Predatory Welfare

Debt, Race and Cash Transfers

By: Erin Torkelson

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Paperback | 26 May 2026

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328 Pages

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22.8 x 15.2 x 2.2

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In Predatory Welfare, Erin Torkelson explores how the direct cash transfer program instituted in South Africa revised and reworked post-apartheid racialized and gendered dispossession, despite its promise of ameliorating extreme poverty. Beginning in 2012, she focuses on how poor Black South African women assert their entitlements to social assistance and responsibilities to familial care against the pressures of expropriation built into the grant payment system. Because the grants did not cover monthly bills, recipients were pushed into predatory loans collateralized by welfare payments. Torkelson finds that the state-sponsored but privately-run program was fundamentally undermined by its reliance on digital financial technologies which encoded wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global development. Even when the government assumed control of grant payment in 2018, the neoliberal bent of fiscal policy continued to drive recipients into debt in new ways. Drawing on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and organization - in grant payment queues, loan offices, grocery stores, Parliament, and the Constitutional Court - Torkelson demonstrates how cash transfers can offer a means to making racial capitalism more acceptable and how recipients can push back to demand reparation.

Industry Reviews

"Who owes what to whom? Can the intergenerational debts of racial capitalism be repaid, let alone repaired? What role, if any, might basic income payments play in this process? Far beyond a simple story about the ills of financialization to be redeemed by a romanticized state, Predatory Welfare is a beautifully detailed ethnography about the intertwined histories, presents, and potential futures of racialization and social welfare in South Africa."-Hannah Appel, author of, The Licit Life of Capitalism "What is so critically important about the cash payments made to poor rural South Africans portrayed in Predatory Welfare? Torkelson, a geographer, shows readers that predatory capitalism in 'unimportant' places is a window onto the production of odious debt everywhere. This exemplary research is a must-read not only for South Africanists but also for all those committed to reforming the global financial architecture."-Anne-Maria Makhulu, author of, Making Freedom

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