Aims:

To better understand the contemporary role of cattle ownership and production in the communal areas of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.In particular, focusing on how cattle feature in the way that Xhosa-speaking people construct their livelihoods, and specifically in their accumulation and exchange strategies, but also examining the cultural meanings and social values that cattle ownership involve, especially in reinforcing alternative forms of value to those that seem to inhere in the dominant 'money economy'.

Methods:

Despite the overall attention paid by the apartheid regime to the agricultural  sector, relatively little is known about the 'nuts and bolts' of cattle ownership and production in former bantustan areas.

This lacuna clearly also suited the owners of livestock and research methods were aimed at establishing sufficient trust so as to begin to unpack the parameters of cattle ownership, production and exchange, as well as to tap into the more symbolic and cosmological significance of cattle to Xhosa-speakers in the Eastern Cape.

(i) Participant observation through 14 months of fieldwork in two village sites;

(ii) conducting in-depth interviews, using semi-structured interview schedules;

(iii) conducting life history/personal narrative interviews;

(iv) administering two questionnaire-based surveys: one, a 'Herd composition and production' survey and two, a 'Household livelihood construction' survey;

(v) conducting archival research into government programmes over the past hundred years in these areas;

(vi) interviewing past and present government officials in the agriculture and livestock management sector;

(vii) interviewing 'commercial' livestock entrepreneurs: speculators, dealers, butchers to see how 'the other side' understand the sector and conduct their business in it.

Findings:

Preliminary findings are that:

(i) The roughly 2 million cattle under consideration are currently owned by only some thirty percent of 'rural' households in the former bantustans of the Transkei and Ciskei in the Eastern Cape province. These cattle have considerable (sometimes latent) cash value and constitute a vital element in the rural economy and in people's risk-averse livelihood strategies;

(ii) It may be wholly counter-productive to continue to use the notion of a dual economy (a 'subsistence' orientation in communal areas and a 'commercial' orientation in adjacent areas under freehold tenure) in analysing the cattle production sector, as this approach carries unhelpful ideological baggage and obscures people's actual livelihood strategies 'on the ground'.

(iii) In the absence of and, lack of trust in, other formal economic mechanisms (such as banks) for saving, accumulating and redistributing wealth and, in the face of economic uncertainty, many people are likely to continue to (or at least, seek to) invest in cattle;

(iv) Cattle remain a potent cultural icon, and are widely used in slaughter rituals aimed at  ancestor veneration. These rituals are a vehicle for encouraging the flow of resources in urban-to-rural transfers and are an apparently important way of asserting a degree of independence from the pervasive 'money economy'.

Region:

Eastern Cape Province, Republic of South Africa

Dates:

1999-2004

Funding:

Commonwealth Scholarship (ZACS-1999-331)

Main papers:

Ainslie, A ed. 2002. 'The Social and Economic Structure of Cattle Ownership and Production in the Communal Areas of the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.' Cape Town: Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape

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