Black Sash Speak Out. Ceres, South Africa. Photo Credit: Leopold Podlashuc

About Me

I am a human geographer interested in the collision between normative assumptions about cash transfers as public goods and the lived experience of cash transfers as private debts in the Global South. My work sits at the intersection of political economy, critical development studies, critical race theory, feminist kinship studies, and postcolonial science & technology studies. 

My current project, Bantustan Banking, explores how a preeminent, state-sponsored cash transfer program has become a means of racialized and gendered dispossession in post-apartheid South Africa. I examine the everyday practices by which poor Black South African women navigate their entitlements to social assistance against the pressures of expropriation built into the payment system. 

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Durham University and Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow. In addition to academic work, I consult for the Black Sash on the South African social grant system. In this role, I have presented my research to the Panel of Experts appointed by the Constitutional Court, the National Credit Regulator, the South African Social Security Agency, and the Department of Social Development. I have also published op-eds in GroundUp, The Daily Maverick, and The Mail and Guardian, and co-wrote a documentary for Cutting Edge on SABC1. 

---

journal articles

Erin Torkelson (2022) ​Deserving and Undeserving Welfare State: Cash Transfers and Struggles for Hegemony in South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies.

The South African welfare program appeared as if it might suddenly end on 1 April 2017, kicking off a significant public outcry by members of parliament, the judiciary, treasury, media, and civil society. At the time, popular explanations of this crisis contended that grants were about to stop because of corruption. Instead, I argue the welfare crisis extended and amplified the hegemonic struggle within the African National Congress (ANC) between two contradictory neoliberal tendencies, which grew out of the post-apartheid transition: a technocratic neoliberal capitalist tendency and a populist neoliberal capitalist tendency. Adherents of each tendency wielded the discourse of deservedness – common in welfare debates for centuries – against people receiving welfare, but also against the political formations vying to deliver welfare. Each claimed to be more deserving of delivering grants and therefore more deserving of holding state power. Ultimately, the 2017 grant crisis helped lead to a shift in power, shoring up South Africa’s very unequal social formation without addressing the exploitation upon which it was based. 

Erin Torkelson (2021) Sophia's Choice: Debt, Welfare and Racial Finance Capital in South Africa. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. ​39(1).

I examine normative assumptions about cash transfers as public goods and the lived experience of cash transfers as private debts. Policy-makers and social scientists often assume cash transfers are apolitical, value-neutral monetary instruments, which improve upon inappropriate, top-down, universalizing development priorities. Instead, I show how cash transfers introduce their own universals, by imagining liberal sovereign subjects, who use credit and financial markets to manage their own financial and developmental needs. I argue that this narrative elides the deep historical and geographical production of racial difference through debt in South Africa’s Western Cape farmlands. I call this phenomenon racial financial capitalism. First, I trace how coloured people have been racialized through debt for the benefit of capital accumulation across generations. Then, I explore how the contemporary spatial realities of cash transfer distribution continue to racialize grantees as debtors and dispossess them of their social entitlements. Finally, I demonstrate how grantees draw upon transgenerational experiences of debt to demand recognition that they are, and have been, net creditors to the nation.

Erin Torkelson (2020) Collateral Damages: Cash Transfer and Debt Transfer in South Africa. ​World Development 126.

Over the past decade, two development programs — cash transfer and financial inclusion — have been bundled as part of global development discourse. Despite differences in their purported objectives, cash transfers are increasingly delivered via financial inclusion infrastructures and technologies. One under-appreciated consequence of this bundling is the transference of credit and debt to cash transfer recipients. In this paper, I explore how the South African cash transfer program has incorporated recipients into a highly coercive and monopolistic financial system predicated on proprietary technologies. The proliferation of such technologies enables cash grants to be transformed into collateral for credit and encumbered by debts to private companies. Specialized payment technologies encourage recipients to accept loans and ensure that they cannot default, making cash transfer a new site of risk-free profit. By focusing on the materiality of financial inclusion, I demonstrate how the efficacy of cash transfer programs can be undermined, when debts as well as grants are passed on to recipients. 

Book Chapters

Deborah James, David Neves and Erin Torkelson (2022) Savings, Investment, Borrowing: A South African Perspective on Thrift. In Thrift and Its Paradoxes: A Household and Political Economy. Edited by Catherine Alexander and Daniel Sosna. Oxford: Berghahn.

Thrift is a central concern for most people, especially in turbulent economic times. It is both an economic and an ethical logic of frugal living, saving and avoiding waste for long-term kin care. These logics echo the ancient ideal of household self-sufficiency, contrasting with capitalism’s wasteful present-focused growth. But thrift now exceeds domestic matters straying across scales to justify public expenditure cuts. Through a wide range of ethnographic contexts this book explores how practices and moralities of thrift are intertwined with austerity, debt, welfare, and patronage across various social and temporal scales and are constantly re-negotiated at the nexus of socio-economic, religious, and kinship ideals and praxis.

Public Writing

Theresa Edlemann, Engenas Senona, Erin Torkelson, Wanga Zembe (2021) The Covid-19 Grant should be R585 so all People in South Africa can Afford to Eat. GroundUp, ​27 July.

Black Sash launches a report into the implementation and impact of the Covid-19 social grant. The report recommends that the Covid-19 grant becomes a permanent Basic Income Support (BIS) for those aged between 18 and 59 who have little to no income - and that this support is linked to the food poverty line. 

Erin Torkelson, Deborah James, and David Neves (2020) Legal but Reckless: Lending to Social Grant Recipients. GroundUp, 29 October.

It’s not just loan sharks or mashonisas who are charging exploitative interest rates to poor people. Beneficiaries of social grants have become a lucrative market for formal lenders too, and this is slipping past the regulatory authorities, write Erin Torkelson, Deborah James, and David Neves.

Erin Torkelson with GroundUp Staff (2017) Social Grants: Has Belamant Answered His Critics? GroundUp, 9 May.

Net1 CEO Serge Belamant has hit back at critics of the company’s management of its contract with the SA Social Security Agency (SASSA), accusing them of conspiracy theories and political agendas. He has referred investors in his company to a 37-page auditors’ report which according to Net1, “sets the record straight”. But does it?

Erin Torkelson (2017) The World Bank’s Role in SA’s Social Grant Payment System. GroundUp, 23 March.

As the main South African investor in Cash Paymaster Services’ parent company, Allan Gray has been under the spotlight over the social grants payment controversy. As a result, a bigger investor, the World Bank, has not received much attention, writes Erin Torkelson

Erin Torkelson (2017) Sophia’s Choice: Farm Worker has to Decide which Child to Feed. GroundUp, 15 March.

When loan repayments left Sophia*destitute, she had to beg a little money from her cousin and make a terrible choice. Either she could feed herself and her 6-month-old baby, or she could feed her 8 and 13-year-old daughters. She chose the latter. When she stopped eating, she also stopped producing milk. Her baby’s weight dropped by 1/3 in three weeks. Erin Torkelson tells Sophia’s story.

Erin Torkelson (2017) Deductions from Social Grants: How it All Works. GroundUp, 3 March.

As the SA Social Security Agency prepares to negotiate a new social grants payment contract with Cash Paymaster Services, Erin Torkelson unpacks the way CPS parent company Net1 is using the payment system to benefit its subsidiary companies.