Nuclear power: The family in decolonial perspective and ‘pro-family’ politics in Africa

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the normative construction of ‘family’ in heteronormative ‘nuclear’ terms is infused with power relations, and therefore must not be taken for granted as an analytical category or concept. Not only a site where racialised and patriarchal western notions of sexed and gendered hierarchies have been naturalised and institutionalised, the ‘nuclear family’ model was positioned as a signifier of modernity, civilisation and progress within eurocentric knowledge construction that served colonial interests. This discussion reviews decolonial thinking on the nuclear family, as well as anti-imperialist literature on the colonial history of the nuclear family ideal. These perspectives are brought into conversation with current developments in which the nuclear family model is being reinvigorated by the conservative US-based ‘pro-family’ movement. The ‘family’, it is concluded, is entangled in multiple relations of geo-political power that should be taken into account in research and the production of knowledge around kinship in African contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Nuclear family
• coloniality
• pro-family
• Africa

1. Introduction

‘Family’, as a category within scholarly and popular discourse, is often referred to in ways that imply it to be a self-evident and apolitical concept. Yet, as this article discusses, ‘family’ when imagined as strictly heterosexual, married and monogamous is far from neutral and is infused with power relations. While a diversity of kinship systems certainly has existed throughout history and across the globe, it is the nuclear family model which has achieved privilege status in modern social imaginaries and development imperatives. As the history of colonial conquest reveals, the dominance of the nuclear family model is entangled with other modern classificatory schemes such as ‘gender’, ‘race’ and ‘nation’ that became the epistemic building blocks of western modernity as strategies of empire building (Stoler, 1995). The variously termed nuclear/modern/bourgeoise family, consisting of a married, monogamous and reproductive man and woman, was positioned as a mark of civilisation, a notion used to classify people and societies that did not practise this particular order of kinship as uncivilised (Kitch, 2009). As Oyěwùmí (2002:1) writes of the legacy of the ‘nuclear family’ model in African contexts, although this model of kinship is a specifically European form it has yet to be seriously interrogated as a colonial concept, and as a result continues to be the source of many falsely universalised concepts that inform gender and kinship research in Africa. In this article, therefore, my aim is to advance a critique of the nuclear family ideal in ways that connect feminist critiques of the multiple hierarchies held in place by ‘nuclear’ power relations (Stacey, 1990; Hill-Collins, 1998) with decolonial perspectives on how geo-political inequalities are reproduced in the absence of a formal system of colonial administration.

Currently, debates over what constitutes family are ensuing in the context of international policy (Martin, 1999; Buss & Herman, 2003; Croft, 2007). These debates have extended decades-old ‘culture wars’ between ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’ in the West over women’s rights, homosexuality, abortion, contraception and sex education. As western feminists and sexual minority activists have globalised their international advocacy to gain equal recognition and rights, so too have western conservatives who, in opposing progressive agendas, have asserted efforts to protect a heteropatriarchal social order that is centred upon male authority and dominance over women and women’s reproduction as well as compulsory heterosexuality. The rights of people who do not ascribe to this order, namely lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people, have become central to these globalised contestations increasingly over the past two decades (Cruz-Malave & Manalansan, 2002).

In African contexts such as Cameroon (Ndjio, 2012, 2013), Zimbabwe (Campbell, 2003; Epprecht, 2005), South Africa (Reddy, 2001; Msibi, 2009; Mkhize et al., 2010), Namibia (Currier, 2012), Nigeria (Izugbara, 2004; Lewis, 2011; Okanlawon et al., 2013), Kenya (Finerty, 2013) and Uganda (Tamale, 2007; Cheney, 2012), calls by non-heterosexual people to have the right to make families that are recognised by the state have been resisted by conservative claims that homosexuality is a form of western imperialism and is therefore threatening to African cultures traditions. Kaoma’s (2009, 2012, 2013) research has provided important empirical evidence showing that the rejection of sexual minorities in these terms is connected to well-resourced US organisations working to drive ‘pro-family’ agendas in their own domestic contexts, and internationally through strategic global partnerships and networks.

Organisations such as the Family Research Council, Family Watch International, Focus on the Family, and the World Congress of Families (WCF) are developing inroads across the continent and have ‘mentored’ local politicians and activists around the necessity of maintaining the nuclear family unit as the only traditional, legal and permissible form of expressing one’s sexuality and gender, within policy and society. Yet, as African scholars have made clear, no such ‘nuclear’ family structure has been practised on the continent as a ‘norm’, historically or currently (Oyěwùmí, 2002). Rather, African kinship systems have taken a diversity of forms in relation to various contexts, cultures, religious practices and belief systems. The existence of pre-colonial art depicting same-sex intimacies (Epprecht, 2004) as well as anthropological research (Nkabinde with Morgan, 2005; Epprecht, 2008) has provided important evidence that Africa is not the heterosexual continent that some politicians and political leaders would like their constituencies to believe. In promoting ‘family values’ in Africa, the conservative pro-family movement advances a singular narrative of the African family that absorbs Christianity and colonisation as part of what they characterise as being traditionally African. In doing so, not only do these discourses enforce a singular and hegemonic notion of what the family is, but they also close down possibilities for the articulation and acknowledgement of the diversity of ways in which kinship has, and currently is, practised in Africa (and elsewhere).

Given these historical and contemporary dynamics, the notion of ‘family’ must be engaged critically when it is invoked in African contexts. In discussing ‘family’ and kinship in the Global South, we must take cognisance of the ways in which these notions, when deployed uncritically, reinforce eurocentric norms and knowledges rather than reflecting or responding to the realities and needs of African people. This article seeks to contribute an understanding of the concept of ‘family’ from a decolonial perspective in order to illustrate the analytical dangers of reproducing the Euro-American model of the nuclear family in policy and scholarship on families or kinship relations in Africa. It is argued that the notion of the ‘family’ must be de-linked from its colonial heritage and reframed in ways that accommodate and acknowledge contemporary realities of diversity and complexity in ever-changing African societies.

2. Method

Literature and documentary sources referred to in this article have been sourced as part of a broader project on the role of the US pro-family movement in influencing sexual politics in Africa. In this article, I refer to pro-family texts collected through desktop research, although I have also employed ethnography as a method of data collection. In making sense of the interest that the pro-family movement has in Africa, in particular, I have drawn on literature and theory from a range of critical perspectives, namely decolonial theory, queer theory, critical feminist theory, African feminist theory, intersectional feminist theory, critical race theory, critical diversity studies, critical discourse studies and critical perspectives on development.

This investigation has revealed that the pro-family movement’s deployment of a singular definition of ‘family’ is central to their efforts at destroying the diversity of other ways in which kinship/family/community have, and continue to be, known and practised. In enforcing a eurocentric norm, such as the nuclear family model, as a universality, the pro-family movement works to reinforce the global power and authority of white western Christians. In this discussion, I bring critical perspectives on the family that have emerged from development studies, gender studies and decolonial theory into conversation with one another in order to reveal the ways in which normative constructions of the family – namely, the nuclear family ideal – code hegemonic practices (Steyn, 2015:386) of heterosexism and the global dominance of the West.

3. The international pro-family movement

A US-driven theo-political movement calling itself ‘pro-family’ is working to advance policy agendas in Africa, Eastern Europe, India and Asia through the establishment of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and increasing advocacy work at the United Nations (UN). As Croft (2007) and Martin (1999) have revealed, pro-family foreign policy involves measures to ‘strengthen the family’ through opposition to birth control, the use of condoms (even in the fight against HIV/AIDS) and denial of the rights and dignity of sexual minorities. Furthermore, ‘Religious activists have consistently opposed any foreign-policy initiative that might weaken parental control over children, facilitate abortion, expand the rights of homosexuals, or devalue the role of the conventional homemaker and mother’ (Martin, 1999:74). The growing influence of an international ‘pro-family’ movement has been noted by scholars who have studied the rise of discourses of the ‘natural’ or ‘traditional’ family within domestic contexts in the West at first, and more recently their advances within the UN and across Africa and the Global South (Buss & Herman, 2003).

Drawing on Christian beliefs about the sanctity of marriage, pro-family organisations work to actively ‘preserve and promote’ the nuclear family model, which is positioned as the ideal kinship structure. For instance, the US-based organisation Family Watch International works with the UN and internationally to:

Preserve and promote the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman as the societal unit that provides the best outcome for men, women and children.¹

Similarly, Focus on the Family – which is US based but which has associate offices in 13 other countries across Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa – sets itself out as:

a global Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive. We provide help and resources for couples to build healthy marriages that reflect God's design, and for parents to raise their children according to morals and values grounded in biblical principles.²

The WCF, a project of the Illinois-based Howard Centre for Family, Religion and Society, was established in 1997 as an initiative to consolidate various pro-life and anti-gay advocacy organisations, and to bring together global conservatives (and elites) who can advance ‘family values’ at the levels of national and international policy. The WCF gives global expression to the notion that the nuclear family is universal to all of humanity and history, arguing that the family is ‘based on the marital union of a man and a woman, is the bedrock of society, the strength of our nations, and the hope of humanity … the ultimate foundation of every civilization known to history’.³

In 2016, the WCF launched the International Organisation for the Family in Cape Town, South Africa, where delegates signed the Cape Town Declaration, confirming their efforts to ‘firmly resis[t] every push to redefine marriage: to include same-sex or group bonds, or sexually open or temporary ones’. Prominent African signatories to the declaration include the head of the African Christian Democratic Party, Kevin Meshoe, and the Nigerian ambassador to South Africa, Uche Ajulu-Okeke. A few months prior to this gathering, the WCF collaborated with the Africa Organisation for Families, the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Kenyan Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, the Catholic Archdiocese of Nairobi, the Cameroon-based Global Institute for Family Integrity and the Nigerian-based Foundation for African Cultural Heritage (FACH) to host the African Regional Conference on Families. Anne Kioko, President of the African Organisation for Families, explained that comprehensive sex education was amongst the concerns of Kenyan pro-family advocates, arguing that such ‘programs go way beyond regular sex education and are designed to change all the sexual and gender norms of society’ (Nyambura, 2016).

‘Pro-family’ discourses advocating for the nuclear family model to be protected in national and international policy as the only legally recognised form of family are becoming increasingly influential within international policy debates and imaginaries. The growing influence of the pro-family movement has been enabled not only by advocacy work in civil society and politics, but also in academia. In the United States, for instance, W. Bradford Wilcox (cited later in this article) is the Director of the National Marriage Project, which is based at the highly ranked University of Virginia. Other pro-family advocates who are based in academic departments include WCF Founder Allan Carlson (Professor of History, Hillsdale College), Mark Regnerus (Professor of Sociology, University of Texas-Austin), Everett Piper (Oklahoma Wesleyan University) and Monique Chireau (Duke University). Beyond universities, a number of pro-family advocates work from US-based think tanks that are notoriously conservative, including the Sutherland Institute, the Witherspoon Institute, the Population Research Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

Increasingly, popular discourse across the continent construes people who do not subscribe to the heterosexual nuclear family model not only as ‘unAfrican’, but also as socially and economically threatening to the developing state. Within these discourses, non-heterosexuals, single mothers and childfree women, those who engage in pre-marital and extra-marital sex and reproduction, and alternative family forms are scapegoated for various social challenges, and therefore experience forms of oppression, namely marginalisation, victimisation and exclusion (Young, 2009).

4. Decolonising the family

As Oyěwùmí (2002:1) writes, the enforcement and institutionalisation of the European concept of the ‘family’ formed the ideological basis of gender and race ‘as two fundamental axes along which people became oppressed’ in colonised African societies. As one of the ‘scientific designs’ of modernity, the nuclear family ideal was not created by Africans but by Western Europeans and Americans, responding to the needs and visions of these places, not those of Africa (Mignolo, 2011:130). As decolonial scholars (Smith, 2006; Lugones, 2007; Quijano, 2007; Mignolo, 2011) reveal, there is scope to decolonise the family, given that this Christian and bourgeois kinship model was an instrumental axis through which colonial power was implemented institutionalised. The control of sexuality and gender that this model enabled was reinforced by European control of knowledge (Quijano, 2007; Grosfoguel, 2013). Within the pro-family movement, the ‘logic of coloniality’ (Quijano, 2007) is reinvigorated in that the normative ways in which the eurocentric nuclear family model is used reinforce western authority while also protecting systems of domination that can be legitimated through the nuclear family’s modelling of sexed and gendered hierarchies as natural.

Mid-twentieth-century literature on kinship in Africa (Hunter, 1936; Krige, 1936; Schapera, 1940; Phillips, 1953; Reuter, 1963) largely offered descriptive accounts that constructed African kinship systems as located along a linear path of ‘progression’ towards ‘advanced’ family forms associated with modernisation (Siqwana-Ndulo, 1998:408). Christonormative European thought constructed the gender binary and hierarchy as evidence of enlightened society, with any other form of indigenous sex and gender practice constructed as ‘savage’ and, further, as an indication of the need to evangelise and modernise these societies (Kitch, 2009). Howard Washington Odum’s 1910 publication, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, illustrates the ways in which racist ideology drew on patriarchal constructions of ‘civilization’, reporting that ‘in his home life, the Negro is filthy, careless, and indecent … as destitute of morals as many of the lower animals [and with] little knowledge of the sanctity of home or marital relations’ (Stacey 1994:66). Such sociological and anthropological scholarship on ‘family’ and kinship in Africa provided the epistemic resources used to justify conquest, colonisation and domination of the non-European world.

Thus, colonised men were constructed as being unable to govern colonised women, and therefore unable to govern themselves (Kitch, 2009). Employing the nuclear family model as a means of measuring ‘savagery’ or ‘civilization’, enlightenment ideology erected a system of racial classification and ranking through a gender/sex hierarchical order that positioned male dominance as a signal of cultural advancement (2009:56). African men, fated to become slaves, were considered to lack fully formed souls, like women, and the institution of marriage offered a gendered biblical model that could justify the capture and enslavement of African people (2009:52). What pro-family accounts of the universality of the ‘nuclear family’, such as those quoted earlier, further obscure is the extent to which African kinship systems were destroyed throughout the period of colonial conquest. At the same time that European scholars were constructing African kinship structures as inferior through the normative modern ideal of the nuclear family, they were actively destroying the kinship systems of colonised people. The idealised western nuclear family model is therefore implicated in economic and knowledge practices of modernity that have justified racism and constructed some human lives as inferior and dispensable (Mignolo, 2011:6).

Mignolo reinforces the salience of heteropatriarchy within a power relations, arguing that a global gender/sex hierarchy ‘privileged males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender configuration and sexual relations’ through the invention and institutionalisation of sex (heterosexual/homosexual) and gender (male/female) binaries (Mignolo, 2011:18). Thus, ‘a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileged European people over non-European people’ secured the privileged status of European men over all men and colonised people, as well as European women (2011:18). These systems were held in place by privileging of western knowledges over non-western knowledges (which were often targeted for eradication) and a spiritual/religious hierarchy that privileged Christianity over non-Christianity and other non-western spiritualities (2011: 18).

5. The pro-family movement in Africa

As already discussed, western pro-family political actors and discourses have taken a particular interest in Africa, as made evident by the establishment of African branches of US-based organisations such as Focus on the Family and Human Life International, as well as the activities of conservative activists from the West across the continent. As Zambian theologian Dr Rev. Kaoma (2012) found, pro-family activists and organisations have played a supporting role in attacks on sexual minorities and women’s reproductive rights in many African countries in their promotion of the nuclear family model as a universal norm.

The recent rejection of the Gender and Economic Opportunities Bill by the Nigerian National Assembly provides one illustration of the influence of the pro-family movement in influencing policy in Africa, along with insight into some of the international networks involved. The Bill, which set out to ‘incorporate and enforce’ certain provisions of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women into national policy, was opposed by the FACH, which is a coalition of conservative civil society groups (Premium Times, 3 April 2016). The Director of FACH, Theresa Okafor, is an influential figure within the international pro-family movement, and was awarded ‘Woman of the Year’ at the ninth gathering of the WCF which took place in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2015. The objectives of the FACH mirror those set out by US-based pro-family organisations as can be seen in their mission statement. As stated on the FACH website, the organisation aims to:

promote the sanctity and inviolability of human life from conception … foster the equality in dignity between men and women through the rejection of false norms and notions of equality that diminish the very dignity of the woman … [and] uphold the family as the natural unit for the upbringing of children while protecting and preserving healthy family values, and Nigerian cultural heritage.⁴

Echoing the mission statements of US-based pro-family organisations that employ notions of ‘tradition’ in efforts to justify the oppression of women and sexual minorities, the FACH clearly positions itself as a defender of ‘family values’ which the organisation connects to an oversimplified and singular construction of ‘Nigerian cultural heritage’. Similarly, Pastor Errol Naidoo has brought pro-family advocacy to South Africa through lobbying of government. After the legalisation of same-sex marriage in South Africa in 2006, Naidoo went to the Washington DC-based Family Research Council (FRC) where he received mentorship, later returning to establish the Family Policy Institute in Cape Town. The Family Policy Institute boasts its status as a partner-member of the WCF, and at its ninth gathering in 2015 Naidoo addressed delegates on the issues of pro-family scholarship, research and policy, speaking to ‘the status of the natural family in South Africa’.⁵ The Family Policy Institute has also weighed in on the White Paper on Families, advocating for a heterosexual definition of marriage to inform that which is recognised as a ‘family’ (Charles, 2013:15). Regarding the draft legislation, Charles (2013:16) warns that the heteronormative ideals of marriage coupled with heterosexist attitude are cause for concern with regard to social development. It is evident, she argues, that there are ‘appropriate’ genders or sexualities that are being promoted and that the closer or further one is to these norms, the more or less access one will have to material wellbeing’ (2013:16).

6. Exceptionalising ‘family’

In centring the importance of the ‘nuclear family’ model and heterosexuality, pro-family discourses exceptionalise the family as a social institution capable of carrying the lion’s share of responsibility for ensuring the (re)production and maintenance of healthy and prosperous societies. This discourse resonates with neoliberal efforts to deflect responsibility for social and economic policy away from the state and towards individuals. In positioning the heterosexual nuclear family unit as the custodian of a ‘moral’, healthy and economically thriving society, the state is able to outsource its responsibility towards its citizenry.

As Rwezaura et al. (1995:56) write, western neoliberal interventions into so-called ‘developing’ economies on the continent have encouraged states to view the family as a unit of social protection and production, with families expected to support their members economically, physically and emotionally. Yet structural inequalities continue to be widely acknowledged as major obstacles faced by families and their members in their efforts to make livelihoods. Commenting on the work still needed to attain the now lapsed 2015 Millennium Development Goals, the UN Economic Commission for Europe allude to some of the effects of inequality on kinship and family systems, arguing that ‘High levels of inequalities … have subsequent effects on health, nutrition and child development … crime, disease and environmental problems are also found to be exacerbated by inequality’ (ECE et al., 2012:7). Economic insecurity, health and health care of parents and children, and environmental degradation all affect families in multiple ways, resulting in ‘rapidly changing family structures and declining family support systems’, and therefore create major obstacles to achieving development goals as noted by the United Nations (UNDESA & UNFPA, 2012:4).

Today’s economic precarity and insecurity are legacies of the colonial era in which kinship systems were fragmented, destroyed and impoverished as part of a project of conquest and colonisation. Rwezaura et al. (1995) provide a comprehensive discussion of the ways in which colonial land theft, entry into the wage labour system by men and integration into the cash economy across southern and eastern Africa impacted familial practices and relations between those connected by descent and community. The resulting ‘in/security’ regimes created conditions of extreme precarity for the majority of the population, and irrevocably transformed African kinship relations (Budlender & Lund, 2011:926).

The rhetoric of ‘pro-family’ advocates ignores the legacies of inequality entrenched by colonial conquest via claims that the ‘natural family’ is the key to unlocking neoliberal promises of prosperity. As Sharon Slater, founder of Family Watch International and active UN lobbyist, told a group of lawyers at the annual Nigerian Bar Association conference in 2011, ‘Children are Nigeria’s greatest asset. They are your wealth, they are your future. It is no accident that Nigeria, the most populous African country, is also one of the wealthiest.’ She elaborates, explaining that children are needed as future ‘workers to fuel their economies and support their older populations’ (Slater, 2011). She warns the delegates that:

Nigeria will eventually face the same problem if you adopt the anti-child values of the West. As Nigeria continues to develop, we urge you to preserve your strong family values. Embrace your children and invest in them by strengthening your families. (Slater, 2011)

According to Slater (2011), when sex outside of heterosexual marriage occurs ‘the family unit disintegrates, children are hurt, economies decline, and nations are weakened’. At the same time, Slater advances the notion that Nigerian people can uplift their economy and nation through individual choices around sex, marriage and reproduction. The enduring legacy of western exploitation of Africa that has created conditions of extreme insecurity across the continent is rendered invisible, and economic prosperity is said to be achieved through adherence to particular (heterosexual) norms and desires.

Within this logic, those who do not conform to the nuclear family ideal – single parents, LGBTI people, divorced people and those who engage in sex outside of marriage – are all presented as elements that undermine and threaten these developmental imperatives. Sex and gender identities and expressions are thereby inscribed with economic value within a capitalist framework. In this sense, as Jakobsen (2002:61) argues, ‘Family Values not only serve as a cultural control on the market, the stable discourse of regulation to be appealed to in times of change’, but they also inscribe sexed and gendered practices and identities with economic value, establishing a ‘crucial distinction’ between those persons whose lives are seen to create wealth from those whose lives are seen as economic liabilities.

Offered as a solution to multiple and intersecting crises within the contemporary context, ‘family values’ can be persuasive because they provide convenient scapegoats for economic instability, an ‘amoral market’ and the supposed ‘decline of national cultural values’. W. Bradford Wilcox, (Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies) summarised this relationship at the ninth WCF gathering in 2015, presenting findings published in the recently released report Strong Families, Prosperous States. He explained:

there’s a connection between strong families and state prosperity because marriage, family life, have deep connections to the labour force, they boost family income access, and they encourage the accumulation of capital in today’s contemporary world. (Wilcox, 2015)

While pro-family discourses construct the ‘natural’ family as being a god-given and biological/natural ‘truth’, the movement also advances neoliberal ideology in which economic value is attached to the sex and gender identities, expressions and practices. Furthermore, the approach illustrated by Wilcox hides the splintering effects that increasing inequality and precarity created by neoliberal growth imperatives have had on practices of kinship, as discussed earlier.

As one can learn from Stoler’s (1995) historical research, contemporary pro-family discourses on the ‘natural family’ regenerate two contradictory elements characterising nineteenth-century social Darwinist constructions of the ‘family’. As a ‘metaphoric figure’ that enabled a unified narrative of race, class and gender distinctions, the nuclear family ideal was a ‘curious paradox’ in the sense that it was ‘figured as existing, naturally, beyond the commodity market, beyond politics and beyond history proper. The family thus became both the antithesis of history and history’s organizing figure’ (Stoler, 1995:44; emphasis added). With regards to the first aspect of this paradox, Stoler argues that the family created a figure through which social hierarchies could be portrayed as natural and familial through the naturalisation of the social subordination of women and children (1995:45). This patriarchal order was rendered a ‘natural fact’, providing a social hierarchy through which other differences could be classified, ranked and rationalised according to ‘categories of nature’.

Figured as an ‘organic element of historical progress’, the family image could be translated into other forms of exclusion and hierarchy within ‘nonfamilial social forms such as nationalism, liberal individualism and imperialism’ (Stoler, 1995:45). With regards to the second aspect of the paradox, in portraying the patriarchal family as ‘natural and inevitable’ rather than as a product of situated histories and cultures and therefore subject to change, the ‘organic family’ trope also ‘became invaluable in its capacity to give state and imperial intervention the alibi of nature’ (1995:45). Thus, the power relations of imperial interventions in Africa and the Americas could be ‘figured as a linear, nonrevolutionary progression that naturally contained hierarchy within unity: paternal fathers ruling benignly over immature children’. The global application of the family metaphor constituted an ‘organizing trope for marshaling a bewildering array of cultures into a single, global narrative ordered and managed by Europeans’ (1995:45).

In universalising the ‘natural family’, pro-family discourse constructs the nuclear family model as a mechanism that can assist developing nations to achieve economic prosperity. Through profound historical erasure of colonial conquest and its enduring social effects, these discourses attempt to achieve a forgetting of the violent mechanisms used by an empire to amass its own power and wealth. In doing so, the structural inequalities created over hundreds of years of the intentional underdevelopment of Africa and theft of its resources by the West (Rodney, 1972) are obscured. Furthermore, the nuclear family – said to be a natural and divine universal norm – is sutured to capitalism, which is further reinforced as ‘natural’, God-given and universal, in turn.

7. Conclusion

This article set out to highlight the coloniality of normative notions of the patriarchal nuclear ‘family’ as an ideal that centres western-centric and Christonormative ways of knowing and doing family. The global activism of the ‘pro-family’ movement is working to universalise the so-called ‘natural’ family as a strategy of re-centring the West as an international power and source of authority. Uncritical use or application of heteropatriarchal notions of the ‘family’ as a category of analysis are at risk, therefore, of engaging the family (in academic research and in policy) in ways that reproduce colonial subjectivities and power relations.

The social consequences of falsely universalised notions of the nuclear family have been discussed by scholars interested in the relationship between family policy and the state. As Creed (2000:345) shows, policies and laws pertaining to marriage, taxation and other state prerogatives produce ‘a single master narrative of the life course’, with ‘The extent to which one’s life experience corresponds to that scenario affect[ing] one’s sense of belonging to the state, which provides the basis of national identity’. Moreover, May (2003:19) discusses the consequences for public life and engagement brought upon by the diminishing of the state’s responsibility towards communities: civic participation and faith in the political process, she argues, wanes with the reduction in government responsibility for the well-being of citizens. She writes that US public opinion polls have shown over the past several decades that ‘as the government has retreated from supporting the needs of citizens and responsibility has shifted to families, faith in public institutions, particularly the government, has eroded’ (2003:19). At the same time, individual engagement in the political process has declined, and ‘desires for personal happiness have increasingly focused on private life, often at the expense of participation in, and obligation to, the larger community’ (2003:19).

While May writes from, and of, the US context, the conditions she describes (such as inadequate state support for the populous, the loss of faith in government and the political process) also resonate African contexts. Across the continent, independent African states struggle to become economically competitive in the global neoliberal market that has simultaneously encouraged them to minimise social support systems through economic growth and restructuring programmes. May’s argument therefore stands as a warning to other nations that efforts to reduce the economic responsibilities of the state result in declining faith in the political system.

Knowledge production on ‘family’ needs to be actively and consciously de-linked from the racist and sexist logic of imperialism in order to produce research and policy outcomes capable of furthering, and supporting, the project of liberation. If scholarship on family and kinship intends to contribute towards imperatives of creating equitable and socially just societies through the development of policy or theory, it must reject and challenge attempts to define the family in singular and universal terms. Areas for future research should include efforts to challenge the ways in which ‘family’ has been normatively defined by western interests, and provide critical discussions that can speak to, rather than deny or exclude, the complexities of kinship and community in societies in which life, for the majority, is precarious and characterised by insecurity. The widening gap between those who hold wealth and those who do not is becoming so extreme that it ‘threatens to pull our societies apart’ (Oxfam 2017: 2). In this context, it is likely that informal networks of support amongst the ‘have nots’, such as those provided by kinship and community, are to remain vital for survival and social cooperation. Should we focus exclusively on the heterosexual, married and reproductive nuclear family model in our research and knowledge production, we are at risk of closing down possibilities for imagining and creating societies and futures that are better, and more just, for all.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was conducted under the supervision of the DST-NRF SARChI Chair, Critical Diversity Studies, which is held by Prof. Melissa Steyn at the University of the Witwatersrand-Johannesburg.

Notes

1 http://www.familywatchinternational.org/fwi/about_us.cfm Accessed 25 April 2016.

2 http://www.focusonthefamily.com/about Accessed 25 April 2016.

3 http://www.wcf11.org/principles.php Accessed 25 April 2016.

4 http://www.fach-nigeria.org/index.php/objectives

5 http://www.familypolicyinstitute.com/news.html