Aging and the Life Course in Steinkopf, a Rural South African Community

grantor: University of TorontoThe focus of this dissertation is on how the economic transformation from a semi-subsistence agricultural to semi-subsistence wage-based economy affected the shape of the life course, and meanings associated with age and aging. While an implicit focus is on the cohort of people born between 1900-1930 the study is necessarily concerned with all age segments of the community. Aging and the construction of the life course are considered here as dialectical processes, whereby people are definitely shaped by their socio-economic circumstances, and yet at the same time resist, negotiate and re-shape these conditions. The study is based on research in 1994-96 in Steinkopf, one of seven communities, legally categorised as "rural coloured areas" (formerly known as reserves) located in the semi-desert region of Namaqualand, in South Africa's Northern Cape Province. Steinkopf underwent enormous economic and social changes over the past century. In this context, the most significant of these changes is the economic transformation which intensified in the decades before and after the turn of the century. Regional mineral discovery, imposed taxes, the issuing of trading licenses and the increasing need for commodities and cash combined to make participation in wage work increasingly necessary to sustain household economies. By the late 1960s, social reproduction no longer occurred unproblematically in the reserve. Today the economic base is one where people are dependent on the boom and busts of the world mineral market, state pensions, and various corporate handouts. These economic effects, and their social manifestations in terms of aging and the life course, were, however, not historically recognised by the state. This meant that very little social welfare funding was provided to "non-white" people. The assumption was that social reproduction occurred in the non-white reserves and that therefore, such people did not require state funding in old age. But in Steinkopf, as throughout the country, voluntary organisations developed to cope with the increasing numbers of poor, homeless and destitute workers who were unable to provide for their retirements. They were, in short, unable to fall back on traditions the state believed them to have. These assumptions, as is pointed in this thesis, do not reflect the actual economic experiences of workers across their life course or in old age. The old age home represents a local solution to economic and social problems, and while not a traditional social structure, it is nonetheless an effective, and therefore a positive, development.Ph.D