Let’s talk about chamas. These are small groups of people that do economically constructive things together. One chama might save for school fees, another for investing in a business, yet another might provide trade finance. In Kenya, where the word chama simply means group, these are the backbone of the economy. In other places other names are used: Hui in Korea and China, Susu in middle Africa, Pardner in the Caribbean.

Chamas operate according to rules, and they are formed of trusted peers in an otherwise untrustworthy world. Often a local market place, or a class of alumni, employees of a business, or an extended family. They are like cooperatives in the Anglo tradition, mutual aid societies in USA or Genossenschaft in Germany, except that they do not currently have to battle governments that are trying to shut them all down.

We were made aware of this first in Kenya, so we use the term from there. We can’t use the word ‘discover’ because the Kenyans know it well, but I suppose we could call it a ‘catch-up’ because the developed world has generally ignored the chama and therefore fundamentally misunderstood developing world society — to sometimes disastrous effect.

Elsewhere, we put out the hypothesis that the chama is an ideal base for a new generation approach to identity because the chama is already formed of people who know and trust each other. This is of particular use to the developed world because of an obsession with “identity” that is now bordering on an attack on civil society — the current governmental policy to identify all persons and finances to such an extent that all are at more risk than before.

As this drift into the dark ages of financial (in)security continues unabated, the topic of identity then is critically important. And into this step, any suggestion that we have a new way to approach the problem of “identity” merits some careful treatment.

This brings us to two opposing observations:

(1) that the chama not only supports real identity in ways that far exceed western practices, it actually does a better job of dealing with the headline attacks that western “identity” pretends to deal with.

(2) the chama is peculiarly difficult to translate into some western contexts. Indeed, there are only a few use cases where it seems to resonate, as mentioned above, and often these are only of limited applicability.

We have both power and poverty for the West. So we are working with some desperation — if a new greater financial crisis were to emerge (cite: The Guardian), as many think inevitable, and the financial system were to fail, as many also fear, the rich world would be cast back to conditions more familiar to people in the developing world: failed payment systems, rickety asset rights, a collapse of trading and wealth leading to high corruption and social unrest.

Somehow, we need the support of the developing world in bringing chamas forth to support trade. Recently, we spotted a new potential use case which resonates so strongly with our community that it bears outlining directly.

The Cryptochama

The cryptocurrency world is only a new thing, but it is not without controversy. On the one hand, a trustless anarcho-libertarian paradise offers opportunity, freedom and the promise of a brave new world. On the other, losses are quite high, participants are often aggressive and the entrepreneur is too scared to deploy her capital (cite: The governed Blockchain). The opportunity in this ‘wild west’ continues to draw in new pioneers, but fear of robbery also turns potential pioneers away.

The chama suggests an ideal vehicle with which to participate in that bipolar new economy because Africa has more in relationship to blockchain than people realise: both are informally-driven economies, with large numbers of youth engaging as struggling entrepreneurs trying to make a better life in a dangerous environment.

People come together in chamas to deal with and secure themselves within a corrupt environment. Business must go on, and what better way to ensure your business is safe than sharing the load with your better friends? People who trust each other will come together and work closely together — often to the extent that they hand over control of substantial sums. There are complications in any common enterprise of course, and they can draw on the entire team’s expertise.

We might see parallels with the DACs or DAOs (distributed autonomous corporation/organisation) but where DACs exist to divorce the human from the business, chamas exist to bring the humans into inalienable domination of the business.

A chama in crypto could be a simple thing — we might save a coin every month, and hold it. This is simple to write but brings in complexity. We need someone to watch the security market and update Trezors and so forth. We need one individual to hold the devices and share keys with someone different again. We would like someone who watches the market closely, and another that watches the big picture, at a high level. A few can do all this, but few can do all of this, and almost nobody can do all this well. And, it is the general population that should be our yardstick not the savants.

A cryptochama could also be more complicated — investing time and effort in a new system. Perhaps a decentralised app, with design, community, programming and cash flow. Or even a blockchain, constructed anew from critical thinking and criticism of the old systems.

Such a chama was Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s apparent from what is now publicly known that the famous team worked in both excessive secrecy but very high trust. This handful of professionals from the Internet security field contributed jointly and separately to code, keys, design, vision, business, documentation, communications and opsec. As a common enterprise with a shared goal, enveloped in a dangerous environment, the Satoshi Nakamotii, various, faced more or less the same challenges that the members of any chama would face in Kibera: work in secret, protect the assets or be robbed and destroyed. Stay close to the vision, stay the long path, and in perhaps the ultimate irony, don’t allow personalities to be swayed by success.

You don’t have to believe me that Satoshi Nakamoto was a chama — and the surviving members may also be bemused and disagreeable. I care little for their bemusement or your disbelief, as being bemused and disagreeable is just evidence of a twitter handle or a reddit post and most people out there are incapable of dealing with that simple scientific logic: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

No matter — my real goal here is to use Satoshi Nakamoto as an example of what we can do today with chamas in the cryptosphere: come together to build a business where we cannot do this alone. Cooperate in knowledge that the other members are working to protect us all, and bring their special talents to the benefit of us all. Save & work to the shared goal.

And keep the enemies at bay.

The cryptochama can extend from the mundane task of saving crypto, to forming a new crypto startup, all the way up to saving society from the formal economy by building the next generation crypto economy. What you do with your chama is up to you, as long as you have that small group of trusted members that can come together, learn the basics, and protect your efforts from the worst the others can throw at you. Chamapesa for the win!

For more information on Chamapesa check out the resources below: