Contextualizing Caring in Black South African Families

Although South African society is now in a state of transition, the legacy of the past remains. Black families have been affected profoundly by apartheid policies, and this has impacted on caring relationships. These families have survived through the paid and unpaid labor of their members and through the sharing of resources. In this paper I examine caring in the families of a group of black, South African social work students in relation to the institutionalized violence of past apartheid policies. The profiles indicate that caring is understood to be reciprocal and to involve issues of sustenance and survival in the context of extreme poverty. Unpaid caring work has largely been done by grandmothers and other available family members (including children) while mothers and fathers left the household for periods to find waged labor. A large proportion of students reported that women in their families were domestic workers, performing poorly paid caring work. To strive towards the future possibility of justice and equity in South Africa, current social policy needs to acknowledge and highlight both the historical context of black families and the caring work that has been performed by women, the elderly, and children.