Back to ContentsMarriage Laws
Colonialism brought a marked deterioration in the position of women, but especially in the position and status of married women. Their status and rights in the 'reserves' came to be determined by complicated rules arising out of customary law as interpreted by white judges and administrators and as affected by common and statute law. Laws affecting domestic relations vary to some extent in different areas; the most regressive, reactionary and repressive features of customary law as codified and construed by the white regime were incorporated into the Natal Code (Law No.46 of 1887).
Africans in both town and country may choose to marry according to general South African law - 'common law' - or according to traditional law - 'customary union'. Marriage by common law is more usual in the towns; most Africans in the bantustans marry according to customary union.
Customary Union
African women must have parental consent to enter into a customary union. Such marriages are validated by lobolo, the transfer of cattle and/or money by the husband to the wife's father. In its earliest forms lobolo was not a bride - price so much as a 'child - price', whereby the cattle exchanges gave the husband claims to the wife's children as his own.
While some aspects of lobolo served a useful function in providing protection for married women, it had an essentially retrogressive aspect, curtailing the independence and freedom of women.
The wife who wished to leave her husband found it difficult to do so because rights to children were involved. Men who had come into ownership of cattle or children were not inclined to part with them merely because a woman wanted her freedom, and the only alternative left to the woman in the absence of a cattle refund from her father, was to give up her children. Even today, an African man may repudiate his marriage unilaterally simply by forfeiting his lobolo rights, but an African woman has no equivalent right. Lobolo was thus one of the means whereby women were under the dominion of men in traditional society.
An African woman married by customary union is in most cases considered a minor under the tutelage of her husband. She cannot own property in her own right, except for her clothing and a few personal possessions; and if she earns money or in any way acquires property this becomes the property of her husband. She is unable to make a valid contract without her guardian's consent; or to sue or be sued. Her husband must do this on her behalf.
These laws vary somewhat according to the province. Under the Natal Native Code, for example, custody of the children can never be given to their divorced, separated or widowed mothers, even if it is the husband's conduct that caused the marriage break - up. Elsewhere, a divorced woman is deemed to have reached her majority, but under the Natal code a divorced woman is a perpetual minor, once more subject to the control of father or guardian, and she must live in his kraal. Her ex - husband keeps the children, though they must be allowed to stay with their mother until the age of about six.
Recent changes to the Natal Code, made in 1982 and 1983, have improved the situation of women in areas of Natal under the Kwazulu Bantustan administration: these women now become legal majors on turning 21 and become able to enter into contracts without the permission of a male relative. The old Natal Code however continues to apply in the rest of Natal.1
Any woman may be confined to her kraal by a banning order issued by a Commissioner if he finds that she 'leads an immoral life', or being absent from her kraal is unable to 'give a good account of herself'.
The Minister of Bantu Administration and Development told Parliament in 1962 that one of the aims of his policy 'was to restore women to their rightful place as wife, mother, leader . . . the position that women occupied in the old society'.2
'In the name of restoring African women to their rightful place in that society, this specious culture over - emphasizes restrictions on women and distorts their role in rural society', says Elizabeth Landis. She concludes:
Since various rights denied to African women under the Natal Code or married according to tribal law are granted without disastrous consequences to single women, it is apparent that these rights are not withheld for the protection of African women. However, to concede this would be to challenge the validity of the separate culture imposed on Africans - and, more importantly, to challenge the concept of separate culture as a basic tenet of the South African political system. The Government consequently cannot countenance any fundamental amelioration in the status of rural African women, for such a reform would inevitably undermine apartheid.3
Common Law
Under common law, married women's rights over children and property depend on the choice made by the marriage partners. The marriage can be legalised by what is called 'community of property', or by the exclusion of community of property through a legally drawn antenuptual contract; or by marriage by customary union (see above).
All of these ways incorporate disadvantages for women, and involve their legal dependence.
To be married under community of property means that the husband acquires guardianship of the wife, who is considered a minor. He holds 'marital power', which means that a wife cannot enter into a binding contract or open a credit account without the prior permission of her husband. Until 1953 the husband could even take his wife's earnings, but the Matrimonial Affairs Act of that year alleviated the legal disabilities of married women. The wife's earnings are protected, although her husband may still take possession of anything she has bought with those earnings unless she obtains a court interdict against him.
An antenuptual contract excludes the husband's marital power and leaves his wife in full legal capacity in most matters.4
Although it is of advantage to them, the majority of women do not enter marriage with an antenuptual contract, either through ignorance, or because of the expense involved in having such a contract drawn up by a lawyer.
Many Africans go through two or even three forms of marriage: customary union, a civil marriage and, for some, a church marriage as well. When married by civil rites, African marriages are assumed to be out of community of property, unless a special declaration to the contrary is signed.
A new Matrimonial Property Act, which came into force in 19845 was lauded as a breakthrough for women. The new act abolishes marital power in marriages under common law, the power that makes husbands the sole administrator of family property and gives joint administration to husband and wife.
The drawback to this apparently progressive measure is that apart from the fact that it excludes all present community of property marriages from its reforms (unless the husband consents to the abolition of his marital power), it also excludes the majority of women - apart from a very few exceptions it does not apply to African married women (whose legal status was made a subject of investigation by the South African Law Commission appointed in 1983).6
The Family
In town and country today, South Africa teaches potent lessons in the meaning of the family, of patriarchy, of the exploitation of women. The illusion persists that the individual family is the basic economic unit of society. The conventional morality relating to the family, piously upheld by the state, by its propaganda, by its religious institutions, by its laws and its codes of ethics, is unrelated to reality. The establishment of bantustans, restrictions on women entering the towns, mass population removals, harsh laws relating to movement and work, and most of all, the spread of migrant labour, all these have had a devastating effect upon human relationships as expressed in terms of marriage and the family.
In 1968 the separation of migrant workers from their families was made more absolute by the introduction of a new system of contract labour. Prior to 1968 a migrant worker whose family had some access to land could work in the cities for a while and then spend some months with his family and working on his land before entering the labour market once more. The new 1968 system made it obligatory for migrants who wished to re - register in their jobs to return within 28 days. By law, a migrant must return to his home area to renew his contract, but may have little more than two weeks each year to live with his family. The new system has also weakened family relations among the workers themselves. In the past employers could specify the area from which they wished to recruit workers; now they may not, and can rarely name individuals whom they wish to recruit. Thus a migrant worker may no longer have his brothers, his sons, or other close relatives, coming to work in the same factory and live in the same hostel as himself.
'It is impossible,' wrote Sheena Duncan in 1983,
for a migrant to bring his family legally to town to live with him, and the illegal residence option is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as the administration of influx control becomes more efficient and the penalties more severe. The demolition of self - built shelters and homes now appears to be carried out systematically . . . and the ruthlessness with which the KTC* people were handled in Cape Town in May 1983 is a foretaste of the kind of action which can be anticipated in the future.
*'KTC' is the name of a site of a squatter camp.
An amendment to the Trespass Act made in 1983, which raised the penalties for this offence from R50 or three months in prison to R2,000 or two years' imprisonment, was another indication of what was in store.
The increasing number of landless people in the bantustans caused by the removal of people from the 'white' areas and their dumping in 'closer settlements' (see Appendix) has also led to a marked deterioration in family structures. If a family has some access to land and therefore to subsistence the permanent family unit has consisted of the children, women of all ages and old people, the able - bodied men being away working elsewhere. This unit may not have the qualities of a normal family group but it nevertheless provides some kind of stable nuclear unit with recognised structures.
In the closer settlements where there is no land many family units consist only of a grandmother and a large number of children abandoned in her care. The younger women leave and disappear into the 'illegal' underground in the cities, returning infrequently to leave another illegitimate baby with the grandmother7
In the urban areas outside the bantustans, Sheena Duncan explains, the destruction of the family has different roots but equally disastrous consequences. Apart from the familiar effects of rapid industrialisation, there are the laws that deny the right of families to live together, and the fact that the regime uses control over the provision of family accommodation as one of the main weapons in the armoury of influx control.
Local authorities were warned by the Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration in 1967 not to provide urban Africans with 'bigger, better, more attractive and more luxurious facilities, because it should be remembered that an urban Bantu residential area is not a homeland but part of a white area'.
Between 1968 and 1978 an embargo on the building of family housing was enforced. There has always been an acute shortage of housing for Africans in urban areas. Families with all the correct documentation and permits must wait many years for the allocation of a house, and meanwhile they will live as lodgers provided they have a permit for this, in the homes of others who must also have a permit to take in lodgers.
One consequence of the housing shortage is overcrowded houses. There were over 21,000 African families waiting for houses in Soweto alone in 1983 and a conservatively estimated national shortage in 1982 of 168,000 family units in urban areas outside the bantustans, according to a government commission in 1982, the Viljoen Commission. These figures do not reflect the real housing requirements as they do not include the thousands of families who are not legally entitled to rent or buy a house and who are unhoused.8
Estimates of the number of persons in the tiny Soweto houses vary, from 5.93 in 1977 by the Bureau of Market Research, to 14 quoted by the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce in 1976; while the Black Sash office has suggested that the number is as high as 29.9
Three or four generations are often crammed into houses designed for a nuclear family unit. The gross overcrowding has changed and distorted the whole pattern of family life in the black community. There are even times, according to Sheena Duncan, when 'the fight to secure shelter leads to complete breakdown in trust and fondness between family members as each goes behind the other's back and the richest takes the house because he can afford to pay the biggest bribe'.10
Another consequence of the deliberately created housing shortage is the growth of squatter townships and the building of 'shacks' or unauthorised accommodation in official townships. Those families who are currently the victims of the nation - wide demolition of self - built homes are the ones who have struggled hardest to maintain the bonds of family and stability. They are now being threatened and often defeated, by the ruthless determination of the authorities. Once the shelter is demolished the family is almost always divided because there is nowhere else they can find space to stay together.11
A family is not automatically re - united when it is allocated a house. If children were away at school at the time the parents applied for a house, their names would not be included on the house permit; others might have been living with relatives in rural areas. Once the parents finally obtain their home, permission to have the children with them is often refused.12
Women in Towns
Even with legal rights to reside in towns, black women live under the strains of great insecurity. Their legal status may be rescinded on a large variety of pretexts. A woman must avoid the misfortune of being left without a husband, whether through desertion, divorce or death. She often loses her home as well as her husband. A divorced woman may be given permission to stay in her home only if she was not the guilty party in the divorce suit, and has been granted custody of the children; if she qualifies in her own right to remain in town; if she can pay the rent; and if her former husband has agreed to vacate the house. If he has remarried immediately, he may choose to remain in the house with his new wife.
African women who are living lawfully in an urban area outside a Bantustan may only obtain work through the municipal or district labour officer, from whom they must obtain a permit. Labour officers can refuse to issue a permit for many reasons, or they may refuse a permit for a specific job that a woman wishes to take and refer her to another somewhere else; or they may require women, with their dependants, to leave the area. A labour officer can also cancel an existing labour contract, a provision that hangs over the head of those African workers (male or female) who may participate in trade union or political activities.
Particularly if she is unemployed, a woman must avoid any activity which would make her fall within the definition of an 'idle Bantu' in Section 29 of the Urban Areas Act. In terms of that law (under challenge in the courts in 1983 and 1984) the definition includes any African woman other than a 'bona fide housewife', between the ages of 15 and 60, and who, even if supported by her parents, is normally unemployed although capable of working (unless she is a student). It also includes women who refuse jobs offered by the labour office, or who are fired from their jobs too frequently. Refusal to accept employment offered by a labour bureau without 'acceptable' reasons, or being dismissed too frequently are also grounds for being declared 'idle'. A person held to be an 'idle Bantu' is ordered to be removed from the urban area, and sent to the bantustans.
A woman must also avoid conduct which will lead an urban authority to hold her presence as 'detrimental to the maintenance of peace and order' and therefore make her liable to removal.
Every African woman is painfully aware of the official attitude repeatedly expressed, that married women, children and older people are 'superfluous appendages', to be removed from the urban area as quickly as possible, even if they are technically qualified under Section 10 (see Appendix).13 Single African girls living with their parents lose the right to stay in an area unless they were born there or the man they are marrying has the right to stay permanently in the area. And they may only live with the man they are marrying provided he has the appropriate residence rights.
A work permit may also be refused to a woman if she is unable to find housing, and the women are under severe difficulties as houses are not usually available for women. Hostels and compound accommodation are for men, with the exception of a few township hostels.
Many unhappily married women suffer, unable to take any action, knowing that if their husbands desert or divorce them, they may lose their right to live with their children as well.
An African woman is even subject to arrest for living with her husband if he stays with her in domestic servant's quarters, or if she cohabits with him in his quarters when he is not qualified to have his family with him.
Hostel Life
Not a great deal of detailed information is available on the subject, but some African women, as well as the men who form the bulk of the hostel - dwellers, are made to live in single - sex hostels. This is the accommodation which the apartheid system imposes on those forced to be migrant workers and on many single people who live in urban areas outside the bantustans.
Women living in hostels are mainly domestic workers or workers in industry, as well as widows, divorcees, orphans or unmarried mothers.
The practice of accommodating migrant workers in single - sex barrack - like quarters goes back to the beginning of large - scale mining in South Africa. From the 1950s there was a great expansion of this practice with the construction of hostels in many townships, including hostels for women.
It was decided in 1962 to establish, nine miles outside Johannesburg, in Alexandra township, the most dramatic prototype of the new life that was being planned.
The scheme to replace all family accommodation with single - sex accommodation for workers involved moving all families out of the area and moving in men and women living alone in the white suburbs of Johannesburg and in servants' quarters in blocks of flats for whites ('locations in the sky'). By 1964 more than half the population of Alexandra had been removed. Eight hostels, each to house 2,500 people were planned. Among the first to be built in 1972 was one to accommodate 2,800 women.14
By that time a hostel for women had also been built in Orlando West in Soweto, a smaller one which in 1980 had 800 residents.15
Life in hostels is harsh, restrictive and oppressive. There are few facilities for leisure; shared rooms for most residents; and in most cases no provisions for children of mothers or husbands of married women to visit. Equally, male hostels have no rooms for wives to stay or children to visit. The exceptions are a few, mainly new, hostels in which improvements in some conditions have been made, while the basic principles of single - sex hostel accommodation have been preserved.16
Women have resisted living in hostels, and in fact the women's hostel in Alexandra had not been filled by 1980. (The scheme to convert the whole of Alexandra to a complex of hostels was itself abandoned in 1979, only partly completed.)17 Resistance came from women not only because of the poor conditions in the hostels, but more fundamentally because of the disruption of personal relations and the fragmentation of family life involved.
Since the children could not stay in the hostels, mothers were unwilling to become hostel dwellers. Some women were so desperate for a roof over their heads together with their children that they would stay illegally in the townships, paying admission of guilt fines whenever raided by the police. Others stayed in houses due to be demolished, moving on again and again when the bulldozers came.18
I lived in a women's hostel where most of the women had children. Many could barely sleep worrying about where their children were staying - with strangers, or old grannies - paying out most of their money so their children could survive. Still they could not see them. This experience turned me around . . . If the government had set out to create a society that would consume itself, it couldn't have done better. It has destroyed our family life, left the homelands fatherless with mothers struggling to help the remains of their family survive. Either the women must go mad or revolt.
(A woman describing her reaction to hostel life - 'The Role of Women in the Struggle for Liberation in Zimbabwe, Namibia & South Africa', Paper presented at UN Conference on Women, Copenhagen, 14 - 30 July 1980)
Many, though, were unable to continue their resistance indefinitely. If they did not qualify under the pass laws for a house, they were faced with the alternative of having to go to a Bantustan or to enter the hostels. Three quarters of so - called 'single' women in the Alexandra hostel had children. Four out of five of the children went to bantustans, and the rest went to live with relatives in the towns or on white - owned farms.19
Occasional reports in the press indicate that the women who live in the hostels continue to resist and protest. In particular, over 350 women in the Alexandra hostel signed a petition in 1980 protesting at the fact that they were not allowed visitors. They also protested that some of them had school - going children living with relatives in the townships who were not allowed to visit their mothers in the hostel rooms.20
The residents have complained, too, of other conditions - for example, inadequate heating and lighting, high rents, and their vulnerability to violence from criminal men.21 The authorities have responded to some of these complaints. It has also been reported that both private and public sector employers plan to improve conditions in hostels and make provision for visits from husbands or wives 'to stay for a few days'. But there are no signs that hostels, or the migrant labour system of which they are a part, are to be abandoned.22
Independence
The enormous gap between the idealised theory of the family and the brutal reality under apartheid has resulted in the emergence of the independent woman. In both town and countryside African women often find themselves heads of households and particularly in urban conditions this has had spreading effects on social relations. Still totally dependent in terms of law and of patriarchal customs, they find themselves in actuality forced into a bitter independence, forced to become the responsible ones, the decision - makers. And the results of this situation have changed their status and will make an important impact on relationships in the future.
A Johannesburg journalist, Percy Qoboza, maintains that the picture painted of the black woman as a depressed, voiceless, subservient person is misleading and often dangerous. He describes the historical background of their militant struggles against political oppression, and says black women are not the subservient objects many people take them to be.
We continue to insult their dignity and motherhood in various ways. Getting them to clean pavements in Soweto is an affront to their dignity . . . throwing them in jail in Hillbrow for not having passes degrades their dignity. Their silent endurance of these insults must not be taken for subservience.23
The truth is that to survive, black women have had to develop a high degree of independence and to exert great strength of character. Sociologists have commented on the emergence of the single, independent, black woman. Speaking on the 'changing status of African women' Professor Monica Wilson of the University of Cape Town said that women's rights were destroyed more by the fact that they were part of a disenfranchised community than that they were women. 'The most pressing disability of African women is the restriction on the rights of movement and residence which prohibits their joining their husbands who are working in the towns.... Why be tied to a man who will be continually absent?24
A black newspaper editor, Mr Tom Moerane, reports on research undertaken by his daughter among African women.
A significant number of young women regarded marriage in an entirely negative manner. They said they did not care about marriage as an institution, nor did they think it was of any particular use to them. Some indicated that they desired to bear children and that this made it necessary to cohabit with a man, but 'the baby is going to be my baby'.25
In both town and country numbers of African women see dubious advantages in marriage and more and more young women show a preference for staying single. 'Girls who are married and have husbands in cities', comments a rural woman, 'are struggling as I do. Many are suffering as I do and yet have husbands.26 Joanne Yawitch says this tendency can be interpreted in many ways, but it does seem clear that the economic rewards of marriage are steadily declining. Furthermore, the fact that there is a gross contradiction in terms of who is supposed to take responsibility and decisions, and who actually does, often makes marriage an unviable option for rural women. Their reaction to the idea of marriage is 'highly ambiguous, contradictory and often aggressive'.27
The overcrowding, crime, poverty and increasing unemployment that are the features of township life impose massive strains on individuals. 'The family functions as a soak pit to absorb expressions of anger that are not allowed elsewhere. Often, men have had a hard day at work, get drunk and take it out on their wives and children. Battery and alcoholism are the most common results of this situation.28 In Soweto 60 per cent of children are illegitimate, and while parents may often marry after they are born, more women are choosing not to marry.
Whatever the complexity of reasons (including, in the urban areas, the tendency for women to be able to enter better - paid work than domestic service, decreasing their economic dependence on men) more and more women are finding marriage a burden to them.
The official census figures, already referred to above, are consistent with such a change. Whereas the proportion of white women who were married increased very slightly in the decade between 1970 and 1980 (from 45.1 per cent to 45.7 per cent) the much lower proportion of African women who were married (only 28.2 per cent in 1970) fell still further to 23.3 per cent in 1980.29
II.2 Children
Children are Illegal
Children, no matter how young, may not live with their mothers if those mothers are resident in one of the hostels, or 'living in' as domestics to a white family, even though domestic servants must live in a room that is actually separated from the main house. To prevent sympathetic employers from breaking this regulation by permitting a small child to live with its mother in domestic service, heavy fines are now imposed on the employers, as well as the penalties that are inflicted on the mother who illegally wishes to keep her baby or small child with her.
Women in Randburg, near Johannesburg, who come from the neighbouring Bantustan of Bophuthatswana to work on contract, must sign an undertaking 'not to introduce' their children into the area.30
Once they reach the age of 16, children may not continue to live with their parents unless they qualify for urban residence in their own right - not because of the rights of a parent or parents. They must go to the bantustans - as the authorities say, 'sent back' - even if they have never been there in their lives, even if they have no relatives nor contact with anyone there. Many children in the towns are not so registered, for a number of reasons. Sometimes the authorities simply refuse to put a child's name on the permit; sometimes mothers are unable to produce a certificate showing the child was born in the area. Many babies are delivered by relatives and neighbours, and registration of African births is not compulsory. Where mothers are illiterate they may be ignorant of the provisions that will ultimately govern their children's lives. An illiterate mother who is given a form to fill in - evidence in years to come - by the local clinic may ignore it. Sometimes the mother is unmarried, and therefore not entitled to have any children on her permit.
The name of every man, woman and child in a house must appear on the permits. When black townships in urban areas are cleared and the residents moved, all who lack the necessary permits, tax receipts or papers are arrested; in many cases the husband has a job and qualifies for urban residence under Section 10, while his wife and children do not. Police raids are carried out day and night to remove the 'unqualified', and often women are arrested when their husbands are at work, leaving even small children totally alone.
When the press published stories of such children during the clearing of Alexandra Township, outside Johannesburg in 1972, Mr Coen Kotze, manager of the local board, stated: 'They are given ample time to make up their minds. We are giving them the choice: they must send their children back to the homelands themselves . . . this is the policy and we will enforce it.' The children, he said, who were being ordered out were illegal; and if the mothers were working, they were migrant workers recruited from the homelands on a single basis. 'The law states that they are illegally in the area, so they have to go. It's as simple as that.31
African mothers living with their 'illegal' children are in constant dread of being found out, and to make matters worse, only those children can be registered for school who are listed on a residential permit which is impossible to procure if the mother is living in the urban area illegally.32
From this abrogation of family life flow results that are deeply destructive, but difficult to assess in any statistical sense. In the early 1970s it was stated that in Britain one child in every 14 was illegitimate. Sheena Duncan states that some sixty per cent of urban African children are illegitimate. In addition, many children are forced by poverty in the rural areas to seek existence in the alleys and doorways of the country's cities.33
II.3 Social Security
Under apartheid social security for black people, in particular Africans, is provided at such a negligible level that it makes little, if any, impact on the conditions of life. Only a small number of people fall within the requirements that make them eligible for such benefits.
This situation is an aspect of the creation of the migrant labour system. By preserving the subsistence sector from which migrant male labour was extracted in growing numbers and in which women were to predominate, labour could be acquired at a very low cost. Costs normally contributed to by the employers were met, if at all, by that sector. 'In real terms, women provide what otherwise would be called unemployment insurance, pension funds, education and health and sickness benefits, etc.34
However, in reality the subsistence sector has been destroyed by apartheid. The lack of land, the mushrooming of populations through resettlement and the general conditions of extreme poverty make it impossible for families in the bantustans to produce what they need in the absence of such services.
The majority of black women workers are excluded from unemployment insurance by the limitations on those who may qualify. Domestic and agricultural workers - the majority of women workers - are excluded. So are seasonal workers and those whose earnings are calculated on a commission basis. The benefits paid amount to 45 per cent of the weekly earnings, for a maximum of 26 weeks per year.35
All pension applications are processed in Pretoria and take between six months and a year to finalise. African widows do not qualify for maintenance grants in rural areas, although such grants are available to widows of other groups.36
The maximum monthly pension for Africans in 1984 was R65 in comparison to R166 for whites. An African person's monthly income must not exceed R27 a month if he or she is to qualify for old - age pensions, whereas for whites the income can be R84. Pensioners living in urban areas outside bantustans who wish to qualify must prove they are living there lawfully. They must also provide documentary proof of their age, which many old people are not able to do. Even when pensions have been approved they may be arbitrarily withdrawn if the district administrator decides proof is insufficient.37
Because of the principle that the aged must return to the Bantustan areas, facilities for their care scarcely exist outside the bantustans.
The situation for women in the bantustans is particularly bad; those who are entitled to pensions, and rely on the small amounts as their only means to survive, have little means of obtaining them if they do not arrive. Many are illiterate. To get someone to write a letter for them, to be able to afford the postage, or the fare to the local office, is often beyond their means.
A very low proportion of Africans, compared with other groups, receive pensions in South Africa, yet their dependence for survival on pensions is the highest of all groups. In 1977 257,663 Africans received pensions at the rate of R20.50 per month; 173,448 whites, at the rate of R79 per month; 120,611 Coloureds and 26,963 Indians, at the rate of R42.50 a month. Most pensions were for old age or disability. Child maintenance grants were not given in the bantustans.38
In many ways women constitute, as one writer recently put it, 'society's shock - absorbers', in the sense that in the absence of adequate social services the harsher and more restrictive conditions imposed by mass unemployment and by inflation fall most heavily on the shoulders of those who are responsible for administering the family's needs - the women.39
Their domestic work increases, they must spend more time repairing old clothes and 'making do', they have to find ways of preparing cheaper meals, and in the urban areas many more are economically active than in the past.
II.4 Control of Fertility - or Populations
Women need to be able to control their own fertility. But when birth control becomes population control as it has in South Africa, it acquires a new significance. The total control over population that apartheid seeks to obtain in all fields extends to this area of social relations.
Contraception
The Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), the largest church in South Africa, is the theological and ideological power base of the regime. In 1960, a DRC spokesman on moral questions stated:
The Church is generally opposed to birth control among whites on Christian and ethical grounds, and I suppose the same would be applied to Africans. This aspect has never been discussed by the church. But we do not consider the argument that the population may become too large is valid. Science and technology will cope.40
However, some years later when the decision was taken to distribute the contraceptive pill freely, DRC theologians had already adjusted to a new position. 'It is the duty of whites to multiply on the earth . . . and thus keep the increase of the white population high.' They would like to ban the pill for all white women. The pill leads to promiscuity and prostitution. However, 'the bantu . . . could be given the pill with an easy mind . . . the morals of the blacks have already sunk so low that promiscuity could not be any greater'.41
Responding to a claim that the country's crippling drought could increase the infant mortality rate, the Health Minister, Dr Nak van der Merwe, blamed 'uncontrolled breeding' for the high death rate among malnourished children, in a statement in April 1983 that called for the reduction of the black birth rate to two children per woman by the year 2020.42
Dr J de Beer, Director - General of the South African Department of Health and Social Welfare, expressing concern about the continuing increase in the black population despite the high infant mortality rate in some areas, stated, 'It is not easy to get the birth rate down other than by penalising people and having sterilisation and abortion both on demand and by command.'43
By January 1982, the Reformed Church was reported to be planning 'an information campaign to counter a declining number of white births in South Africa'.44
The white attitude to birth control is thus conditioned by racialist beliefs, and this found expression in a symposium on the 'population explosion' in South Africa organised by the Northern Transvaal Branch of the South African Medical Association in 1971. Dr Chris Troskie, a past president of the Medical Association, set forth a thesis that there were two basic groups among mankind, the 'haves' and the 'have - nots', the former group being intelligent, with a sense of responsibility and civilisation; the latter lacking responsibility and 'breeding recklessly'. The genetic composition of the population, determined at birth, had to be improved by eliminating inferior genetic material, and he argued for the sterilisation of defective people. Dr N J van Rensburg, deputy Superintendent of the H F Verwoerd Hospital in Pretoria, likened population growth to cancer which, if curative measures are not taken, spreads through the whole body and destroys it.45
The Family Planning Association (FPA) was formed in 1932 to provide voluntary birth control services; it joined the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1953 and for a number of years battled against resistance to contraception at all levels of society. Objections on religious, moral and medical grounds existed among white and black people. Social factors influenced African men, such as loss of social status in the community and loss of bride - price. Women feared the anger of their men if their use of contraceptives was discovered, and many women were unable to obtain information about contraception because clinics would insist on the man's consent.
In 1966 the FPA received its first government grant, and in the six years to 1972, it transferred its 229 clinics to local authorities as soon as they were established. The FPA provides lectures, films, slide shows, comics and pamphlets to spread its message. Whites are drawn in to help 'educate' blacks with whom they have contact. An advertisement in a woman's magazine, Fair Lady, shows a white woman in her kitchen with the black domestic servant in the background. 'Family planning is my baby too!' the white woman says, and goes on to explain that as an employer her duties don't stop at paying her domestic a good salary, or providing her with food, clothing and a roof over her head. They go beyond to a 'sincere interest in her family life'. So she discusses family planning with her maid, and takes her to the nearest clinic, and thus has a more efficient and devoted domestic.46
Health Department propaganda shows happy, prosperous families with only two or three children, side by side with poverty - stricken families with many children. These images are used on posters, in comics and advertisements, with the clear implication that success, good jobs, smart clothes and money are the inevitable consequence of limiting family size. The General Secretary of the white - controlled trade union congress, Arthur Grobbelaar, sees birth control as a solution to unemployment: 'The long - term solution is birth control.'47
The Health Department pays for the training of nurses as well as the drugs used by the FPA clinics - but it will not support the cytology laboratory of the FPA in Johannesburg.48 The rate of cervical cancer in South Africa was stated in 1983 to be 35.6 per 1,000 women screened (the year for which these figures applied was not stated).49
Of the entire Health Department, the only division that printed its pamphlets in every South African language was 'Family Planning'. A study undertaken by Barbara Klugman in a rural area in 1980, the Bochum area of the Lebowa Bantustan, revealed that three out of five children in the area had pellagra, arising from malnutrition, and that there had been a recent epidemic of typhoid - from lack of adequate sanitation. Yet there were no campaigns on these issues which include pertinent literature in every language.50
Only an estimated two per cent of expenditure on health care service was devoted to preventative medicine.51
In theory contraception is free and available to all women; but availability is dependent on access to clinics, and despite the fact that there are 3,000 such clinics, women in remote rural areas are less likely to have such access, or the means to travel to the nearest clinic.
South Africa was one of the testing grounds for injectible contraceptives, like the controversial Depo Provera which has been banned in several countries, such as neighbouring Zimbabwe, and since 1978 the USA because of evidence that it has harmful side effects and may cause cancer. The manufacturers, Upjon Pharmaceutical Co., continue to market the drug in 76 countries. Dr Nthato Motlana, a Soweto physician, has stated: 'The developed world is dumping Depo Provera on the Third World, and government - funded agencies are administering the drug to young black women without their consent.'52 Its convenience over other forms of contraception in ill - educated and rural populations is high. It is injected once every three or six months and is irreversible - nothing can be done until the drug ceases to be active. It is cheap and easy to administer. But without doubt the side effects have not been adequately studied, nor its possible effects on the foetus or the breast - fed baby. D - P is used throughout South Africa and the routine of the mobile clinic in rural areas is governed by the period at which Depo Provera injections are given - namely, a visit to each farm, once every three to six months.53
Experience both in South Africa and in other countries shows that women do want to know about birth control, and readily accept it when women's organisations or local midwives give the instructions. There is no simplistic solution to the problem of birth control; medical, religious, moral and cultural factors and standards of living all play a part in forming attitudes. But the issues could only be resolved in a society that would give women status, education and health facilities.
Abortion
Abortion is virtually illegal in South Africa, although the Abortion and Sterilisation Act of 1975 legalised abortion in certain very closely controlled situations. These are: if there is a threat to the permanent mental or physical health of the mother or child; if pregnancy is a result of rape (see below) or incest; or if the mother is an imbecile.54 Approval must be obtained from at least three doctors, one of whom must be a state employed psychiatrist where the mental health clinic is involved. As there are only 27 state - employed psychiatrists in the country, this makes access difficult for many.
Assessing the effect of this law for the twelve months following its introduction, the president of an abortion reform group told a conference that the Act had failed; during this period, only 570 medical abortions had been performed, most of them on white women: amongst the 570 patients there were 402 White, 56 Coloured, 8 Asian and 21 African. She put the number of backstreet abortions 'conservatively' at 100,000, a figure also given more recently by a professor of law.55
Information about illegal abortions is difficult to obtain, but there are some indications. Approximately 25 per cent of all bed space in gynaecological wards in South Africa is occupied by women suffering complications following back - street or self - induced abortions, and it has been estimated that as many as 70 per cent of the deaths in gynaecological wards in 1976 were due to incomplete abortions.56 The Centre for Applied Social Sciences in Natal estimated that in 1970 alone approximately 141,800 black women and 17,800 white women resorted to abortion.57 Baragwanath Hospital (near Soweto, Johannesburg) runs two special wards at weekends to treat incomplete abortions. The Groote Schuur Hospital in the Cape was forced to support a special septic abortion unit which had the highest bed occupancy and highest patient turnover of any ward in the hospital.58 The King Edward VII Hospital in Natal treated over 4,000 septic abortion cases in 1972.59 According to one newspaper report in 1981 hundreds of South African women were going to an 'abortion factory' across the border in Lesotho, where the superintendent of the Government Hospital at Teyateyaneng, a doctor from South Korea, performed abortions for R400.60
II.5 Rape
It is extremely difficult to obtain accurate figures of the incidence of rape. By far the largest number of rapes take place against black women in the violent and degraded conditions in the urban townships where the police are more concerned with the suppression of resistance and the enforcement of apartheid than with crime prevention. Many cases go unreported and those cases that are reported may not be dealt with seriously by the police.
The figures given here come from different sources. A Medical Association of South Africa report states that a woman is raped every three minutes in South Africa - 300,000 annually.61 Official (police) statistics of reported rape cases have been given as 14,600 per annum - 40 a day.62 Another source reports 14,953 reported rape cases in 1977, of which 14,242 were of 'non - whites by non - whites', making up 95 per cent of the total.63 In 1980, 15,000 rapes were recorded by the Department of Law and Order,64 and the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders states that 400 women are raped every single day, a horrific figure, they say, of which only some 20 cases are actually reported. Jacklyn Cock has put the daily figure at almost double that: 777 women raped every day in South Africa.62
Mr Roland Graser, director of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders, stated that the rape figure for 1976 should stand at 292,000 per annum, with an estimated 2,920 rape associated abortions.66 As the official statistics for that year showed only 539 legal abortions for all causes, of which 399 were performed on white women, it would appear that women are either refused the right to legal abortion, or too intimidated by the intricacies of the requirements to ask for legal terminations; or else remain in ignorance of the fact that they have a right to termination.67
In the United States it is estimated that only one in ten rape cases are reported; however, in South Africa the estimate of reported cases is only one in twenty; and rape has the lowest conviction rate of any crime of violence in the country.68 In the Cape Flats - an area of shanties and slum housing - it was estimated that the figures could be as high as one in thirty.69
A 'Rape Crisis' report from Cape Town reported 41,341 men prosecuted for rape in a four - year period. Of these, 22,408 were convicted, and 19 were sentenced to death. The youngest rape victim was three, the eldest seventy. There were 41 cases of children under seventeen.70
The rape of a white woman by a black man is a serious crime that can result in sentence of death. Rape of black women is treated as a minor offence. In reported cases police themselves are frequently involved in the rape of black women, often of those who have been arrested on some pretext. As in other countries, humiliating police interrogation, unsympathetic medical examinations and harassment by lawyers discourage women from proceeding with charges of rape. To this must be added the context of blatant racial prejudice, often expressed openly in obscene language by the police towards black women.
Representatives of rape clinics meeting in Johannesburg in 1982 made suggestions of law changes in the case of rape, the definition of which was far too narrow. It was said that the crime of 'rape' should be supplanted by a broader category of 'sexual assaults', which would help to remove the stigma of rape, making victims feel freer to report incidents. One of the main reasons that many rape cases were not reported, stated a representative, was because the crime of rape carried the maximum penalty of the death sentence. 'In some cases the rapist is known to the victim and she is reluctant to report the case, realising the person could be hanged.71
II.6 Health and Poverty in the Countryside
Infant mortality rates (IMR) - that is, the number of babies who die before their first birthday, per 1,000 live births - are usually accepted as a reliable guide to the general state of health and health services in a country.72 The problem in South Africa is that apartheid does not collect national figures for Africans; the figures shown in Table V are based on surveys in different parts of the country. By comparison the numbers of deaths per 1,000 live births in Britain in 1980 was 12 and the number for Canada in 1981 was 9.6.73
The white population of South Africa enjoys an extremely high standard of health care. There are no malnutritional diseases to be found among them, there is a more than adequate supply of doctors, and hospitals have a high reputation for their treatment of their white patients. The infant mortality rate for whites is among the lowest compared with the highly developed countries of the western world.
African women in rural areas have heavy and often lonely responsibilities. The lives of most of them are defined by poverty, unemployment and landlessness and this is reflected in the diseases suffered by them and by those they are responsible for.
The women are responsible for the care and feeding of the children when so many families are without fathers. Often there are no hospitals or clinics available in distant country areas.
Too often in conditions of extreme poverty, women starve themselves rather than their families. Tension - related illnesses and mental breakdowns are the outcome, and daily tasks of a very hard physical nature (fetching water from long distances, for example) are often carried out by very young or very old women.
Medical facilities,74 when available, are not free; the R3 needed for hospital attention or the R1 for clinics may mean that the women postpone attending as long as possible. Long distances have to be travelled to seek medical assistance. Maternity care is often totally absent, and delivery and ante - natal care are costly and beyond the reach of many.
Health workers explaining the need for balanced diets, regular examination and sanitation may only increase the guilt that the women feel for the illnesses of their families.75
The problem in assessing health conditions of the black population is the lack of statistics, and in particular the fact that the little information that is available is not broken down by sex. But there is enough information to indicate some of the problems for women in rural areas, where they rear children and care for the aged under difficult circumstances.
After I started to have children I began to feel the hardship. For example, if a child fell sick it would take time for me to write to my husband and for him to reply and all the time the child would be getting worse. By the time I received money from my husband to pay the doctor the doctor would be angry that I had not brought the child before . . . Perhaps I would be able to purchase only one bottle of medicine with the money I was sent and then not be able to take the child back to the doctor. This happened with my first child but when this happened to my second child my husband advised me to come to Cape Town.
(A woman who went 'illegally' to Cape Town in defiance of the pass laws - 'The Effects of Apartheid on the Status of Women', Paper presented at UN Conference on Women, Copenhagen 14 - 30 July 1980)
Nutritional diseases such as kwashiorkor are no longer notifiable, and so it is not easy to estimate their scale. But among the African population malnutrition has reached epidemic proportions, a fact that has been recorded in numerous studies.76
In 1966, the last year in which kwashiorkor was a notifiable disease, official figures mentioned 11,000 cases.77 In 1980, it was found that in one area alone in Pietermaritzburg, 40 children died every day from kwashiorkor or marasmus.78
The extent of malnutrition was underlined in a paper to a United Nations Conference in 1980:
Malnutrition has assumed crisis proportions in South Africa and, with the price of essential daily food such as bread and milk rising, there is every possibility that hunger will rage through the deprived black community of South Africa like a dreadful scourge. Indeed the prospect for blacks is grim and forbidding . . . 75 children (African and Coloured) are dying every day from lack of proper and adequate food.79
More recently, in 1983, Professor Allie Moosa estimated that 30,000 children die of malnutrition every year, and that between two and three per cent of the eight million black children in South Africa are suffering from malnutrition. Forty - five per cent of all children admitted to the King Edward VII Hospital in Durban suffered from malnutrition, and about one in five dies, Professor Moosa stated.80 Reacting to this report the Minister of Health, Dr Nak van der Merwe, said that responsibility for a high toll of dying children should be shared by those who breed uncontrollably. He said the problem of three of four children dying every hour was intimately tied to the socio - political situation.81
The South African Institute of Race Relations stated in 1983 that the government's population removal programme has helped to destroy subsistence agriculture and has contributed to the 'staggeringly high' black infant mortality rates which were a direct result of apartheid policies.82
Dr Jack Penn, one of the world's leading plastic surgeons, stated in 1981:
.... the battle against malnutrition is becoming climacteric. For example, children who are burned and require skin grafts, must have their surgical treatments delayed until their nutrition has been brought to a suitable standard. In cases where malnutrition has been a feature since birth this may be almost impossible and the risk of infection and slow healing is always a problem. Moreover, even though the child may make good progress while well cared for and fed, on returning to the home environment, the lack of adequate nutrition may cause a breakdown of his wound.83
The trauma and agony of coping with these children, of being unable to provide them with sufficient food, of watching their deteriorating conditions, of digging graves and putting up small wooden markers over the place of burial in stony land - all this falls on the shoulders of the women.
Patterns of Disease
One of the world's six most formidable diseases, cholera, usually gets a hold in populations living without a purified water supply. The source is most likely to be water contaminated by human excrement. In the past few years cholera, after being absent for many years from South Africa, has appeared in resettlement areas; the first outbreak occurred in the Kangwane Bantustan in the eastern Transvaal in 1980. Six weeks after the first case was confirmed, 28 people had died from cholera, and a few months later it was estimated that well over half the population of 80,000 had been infected. By the end of the year a second cholera epidemic was spreading in the 'homelands' - this time in Bophuthatswana and Kwazulu.
As well as cholera, typhoid epidemics occur with increasing frequency in resettlement areas. The dumping - grounds have become death camps in which not only cholera and typhoid, but other diseases - gastro - enteritis, poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, malaria, as well as diseases of starvation, such as kwashiorkor, marasmus and pellagra - flourish. These diseases are usually associated with severe poverty in countries that lack developed resources and basic amenities. Yet they are found in rich, prosperous South Africa.
In the same year,1981, it was estimated that 50,000 children would die of malnutrition in the rural areas with another 100,000 children's lives at risk.84 Malnutrition takes many different forms: kwashiorkor is a disease resulting from protein deficiency; marasmus and pellagra are prevalent, and less commonly, rickets, scurvy, beri - beri and anaemia.
In 1978 there were 42,785 new cases of tuberculosis reported in South Africa. Communicable diseases play havoc with malnourished young bodies, so that a high rate of tuberculosis, typhoid, tetanus, measles, polio, diptheria, hepatitis and pertussis are common. Measles in South Africa kills more children in three days than it does in the United States in one year. A press report in 1983 noted 100 deaths in three months of black children in Port Elizabeth, from measles. Soweto has the highest recorded incidence of rheumatic fever in the world.
During the first ten years of the existence of Limehill, a resettlement area in Natal,11 per cent of the children who were aged five years or less at the time of removal were dead. It was described by the people living there as 'a land of sorrows'.
It is not only a question of physical health.
It is unthinkable that racism would be without implications for mental health. Healthy mental functioning and personality development depend on the presence and continuity of such essential experiences as the individual's sense of security and worth, freedom for personal growth and identification with a community of equals. Racism undercuts at the roots of healthy mental life by depriving its victims of these experiences and by conditioning them into accepting the myth that the cause of their inferior status in society lies irrevocably within themselves.85
Migrant labour is the cause of much of the mental illness experienced by Africans, women in particular. This is clearly stated in a study by a group of black doctors:
There can be no doubt that the migrant labour system is damaging to the mental well - being of black people. This enforced separation of migrant labourers in city hostels from their families in the homelands has destroyed the fabric of traditional African society and robbed Africans of the fundamental human right of working and living within the security and comfort of their own families.
Mothers and children in the ethnic 'homelands' are denied the fulfilment provided by the presence of the husband and father. The emotional and intellectual deprivation of this enforced and totally inhumane separation must result in incalculable harm to the family unit.86
Breakdowns in health are not confined to physical symptoms, according to research on resettlement problems in Kwazulu.87 The resettlement experience is extremely traumatic, particularly because the people being resettled are generally uneducated and illiterate. Whatever degree of mastery they may have over their environment is usually acquired as a result of experience and tradition which often cease to apply in a new area. The process of removal precipitates extreme mental stress. 'Extreme depression, sometimes even complete mental breakdown and a high incidence of stress - related illness are all common features of the health profile in resettlement areas.88
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II.1 Marriage and the Family