Child Support in South Africa: A Feminist History of the Politics of Distribution

In South Africa, successive governments extending back to the colonial era have ritually invoked the notion of a crisis in the family to explain a host of social ills and to legitimate interventions into the intimate domains of domestic life. Notably for South Africa, the object—the family—was a cross-racial concern, though the imagined ideals and criticisms took different forms. While critiques of family functioning changed over time across shifts in political culture, debate persisted over what persons or institutions were obligated to support a child and by what means. This paper brings the families of poor urban whites and urban Africans together into the same analytic frame to track their engagement with, circumvention of, and exclusion from, shifting child welfare regimes between 1960-2014. By focusing on changes in one inner-city neighborhood, I offer a unique glimpse into modes of family life and constructions of motherhood in spaces quite different from the rural areas, townships, and suburbs commonly addressed by both scholars and activists. In contrast to the other panelists who deftly show how the domestic domain was mobilized in political arenas, this essay attends to the micro-politics of domestic life under poverty as the target of social welfare intervention—and the political recognition it conferred—changed over time. In doing so, this essay provides a feminist history to the new politics of distribution in a country that has become an exemplar for a re-envisioning of social welfare.