About the Trust Project | Standard Bank Chair in African Trust Infrastructures

A pervasive crisis of trust has been obvious for decades in democratic societies. Most attempts to explain the crisis date it to the publication of Robert Putnam's 1993 essay Bowling Alone that diagnosed the collapse of public trust in the US, mainly, as a consequence of the isolating effects of television. After Putnam, all the western democracies, starting with the US but recently including even the Scandinavian countries, have become increasingly dominated by the tribalised public trust that scholars like Peter Ekeh had attributed to the effects of colonialism on the African continent. Since the 1980s, firms and governments have been scrambling to develop network technologies that they hope will repair and strengthen trust, although they generally mean by this that people can be trusted to borrow – often at unsustainable and impoverishing interest rates. These trust infrastructures include Digital Public Infrastructures that combine identification and bank account information, geolocation tools, credit scoring systems, predictive machine learning and, most importantly, biometric identification systems that are familiar to South Africans. They are particularly important and dynamic on the African continent because they address the registration deficit – the absence of paperwork credentials in land, moveable property, people – births, marriages, deaths, addresses – that was one of the key effects of African colonialism. The trust infrastructures are improving the environment for digital lenders, and for tax collectors looking for sources of revenue, but it is not at all clear that they are fostering institutions or practices of trust; the opposite seems actually to be the case as networked digital systems must rely on a systemic mistrust to limit cyber attacks. Yet this is still an important change – trust and credit, as Muldrew and Carruthers, and others, have shown, have long been mutually constructed. In this project, Standard Bank is supporting long term research of the institutional drivers of trust in history and across the contemporary African continent. Researchers in the Trust Chair are working in Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and in South Africa. After eighteen months of intensive research some surprising answers are already clear. The unified study of trust infrastructures in the public sphere, in Islamic law, in the common and civil law traditions, in the history of capitalism and modern finance, in the learned professions, and in the forms of communal property much favoured by colonial and postcolonial governments shows that trust is produced by self-regulated fiduciaries who manage the risks of modern economic and social life. Fashioning policies that will support these fiduciaries, in a world dominated by cost-saving, centralising and automating networks and computers, remains a formidable challenge.