Of lotteries, pinball machines and Calvinist anxieties

The apartheid state may have enforced racial segregation with an iron fist, but when it came to the “evil” of gambling in select forms, its efforts were generally ham-fisted.

That is among the many takeaways from “The Quest for Wealth without Work: The Lourenco Marques Lottery, Protestant Panics, and the South African White Working Class, circa 1890-1965”.

The final volume of Charles van Onselen’s recent trilogy maintains the narrative thrust, untangling the often fraught relations between a Protestant, Anglophone state that underwent rapid resource-driven industrialisation under an austere Calvinist gaze and its Lusophone, Catholic, commercial and rural neighbour.

Volume 1 explores the deep historical roots of Mozambique’s underdevelopment, while volume 2 is a rocking account of broadcasting and its role in culture and liberation wars in 20th-century southern Africa. 

This includes hilarious attempts to curb the satanic influence of “hippy music”, a feature of Lourenço Marques Radio, which found a receptive audience for its programming among white South African listeners, to the horror of the National Party’s Calvinist overlords. 

Volume 3 picks up on the Calvinist crusade against vice in the face of the tectonic cultural forces unleashed in the 20th century by the emerging industrial and urban landscape. 

The focus is on gambling and campaigns against other social evils such as pinball machines. Elton John would sing an ode to a “pinball wizard”, and Calvinist crusaders certainly saw, if not witchcraft and wizardry, something spiritually sinister in the appeal of the machines to the white working class.

“The nature of markets and the ‘animal spirits’ that drive them are impossible to determine with certainty,” Van Onselen writes. 

“The parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) prioritises investment and speculation, along with the hidden elements of gambling and risk-taking, over the mere retention of capital. Money, if not the people who are lucky enough to possess it, must work. 

“Elsewhere, the Bible provides little explicit guidance as to how to reconcile the elements of gambling and investment, and a lottery, or ‘drawing of lots’, was not unheard of among Jesus’ disciples. Somewhere between the ‘animal spirits’ and the productive deployment of capital, then, lies a zone of ethical uncertainty…”

It is this zone that Van Onselen probes with his trademark blend of sparkling prose, original insight and wit.

What, for example, is the difference between speculative investment and the purchase of a lottery ticket? Both involve an element of risk, and the former is the cornerstone of a capitalist economy.

“Investment bankers work. But so, too, do those who dig ditches, even though a Grand Canyon separates the nature and ultimate outcomes... When bankers use their huge disposable incomes, amassed through speculation and mediated via the investment market, to acquire luxury cars, they are cast as clients, as rational, albeit slightly self-indulgent consumers, folk who contribute ultimately to the social well-being by helping to underwrite the viability of the commercial sector of the economy,” Van Onselen notes.

“But when manual labourers invest their modest, unmediated disposable incomes on horse races or lotteries, curtailing the amount that can be spent in retail outlets or other sectors of the economy, they are cast as wholly irrational spendthrifts. 

“They are, it is suggested, undermining the wider economy, leaching household budgets of essential items such as food and threatening the reproduction of the working-class family as a source of cheap labour.”

This is an original way of framing the issue, and it provides the backdrop for South Africa’s wars on gambling that took place against often speculatively driven periods of economic boom and bust.

“The (National) party strongly disapproved of the uncoupling of work from wealth while simultaneously encouraging those animal spirits capable of underwriting the growth of an economy that fed into white prosperity as it sought to build political solidarity,” Van Onselen writes.

“As with virtually all their predecessors, nationalist governments virtually ignored the sport dominated by the financial elite of the ruling classes – horse racing – but repeatedly passed laws and regulations designed for ideological gratification rather than the effective elimination of football pools, pinball machines and lotteries among the under- and working classes.

“The deliberately orchestrated moral confusion that informed and inflated apartheid policies – the big lie – made many smaller lies around gambling easier to swallow.”

This also underscores the twisted nature of the “moral” universe that underpinned apartheid. Enforced racial segregation was fine, but pinball machines were the work of the devil.

And like the hysterics over hippy music, Calvinist contortions over such matters cast an increasingly archaic aurora in the mid-20th century.

“The 1950s saw the launching of the first atomic submarine and the first orbital satellite,” Van Onselen wryly observes. “In South Africa, the police were tasked with curbing gambling and lotteries using Calvinist handcuffs forged by the Volksraad in the 19th century.”

The narrative is vintage Van Onselen, peppered with a motley assortment of characters, notably the Australian bookmaker Rufe Naylor, who ran the Lourenco Marques lottery with the help of his family and a defrocked priest. 

Risk and uncertainty, hallmarks of the world of business, “were prominent in the Naylors’ transnational lottery enterprise”. 

Based in Mozambique, the lottery’s consumer market lay across the border in South Africa, where the web of apartheid laws was woven ever tighter, while those that sought to ensnare the gambling industry were as often wispy as cobwebs. 

Long before they started shaking down motorists for “a cool drink”, Joburg’s Keystone Cops were on the take.

Still, the apartheid police state had some of its roots in the efforts to root out gambling, and Van Onselen traces how this overlapped with the one Mozambican export that South Africa required for its expanding mining industry – a plentiful, cheap and exploitable supply of migrant labour.

And the lottery had its uses for an exploitative state intent on keeping the plebs, black and white, in their place.

“The poor, unemployed and working classes readily embrace the hope for a fantastical ticket-based escape from the same restrictive parameters of class, education and skills that confine, condemn and lock them into a frequently dreary and routinised proletarian existence. 

“George Orwell captured some of the resultant desperation when laying out the response to the Ministry of Plenty’s lottery in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. That lottery, with its weekly payout of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention,” Van Onselen writes.

“The prospect of wealth acquired through a lottery rather than through work runs contrary to Protestant ethics, but it does simultaneously provide the state with some of the political sedative necessary to dull the conscience of the few with the power who determine the economic fortunes of the many they preside over... The lottery acts as a pressure-release valve in society and, taken holistically, benefits the political elite and state more than the dispossessed.”

South Africa’s current National Lottery, amid swirling claims of corruption, has certainly seemed to benefit a few with political connections more than the swelling ranks of the dispossessed.

It has been a long and pot-hole-strewn road to that lottery, launched in 2000, and the first law prohibiting lotteries in South Africa in 1890.

“Today, the National Lotteries Commission lies buried beneath a veritable avalanche of allegations of bribery, corruption, theft and nepotism, itself possessed by strange animal spirits, bent only on consumption, without investment or work,” Van Onselen bitingly points out.

This trilogy is simply social history at its finest. Any reader who wants to take the plunge is taking no risks. It’s a fine investment that rewards with dividends of historical perception. DM