By Naledi Khumalo

R100 is not a lot of money. I have probably said that sentence before. R100
disappears quickly: two coffees and something to eat, if that. Maybe an Uber to the
mall, R100 can hardly make dinner work for a family in South Africa.

Then I listened to R50 Mashonisa. The episode follows a young woman who lends
people small amounts of money, sometimes as little as R50 or R100, and charges
interest on those loans. Fifty per cent interest? That is outrageous. But the longer I
listened, the more I found myself thinking less about the interest and more about the
amount being borrowed. What kind of emergency is solved by R100? And perhaps
the more frightening question: what kind of life can be thrown into crisis because
R100 is missing?

Maybe it is taxi fare to work for the rest of the week. Bread, milk and mealie meal
until payday. Electricity. Sanitary pads. Lunch money for a child. Data needed to
send a CV. The last contribution towards school transport. A few groceries to make
sure there is something in the house tonight. It would even just be enough money
for a date or to be able to pay for a drink when out with friends. I get why the
Mashonisa does not ask what people borrow the money for, the more you, the more
concerning it can be that someone comes to you desperately in need of R500. None
of these things soundsdramatic; it may just be Tuesday, just getting through
Tuesday. That is what disturbed me about the episode.

We usually talk about debt through the language of excess. People are warned
about living beyond their means, buying things they cannot afford or failing to
manage their money properly. But what happens when someone is borrowing
simply to live within their means? What happens when their means are not enough?
There is something almost absurd about needing to borrow R100. Someone can be
working, hustling, receiving a grant, selling something, doing everything we tell
people to do to survive, and still have a hole in their life that R100 can fill. If you do
not have R100 today, what are the chances that you will have R150 when it is time to
repay it? The loan solves a real problem. That cannot be dismissed. The person
who lends you R100 may genuinely be the reason your children eat that evening.
She may be the reason you can get to work and keep the job you desperately need.
In that moment, she is not a villain. She is the person who said yes when there was
nobody else to ask. Banks are not lending R100 to get someone through the week,
there is no application form for “my electricity finished three days before payday”.
The mashonisa exists in that space; the mashonisa is essential there. She is quick.

She is nearby. She knows you. Sometimes she knows exactly when your salary or
grant will arrive. She does not need a payslip, credit score or three months of bank
statements. In an economy full of people who do not qualify for formal financial help,
informal debt becomes its own form of infrastructure.

It is complicated, the same R100 that saves you can also trap you. You borrow
because you are short this month. Then repayment leaves you shortter next month.
So you borrow again. Maybe you borrow from someone else to pay the first person.
The amounts remain small enough that, from the outside, it barely looks like debt.
But perhaps we misunderstand debt when we only measure how much is owed.
R500 owed by somebody earning R50,000 a month is not the same debt as R500
owed by somebody who has R20 left after paying rent and transport. Small debt can
occupy an enormous part of a person’s life. It can determine which phone calls you
answer. Which route you take home. Whether you can buy groceries after payday.
Whether the money coming into your account ever really belongs to you. There is
something especially cruel about paying a premium for being poor. If you have
money, money is relatively cheap. If you are poor, almost everything costs more.
You buy the smaller packet because that is what you can afford today, even though
the larger one costs less per kilogram. You use expensive transport because you
cannot afford a car. You borrow R100 and repay R150 because you cannot access
the kinds of credit available to people who have more money. Poverty charges
interest.

And yet I hesitate to make the mashonisa the villain of this story. The woman in R50
Mashonisa is also trying to build a life. She is using what she has to create an
income. She carries the risk that people will not pay her back. She exists in the same
unequal economy as the people who borrow from her. This is what makes the whole
arrangement so uncomfortable. Both people may need the same R50.
One survives by borrowing it, the other survives by lending it. Maybe that is why I
cannot decide whether micro-debt is a safety net or a grave. Perhaps it is both. It
catches you before you hit the ground, but it can also become something you spend
months, sometimes years, trying to climb out of.

The thing that stayed with me after the episode was not really the question of
whether I approve of mashonisas. It was the fact that they are necessary;
somewhere tonight, somebody needs R100. Not for a luxury but to survive tonight or
to make it to work.
And the person who can give it to them may be both the person who saves them and
the beginning of their next problem. The real question is not why someone would

borrow R100. It is how we built an economy in which so many people have no other
place to find it.