Technology, so often blamed for eroding culture, can be a powerful tool for cultural survival when communities control it on their own terms, according to a new University of Cape Town (UCT) PhD study in Information Systems.
Authored by Pitso Tsibolane, a senior lecturer in Information Systems and associate of the Centre for IT and National Development in Africa (CITANDA), indigenous financial institutions in South Africa – known as stokvels – play a vital role in addressing financial exclusion among communities whose economic and cultural practices have been marginalised for centuries.
“Despite their social and economic significance, limited theorisation exists on how digital technologies reshape the financial, cultural and social lives of these institutions and their members,” he says.
Tsibolane’s study, titled Re-membering indigenous identity: A grounded theory of digitalisation in South African indigenous financial institutions (stokvels), addresses this gap by examining how stokvel members in the Free State province negotiate their indigenous identity as they encounter, adopt and reshape Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) within their collective financial practices.
“South Africans save an estimated R50-billion a year through stokvels, and my thesis found that as these savings clubs go digital, their members are using technology to reconnect with their cultural identity, not lose it,” says Tsibolane.
“My research asked what happens to the culture and identity of these communities as technology, banking apps, WhatsApp, mobile money, enters their financial lives,” he says. “Do people lose who they are when their traditions go digital?”
The answer he found was the opposite, and it was the heart of the thesis.
“Our history of colonialism and apartheid deliberately cut African communities off from their own languages, traditions and ways of managing money. The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls this ‘dismembering’,” Tsibolane explains. ““What I found is that stokvel members are using digital tools to do the reverse: to ‘re-member’, to put themselves back together and strengthen their sense of self. Members use online networks to survive and support each other through hard times. They embrace modern tools like banking apps, but make them serve stokvel values rather than the other way round.
“The members actively keep cultural memory alive, holding on to the record book, the rituals, and the Sesotho of their meetings even as they adopt new technology,” he says. “And they resist being swallowed by the formal banking system, whose charges and impersonal rules clash with the compassion at the centre of stokvel life. I call this whole way of doing things ‘Digital Letsema’, after the Sesotho tradition of letsema – where a community comes together to work on a shared task.”
A product of stokvels, Tsibolane’s parents and his whole extended family and his childhood community utilised stokvels in various ways. He graduated for his PhD last week.
“My doctorate itself has been an emotional journey to seek a place for African indigenous experiences and stories within the global epistemic archive, all alongside my full-time teaching and research,” he says. “In many ways it was a journey home, back to the Free State, back to Sesotho culture and language, listening to stokvel members in the language in which their financial lives actually happen.”
Fieldwork was conducted in three phases with 42 participants from multiple stokvel groups in the Free State. Data was analysed through iterative coding, constant comparison and theoretical memo-writing.
Tsibolane says most global technology research treats African communities as passive recipients of tools designed elsewhere.
“I wanted to tell a different story, one where our communities are having a relationship of agency and innovation as they interact and reshape digital technologies,” he says.
Tsibolane hopes to change how banks, fintech companies and policymakers see stokvels.
“They are not informal, backward or waiting to be absorbed into the banking system,” he says. “They are sophisticated financial institutions carrying culture and identity, with their own values of trust, mutual care and shared responsibility.”
He says any technology built for them must respect and strengthen those values rather than replace them. “I also hope to show young African scholars that our languages, our philosophies like Ubuntu, and our everyday practices are worthy foundations for world-class research,” he adds.
With more than 11-million South Africans belonging to stokvels, Tsibolane believes that if banks and app developers understand what stokvels actually value, they can build products that serve these communities instead of exploiting them.
“Regulators often push for everything to become digital and formal, but my findings show that communities benefit most when they can choose how much technology to use, and when,” he says. “And beyond money, the research shows that technology – so often blamed for eroding culture – can be a powerful tool for cultural survival when communities control it on their own terms.”