PREDATORY WELFARE, how finance capital profiteers from social grants

304pp., illus., paperback, Jacana, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9781431436880

First published by Duke University Press in 2026.

Erin Torkelson challenges the widely held belief that social grants, distributed in the form of direct cash transfers, can solve poverty, and offers a bold rethinking of welfare, development and racial inequality.

Drawing on seven years of immersive fieldwork in South Africa - in grant payment queues, loan offices, grocery stores, Parliament and the Constitutional Court - she demonstrates how cash transfers are often leveraged by lenders as collateral and instead of offering relief pull recipients, especially Black women, into cycles of debt. 

“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

Scholar and activist Erin Torkelson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of the Western Cape and holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Her popular articles have appeared in Counterpunch, Znet, GroundUp, The Daily Maverick and The Mail and Guardian, and she made a documentary film for The Cutting Edge on SABC1. She works with the Black Sash, Open Secrets and Institute for Economic Justice on the South African social grant system and has presented her research to the Constitutional Court-appointed Panel of Experts, the National Credit Regulator, the South African Social Security Agency, and the Department of Social Development.