatest debt is to my
wife Patricia, who shared the anxieties of urban fieldwork and
welcomed Mary as our adopted daughter. Unavoidably, it may be
questioned whether the degree of our own involvement in Mary’s
life was either methodologically too close, or morally too
distant -- something which perhaps applies to all genuinely
participatory observation (cf. van Binsbergen 1979). It has been
my intention to present my portrait of Mary over time in ways
that make full use of the available and relevant information,
without portraying her other than as a fellow human being; if I
have not succeeded in doing so at the first attempt, I sincerely
apologize to her and to whoever may identify with her, and
promise to do better.
[2] See van Velsen’s classic
account (1969).
[3] The word ‘tribal’ may be
puzzling in a contemporary anthropological context; however,
eight constituent ‘tribes’ of the comprehensive Tswana group
have been written into the Botswana constitution (Republic of
Botswana 1982, 1983), and my use of the word ‘tribe’ reflects
its everyday use in the public parlance of that country.
[4] In southern Africa the word shebeen
denotes a bar within a private home or in the yard of a private
home. In independent Botswana, such arrangements are entirely
legal, and thus devoid of the connotations of criminality and
excessive moral licence which the term shebeen has in
other southern African contexts.
[5] Obviously more is
involved: while Francistown has a unique labour history, it
displays the same high incidence of female-headed households that
is common in southern and south-central African towns; and,
throughout present-day Botswana, a majority of children are born
outside wedlock.
[6] And by extension Botswana:
the SHHA schema was a national one, by no means restricted to
Francistown.
[7] In Botswana today it is not
unusual for Ikalanga-speakers to give their children Setswana
instead of Ikalanga names.
[8] This again is a Setswana word
which is equally current among Ikalanga-speakers.
[9] Which, it should be said,
lest wrong impressions about southern African hygienic standards
be fostered, contrasts only in comfort and sociability with Mary’s
punctual two daily baths in cold water taken in her crammed room,
for which she first has to fetch several buckets of water, on her
head and usually through the dark.
[10] On the practice and pitfalls of
suing for maintenance in Botswana, cf. Molokomme 1991.
[11] This is actually less surprising
than it looks. There is fundamental structural affinity between a
historic Kalanga homestead, like TaLawrence’s (cf. diagram 2),
and the house which TaJulia, using a fairly common ground plan
that accorded with SHHA stipulations, constructed on Mary’s
former plot:
Diagram 3. Ground plan of the house TaJulia built on Mary’s plot.
[12] As my colleague, the economist
Henk Meilink points out, this could be the case only if the
interest charged exceeded the rate of inflation which, although
dramatically lower than for most African countries in the early
1990s, was still far from negligible in Botswana, ‘Domestic
inflation steadily increased, averaging 11.6 percent per year in
1988--92; however, unofficial estimates indicate that it is
appreciably higher’ (Brown 1994: 174). My impression is that
the interest rates in question do exceed 10 percent per annum;
however, further research is required on this point.
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