In Trinidad & Tobago, citizens defend sou-sou savings against pyramid scheme comparisons · Global Voices
Trinidad and Tobago money. Photo by <PERSON> on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
With the COVID-19 pandemic has come a worldwide rise in financial fraud. On September 22, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) arrested nine people and seized at least 21 million Trinidad and Tobago dollars (just over 3 million United States dollars) in conjunction with what they suspect was an illegal pyramid scheme.
Because the group dubbed itself a sou-sou, or cooperative savings system, there has been an outcry over the conflation of the term — which describes an age-old, community-minded savings practice rooted in West African tradition — with illegal financial rackets.
Facebook user <PERSON> was adamant that the term sou-sou should be distanced from all insinuations that it is illegal or illegitimate:
A properly run sou-sou is a traditional African-derived plan of savings and pooling with a fixed set of participants in a revolving payment of collective deposits. It has been used successfully for over 150 years here. A pyramid is an exploitative con scheme whereby there is an intentional growing network of depositors where the latter entrants are doomed to never get paid.
In a 2011 post, Outlish magazine described how the practice works:
A sou-sou is structured where one person will be in charge of collecting monies from a group of people. 957
All the monies collected will be given to one person in the group, on selected dates, and it rotates that way until each person has received what they call, a ‘hand.’
A practice routinely dismissed
In December 2019, when the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago demonetised the country's existing $100 bill and replaced it with a new, more secure polymer note, people rushed to the banks to trade in their old currency before the deadline.
But <PERSON>, pre­sident of the Bankers Association of Trinidad and Tobago (BATT) and chief executive officer of First Citizens, a state-owned bank, said that on the required Source of Funds declaration form, banks would “not ­accept sou-sou money as […] legitimate,” even though the practice is well-entrenched in the local culture. “From a banking perspective,” she said, “it is impossible for us to validate a sou-sou.”
Back then, Facebook user <PERSON> explained:
The media never fails with its lack of acknowledgement of anything African, so I'm not surprised at the description of sou-sou as ‘an informal, cooperative loan system…popular in Trinidad and Tobago and throughout the ­Caribbean.’
This empty and limited description dismisses the fact that this practice is a centuries-old financial institution and can be found among West African populations and was brought to this part of the world through enslavement and has survived and thrived as a system of cooperative economics for African people for whom the banking system was not set up and systematically excluded until well into the '70s.
Sou-sou: Key to Black development
Many social media users echoed this stance. Politician <PERSON> proudly noted that many of the opportunities he was afforded in life came as a result of his parents being involved in “non-predatory sou-sous”:
In this new age of VERY OLD get-rich quick schemes, it has become popular to bad-talk traditional methods of savings in the absence of a clear understanding of the roles they played in the economic development of historically disenfranchised communities here. <PERSON> is a prime example of this.
He went on to explain that after emancipation in 1838, Black people were still denied an equal chance at development thanks to “draconian laws, strictures against the selling of land to the formerly enslaved and quite significantly, the denial of access to mainstream financial institutions for loans to establish businesses or for savings”:
Interestingly, the historical response to this was a culture of self-reliance and self-development. It saw the creation of institutions […] to provide financial access, and the utilsation of traditional West African norms like the gayap [from the Indigenous word kayapa, describing how people come together to complete an otherwise daunting task] to physically build houses and communities. And of course, the sou-sou to help recreate a CULTURE of savings and to provide the capital needed to invest in their own activities.
What's in a name?
While pyramid schemes capitalise on the trust that names like sou-sous or “blessing circles” invoke by adopting the names, they have very different characteristics. 957