THE CONCEPTS

Three successive concepts — pauper, percentile, precarity — have shifted from one to the other over a long analytical-historical sequence, both in Europe and in their application elsewhere. The English Poor Laws of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries defined the ‘pauper’ as a condition of deprivation in the basic sense of food, shelter, occupation, and well-being. The word pauper itself is derived from Latin and was a concept in administrative law. The condition of ‘vagabondage’ was a major motivating factor for the development of the Poor Laws in Britain, seen to be negative for employment and dangerous to social order.Footnote ⁴

Percentiles entered the British administrative system with the expansion of statistical records on income and wealth distribution, most clearly in the twentieth century, building from the growth of a participatory class politics. Those in the bottom percentiles, whatever process placed them there, would qualify as poor according to their monetary incomes. Considered in class terms, this would be seen as an enduring structural condition of whole categories of the population in the industrial economy.

Precarity enters the lexicon with the growth of a focus on risk and uncertainty, and the post-World War II responsibility of government to provide ‘safety nets’. American Catholic activist Dorothy Day was one of the first to link modern poverty to precarity in 1952.Footnote ⁵ However, her argument was a religious one. The secular referent of precarity comes later in the neoliberal era of shifting markets, exchange rates, and insurgent capitalization of assets. The economist Guy Standing devoted a book to the emergence of a class of western populations whose jobs, hours of work, and incomes are all unpredictable, while many of the components of the cost of living are inflexible. He referred to them as ‘the precariat’.Footnote ⁶

APPLICATION TO AFRICA

For the first two concepts — poverty and percentile — there is a certain implicit, social evolutionary movement. They were once applied to European populations of the past and became extrapolated, later, to Africa. John Iliffe's classic 1987 work, The African Poor, shows how analogies were drawn by colonial administrations, and points out the general nature of the pattern of change in the history of poverty. Especially in South Africa, with its industrializing economy, he saw a shift from poverty being the result of people's lack of access to social networks, in the past, to a condition in the twentieth century where it resulted from a scarcity of resources in people's areas of residence and a scarcity of reliable jobs in an industrializing economy. The shift from pauperism to low-percentile income was thereby seen as a general one in industrializing economies.Footnote ⁷ However, this sequential shift was clearly patchy and varied elsewhere in Africa.

Where I first worked in rural Nigeria in the 1960s, there were a few people there who would have been depicted as paupers in Europe, mainly due to their disability. And there were some classic regular causes of preventable morbidity and mortality. However, there was less general day-to-day grinding poverty, in the sense of deprivation of the necessary conditions for life, than would have been conveyed in quantitative terms that depicted these populations at the bottom of the percentile distribution of money income per capita. Within communities and families, there were redistributive networks for all the requirements of life, and these were brought forward as the economy commercialized in the context of the expansion of urban food supply.Footnote ⁸

For my 2004 work Marginal Gains, I was in the established, state-governed world of surveys and percentile summaries borrowed from the techniques of western national, colonial, and international administration. These were largely based on the class definitions of socio-economic life within nation-states, as distinct from colonial regimes, that were crucial for social policy after World War II. Deprivation was largely measured in terms of income, complemented with studies of health, housing, and consumption conditions, which were shared with many others, rather than in terms of individual circumstances of life. My own analysis of the Ghana Living Standards Survey suggested, however, that there were still distributional dynamics within local populations, in kind, that a cash-income focus was not capturing.Footnote ⁹

Finally, precarity became a concept to depict the poverty of the twenty-first century. The tracing of assets was moved into the methodology, as well as cash income.Footnote ¹⁰ Precarity arose under the conditions of the twenty-first century global economy, when employment and commodity prices began to fluctuate in an internationalized, and financialized, private sector that moves in increasingly surprising ways. Precarity is identified in terms of vulnerability, but not only with respect to the classic ecological and political forces of life, famine and war, as might have been the case in both the European and African past.Footnote ¹¹ Now the presence of precarity due to the market has become normalized as uncertainty. Opportunity and danger meet under this concept, unlike the personal deprivation of pauperism and the structural entrapment of a percentile economy. The study of assets, and especially the lack thereof, as indicating ‘precarity’, brings to the fore the study of what would be ‘savings’ in a fully monetized economy: that is, a combination of factors in African societies and economies, where not all assets have been fully monetized.

With precarity, the idea of a repetition of past, long-term processes has been replaced by a sense of convergence with the poor elsewhere in the globalized economic world. In the varied and very patchily industrialized economies of Africa, as elsewhere, the framing of poverty in terms of stochastic features, the intersection of variables modelled through sophisticated probability theory, is analytically different from the underlying assumptions behind structural class theories. But then, poverty as precarity arises in the African critical literature most strongly in relation to recent processes of dispossession in rural areas, that is, liquidation of land assets, usually under political pressure or legal redefinition of the customary bases for ownership.Footnote ¹² This undermines the old social grounding for the mitigation of low-income levels. And, in analyses of the current dynamics of the older industrial economies, most prominently of South Africa, as Iliffe predicted, the concept of precarity arises in relation to the increased unpredictability of employment.Footnote ¹³ And there is a growing economy not unlike the migratory ‘gathering’ of the past: artisanal mining for gold, diamonds, coltan, and other minerals.Footnote ¹⁴

Paupers, percentiles, and precarity are the interwoven themes of this analysis, with particular emphasis on the increasingly important place of situationally mobilizable assets, as distinct from regular money income. Assets have figured particularly prominently in African societies under the rubric of the composition of the multiple components of ‘wealth’, from the past; and, now, with an intensified concern with the unpredictability of life in the present. I took this concept of composition from my wealth-in-people work which highlighted how the many different kinds of (everything) in Beti valuational and social life were composed into synergisms, for the purposes of the moment: composition of interactive differences (as distinct from the accumulation of sameness).Footnote ¹⁵ This focus on composition in the past, and how it might work now, can come together with the theme of assets (in the current sense), combined in their compositional rather than accumulational dynamics, in the context of new conditions of life: involuntary displacement, involuntary confinement and unstable employment, and other sources of precarity.Footnote ¹⁶

THE IMPROBABILITY OF AFRICA AS UNIQUE IN THE HISTORY OF STRUCTURAL AND ENDURING CONDITIONS OF POVERTY

The call for papers for the 2014 conference ‘The History of Poverty in Africa: A Central Question?’ opened: ‘In the popular mind, Africa exemplifies poverty. Media coverage focuses on destitution … abject condition… famines’.Footnote ¹⁷ From my own biographical perspective, this picture would be different. Certainly, there would be cases of strikingly deformative illnesses such as leprosy, but the so-termed ‘naked savage’ or ‘primitive man’ (images that come from a much earlier period than our own) always looked extraordinarily strong and healthy by comparison with the older generation of the English working class with whom we grew up in the post-Depression era. My own era of childhood was one when the older generations in the industrial towns had been physically marked by the injuries of two wars that had been brutal for the foot-soldiers, and by the deprivations of the Great Depression. We had words to describe people with rickets deformities: ‘bandy legs and knock knees’. And some men from the working class were clearly stunted: shorter than me (five foot two inches). We had an industrial folk music that included lines like ‘we lived upon nettles when nettles was in’.

By contrast, representations of slaves and ‘the essential kaffir’ show extraordinarily healthy and strong-looking people.Footnote ¹⁸ We can pause for a moment to think logically about the physical resilience of these slaves, presented to buyers as ‘prime and healthy’ after the ordeals of the Middle Passage for between one to six months, with a death rate estimated at twenty-five per cent.Footnote ¹⁹ Maybe some of our Western hard-labour jobs built such physiques and such resilience, but in my own generation of childhood we did not see many people built like this. And when the National Health Service came in, and other services, their most immediate and recognizable effect, to us, was that old people got false teeth, everyone who needed them got eyeglasses, we drank free orange juice, and were required to drink the free milk every morning in school. In our views of comparative poverty, the recent nature of such deprivation in our own societies, of measures to mitigate them, and — in some places — the continuing processes of deprivation, are left largely in the dark. I myself had all the childhood diseases. My own maternal grandmother died very soon after childbirth in 1914. She had been one of eleven children, only six of whom lived to adulthood. And there are other such cases in my own personal networks. Their condition was a result of the percentile, working class condition that was not exactly ‘poor’, but within the lower percentiles.

In fact, my instinctive response to John Iliffe's first paragraph of his history of poverty in Africa was my non-recognition of his second reason for writing it. He wrote that it was motivated by three factors: first, that ‘poverty is growing today in sub-Saharan Africa.’ This we clearly need to examine, in the frame of ‘impoverishment’ as a process, as distinct from ‘poverty’ as a condition. His time of writing was soon after the disastrous famines and political disruptions of the 1970s. A ‘second reason … (was) a belief that Africa's splendour lies in its suffering … in the struggles of ordinary people against the forces of nature and the cruelty of man.’ And a third reason was that academic histories of Africa had, so far, been elitist.Footnote ²⁰

I felt unsure of the second, based on my experience in Western Nigeria. People made a living, probably a better living than the early generations of the European industrial working class.Footnote ²¹ My own thinking turned first, then, to pauperism, that is, to individual misfortunes that produced not disappearance — by death or migration — and not eventual recovery, but a chronic state of individuated damage and want. For the African regions I knew pauperism was the form of poverty most familiar to people in the mid-twentieth century, before the ravages of war and outside of the land deprivation of the South African and other settler economies.

I: PAUPERISM AND CONDITIONS OF LIFE

The only close-to-destitute people where I worked in Western Nigeria were those with certain disabilities: madness, advanced leprosy, blindness, and elephantiasis.Footnote ²² There was one well-known beggar with enormous elephantiasis of the scrotum. But people fed him, gave him clothes, and otherwise kept him from total demise (at least, as long as I was there). Iliffe discusses such illnesses as a major cause of poverty. But we might also pay attention to conceptions of poverty, in Iliffe's own terms. He writes: ‘a precise and consistent definition is not feasible. Nevertheless, poverty has an inescapable connotation of physical want.’Footnote ²³

Amos Tutuola entitles his stories about the playing out of individual fates given at birth: Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer. They are all children of high birth, whose lives take off on the long and convoluted trajectories predicted for them, and in part chosen by them, when they came into the world. Pauper works very hard but achieves nothing that yields anything, except one orange tree.Footnote ²⁴ The three of them together produce nothing but confusion for themselves, amongst each other and for the rest of the social world, regardless of environment and interaction.Footnote ²⁵ This is a parable about individual destiny in the social world.Footnote ²⁶ There will always be the odd, unfortunate, suffering, and aggravating people whose lives are lived in one sort of deprivation or another. But this is neither a whole social category, nor a marginal condition. It simply arises, within ongoing society, as a particular configuration, given by a destiny that is partly chosen by the people themselves, to which others accommodate since they, also, have their own destinies to cope with.

We might find this conception consonant with the wealth-in-people model and the implication that the networks of the social economy are crucial to high profile and wealth, and that their paucity or weakness allows the descent into low profile and poverty. Odd, useless, and perhaps dangerous people simply fall out of the networks and end up being ‘poor-in-people’: but each in his or her own way, and thereby not easily categorizable into ‘the poor’ as a general category. African indigenous paupers may never have acquired that fixity as a social phenomenon from which the special legal status is derived in western law and administration. Tutuola writes that ‘the miserable’ must be supported by the rich, but largely in the latter's own interests for their own moral character.Footnote ²⁷ The condition itself cannot necessarily be improved.

This, then, would be the place to explore how wealth-in-people has been understood in relation to poverty in more recent studies of Africa, after the catastrophes of the 1960s through the 1980s. The working of social support networks beyond the classic ‘household’, and the ways in which wealth-in-things can, or cannot, be converted back and forth, has been particularly difficult to study over large numbers of cases. Iliffe notes however, that in the generally understood case, no one with a large kinship network would fall into deprivation through adverse events in their own lives.Footnote ²⁸

The dynamics of what value is transacted along ‘wealth-in-people’ lines, vary from ‘place’ to ‘place’ (and I emphasize ‘place’ as a possible locus of crucial deprivation). Michael Carter and Chris Barrett write of the most important network value in South Africa being information about jobs.Footnote ²⁹ This, of course, would fit better with our own ‘wealth-in-knowledge’ interpretation of wealth-in-people than with the labour accumulation, stable working class, model. Here, information is a crucial resource, so understanding variable access to it would help to understand the dynamics of particular individuals, and particular groups of people in niche circumstances, becoming ‘paupers’: people who lose access for one reason or another; the ill, the less smart, less talented, or less capable of the performativity of urban life.Footnote ³⁰ But also whole groups who are moved out of ‘place’ by the happenstances of political and ecological life.

Following out pauperism in this way diverges increasingly from the vast metrics of the global comparative poverty picture, but I think it is an important task for anthropology and history, and for any focus on the ‘failures’ who inevitably fall through the cracks in all competitive situations. It links strongly to questions of precarity, and the question of who, exactly, falls into ‘poverty traps’, and why. The twenty-first century economic view is that it is the mechanisms of financial exclusion that underlie poverty traps.Footnote ³¹ This is a new view, but possibly linked by people's own concepts to old situations of unpredictable forces in the world. In this older sense, they would be situations whose origins and imports would be accessible through divination and wisdom, rather than hidden in distant and inaccessible institutional power dynamics. People's current frames of understanding, in precarity mode, can then be creatively linked back to existing and developing repertoires of thought about life, things, and people, thereby of wealth-in-people and wealth-in-things, as specific configurations of time, place, power, and the meaning of the ‘person’. These ends may tie together, if we take in, experimentally and imaginatively, both the distant view of large forces and the intimate view of existential life, in regimes where what we called wealth is now rendered in limited terms as material and financial ‘assets’ whose power and meaning is defined analytically within secular power dynamics.

II: PERCENTILES AND INCOME

The vast metrics and geographies of poverty stand back from the pauper, and even pauperism, to patterns and distributions whose causes and consequences became particularly important, but also challenging, to address in quantitative terms for comparative and policy purposes. This wave of work about African poverty set in towards the end of the colonial period. It then picked up again during the 1980s, intensifying in the 1990s with structural adjustment and globalization. Both of these phenomena drew attention to the apparently growing gap between Africa and the rest of the developing world with respect to income distribution on a large, population-wide scale. National policy had made depictions of money-income disparities imperative.Footnote ³² Then global policies encouraged the development of a transnational metric of ‘living on $1 a day’ PPP (purchasing power parity) for the whole world after the 1980s.

‘Percentiles’ with respect to income became very puzzling in the African context. In Marginal Gains, I argued that income percentiles did not predict consumption standards: particularly for food.Footnote ³³ Following Polly Hill's work, I suggested that there were far more transactions of food across households than had been picked up by the independent household method.Footnote ³⁴ The richer households were simply feeding more people, and not only household members. The reduction of income to quintiles, and a too-narrow set of assumptions about ‘the household’ had not helped to make consumption — and sharing — patterns clear. Absolute income level was neither the main variable at play, nor perhaps the sole dominant variable, in the allocation of income. The macro-depiction of poverty in metrics moves back to the distant view, where both the basic generative forces producing vast economic categories, as well as the intricate and intimate distributional dynamics, move out of focus in favour of regional-global comparison.Footnote ³⁵

Most of the World Bank approaches to the economic dynamics of poverty have been based on reduction to monetary valuation, of which cash income is the most convenient and accessible.Footnote ³⁶ But the turbulence produced by the macro-circumstances threw both wealth–in-things and wealth-in-people into growing indeterminacy. The need to include other analytics has become widely recognized in the twenty-first century, particularly moving from class- and money income-based metrics to the perception of ‘vulnerability to shocks’ or precarity. Our question, then, becomes how far the analytical focus moves outwards to causative conditions, and how far inward to intimate relations.

III: PRECARITY AND DURABLE ASSETS

There was a long historical literature on uncertainty and change within African economic studies well before the specific turbulences of the present became more central to thinking, from several angles.Footnote ³⁷ We can think of Sara Berry's trailblazing work on No Condition is Permanent, including — to cite her important commentary on our Money Matters collection — the nature and value of ‘assets’: whatever they are taken to refer to.Footnote ³⁸ This term now seams together several recent literatures. The World Bank produced a pyramid of concepts in the African Poverty at the Millennium (2001), and shows how ‘assets’ come to the fore in relation to analysing poverty, especially in contexts of turbulence: economic crises, environmental variability and overall degradation, and the fragmentation of labour markets in the globalized world.Footnote ³⁹ ‘Assets’ clearly goes a step beyond ‘income’, as an indicator of an implicit class differentiation, and beyond ‘wealth-in-people’ in a simple social sense. But what, then, are assets?

According to the 2001 World Bank report, anything that serves as a buffer is an asset. That ‘the poor have inadequate capital’ — the title of a chapter — seems, however, to be understood more in human capital and financial senses, and in the quality of the land, rather than in a classic materialist sense of the means of production more inclusively: land, seed stores, a house, tools, a workshop, skills, etc. The authors infer that a ‘sustainable livelihood is one that does not run down the asset base on which it depends, undermining future welfare’.Footnote ⁴⁰

There was a time when I myself tried to make arguments for focusing on assets in a broad ethnographic sense: ‘One gets hardly any tangible sense [in the economics] of the florescent abundance of items considered to be “wealth” that appears in ethnography’…‘their creation, maintenance, and polyvalent transformations’. I suggested that, if we cannot unambiguously separate ‘consumption’ from ‘investment’, then we might do the experiment of considering over-expenditure to be investment of some kind.Footnote ⁴¹ And I argued strongly for a gendered framing of all description and analysis. One of my colleagues criticized me for using a capitalist term like ‘assets’ for those ‘goods’ that allow the ‘long-term’ to be both envisaged and realized. As we examine how the term ‘asset’ or even ‘capital’ has been diversified to include characteristics previously thought of as personal and social — such as health and education — we can see the implications more acutely now than I did then. Assets in the financialized modes of life are now items whose value can be directly realized in markets and measured in money. It seems that we make no firm distinction between an item whose value for the future is continually enhanced by use (like human capital, that is health and education; cultivated land and the seed repertoire), and social capital that requires investment of time, imagination, and often an aesthetic cultivation. I would argue that it is the composition of assets that is crucial to resilience to shock and also to onward growth; in particular, composition beyond small social units such as households and communities, into regional systems such as urban food supply hinterlands.Footnote ⁴²

My own position had been that it is precisely the variety of assets that people — even poor people — may be able to compile and compose that enables both the buffering and the spring boarding potentials. We cannot necessarily define from the outside exactly what an ‘asset’ is, without studying the portfolios people can compile and mobilize. We are challenged to understand how the different components of asset portfolios might be made to work in synergy with one another, and by whom. But one thing is sure: in a world where land values are rising, the concept of asset as a component of livelihood for the poor cannot drift into prioritizing only human and financial capital, above all for populations whose livelihoods have sprung from access to the land and productive resources, such as seed stocks.

Iliffe may be right that ‘poverty in Africa has been a cumulative phenomenon.’Footnote ⁴³ But people's control of assets in land, their access to a variety of assets as wealth-in-people and things, the possibility of voluntary mobility and the capacity to compose workable synergies of these components into asset portfolios, may be the crucial, but cumulatively-eroded dynamic of the current situation. We need to think of these portfolios in much broader than financial terms. Wealth-in-things and wealth-in-people involve composition, otherwise their operation to advantage cannot be counted upon. Access matters, as Jesse Ribot points out.Footnote ⁴⁴

Another powerful strand of research is needed that places the composition of the relevant asset bundle at the centre. The dynamics of place brings together macro-dynamics and intimacy: particularly the extreme forms of involuntary displacement and confinement that undermine all possibility for achieving compositional portfolios. Indeed, these situations result in the parsing out of the components of asset bundles in literally dangerous ways.

One line of enquiry is the study of ‘displacement economies’, where loss of land is also loss of place, of relevant livelihood knowledge, of relationships in the ‘wealth-in-people’ mode, of modes of access to a variety of long- and short-term goods. Over the past fifteen years, the expansion of land alienation has been the result of state policy and corporate interests. Amanda Hammar examines the alienation of land and ‘both the intended and unexpected — and paradoxical — material and symbolic effects that displacement in practice produces.’Footnote ⁴⁵ We can note the compositional dynamics implied here. A broad anthropological and political-economic approach is pursued by Kojo Amanor on the recent loss of land, forests, and other resources by local populations in Southern Ghana.Footnote ⁴⁶

The dispossessed youth, in particular, have become a new category in the analysis of precarity. The anthropologist Marc Sommers's book on migrant Rwandan youth in Kigali, is entitled Stuck, a term that I found repeatedly in this literature where confinement, or a sense of confinement, is as disabling as displacement.Footnote ⁴⁷ These young people have some ‘assets’: but they seem parsed out, not amenable to composition.

The current meaningful portfolio of all the asset-elements of a compositional life, then, is a question mark, especially in Africa, with the combination of land alienation, the instability of war and the patchwork of policy interventions, many of which are in their early stages of development, such as the cash transfer system in South Africa.Footnote ⁴⁸ Jean and John Comaroff drew attention to the capacity of law in the postcolony to produce disorder as well as address it in restorative mode.Footnote ⁴⁹ In terms of poverty, we can ask: once submitted to monetary dynamics, how do prices play out through this precarious and perhaps generally impoverished assemblage of assets, all under legal redefinition? And once we look at composition, then the idea that assets function as a ‘buffer’, in part by being realizable in case of need for cash, is a quality we would look for in their actual sale, one by one. It would be necessary to consider whether the liquidation of assets, or their use in ways damaging to their ‘owners’, creates new difficulties and a clear path to a more general impoverishment.