Deciphering the “duty of support”: caring for young people in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Abstract

Framed around a public and legal debate about the boundaries of responsibility and obligation to care for children in post-apartheid South Africa, the paper interrogates key assumptions regarding family structure and care patterns, as embedded in policies and programmes intended to offer support to “vulnerable” young people. Drawing on a legal contestation of eligibility for the foster care grant, the piece examines the South African state’s definitions of the duty of support and the right to care for children. Then, to explore how responsibility for children is conceived of and distributed, the article briefly describes what one could refer to as “the problem of the patriline” in Zulu kinship, that is, the tensions between the rules governing descent, ownership of and obligations to (and from) children and shifting experiences of kinship and care. Finally, by exploring how responsibility for children is conceived of and distributed for a small group of young people in one locality in KwaZulu-Natal, the paper opens up broader questions of about the forms of belonging, inclusion and exclusion that determine systems of care for young people in contemporary South Africa.

Keywords:

• care
• family
• kinship
• social grants
• South Africa
• vulnerability

Acknowledgments

Firstly, I’d like to gratefully acknowledge the trust, time and kindness offered to me by the families with whom I worked, as well as the researchers and staff at the organisations I worked with and at the Africa Centre for Population Health, where I was based while I conducted much of this research. The initial writing was completed while on a South African National Research Foundation Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2013–2015) in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University and then revised while a postdoctoral research associate in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown. The article was first presented at the “Families of Care” workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (April 9–10, 2015), organised by Professors Lenore Manderson and Ellen Block. I appreciate the thoughtful comments I received from the workshop organisers and other participants, particularly from Professor Manderson. In addition, I’d like to acknowledge the very helpful comments I received from the anonymous reviewers at Social Dynamics. All errors and omissions are my own.

Notes

1. For more details regarding the institutional ethnographic methods, see Reynolds (2014a, 2014b).

2. See Reynolds (2015) for details regarding the sampling approach.

3. Most “vulnerable” young people would also have been eligible for the Child Support Grant, valued at R330 (~US$30) per month in 2015. However, it did not offer a sufficient level of financial support for many, leading relatives to seek out a foster care placement in order to access the larger grant, worth R860 per month in 2015 (Rohrs 2015).

4. Following other scholars (White 2010), I use the term “Zululand” here, despite its explicitly colonial origins, to describe the region of north-eastern KwaZulu-Natal that runs from the Tugela River northwards to the Mozambique.

5. If the husband splits from his wife, according to Gluckman, the children will most often remain with the paternal lineage. If he dies, a relative will take his place and continue to father children in the dead man’s name. If the wife is infertile or dies before bearing children, she may be replaced by a sister who will bear children to fulfil her family’s obligation towards her husband and his lineage. If the wife has an affair, her children from that union are still absolutely the children of her husband’s lineage.

6. In the classificatory kinship system, all of the sisters of a child’s mother would be called by the title “mother” and understood to be also the mothers of the child, in terms of their obligations to care. Similarly, the brothers of a child’s father would be classified as “father” (Krige [1936] 1950).

7. The “cattle complex,” as Kuper (1982) calls the central place of cattle in Bantu societies, has been much discussed in anthropology. Cattle feature centrally in ethnographic studies of the Zulu, particularly for their use in payments of bridewealth, or ilobolo, as I described briefly above. For Thulani, the effort required to care for them and ensure their well-being was the central frame of a large majority of his journal entries. Both everyday rhythms and powerful ritual moments were structured by engagements with these creatures.