Becoming a Debtor to Eat: The Transformation of Food Sharing in Namibia

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 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 standardised 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 circulation 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 products between wife-takers and wife-givers (Kuper 1982; 2016). Since marriage payments 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 & Comaroff 1981; 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 (Woodburn 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 dependencies they create (Peebles 2010; Shipton 2010; Bähre 2011; Graeber 2011; Han 2011; 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, furniture, 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 significantly in regard to their social formations and effects (Peebles 2010; Graeber 2011; 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 (Granovetter 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 networks 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.

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 indigenous population into its growing capitalist economy. In doing so it significantly restricted the amount of land available to indigenous groups (Schnegg et al. 2013; Sullivan & 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 pastoralism. 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 necessity, 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 government has become the most important employer in Namibia. Government employees 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 black middle class (Southall 2004). The same state employment also providing the collateral 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 independence the state removed the racial criteria from the ‘old age pension payments’, a discriminatory 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 household’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 government 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 distribution 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 Fransfontein 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 inhabitants 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 servants – 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 Fransfontein, 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 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 payments 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.

I first 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 collected 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 meanings 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 Fransfontein, 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 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 consecutive 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 quantitative 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 situations 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 importantly, 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).

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.

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
Snuff	30	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

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. Learning 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 supermarket 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 transaction 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?

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 northwestern 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 introduction 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 symmetrical. 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 maintains 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 community 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 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 beginning 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 hospitable 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 importance of augu has drastically decreased. While people engaged in almost two augu transactions 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.

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

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 transactions are reconfiguring the social structure of the community.

But who are the people who give out goods today? There are 14 shops in Fransfontein. 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 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 traditional 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 relationships. 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 creditor relationships. That is, one-third of the households in the community have become their debtors to eat.

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. How does this compare to countries like Europe or the U.S.? In Germany, 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 concepts 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 relationship 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 Fransfontein. 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.

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 important 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 transaction? 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 works with the same goods and among the same people as other types of exchange. Because of this, surude is reconfiguring relationships and 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, ‘You always ask those people where you 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 important 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 concerns 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’, they also realised that their 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 this is so, some people in Fransfontein are beginning to accumulate the future of 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.

Conclusion

When the German missionary Vedder wrote the ethnographic reports that found their way into Polanyi’s The 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 off the 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 redistribution 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 component of the past egalitarian society, no longer crosscuts social groups. On the contrary, in some respects, food sharing manifests them.

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 population 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 continuity, albeit in shifting forms.

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 extremely 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).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number SCHN 1103].

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 consonants. 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 Südwestafrika (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.

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 Comaroff have shown so convincingly in relation to ‘work’ (e.g. as bereka and tiro) among the Tshidi Tswana in South Africa (Comaroff & Comaroff 1987; 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