Postcolonial Africa and its Lotteries
Postcolonial Africa and
its Lotteries
Ilana van Wyk
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This non-peer reviewed entry is published as part of the Critical Gambling Studies Blog.
Over
the last twenty years, a growing body of work on the decolonization of Africa
has focused on leisure activities, and particularly on the ways in which these
activities mark growing inequalities (Grundlingh, 2003, pp. 174-189) and define
postcolonial identities, citizenship, bodies and morality (Besnier, Brownell
& Carter, 2017, pp. 39-70; Diouf, 2003, pp. 1-12; Wagg, 2005). As several
scholars have also shown, religious activities (Marshall, 2009) as well as
sports and cultural clubs (Diouf, 2003, p. 8) in postcolonial Africa often
threaten the postcolonial state’s political and moral order. Surprisingly,
given the pervasiveness of both gambling and state lotteries on the continent,
very little research has been done on postcolonial state lotteries in Africa.
On
one level, this is perhaps not that surprising given that state lotteries in
Africa fit awkwardly into the category of leisure; unlike the Brazilian “animal
game”, a popular, long-standing lottery in which punters engage in elaborate
social rituals and draw on extensive symbolism (DaMatta & Soárez, 1999),
lotteries in Africa take on standardized forms, are mechanized through lottery
terminals, and rely on rather perfunctory individualized play. Even as a form
of gambling, state lotteries lack the frisson of high-stakes poker, the glamour
of casinos, the cultural weight of indigenous games, or the immediacy of slot
machines. But on another level, the lacuna of research on state lotteries in
postcolonial Africa is surprising given their ubiquity and their long
histories, preceding the (re)legalization of state lotteries[1]
in the Global North. While the USA’s
Powerball
had its origins in 1988 in the multi-state game known as Lotto America, the UK’s national lottery held its first draw in
November 1994, and EuroMillions was launched in February 2004,
most African lotteries were launched shortly before and after independence.
Thus, Zambia’s lottery was established in the
1950s,[2]
the Ghanaian lottery in 1958 (Aflakpui, 2016, p. 3), the Ethiopian lottery in 1961, the Moroccan lottery in 1962, Senegal’s
(Brenner, Lipeb & Servet 1996, p. 155) and Kenya’s (Louw, 2017, p. 110)
lotteries in 1966, Uganda’s lottery in 1968 (Louw, 2017, p. 110) and Cameroon’s
lottery in 1972 (Brenner, Lipeb & Servet 1996, p. 154).
Apart
from their historical pedigrees and abundance, state lotteries in Africa are
singular institutions; their rules, constitutions and governance are subject to
government legislation and oversight while they play a key fiscal role in many
postcolonial economies. Since few postcolonial states had efficient tax systems
in place at independence, lotteries presented an efficient and politically
painless ‘soft’ source of revenue (Brenner & Servet, 1995, p. 48). And
while scholars have typified the public performances of postcolonial African
governments as alienating, violent spectacles of power (Bayart, 1989; Mbembe,
1992), their lotteries had a very different public face. Across the continent,
lotteries peddle their impossible dreams in technicolor on larger-than-life
billboards, at every bus stop and in the windows of every corner shop. These
advertisements are in the register of the familiar non-threatening world of
consumer goods precisely because the state has to woo, rather than threaten or
coerce, vast numbers of citizens to participate in their enterprise; as both
punters and independent lottery sellers. The regularity and predictability of
state lotteries’ weekly, bi-weekly and sometimes daily draws on television and
on radio are also easily slotted into domestic cycles of eating meals and
socializing with friends and family. It is this intimacy between postcolonial
states and their citizen punters that make state lotteries an interesting
vantage point from which to look at postcolonial states.
Politically,
the turn to state lotteries marked an important statement by many newly
independent African countries about dignity, citizenship and governance.
Dignity is perhaps an unexpected word to use in conjunction with state
lotteries, but in Africa, the restriction and control of gambling during
colonialism went hand-in-hand with a number of sumptuary laws[3]
intended to control African social life (Louw, 2017, p. 111) and underscore
class and racial differentiation (Ross, 1999). One case exemplifies the
racialized nature of gambling legislation in many former colonies. Southern
Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) first legalized gambling on horse racing in 1914 but
prohibited turf clubs from accepting bets from children and ‘Africans’ (Roberts,
2007, pp. 12-130). In 1935, the colonial government launched a state lottery
but only allowed ‘Africans’ to play from 1959 onwards (Roberts, 2007, p. 14).[4]
In other colonies, this kind of racist legislation was only lifted after
independence and by all indications, was something that most new citizens
welcomed as they eagerly participated in state lotteries. Where new democratic
governments tried to ‘protect’ their poor citizens from gambling, as the South
African government’s Department of Social Welfare threatened to do in the late
1990s, citizen groups objected that this would trample on their “human rights”.[5]
In the light of exclusionary and racist colonial (and apartheid) gambling
legislation, these were statements about dignity and citizenship.
Hand-in-hand
with these lofty political statements, state lotteries also presented new
elites in Africa with an attractive source of rent, something that became a
central mechanism in the post-colony’s political machinery (Bayart, 1989;
Mbembe, 1992). Indeed, Raila Odinga, Kenya’s former Prime Minister, described
Kenyan gambling in 2016 as “a hustler philosophy” that governing elites
manipulated for their own purposes (Louw, 2017, p. 111).[6]
Perhaps the most blatant example of this occurred in 2000 when then-president Robert Mugabe won the top prize in a Zimbabwean
lottery.[7]
Other political elites have been less conspicuous in their extractive
practices, but across the continent, lotteries are often tied to corruption.[8]
In some cases, this has led to a loss of public trust in the institution of
lotteries. For instance, in the 1970s, Cameroonian punters stopped playing the
lottery when it did not pay out prizes and when the lottery lowered the odds of
winning (Brenner, Lipeb & Servet, 1996, p. 154).[9] In
other places, lotteries were central barometers of economic and political
discontent. Thus, during the 1980s and 1990s, Ghanaian (Goodman, 2019, p. 39)
and Senegalise citizens (Brenner, Lipeb & Servet, 1996, pp.157-158)
feverishly participated in national lotteries to change their personal fortunes
in the wake of the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs. When the
American green card lottery, or the Diversity Visa (DV) lottery program, was launched in the
mid-1990s, large numbers of Ghanaians (Goodman, 2019, pp.
27-52),
Togolese (Piot, 2010), Nigerians and people from other African countries
applied.[10]
The popularity of this program has seen large home-grown DV application
industries come into being in Ghana, Togo, Algeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan,
Morocco and Congo-Kinshasa.[11]
And
while these lottery fevers illustrate the ways in which lotteries have come to
occupy an important imaginative alternative to postcolonial nightmares, they do
not exhaust the ways in which people engage and imagine the ‘work’ of lotteries
on the continent. For instance, in South Africa, where lottery officials are frequently
exposed as corrupt,
and where punters circulate countless stories about the ways in which powerful politicians supposedly
manipulate lottery
wins, enthusiasm for the lottery continues unabated. As I’ve argued elsewhere,
South African punters often view the lottery as an important gauge of their
individual ontological ‘health’ and a key way in which to scrutinize the
working of power (van Wyk, 2012; van Wyk, 2013).
Just
as postcolonial Africa is not one country, its lotteries do not tell a singular
tale or signify one thing. However, they do allow us a new lens on the intimate
ways that regular people on the continent relate to the state as an intimate
familiar, a vendor of dreams and an alternative to itself.
Ilana van
Wyk is a social anthropologist.
She received her PhD from SOAS in 2007, served as editor-in-chief of
Anthropology Southern Africa and did a stint as the Director of the Institute
of Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She has taught at
SOAS, the LSE, Pretoria University and at UCT. She is currently an associate
professor at the University of Stellenbosch. Her early research focused on
Pentecostal Charismatic Christians in southern Africa, but she is currently
much more interested in sinners; the boastful dandies, gamblers and crooks that
make the postcolony such an interesting place.
References
Aflakpui, A.A. (2016). The demand for sports lottery
in Ghana: A case study of the Kumasi Metropolis. [Master’s thesis, Kwame
Nkrumah University of Science & Technology]. Retrieved from http://ir.knust.edu.gh/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/9384/AKOFA%20ADZO%20AFLAKPUI.pdf?sequence=1
Bayart, J. (1989). The state in Africa: The politics
of the belly. Longman.
Besnier, N., Brownell, S., & Carter, T. F. (2017).
Two. Sport, colonialism, and imperialism. In The anthropology of sport
(pp. 39-70). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520963818-005
Bobbitt, R. (2007). Lottery wars: Case studies in
Bible Belt politics, 1986-2005. Lexington Books.
Brenner, G. A., Lipeb, M., & Servet, J. (1996). Gambling
in Cameroon and Senegal: A response to crisis. In J. McMillen (Ed.), Gambling
cultures: Studies in history and interpretation. Routledge.
Brenner, G. A., & Servet, J. (1995). Proximity,
confidence, and the tapping of savings: The case of African lotteries. African
Review of Money, Finance and Banking, 1(2), 47-59.
DaMatta, R. & Soárez, E. (1999). Eagles,
donkeys and butterflies: An anthropological study of Brazil’s “Animal Game”.
Notre Dame Press.
Diouf, M. (2003). Postcolonial cultures: African youth
and public space. African Studies Review, 46(2), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.2307/1514823
Goodman,
C. B. (2019). Selling Ghana greener pastures: Green card Entrepreneurs, visa lottery,
and mobility. Journal of Social History, 53(1), 27–52. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shz026
Grundlingh, A. (2003). ‘Gone to the dog’: The cultural
politics of gambling—The rise and fall of British greyhound racing on the
Witwatersrand, 1932–1949. South African Historical Journal, 48(1),
174-189. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582470308671930.
Louw, S. (2017). African numbers games and gambler
motivation: ‘Fahfee’ in contemporary South Africa. African Affairs,
117(466), 109-129. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adx043
Marshall, R. (2009). Political spiritualities: The
Pentecostal revolution in Nigeria. University of Chicago Press.
Mbembe, A. (1992). Provisional notes on the
Postcolony. Africa, 62(1), 3-37. https://doi.org/10.2307/1160062
Piot, C. (2010). Nostalgia
for the future: West Africa after the Cold War. University
of Chicago Press.
Riello, G., & Rublack, U. (Eds.). (2019). The
right to dress: Sumptuary laws in a global perspective, c.1200–1800.
Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1814/64804.
Roberts, R. S. (2007). Towards a history of gambling
in Zimbabwe, with special reference to betting and greyhound racing. Heritage
of Zimbabwe, 25: 12-19.
Ross, R. (1999). Status and respectability in the
Cape Colony, 1750-1870: A tragedy of manners. Cambridge University Press.
Sweeney,
M. (2009). The Lottery Wars: Long odds, fast money, and the battle over an
American Institution. Bloomsbury.
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the lottery in post-apartheid South Africa. Africa, 82(1): 41-68. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972011000726
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156-170). London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203718872
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[1] Historians
trace the first state lottery to the Hun Dynasty in China in 100 BCE while
modern versions of state lotteries are often traced back to the 1434 lottery in
Holland, and then to the continuous lotteries that ran in Italy, France and
England from the 1530s onwards to pay for public services, royal expenditures,
public works and wars (Bobbitt, 2007, pp. 1-2).
[2] Zambia gained independence from the UK
in 1964, but laws relating to gambling were relaxed in the 1950s.
[3]
Sumptuary laws were common between 1200 and 1800 in Medieval and early modern
Europe, in China, Japan and precolonial Benin and Dahomey (Riello & Rublack,
2019).
[5] With
the support of a number of parliamentarians, the Department suggested that social
welfare grants be paid out in vouchers rather than cash to stop poor people
from wasting their money on the lottery.
[6] See https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/nairobi/article/2000210992/gambling-is-kenya-s-next-big-scandal-raila-now-cautions
[7] While
he did not win the jackpot in the Zimbabwe official state lottery, Mugabe’s win
was in a lottery organised by a partly state-owned bank. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/621895.stm
[8] Which
was of course not specific to Africa. For instance, in the USA the opposition
to lotteries in the early 1800s were centrally informed by their long-standing
poor reputation for fraud and corruption (Bobbitt, 2007, p. 2; Sweeney, 2009, pp.
15-30).
[9] The
Cameroonian lottery was relaunched in April 1988 with an instant lottery prize
of 1 million francs CFA (Brenner, Lipeb & Servet 1996, p. 154).
[10] See https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Diversity-Visa/DVStatistics/DV-applicant-entrants-by-country-2019-2021.pdf.
[11] See
Piot’s (2010) wonderful ethnography of this industry in Togo.
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