Mafisa: the trust system Sotho-Tswana families traded by, rebuilt as an app

For centuries, across Sotho-Tswana country, a cattle owner could place animals in another family's kraal and walk away. The family milked the cows, ploughed with the oxen and raised the calves. The owner still owned every one of them. The whole arrangement stood on rules that everybody knew and a word that everybody kept. It was called mafisa.

The deal, in plain words

Mafisa was a loan of live animals. A person with cattle handed some of them to a person with few or none. The keeper looked after them. In return, the keeper had the milk, the oxen to plough with, and, depending on the agreement, some of the calves. The owner kept ownership of the animals and could ask for them back.

The rules were strict and they were known to everyone. The keeper could not sell or slaughter a mafisa animal. The animals were held in trust and stayed the owner's property. In Lesotho, one common version gave the first calf to the owner and the next to the keeper, turn by turn, so that a poor family could build its own herd over the years. In Botswana, an owner might give the keeper a heifer or two "as a sign of appreciation" for good care.

Historians have found the custom everywhere Sotho-Tswana people lived: among the Batswana, the Basotho, the Bapedi, and as far as the Lozi of the Zambezi. Statistics Botswana still defines it today in its official statistics: livestock "borrowed by another person to look after and benefit from milk and or draught power", which "still belongs to the owner", and about which the keeper cannot take any decision without consulting the owner.

Why it worked

Mafisa solved three problems at once, and every one of them is still with us.

1. Risk. A herd kept in one place can be lost in one drought, one disease, one raid. A herd spread across several kraals, in several districts, survives. Owners used mafisa to spread their cattle the way a careful person today spreads savings.
2. Poverty. A family with no cattle had no milk, no plough and no way to start. Mafisa gave them all three, and a path to a herd of their own. When Herero refugees arrived in Ngamiland in the early 1900s with nothing, the local chief loaned them royal cattle under mafisa. Within a generation they were wealthy cattle owners.
3. Loyalty. Chiefs used it to bind people to them. Moshoeshoe, founder of the Basotho nation, lent cattle and sheep to families whose herds had been destroyed in the wars of the 1820s. They repaid him with milk, a share of the increase, and their loyalty. That is how a nation was gathered out of scattered refugees.

Scholars still argue about how fair it was. Some describe a system that let the rich and the chiefs control the poor. Others describe real reciprocity, where both sides gained and a poor man could rise. Probably both were true, depending on the owner. What nobody disputes is that it worked for a very long time, across a very large region, on trust.

Milking with an eye on the road

There is a Setswana saying about mafisa cattle: Mogama kgomo tsa mafisa o gama a gadimile tsela. The one who milks a loaned cow milks while looking at the road. The owner could arrive at any time to take the animals back. The keeper lived with that.

That is the honest heart of the custom. Trust was never blind. It stood on two things: rules that everybody knew, and a whole community that knew who owned what. If a keeper sold a mafisa cow, everyone would know, and there would be a reckoning. The word held because the system held it.

The languages of the region say the same thing about a person's word. In Setswana: Kgomo e tshwarwa ka dinaka, motho o tshwarwa ka mafoko, a cow is caught by its horns, a person by their words. In Sesotho the person is caught ka dipuo, by their speech; in the Sepedi and Sepulana of our own lowveld, ka leleme, by the tongue. The Setswana word for wealth, leruo, still carries livestock as one of its meanings, and another old saying puts it plainly: Go se nang kgomo ga go na lehumo, where there are no cattle there is no wealth.

Is it still alive?

Yes, quietly. In a 2013 survey of cattle-owning households in Toteng, in Botswana's Ngamiland, one in ten had acquired cattle through mafisa. Botswana's 2015 agricultural census still counted farms ploughing with mafisa animals. In 2022 the Botswana government borrowed the name for a new scheme: start-up game animals loaned to new farmers, who must pass the same number on to the next farmer once the animals have bred.

The same idea lives under other names too. Zulu speakers say ukusisa. Xhosa speakers say nqoma. The words differ; the deal is the same: use the animals, keep them well, and never forget whose they are. Even the South African government reached for the name: from 2004 its small-farmer loan scheme was called MAFISA, the Micro Agricultural Financial Institutions of South Africa, because everyone in the countryside already knew what the word promised.

What it teaches a modern marketplace

When we built Live Stock, we did not start from a payment system. We started from mafisa, and asked what made it work.

• Something valuable can sit safely in another's care, if everyone knows the rules. In mafisa it was cattle in a keeper's kraal. On Live Stock it is the buyer's money, placed with a licensed escrow provider that cannot spend it, cannot lose it, and releases it only when the rules say so: after the buyer has inspected and accepted the animals.
• Everyone must know who is who. Mafisa worked because a community knew every owner and every keeper. A marketplace of strangers has no such memory, so we built one: every seller and every buyer is identity-checked by a person before any animal changes hands.
• The record is the trust. In the old system the record was in people's heads. On Live Stock it is written: photos of the animals from every side, taken on the spot, the seller's vet certificate read by our desk, a health declaration, a movement record and proof of sale on every deal.
• Nobody should milk while watching the road. The old keeper never quite knew when the owner would come. On Live Stock nobody waits in fear: the buyer knows the money comes back if the animals are not right, and the farmer knows the money is already there before anyone travels.

Mafisa moved cattle between families on trust and gave the poor a way in. We are trying to do the same for the sale of cattle: a way in for the farmer with three animals and no buyer, and a way to trust for the buyer who has never met them. The farmer keeps 97%. The word holds, because the system holds it.