South Africa: Shared Poverty and the Curse of Unemployment in Rural South Africa

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In the 1960s, there was an intense debate in the social sciences about how culture and poverty were connected. At the time, the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1966; 1960) famously asserted, based on ethnographic research in two slums of Mexico, that he felt that it was possible to speak of a “culture of poverty“,[1] where families and communities had lost faith and developed attitudes and traits that made them feel fatalistic and hopeless.[2] The concept was poorly received because others argued that Lewis seemed to blame the slum dwellers for their poverty. They asserted that it was not culture that caused poverty but capitalism and structural inequality.[3]

In another part of rural Mexico at this time, anthropologist George Foster (1964; 1965) came up with the idea of an image of limited good for the rural poor. He suggested that peasant-proletarian-type communities were dominated by a “cognitive orientation” defined by the idea that all “good” (both material and spiritual) was in short supply and that one’s gain would be another’s loss.[4] The basic model, he suggested, was informed by a sense of maintaining social equivalence and avoiding anti-social inequality.[5] The outcome of the debate, based on Mexican urban and rural ethnography, was that the use of the concept of poverty culture was seen as problematic, especially given that it seemed to imply that people were poor because of their culture.

This article is based on ongoing ethnographic research in the rural Eastern Cape. It illustrates how advanced marginalisation, state neglect and the massive loss of migrant jobs over the past five years causes communities to turn on themselves in a world of “limited good”. The article engages with debates about culture and poverty to show how deepening structural exclusion, combined with populist discourses around inequality and luck, undermines hope, social cohesion and a general spirit of shared poverty in rural locations. Sharpening rural inequalities combine here with conditions of deepening precarity and desperation.

The state and limited goods

In South Africa, the use of the culture of poverty concept has further limitations because it appeared to dovetail with the racist ideologies of the apartheid state. However, the idea of culture has recently come back into circulation. Some scholars now use concepts like landscape, belonging or life worlds to account for the non-linear, zigzag nature of rural social change and persistent attachments of urbanising black South African families to their rural homes.[6] Others speak of indigenous knowledge systems (IDS). Finding the right language to acknowledge culture without essentialising it, or over-estimating its significance, is tricky, but local belief systems should also not be ignored or denied. In this blog, we apply the idea of “the image of limited good” to the politics of service delivery and joblessness.

In 20th-century rural South Africa, the apartheid government enforced forms of social equivalence through policies that restricted families in the reserves or homelands from accumulating “too much” land, livestock, or material assets. Communal land tenure systems helped flatten out rural social differentiation and create a state-supported system of shared poverty to support the cheap labour economy. The policy aimed to ensure that rural households remained too poor to assert their independence or lacked the means to withhold their labour from the market. Low, bachelor wages were paid in the cities to naturalise racial inequality and reinforce shared poverty and social equivalence in poor rural communities. After apartheid, when the state no longer controlled the labour market through influx control and the migrant labour system dismantled, families were more inclined to express social differentiation by improving their rural homes and the acquisition of material goods, like satellite TV, cell phones and cars. The long-standing expectation of social equivalence remained while social differentiation was increasingly evident with the rise of consumer culture in the villages.

This persistence of an ideology of equivalence is one of the reasons that access to basic services has been such a vexed and contested issue in rural areas. After apartheid, rural communities contested the idea that some areas were getting services, like electricity and running water, when others were not. Many communities even boycotted elections because they were not getting the same services as their neighbours. With limited public goods and corruption, the ANC has struggled to meet rural basic service demands but has nevertheless implemented a standardised system of social security and grants, which allows access irrespective of location. In this time of elections in 2024, rural communities are intensifying their demands on the state for equal rights and equivalence in terms of the delivery of basic public goods. Rural people know that public goods are in short supply and that even protest, and “presence“, will not deliver results. Many feel pessimistic that their efforts will bring change. At the same time, officials and politicians emphasise how the social grant system delivers citizenship and equivalence. They warn that other political parties might not be generous to the poor if they came to power. In this context, there is enormous competition amongst villagers and village sections for control of what they have. When service delivery meetings are held by officials in one section or area, residents block citizens from neighbouring communities from attending, to monopolise whatever the government might be offering. They also shut schools to children from other village sections even if those schools are not full. The culture of limited good is built on the idea that what comes inside, for whatever reason, belongs to those who live inside. This creates intra-community competition and fracture and makes it difficult for the limited public goods available, like high schools, to reach children in more than one area.

The government’s strategy since Covid-19 in a context of fiscal crisis and limited funds to target youth with special poverty relief grants or support, such as skills development, occasional public works jobs or child support, angers older people who feel excluded. They are bitter that they have been cut out in the same way that older men felt cut out in the past when state transfers predominately supported older women. So, while the Department of Social Development espouses an ideology of building family values, its rights-based policies continue to divide families. This makes one wonder whether a Basic Income Grant (BIG) would be a better poverty relief strategy to encourage intra-household cooperation? In the election year of 2024, the chronic failure of service delivery, together with the increasing isolation of rural communities, seems to have unleashed an increasingly vitriolic culture of competition over scarce resources that resembles a culture of “limited good”.

The curse of unemployment

In this environment of growing suspicion, fear, and competition, we noticed that rural individuals and households increasingly feel that inclusion or exclusion (access to goods of any kind) is a matter of luck or good fortune. In Tsolo, a rural village in the former Transkei homeland of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, where jobs are scarcer than ever before, many speak of persistent unemployment as unnatural. They claim that there have never been so few jobs in their living memory. Older men and women speak of a time when almost every family had someone employed somewhere, often in the mines or the cities. The level of unemployment confronts them as an existential crisis for life as they knew it and their capacity for social reproduction. Over the past year, we have been observing and listening to local accounts of the struggles for jobs and why some get them, and others do not. One narrative that has emerged in this area is that persistent unemployment is a curse.

The shift from periodic to permanent joblessness for households has become a source of much discussion. Some say the situation means that some families are no longer just disadvantaged but “damned”. They say that the level of unemployment is more than a misfortune. It is a curse which appears to be underpinned by the theft of luck. Nozipho, a young Makoti (newlywed), said that sometimes God grants you an employment opportunity and then evil witches hijack your luck and prolong the pain your family is experiencing. She stated that those who steal luck get pleasure out of prolonging the pain of seeing families live without remittances and support. She added that these evil people, who steal the luck of others, possess a microscopic spiritual eye to predict when a person is going to be successful. They make it their mission to steal this luck before it materialises. She emphasised that, through magic, luck is being stolen by others in the locations and thus traps some families in a perpetual state of unemployment, making them zombies.

Another young woman, Zimasa, concurred saying that it does not make sense that whole families are unemployed for years and “nothing comes up”. She suspects that there must be a third evil eye that oversees their lives. This is because they have been applying for many job opportunities and have had no luck. Speaking of her own experience, she explained that she has tried for many assistant teacher posts and is well qualified but never asked for an interview. This raises suspicions that her family is cursed. She said that by shutting down the luck of others, witches enhance their opportunities. To get to you, she explained, they take something of yours, like an item of clothing or a lock of your hair, and turn it into a curse. Once they have you under their spell, she explained, they can make all sorts of misfortune occur. If you are an employed person and they want you to lose your job, she said, they can also make sure that conflicts escalate at work so that you get fired. And if you are not employed, they can just ensure that your work-seeking efforts are fruitless. She emphasised that evildoers (witches) travel everywhere with their spiritual magics and can relentlessly pursue you everywhere you go. They can even punish you when you are hundreds of miles away.

A neighbour in the field said that once a bad omen has taken hold of you nothing positive will happen in your life. He said that the witches like to steal pictures of their victims so that they work on them and control the curses they impose by manipulating the image. The neighbour said that many people are cursed, like families who have continuous bad luck, but they are not even aware of the action being taken against them. Some Christian believers in the village explained that it was God who released employment to people, but Satan was always there to take it away. He said that the issue of gaining access to jobs was a matter of “spiritual warfare”; you can be given a job and then quickly become “trapped in the spiritual realm” which makes it impossible to take advantage of any income-earning opportunities. Many we spoke to said that these curses were delivered by older members of the community, especially women, who could not find jobs and wanted to stop others from getting them.

One of the mothers interviewed in Tsolo, Nokwakha, said that she was certain her family had been targeted because she had four children with post-school qualifications and none of them had been able to find a job. Nokwakha revealed that she once consulted a local sangoma (healer) who revealed that she had been cursed and was caught in a spiritual state of unemployability. The sangoma said that someone else was spiritually holding their employment blessings because of envy they had of the education of her family. She said that the relative success of her children in a village where many dropped out of school and became addicted to drugs made her vulnerable to the work of witches. This was exacerbated by the fact that educated children came home to the village during the Covid-19 pandemic, which made them vulnerable to the evil doers.

The sangoma recommended a ceremony called ukuqinisa umzi (fortification), adding that once they had done this ritual, the spell would be broken, and their luck would change. Nokwakwa explained that she had followed the sangoma’s advice and fortified the family but had yet to see results emanating from this action. In other places, we heard that spells of this sort had driven some young men to commit suicide. In Kwelera two men hung themselves in trees. In another case in this area, a male youth said that he refused to tell his parents the degree he was registered for at a local university because talking about his education could put the family in danger. The danger of being cursed caused many of those who returned during the pandemic to seek ways back to the city. One educated young man said that when he went to public events, rituals and funerals these days, he always acted stupid and dumb so that he would not be targeted by envious witches, who wished to steal the promise of his education and strip him of his luck.

Caution at funerals

When the Covid-19 pandemic broke and customary practices were banned in rural areas, families and communities responded with panic, anger and fear. They said that the state was “closing the gate” on their culture and preventing them from burying the dead with dignity and in terms of their time-tested customs. They begged for the lockdown to end so that they could consult their ancestors and rectify their broken world. It took over a year and several deadly waves of runaway infections in the rural Eastern Cape before there was any sign of respite.

The first inclination of those who had lost family members and experienced incomplete ritual practices was to mobilise their families to rectify unsatisfactory rituals. In some instances, this meant exhuming the bodies of their loved ones and reburying them, while in others it simply meant holding ceremonies to explain to the ancestors why they had not communicated for some time. In many areas within which we have been working, 2021 and 2022 were years for rectification within families which were hard-pressed to make ends meet. The demands of custom thus encouraged greater indebtedness and vulnerability.

After correcting the pandemic mishaps, many families revisited their burial practices and the enormous cost of funerals before Covid-19. In Tsolo and other areas around Mthatha, we have observed that the night vigil ritual stage (imilindelo), where the coffin was opened, and the body washed and dressed in the presence of kin, had been widely dispensed with in favour of simply taking the sealed coffin to the grave on the day of the funeral. In other areas, by contrast, the pandemic reinvigorated custom and enforced a return to even more elaborate burials and mourning practices than had been the case before Covid-19. In Tsolo, where night vigils have been mostly abandoned and the shorter format burials adopted, locals offered different explanations for their decisions to break with tradition. Many said that families could no longer afford the elaborate funerals of the pre-pandemic era. They noted that restrictions had brought home the need to change something that had needed to be changed some time ago. Others spoke of the scourge of rising crime and the dangers that family members faced when travelling to night vigils and returning home in the dead of night.

In listening to these explanations, two reoccurring narratives stood out. The first was the question of spiritual contamination. In several accounts, we heard that the real danger of the night vigil lay in the spiritual vulnerability of the body and the family when kin and neighbours visited. They said that if any of the visitors at the vigil harboured evil feelings and ill intentions, it was a perfect time to curse the family. Keeping the coffin shut and restricting access to the corpse was one way to protect the family from misfortunate in fragile and spiritually dangerous times.

The other narrative associated with the concerns about funeral costs was the idea that funerals were too ostentatious before Covid-19 and thus shamed poor households without the means to have elaborate funerals. The decision to stick with some of the Covid restrictions was thus appealing to minimise the threat of spiritual contamination, while at the same time demonstrating a commitment to social equivalence at a time when witches were on the loose and highlighting social difference and inequality could be dangerous. In some ways then, funeral practices were being brought into line with a new emphasis on social equivalence and “the image of limited good”.

Conclusion

Oscar Lewis’s culture of poverty concept and Foster’s image of limited good were heavily criticised in the late 1960s and 1970s for being too presumptuous and implying that poor or rural people became entrapped in distinctive and negative cognitive orientations or sub-cultures.[7] These theories were ahistorical, insular, and over-generalised, but they were also developed from long-term, in-depth ethnographic enquiry in real-life situations in Mexico. Many of their insights have thus been lost or discounted as they tried to reach too far beyond their context.

In the discussion above we have explored aspects of the “image of limited good” as a common frame of reference in a situation of increasing scarcity, inequality, and fear in rural South Africa. In this election year, when aspirations and hope are high, the failure of state service delivery to reach the poor has produced a new politics of competition within and between communities and families. Even targeted poverty relief measures and grants are dividing rather than uniting families, genders, and generations. In this context broken promises and collapsing services intensify feelings of rural entrapment and isolation which help to reinvent the cultural politics of “limited good”.

At the same time, we also found that inexplicable and unnatural levels of unemployment stoked beliefs that evil agents in the local community were stealing the luck of ordinary folk to enrich themselves. There is a pervasive belief that luck is now in such short supply that it must be stolen to feed the desire for advancement amongst those, like the older generation, who are excluded from the job market. We also noted that in a climate of spiritual predators and a disdain for rural inequality, many locals changed their long-standing family funeral rituals. These views and practices have produced a new cultural politics where poor rural communities are increasingly involved in a struggle against structural exclusion from opportunity, but increasingly in an acrimonious struggle against themselves.

Endnotes

[1]Lewis, Oscar, 1966, “The Culture of Poverty”, Scientific American 215 (4): 19-28.

[2]Leacock, Eleonor, 1971, The Culture of Poverty: A Critique. Touchstone.

[3]Valentine, Charles, 1968, Culture and Poverty: A Critique and Counter Proposal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

[4]Foster, George, 1964, “Cultural Responses to Expressions of Envy in Tzintzuntzan”, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21 (2).

[5]Foster, George, 1965, “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good”, American Anthropologist 67 (3): 293-315.

[6]Bank, Leslie and Tim Hart, 2019, “Land Reform and Belonging in South Africa: A Place-making Perspective”, Politikon 46: 411-26.

[7]Lewis, Oscar, 1959, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books.

Leslie Bank is an Extraordinary Professor of Anthropology at Walter Sisulu University. Bonelwa Nogqaza is a graduate researcher at the Human Science Research Council in South Africa. They are both researchers on the Ukuvula Isango Women RISE project on post-Covid recovery in rural South Africa, funded by the IDRC in Canada. https://www.womenrise-ukuvula-isango.com/. Leslie Bank is also a co-author of the African Arguments book, Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa (Hurst, 2022).