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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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The Janus Head of Insurances in South Africa: Networks of Inclusion and Bureaucracies of Exclusion
| Panel |
34. Post-apartheid: ethnographies of the South African transition
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| Paper ID | 506 |
| Author(s) |
Bähre, Erik
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| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
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| Abstract | Drawing on fieldwork (open interviews, participant observation, household surveys), the increase of insurances marketed for the poor and lower middle classes in South Africa are examined. South African companies, such as Sanlam, Old Mutual, and Metropolitan, establish a myriad of policies in order to incorporate the previously excluded, mostly non-White, poor and middle classes. While poverty, violence, and AIDS put state institutions and social relations, particularly kin, under severe pressure, insurances enable people to manage risks in hitherto unthinkable ways. The paper examines these initiatives as a ‘double faced head’. Research among clients living in the townships of Cape Town, as well as insurance brokers, actuaries, and others involved in the world of insurance, reveals how social capital, often of intermediary grassroots organisations, is crucial for the marketing of policies but that, once poor and lower middle class clients try to claim benefits, it is insecure whether they can mobilise these same networks. The paper reveals how clients are caught up in a, at times, Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It analyses which type of networks clients and insurance companies drawn on and how these networks relate to the bureaucratic procedures. The paper raises fundamental questions with regards to financial inclusion in post-apartheid South Africa through the expansion of insurance to extremely vulnerable and risky clients. It urges us to consider whether inclusion in risk coping institutions can contribute to social security in South Africa. |
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