The state of families in South Africa

The aim in this chapter is to assess the state of the family in South Africa, a task motivated by the watershed democratic transition in 1994. Given the complexity and the multi-dimensional nature of families, four crucial aspects of family life were selected for examination based on secondary analysis of the 1996 population census data and other anecdotal sources. The features of family life examined were the residential dimension of the family or household structure and pattern of marriage, childbearing and divorce. To accomplish the aim, the study was put into an historical context by critically examining the nature of family scholarship in the country, especially during the apartheid and post-apartheid eras, to five a sense of how the perceived state of the family has been affected by the every nature of this scholarship.