Indigenous usury system remains an enduring informal microfinance dating back to the pre-colonial era, despite its exploitative nature. The paper empirically examined the features (relevance, accessibility, usage, network, repayment schedule and sanctions) that have sustained contemporary Indigenous Usury System (IUS) among the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria. Data were gathered using various qualitative methods while interviewees were purposively selected using the snowballing techniques. Urban Ibadan is the study area. The relevance of IUS in contemporary informal microfinance was predicated on the subjective, but contextual rational interpretation of the system as benevolent-help (aanu). Access to IUS fund is dependent on referral from a trusted guarantor (trader lendee), reputation of a lendee's organization (formal sector workers) and good credit history. Usury lenders finance both economic and social ventures. Repayment default attracts sanctions such as police arrest, incarceration, property seizure, blacklisting, social stigmatization and physical assault. Informal usury system has remained a major source of finance for lendees despite its exploitative nature due to its accessibility which gives it an interpretation of contextualised magnanimity.

Keywords: Indigenous usury system, benevolent-help, Microfinance, Ibadan-Nigeria

Many women in the city of Dakar, Senegal are part of informal or more formalized neighborhood credit associations, called mbootaye, often funded by government sanctioned projects or through money pooling by its members. The associations are designed to allow women to pursue development projects and more commonly, to meet the social demands of contributing to family ceremonies. Mbootaye have become popular spaces for popular development strategies to provide micro-loans to women's organizations. This paper examines the money pooling and lending activities of several of these associations in the outlying neighborhoods of Parcelles Assainies and Yeumbeul Sud. It discusses the place of the associations and their members among public discourse that casts them as productive and yet contributing to excessive and unproductive enterprises such as expensive family ceremonies.

In Uganda, World War II provoked serious official efforts to persuade Ugandans to buy war bonds. Further, as the war ended, official propaganda continued to encourage people to defer purchases in favor of longer term formal sector saving. Drawing on the propaganda of the 1940s preserved in the National Archives of Uganda—posters, advertisements, radio plays, and more—this paper will look at how modern savings and imperial thrift was promoted, and how spending for status, display, and politics was mocked. Juxtaposing the vividness of this specific thrift campaign with my larger research project on the politics of the 1940s and 1950s allows me to mark the vigor and creativity of efforts to shape African economic behavior. But it also points to an urban environment of media, politics, and ideas about money and citizenship where government campaigns were only one of the information sources people weighed when agitating for and investing war bonuses, deferred wages, gratuities and pensions, and profits from strong wartime commodity prices.

This paper focuses on the intersection of credit, morality, and community in the Kariakoo neighborhood in the city of Dar es Salaam in the colonial period. Government officials planned Kariakoo as the "African section" of the city with a grid-like structure of orthogonally intersecting streets and neatly separated from the Asian and European sections by a cordon sanitaire. Despite the anonymity inherent in the monotonous and repetitive street layout, the cosmopolitan residents of the neighborhood, who were of African, Asian, and Arab descent, formed meaningful local communities, usually around corner shops. Members of these "corner communities" were held together by myriad intersecting relations of credit and debt, which in turn were regulated by moral codes embedded in these communities. Membership was defined by a member's ability to lend or borrow money or goods to another member, according to one's status and wealth. The existence and effectiveness of moral corner communities also enabled members to buy goods on credit from the nearby shop. For shopkeepers, the practice of selling goods on credit was a crucial way of asserting membership in Kariakoo. Trust, shame, and respectability were shared notions among members irrespective of their racial and class backgrounds. This understanding of neighborhood sub-communities challenges colonial views of Asian-African relations in Dar es Salaam as oppositional and benefitting only Asians. Furthermore, it exemplifies how Africans were able to create meaningful spaces of belonging in the city. Credit and debt relations were constitutive of urban communities and the urban economy.

Biocapital impacts global development projects and economies across all societies. However, existing analyses limit our understanding of this impact by focusing on the cultural logics of industrial production, while disregarding financial circulation. This ignores processes of biofinacialization that produce speculative human capital markets. Human capital is the cornerstone of all neoliberal societies. However, the role that pharmaceutical technologies increasingly play in the risk hedging strategies of human capital hedge funds—our (risk-bearing) human capital selves—remains undertheorized. I ethnographically explore the financialized debt relations produced through calculations of abstract biomedical risk by black gay African men in the context of a the global HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinical trial. Biofinance is when individuals use pharmaceuticals as if they are derivative contracts; it occurs when individuals and/or populations treat (or hedge) risks rather than actual disease. This creates surplus health since they are not sick. As bearers of industrial biocaptial, individuals claim rights to health and conceive of having property in themselves and ownership over their bodies. Alternatively, as bearers of biofinancialized human capital these claims are transformed. When hedging biomedical risks, this creates surplus health for those that can access pharmaceutical derivatives and surplus risk for those who cannot. Thus, surplus risk is a form of relative debt owed to those who are too poor to access drugs that produce surplus health. This is especially the case when those who inhabit contexts of surplus risk are increasingly exploited research subjects of global clinical trials, which drive biofinancial cultures globally.