'When they see money, they think it's life': Money, modernity and morality in two sites in Rural Malawi

Journal of Southern African Studies

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 335-349

  Kaler, Amy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

PERCEPTION; SOCIAL HISTORY; SOCIAL THEORY;

AFRICA; EAST AFRICA; MALAWI; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA;

EID: 33745061355     PISSN: 03057070     EISSN: 14653893     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03057070600656333     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Marx, cited in V. Zelizer, The Social Meanings of Money (New York, Harper Collins, 1994), p. 346.
2. L. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 193.
3. G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 128.
4. Ibid., pp. 152, 429-31.
5. Ibid., p. 256
6. K. Doyle, The Social Meanings of Money and Property: In Search of a Talisman (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publishing, 1999)
7. H. Codere, 'Money-exchange Systems and a Theory of Money', Man, 3, 4 (1968), pp. 557-77
8. K. Hart 'Heads or Tails?: Two Sides of the Coin', Man, 21, 4 (1986), pp. 637-56.
9. Zelizer, The Social Meanings of Money
10. V. Zelizer, 'The Social Meaning of Money: Special Monies', American Journal of Sociology, 95, 2 (1989), pp. 342-77.
11. Zelizer, The Social Meanings of Money, p. 14.
12. E. Schatz, Does Women's Position Matter? An Analysis of Contraceptive Use in Malawi (Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center, 1999), p. 19.
13. Ibid., p. 23.
14. Ibid., p. 24.
15. In this perception, they differ from theorists who have written about postcolonial southern Africa, such as John and Jean Comaroff, who argue that there is no sharp break between 'traditional times' and 'modern times'. See J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993).
16. The interviewer had an example of this 'money with spears', a coin given to him by his own grandfather.
17. Historical accounts also remind us that money has never been the only basis of status distinction among Malawians, despite what the elders may suggest. Kandawire (1980) describes a history of inequality and class formation among Malawians going back to the fifteenth century, centred on control of land and on competing claims to legitimate ownership of land. This process was exacerbated in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries as British settlers forcibly appropriated land, heightening the divide between those Africans who retained effective control over their land and those who did not. See J.A.K. Kandawire, 'Village Segmentation and Class Formation in Southern Malawi', Africa, 50, 2 (1980), pp. 125-44. However, as I suggest below, because of its portability and fungibility, money had qualitatively different social effects than other forms of wealth, such as land or command over labour.
18. Report of the Consul and Acting Commissioner Sharpe of the Trade and General Condition of the British Central African Protectorate for April 1 1896 to March 31 1897, from the files of J. Clyde Mitchell in Rhodes House, Oxford. All further references to Mitchell's files are to this collection of papers and are identified by the name of the box and the file from which they were taken.
19. Interestingly, in a later set of interviews with elders in Machinga conducted in 2001, which focused on labour migration, none of the men mentioned taxes as the reason why they went to what was then Northern and Southern Rhodesia or to South Africa to work. They described their motivations as getting the necessities for marrying and raising a family.
20. Even before labour migration to South Africa began in the very early twentieth century, Malawian men spent long periods away from home as hunters and traders between the interior and the Indian Ocean coast (now Tanzania and Mozambique). Wiseman Chirwa claims that some Malawian men had been employed for cash wages as earlier as the nineteenth century, working as porters for Portuguese slave traders and ivory traders (W. Chirwa, 'Theba' is Power: Rural Labour, Migrancy and Commercial Fishing in Malawi, 1890s to 1985 [PhD thesis, Queen's University (Canada), 1992], p. 89).
21. Files of J. Clyde Mitchell, Box 19, File 3.
22. Files of J. Clyde Mitchell, interview with Peter Grant Ngwazi, Box 11, File 2.
23. B. Morris, The Power of Animals: An Ethnography (New York, Berg Press, 1998), pp. 44-5.
24. C. Lienau, Labour Migration and Agricultural Development in Malawi - A Preliminary Report (Munster, Geography Institute, Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat, 1980), p. 13.
25. Ibid.
26. J.K. Kandawire, 'Thangata in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Systems of Land Tenure in Southern Malawi, with Special Reference to Chingale', Africa, 47, 2 (1977), pp. 185-91
27. Kandawire, Village Segmentation and Class Formation in Southern Malawi', Africa, 50, 2 (1980), pp. 126-45. Concerning land ownership as a resource in status differentiation,
28. see also P. Peters, 'Bewitching Land: The Role of Land Disputes in Converting Kin to Strangers and in Class Formation in Malawi', Journal of Southern African Studies, 28, 1 (2002), pp. 155-79.
29. J.C. Mitchell, The Yao Village (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1956), p. 256.
30. The kwacha is the main unit of Malawian currency, worth (at the time of the interviews) about 1/43 of a US dollar. Each kwacha is divided into ten tambala.
31. This practice of giving customers free gifts as a way of building consumer loyalty was common in southern Africa at the time, referred to as 'bonsella'. See T. Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1996), p. 72.
32. In this respect, the elders of Malawi differ from other people encountered in studies of money in Africa, such as in J. Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1989).
33. Chirwa, 'Theba' is Power, p. 381
34. In the days of widespread migrant labour, goods, such as clothes, shoes and bicycles, rather than cash, figured prominently in domestic disputes over the riches of migrant labour, according to the notes on local court cases and family disputes in J. Clyde Mitchell's papers.
35. In the interviews, the nature of casual money-making work is highly gendered. While young men might be able to do zitakataka or to find work, for young women, the only money-making enterprise mentioned was prostitution. This contrasts with historical and anthropological depictions of Yao and Chewa women's work in the past, in which beer-brewing and hiring oneself out for agricultural labour played a major role. See M. Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 128.
36. Some of the elderly female respondents said they knew other old women who earned occasional money for conducting rituals for first pregnancies or for the initiation of girls, but did not claim that they earned money this way themselves. Beyond that, there was no mention of older women earning money to which they could hold title. Nearly all the male respondents, however, made some income from selling their crops, especially cotton and tobacco. Most of these men had also worked as labour migrants in their youth.
37. M. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (London, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 173.
38. Ibid., p. 176.
39. Morris claims that bridewealth has become more common in Yao areas as the amount of money in circulation has increased, edging out the practice of chikamwini or matrilocal marital residence. He claims that Yao elders were disdainful of bridewealth-based marriages, viewing them as morally inferior to chikamwini. (Morris, The Power of Animals, pp. 38-9).
40. As long as 70 years ago, during the childhood of the eldest elders, outside observers of the patrilineal societies of central Nyasaland perceived that monetisation was driving up bridewealth. This increased bridewealth led to the atomisation of patriarchal extended families as fathers monopolised the bridewealth paid for their daughters, cutting out relatives such as brothers and cousins: Today, one of the mo st frequent accusations leveled at our European ways is that it has made it possible for a man to 'eat by himself' the chuma cha pa mwana, the child's marriage settlement... fathers demand atrocious totals for their daughters in cattle, money, hoes and clothing, and there is little or no restraint upon a man who may take to himself these goods (T.C. Young, Letter to the Editor, Man [April 1930], pp. 75-6).
41. A. Phillips, A Survey of African Marriage and Family Life (London, Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 90.
42. See also J.C. Mitchell, 'An Estimate of Fertility in Some Yao Hamlets in Liwonde District of Southern Nyasaland', Africa, 19 (1949), p. 298.
43. The HIV prevalence rate in Malawi is estimated at about 15 per cent of adults between the ages of 15 and 49 (http://www.unaids.org/html/pub/Global-Reports/Barcelona/ TableEstimatesEnd2001_en_xls.xls, accessed 29 December 2003).
44. E.P. Shipton, Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities (American Ethnological Society Monograph Series Number 1) (Washington, DC, American Anthropological Association, 1989)
45. J. Guyer (ed.), Money Matters: Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 1994).