Stacey (1983) offers the hypothesis that modernization under the auspices of revolutionary socialism may have been less destructive of pre-modern family ties than that under capitalist modernizing processes. As an adjunct to modernization elsewhere—though not itself warranting the label of ‘modern’—the slave system was particularly destructive in rupturing pre-existing marital, family and household forms. Procreation in some cases was reduced to the production of human commodities for sale, with mothering becoming an often temporary exercise and fathering regarded as expendable. Marriage, kinship and family forms were reconstructed from within this legacy, not just of disintegration but of calculated obliteration of the integrity of former traditions.
The role of the colonial state as a modernizing force—or the overseer of economic change—also imparted a destructive impact on pre-modern family forms, if perhaps in general less extreme than under regimes of slavery. While in some cases upholding customary law and practice, not least in areas bearing on the family, colonial administrations also invariably imported civil codes from the metropolis, which were in turn frequently supported by the religious ideologies promulgated by missionaries. But their sponsorship or tolerance of particular forms of economic practice—including forced labour and long-distance migrant labour—also had implications for family structures. By removing young adult males from the hinterland, while simultaneously concentrating purchasing power within the new monetary economy in their hands, systems of migrant labour had the capacity both to undermine the authority structures on which the rural extended family were based and compromise the sustainability of any residual nuclear households.
In many cases, a clear preference for the nuclear, monogamous family may have been expressed through the imposition of imported legislation and the gender ideologies adhered to by colonial administrators. Yet the mixture of contradictory forces impinging on families was often played out very much behind the backs of the colonists. There was seldom a deliberate and calculated effort to undermine the ‘traditional’ family in colonial situations of a degree paralleling that under slavery or indeed under socialist regimes; nor, as Stacey (1983) claims to have been the case in China, was a stable family form typically put in its place. And while old forms were certainly undermined—sometimes in dramatic ways—the articulation between old and imported forms registered some elements of continuity.
Themes of dissolution, conservation, and reconstruction of family forms applied differently among different groups, depending on the manner in which their particular economic experience of colonialism interacted with previously existing cultural and economic forms. But the prevalence of female-headed households, particularly in rural areas, is a dominant feature across many formerly colonized countries. Estimates of the proportion of rural households headed by women range as high as 60 per cent in Mozambique, with figures of 55 per cent for Ethiopia and the Maldives and 50 per cent in the Congo and Angola (Jazairy et al. 1992:273, 406-7).12
The role of the state in enforcing the fracturing of families that such figures reveal was particularly acute in South Africa, where the regulation of movement by pass laws and the creation of homelands, disproportionately populated by the young, the old and females of all ages, were crucial elements of the apartheid strategy. But if women were frequently ‘left behind’ by their migrant menfolk, they did not merely ‘wait’ passively (Berger 1992). Many responded to their situation by ensuring economic self-sufficiency for themselves and their children, through their own migration to towns, where they sometimes entered into informal unions, or by obtaining work in the factories that became established in the ‘homelands’. For Berger the situation was one of families not simply breaking down but being refashioned in accord with circumstances, with the result bearing some parallels to patterns of kinship and family formation in the Caribbean:
[F]amily relationships were being reconstructed in new ways that
stressed the connection among women, children, and other
female kin. This reorganisation of family life occurred because so
many women became actual or de facto household heads at an early stage of their lives.
(Berger 1992:244-5)
In commenting on this pattern of ‘woman-centred households’, Preston-Whyte (1993:66-7) suggests that for many a fundamental break has occurred between institutions of childbirth and marriage. While marriage is not necessarily shunned, life without marriage constitutes an alternative route through life, albeit one in which children continue to feature prominently.
In this case, as with colonial and post-colonial states more generally, a mixture of patterns is evident, with different trajectories of change operating simultaneously. If the extended family is in some cases being undermined, so too is the nuclear family—existing in truncated form and sustained by often overburdened de facto female heads. Moreover, it may be the extended family that is experiencing the greatest rate of increase in recent years, as attempts are made to survive amid shortages of housing, employment and income in the context of structural adjustment. At the least, as Lauras-Lecoh (1990:489) observes in her overview of family trends in Africa, enlarged families, ‘midway between the extended family of blood relations and small family units’, are holding their ground. And while the prevalence of female-headed households and of lone motherhood is sometimes taken as a measure of deprivation, it may also be an expression—at least in some cases—of the crafting of survival strategies based on reciprocity and assistance among female kin.