Oertel Sparks and Dr. Carol Ward, Sociology
To increase understanding of the family structure of one group in South Africa, I conducted this field study in East London where almost all of the blacks belong to the Xhosa tribe. Family is an important unit of socialization in all societies and is a key element to studying any culture or group of people. Through study, I found that many Xhosa women choose to be single mothers. Therefore, my research question was: Why are many Xhosa mothers choosing to remain unmarried?
Having children determines a woman’s ability to make life choices. When women have children at a young age they are less likely to receive an education as those who do not. Opportunity is also influenced by race. The poverty cycle among black women is perpetuated by lack of opportunities. Women are having children, with no way to support them. The black South African population is growing and the townships and squatter camps do not have room to hold them. Poverty is a critical social problem.
My hypotheses predicted that: apartheid changed the shape of gender roles leading women to remain single; apartheid and urbanization broke down tribal structures leading to nuclear families and fewer marriages; and employment impacted women’s choice to remain single. I hypothesized that the mothers would be the primary source of income for their families, due to a decrease in factories and manual labor accompanied by an increase in service jobs, and that women would not want to marry if it meant supporting their husbands.
I chose Salem Baby Care Centre [sic] as a case study fitting my research question. Salem is an in-take center for single mothers providing maternal health care and education. It is located in East London near the squatter camp (“town” made of shacks) known as Duncan Village. I feel that the women utilizing the center represent the attitudes of many mothers from squatter camps.
My research was conducted as a participant-observer of the Xhosa culture. I lived with a Xhosa family with a domestic worker from a local township. I made friends through activities that added cultural insight for my research. I learned from the mothers at Salem. Also, I sought ‘hard’ data in the form of interviews and questionnaires. Each woman signed a consent form before completing the questionnaires requesting basic demographic information and opinion based open-ended questions. Questionnaires in Xhosa were preferred by the mothers since many spoke only broken English.
It is complicated to narrow down four months worth of impressions and findings. However, various reasons women choose to remain single include: having children with different fathers, parental influence, unemployment/education, and AIDS.
The first of my major findings is the significance of the women’s children having different fathers. Culturally, Xhosa men will only provide for children that are genetically his. This is a problem because young sexual activity leads to early impregnations. Young couples separate and with new boyfriends, there is another pregnancy. There are several factors contributing to young sexual activity. Most cannot afford school. Townships provide little amusement for children. Many began having sex at a very young age. In townships, the tight living quarters, leads to increased physicality and decreased personal space. Birth control is not understood. Of the 39 women studied, 20 were using some form of birth control during conception. Women want to keep their children, and will not marry if they have children with different fathers.
A second reason women are not getting married is parental influence. Many of the women moved from the homelands while young to live with relatives other than their parents. Only three of the women were raised by both parents. Apartheid led to the migration to the city areas and the fragmentation of the family. Sexual norms were not allowed to progress normally. Girls having children out of wedlock became common and thus was no longer a social control factor.
Unemployment and lack of education also contribute to women remaining single. The unemployment rate in the East London area is over fifty percent. Schools all require a fee be paid. With no alternative activities, young girls would become pregnant, yet the lack of employment led to little desire to marry. Women do not want to marry a man without a job, and very few men are employed.
AIDS and STDs also lead many women to remain single mothers. People are scared. HIV progresses quickly into AIDS in children, and the mothers are scorned as having AIDS. This prevents marriage opportunities, even with infected men who refuse testing and often do not show symptoms for years. Information about AIDS is often inaccurate, and perpetuated by the lack of education (even in the government) and the teachings of the sagnomas, or witch doctors. These sagnomas teach that having sexual intercourse with virgins cures AIDS. No one wants to talk about AIDS, but it is killing off people at a faster rate than the highly publicized crime.
My hypotheses were supported. Yet, I found that many factors played a role, and that the complexities of life make simple assumptions difficult to make. The underlying factor towards the number of single mothers is the extreme poverty. The majority of Xhosa families live in poverty. Poverty is most likely in single mother homes. The government sets up programs and grants to aid this problem, but many are ineffective. My biggest policy recommendation is to improve the education system and educate some of the government leaders who are often uneducated as a result of apartheid. Birth control is not understood, and until the programs to implement change understand the cultural connotations, policies are doomed before they are started.