Erin Torkelson: Bantustan Banking: Debt, Race and Space in South African Social Welfare

Ataya: HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

Speaker: Erin Torkelson, University of Western Cape

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Bio: Erin Torkelson is a Lecturer in the at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Geography at Durham University in England. She is a human geographer interested in the collision between normative assumptions about cash transfers as public goods and the lived experience of cash transfers as private debts. Her current project, Separate Development: Debt, Race and Repair in South Africa (under contract with Duke University Press), explores how a preeminent, state-sponsored cash transfer program has become a means of racialized and gendered dispossession in post-apartheid South Africa. In addition to academic work, she has consulted for the UN Office of the Special Advisor on Africa, the Black Sash and Open Secrets and published in popular outlets such as Counterpunch, Daily Maverick, and Ground up.

Topic: For two decades, there has been a surprising consensus that cash transfers are simple, value-neutral, payments from governments to their citizens. However, when the South African Social Security Agency outsourced grant payment to Net1 Technologies, there was nothing simple or apolitical about the welfare system they created. Far from being progressive refashioning of the welfare state, cash transfers became a new stream of profit for finance capital through the aggressive marketing of financial products to recipients. I show how Net1 forcibly removed racialized and gendered grantees into a separate digital financial space subject to indirect rule by a private corporation outside the protection of national financial authorities. In so doing, bring literature from African Studies to Economic Geographies to show how the post-apartheid welfare state effectively financed the re-institution of racial and gendered segregation through the division not of territorial but of digital financial space.

How Ataya works: One presenter and their work – in exchange with the audience. Each Ataya session engages with selected work by the presenter (a text, artwork, performance, even food). The presenter introduces their work and grounds the subsequent discussion with the participants. For best engagement, we recommend participants to view the work (made available in advance on our website) before the session.