Contents
Summary
Introduction
The migrant economy in Nima
Types of belief: faith, trust and confidence
Theoretical reflections on trust
References
Summary
This essay is based on one I published over three decades ago: Kinship, contract and trust: the economic organisation of migrants in an African city slum, in D. Gambetta (ed) Trust: Making and Breaking Co-operative Relations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988: 176-193. It was an ethnographic analysis of 1960s fieldwork done in the slums of Accra, Ghana’s capital city. My original article had three sections. The first was empirical, which I have greatly reduced here. I address there how durable economic relations could be sustained in an urban environment that was marginal to both traditional and modern society. I illustrate with examples the tenor of commercial life and petty enterprise in Nima. I do not highlight trust at first. Only in the third section do I turn to what we may call the philosophy of trust. I focus there on migrants’ attempts to build viable enterprise. An intermediate section bridges the empirical and theoretical parts by exploring the semantics of trust and the set of terms for belief to which it belongs. Anthropology is philosophy with real life examples. I offer here some reflections on what I have since learned, but first a few empirical observations.
Introduction
For two and a half years I lived among migrants from north‑east Ghana called Frafras who included the Tallensi, the object of a classic study by Meyer Fortes. At home these were a traditionally stateless people, huddled together in densely packed settlements, egalitarian millet farmers and raisers of livestock. In 1960 only 1 in 16 was Muslim or Christian; fewer adults had any schooling. Their political organization and religion were based on lineages, an earth cult, ritual specialization of clans, and marriage exchange. Seniority conferred stewardship of common assets, principally cattle, on a gerontocracy. But individual mobility and small‑scale accumulation were widespread; and raiding between neighbors lent considerable uncertainty to the social life of these fighting hill tribesmen.
By the 1960s the Frafras were dispersed throughout Ghana as unskilled laborers, petty traders, soldiers and, in popular repute, thieves. They circulated between southern cities and the northern savanna , being usually linked to an extended family network based on their home village. When I first went there, some 10,000 Frafras were living in Accra, many of them in a sprawling slum called Nima. This was the chief red light district of the city’s lower classes and a criminal ‘bad lands’ only sporadically policed from the outside. I lived with a Frafra ‘fence’ (receiver of stolen goods) and before long became involved in a series of criminal and semi‑legitimate enterprises that formed the backbone of my fieldwork.
The focus of my research gravitated towards the self‑made economic activities that sustained Nima’s inhabitants. Many Frafras had poorly paid wage jobs, many had none. All benefited from what I later called “informal income opportunities”: a sphere of self‑employment, casual labour, petty accumulation, and illegal transfers defined at the top by the corruption of public life. I concentrated on the few successful Frafra entrepreneurs to be found in Accra and scattered throughout Ghana (some 70 cases in all);[1] but I also tried to capture the style of economic life for the mass of transients and longer‑term residents who made up the migrant community, one of scores of ethnic groups retaining a distinctive identity in Nima’s melting‑pot.
I was captivated by what seemed a paradox: on the one hand the banality of a barely differentiated Dickensian mob—of water carriers, bread sellers, barmen, taxi drivers, pickpockets, housewives and women of easy virtue; on the other the communal spirit of hill tribesmen whose fathers were earth priests and lineage elders and who expected to end up as custodians of ancestral shrines. I was impressed by the energy and ingenuity of their efforts to enrich themselves and by the inevitable failure of all but a handful. The economy was being made, unmade, and remade from day to day. The main task for everyone was to find a durable basis for livelihood and even for accumulation, a stable core in the chaos of everyday life. That was why even an extremely low wage was valued: it was an island of regularity and predictability in a sea of ephemeral opportunities. I now think of this as the search for economic form, the invariant in the variable, for rules and regularity in a world constituted by flux, emergence, and informality (Hart 20. But the mania for deregulation has allowed informality to penetrate all levels of the world economy today (Hart 2015).
The Frafra migrants were doubly hampered in this task. First, they lacked effective legal sanctions; the state’s presence in the slum was intermittent and punitive (occasional police raids). They knew well enough about the contractual ethos of civil society, but it was not evident how this could be translated into the social conditions typical of Nima. They were in many ways pre‑adapted to the statelessness of the slum, less suited perhaps than Islamic migrants to the mercantile society that was growing up in the cracks of state rule. Second, their traditional mores were reinforced by slum conditions; but they could not transfer their customary rural institutions to the city. At home kinship is structured by lineage organization, lending the full authority of ancestors to fathers, husbands, and senior brothers. Away from home the migrants temporarily abandoned this religion of descent. Differences of generation were collapsed into a single conceptual brotherhood; ancestor worship could not be practiced since the home groups necessary to make up a sacrificial congregation could never be replicated. The unequal power of parenthood writ large was absent in the slums, where ethnic solidarity found expression in beer talk and kinship was domestic relations of uncertain moral force.
To summarize, Frafra migrants had to build economic relations from scratch in a world lacking both state regulation and the kinship structure of their customary society. They had three basic models for these relationships, all problematic. One, kinship, extrapolated from traditional statuses typical of their rural homes; its antithesis was the legally sanctioned contract of the modern state and civil society. There remained a zone of free‑floating social relations formed by choice in the expectation of mutuality. A neutral term for this is association, but its strongest form of expression is friendship, the negotiated order of free individuals joined by affection and shared experience rather than by legal sanction or blood ties. Trust plays a prominent role in this third area of social life.
My original article had three sections. The first was ethnographic, which I have greatly reduced here. I addressed there how durable economic relations could be sustained in an urban environment that was marginal to both traditional and modern society. I illustrated with examples the tenor of commercial life and petty enterprise in Nima. I did not specifically highlight trust then. Only in the final theoretical section did I turn to what we may call the philosophy of trust. I focused there on migrants’ attempts to build viable enterprises. An intermediate section bridged the empirical and theoretical parts by exploring the semantics of trust and the set of terms for belief to which it belongs.
Anthropology is philosophy with real life examples. Here I will curtail the ethnography to focus on the other two. I will then offer some reflections on what I have since learned, but first a few empirical observations.
[1] Details of the entrepreneurs’ sample may be found in Hart (1969). Another article (Hart 1975) is germane to the present enquiry