Luo entrustment: foreign finance and the soil of the spirits in Kenya

Abstract

This article examines the cultural dimensions of financial credit and debt, placing these against a deeper and broader background of entrustments and obligations. A standard response of the largest international aid agencies to African rural poverty has been to set up programmes to lend money and other resources to rural people without understanding what the borrowers already owe to other creditors and claimants, or how strong these competing claims are. The history of credit programmes has been a history of dismal failures and of disappointments for borrowers and lender alike, particularly where land mortgages have been involved. Intensive field research reveals that Luo farmers in Kenya, like other East Africans, already have a broad assortment of borrowings and lendings of their own, some far more meaningful to them than loans from banks, co-operatives, or marketing boards will ever be. Some are only partly economic in nature; some involve sacred trusts or important political contacts. Land, labour, animals, money, and humans themselves are all objects of entrustment and obligation among kin, neighbours, or other familiars. Farmers channel resources from socially distant institutions into uses that are often locally more meaningful than those their lenders intend; and they may not be at liberty to convert them back into liquid forms for repayment. Requirements of land title collateral misfit a cultural context where attachments to land, and to ancestral graves on it, symbolise an individual's or family's social identity. More broadly, the credit strategy of development aid needs rethinking. Rather than continuing to enmesh rural Africans in debts and uncertainties, those who purport to help reduce poverty in rural Africa should shift their strategy from lending to encouraging saving and investment, or to promoting other kinds of locally rooted initiatives not financial in nature.