The illegitimate and the illegal in a South African city: the effects of apartheid on births out of wedlock.

Expectations are running high in South Africa that, with the end of apartheid, the way is now open for a new society to emerge in which, inter alia, current serious dislocations in family life will disappear. One consequence of these dislocations is an extremely high illegitimacy rate, resulting in a very large proportion of the nation's children growing up in female-headed households with little financial support and, even now, some stigma. Detailed examination of illegitimacy patterns over the past half-century demonstrates that family behaviours among all groups in South Africa have been singularly vulnerable to legal regulation, producing very different family patterns at different times in different sections of the population. Whether the removal of descriminatory legislation will have the desired effect must therefore be considered in the light of the likely persistence or otherwise of the changes brought about, and of what earlier patterns preceded them. The most extreme attempts at social engineering have been made on those groups other than White, and it is on those that we concentrate in this paper.

Cape Town and Its People

Our data come from a larger research project(1) and relate to Cape Town, today one of the three largest cities in South Africa and its legislative capital. To understand the composition of the population, a swift overview of the city's history is necessary.

Cape Town originated from a decision of the Dutch East India Company to create a settlement at the tip of Africa to service its ships en route for the East Indies. The Dutch settlers, who arrived in 1652, found the indigenous hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, the Khoisan, were willing to trade in cattle but, in the early period at least, were not generally ready to be employed as labourers. Initially all colonists were employees (or the families of employees) of the Dutch East India Company, but from 1655 some ex-officials were granted permission to remain at the Cape to farm. Slaves - many Muslim - were therefore imported from the East Indies and Madagascar, and a few from Africa. Gradually the colonial population increased. By 1713 it numbered 3,679 (1,585 settlers - not counting company employees - and 1,794 slaves); by that date the slave population therefore exceeded that of the colonists. The Khoisan were not included in these figures, but the figures do include the class of Free Blacks that developed as slaves were freed, opponents to the Dutch in the Indies were exiled to the Cape, and the intermixture of the peoples at the Cape increased.

From 1795 the Cape came under British control, apart from a brief period of rule by the Batavian Republic from 1803-1806. As a crucial staging post for the defence of the sea route to India, it received increasingly heavy traffic. The ending of the oceanic slave trade in 1807 resulted in further admixtures to the population, as many slaves, mostly from Mozambique and Madagascar, were brought to the port from seized ships and set free as apprentices there. In 1834 the British emancipated the slaves at the Cape, although all were immediately compulsorily indentured to their masters until 1838 and only then were free to move elsewhere. During the course of British rule over the following century, Indian and Chinese indentured labour was imported into South Africa, and although the bulk of both groups was located elsewhere in the country, a small community of mainly Muslim Indians developed in Cape Town as a result of this importation, adding to the already very varied population. In addition, by 1891 there was a small population of Africans from the interior living in Cape Town, which by 1900 numbered some 10,000 living in and around the city.(2) However, when a plague epidemic broke out in 1901, panic about slum living conditions led to almost all those living within the municipal limits being moved to accommodation at Ndabeni beyond the boundaries of the city, and therefore their disappearance from Cape Town's statistics until 1925, when Ndabeni's reincorporation within expanding city limits resulted in their statistical reappearance.

In 1910 the various colonies in what is today South Africa were unified into the Union of South Africa, which had Dominion status as part of the British Empire. However, in the 1948 national elections the National Party, consisting mainly of descendants of the Dutch settlers, came to power on the basis of its policy of apartheid, which advocated separation of population groups based on race, under the domination of those classified as "White." This resulted over the next two decades in the disruption of long-established communities and the mass removals of those not classified as "White" from urban areas throughout the country to newly-created townships round the outskirts of the cities or, in the case of Africans, to rural areas. From 1955 till 1985 a policy was in force throughout the Western Cape to protect labour-seekers who were classified as "Coloured," rather than "Native" - later termed "Bantu," then "Plural," then "Black" (that is, African). With Africans' right of residence in urban areas tied to employment, their access to Cape Town was further curtailed. But by the mid-1980s enforcement of apartheid was increasingly proving impossible, and finally in February 1990 the National Party publicly conceded that its policy could no longer be implemented. Thereafter the pace of reform, which had already begun, greatly increased, until multi-racial national elections took place in April 1994, ending 46 years of National Party rule. This paper concentrates on the effects of the apartheid years on illegitimacy among Cape Town's very varied population.

Illegitimacy in Cape Town on the Eve of Apartheid

The first statistics on illegitimacy had been compiled in 1896, two years after the office of the Medical Officer of Health was established in Cape Town, when birth and death registration was made compulsory. Unfortunately for historical work, these figures were broken down only into the categories "European" and "Coloured," and Africans were included in the category "Coloured" (sometimes listed as "Mixed and other," "Other than European," or "Non-European"). As Africans in Cape Town and African townships were included or excluded from these statistics at different times, the figures are not a reliable guide to trends in either the African or Coloured community for much of the period from 1896 until 1955, after which separate statistics were provided for each category.(3) However, population estimates for the different racial categories in Cape Town were provided throughout the period. From 1937-39, for instance, the number of Africans included in the Medical Officer of Health's statistics ranged from 8,958 to 9,800, amounting to between 6.3 and 6.5 per cent of the city's Non-European population. The illegitimacy ratios for the Non-European category over these three years were 21.91, 21.11, and 22.35, which can be assumed to be almost entirely for the Coloured population. While this was high in comparison with figures for the White population in the same period (4.72, 5.47, and 5.02), it was a notable decrease from close on 100 per cent of Coloured births a century earlier as slavery ended.

From this it may be postulated that there were increasing reasons for people to go to the expense and trouble of contracting marriages recognized by the law.(4) Certainly for some fortunates who had prospered considerably, increasing wealth would have raised the issue of legitimate inheritance. But for the majority, the 1920s and 1930s was a period of increasing poverty.(5) However, as the generation of ex-slaves was replaced almost entirely with freeborn adults, an ever-increasing number became members of the mosques or many and varied churches being established, and a variety of sources all indicate that a new ethic of respectability was making itself felt in Cape Town's increasingly differentiated Coloured community.(6) Those regarded as Coloured now ranged from the destitute to "the emergent coloured petty bourgeoisie, which consisted largely of skilled artisans, small retail traders, clerks, teachers, and a handful of professionals."(7) The result was a developing divergence of class attitudes which may be seen in the journal of the Teachers' League of South Africa, a prominent Coloured organization whose members felt strongly about the need for increased respectability throughout the community.

Besides their altruistic motives, there was also an important element of self-interest in the League's incentive to raise the social condition of working class coloureds. While they regarded the "advanced" sectors of the coloured community to have attained the requisite level of "civilization" to merit their acceptance into the dominant society, it was clear to them that the majority of coloureds had not. The League recognized that, in the minds of whites, colouredness was intimately associated with a number of negative, racially attributed characteristics. It was extremely conscious of the unfavourable image that whites had of coloureds - the perception that coloureds were "a backward, lazy, debased people for whom it was better to build strong jails" ... In addition, rowdiness, drunkenness, criminality and the whole gamut of "immoral" and delinquent behaviour were sufficiently common amongst the coloured working classes to embarrass "respectable" coloureds acutely.(8)

Throughout the interwar period, the petit bourgeoisie grew steadily in size and economic standing. Patterson, writing of her research between 1948 and 1951, highlighted the centrality of the family by then for most Coloureds in Cape Town, but especially the petit bourgeoisie. She pointed out that families from this background tended to be what she described as patricentral - that is, those where the father played the predominant economic and emotional role - and to have a strong familial bond, all features in marked contrast to those resulting from the conditions of slavery.

There is still a tendency for married children (particularly from patricentral families) to settle in the same neighbourhood as their parents and to continue to live a highly integrated family life, helping their parents or being helped by them financially or otherwise.... Voluntary associations have only a limited range, while community bonds are tenuous and uneven. The family is therefore for most Coloureds the only social unit which can give them any sense of stability and a feeling of "belonging" in a society where their status is so uncertain.... In the large cities, however, some community feeling seems to exist in the longer-settled areas which house the better-off permanent residents; as ratepayers these have some say in municipal administration, and in areas where they predominate may elect a Coloured member to represent them on the City Council. There may be something in the nature of semi-permanent larger local groups in the poverty-stricken communities living out on the quasi-rural Cape Flats. Amongst the great shifting mass of transient unskilled workers who inhabit the urban slums, it is doubtful whether there can be anything in the nature of a larger unit than the family, immediate or extended.(9)

Family pressures, therefore, were of particular importance in determining attitudes to illegitimate births in a Coloured population rising slowly and unevenly in status. As Weiss showed in her research on working Coloured women in Cape Town in the same period, by that stage illegitimacy was deprecated by all, but the strength of family pressure was greatest where social and economic integration in Cape Town's wider community was highest. Premarital pregnancy "was treated as an absolute family disaster" in the elite. In the case of a middle-class family it occurred more frequently "but the reaction of the parents [would] not be quite so drastic. The girl [would] most probably get a hiding, the man be made to marry her." In the respectable lower class the economic consequences predominated in determining the negative response of the parents. Whether marriage ensued or not, nobody would have viewed the event "as a particular social disgrace." In the "outcast" class it was regarded as probably inevitable but, so long as the girl could get some maintenance for the child from the man, she would only be scolded for her stupidity.(10)

The Apartheid Era

In the period that followed, however, legislation became the crucial tool in a massive attempt to restructure South African society and its families. In 1948, after the disruptions of the Second World War, the National Party came to power and proceeded as rapidly as possible to strengthen already existing segregation, extending it to every sphere of life. Such a major project of social engineering took some years to introduce and even longer to take effect in all its cumulative force, before the disbelieving eyes of Cape Town's population. As a result of its history, Cape Town was relatively more liberal than either the surrounding rural areas or the Transvaal, which provided the power bases for the new ruling party. For such a city, where White and Coloured people lived intermixed throughout the Cape Peninsula over which the suburbs had spread, what followed would have been inconceivable had it not been introduced in stages which gathered momentum as the alienation of the earlier measures took effect.

The major relevant legislative landmarks began with the prohibition in 1949 of marriages between Whites and those regarded as African, Asian, or Coloured.(11) The following year legislation was passed to make possible the formal classification of everyone by race in terms of the Population Registration Act,(12) which split many families and divided neighbours of longstanding after the Group Areas Act of the same year took effect. This instituted strict residential segregation; members of one racial group were prohibited from acquiring or occupying property in an area designated for another. That same year the Immorality Amendment Act outlawed even sexual intercourse between those classified as White and all others, and from 1953 the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act regulated the admission of Whites and others to public places. From 1951 the government set out to remove those classified as Coloured from the Common Voters Roll, finally succeeding in 1956 despite mass protests and strenuous legal opposition to violation of the constitution. Subsequently most of these laws were tightened and expanded, as loopholes were closed and the government further established itself.(13)

1. Those Classified as Coloured under Apartheid

In 1957 the first Group Areas in Cape Town were proclaimed, after prolonged and heated opposition from the Cape Town City Council and many organizations.(14) By the early 1960s removals under the Act had begun in earnest, but the pace was initially limited by the amount of alternative accommodation available. When this proved too slow for the Secretary for Community Development, the number of evictions was stepped up later in the decade until, by 1974, the city was in the throes of a "squatter crisis," with an estimated 200,000 people living in makeshift accommodation they had erected illegally. The crisis was mainly the result of the removals, rather than natural increase of the population or influx from the rural areas.(15) It added to the nightmare suffered by those faced with displacement from their homes; people were moved without any attempt to keep either extended families or communities together when new accommodation was allocated.(16) The areas to which they were removed were far from the city centre: bleak, regimented council housing estates, of which a major government commission reported "... untarred streets and an absence of pavements, stormwater drains, sewage, good lighting, telephones etc. are characteristic...."(17)

Attempts to solve the squatter crisis resulted in two new townships being built, 27 kms and 45 kms from Cape Town's centre. One (Mitchell's Plain) had housing that was, unfortunately, far too expensive for those most in need of the accommodation. Despite various attempts to solve this problem, "financial stress, debt, arrear rentals and repossessions [were] frequent occurrences in the area. By March 1981, over 800 of the houses sold had been repossessed, the Council was owed more than R1 million in arrears rentals, and nearly one in every three households was in arrears."(18) The second area, Atlantis, while cheaper, was further from Cape Town and had few facilities. By 1983 it had proved unable to provide employment for more than a third of its residents, with the rest, if able to find work in Cape Town, faced with several hours of expensive commuting each day.

The evidence given before the Theron Commission of 1976 used such terms as bitterness, distrust, instability, insecurity, frustration and hatred to describe conditions.(19) Hardly surprising in such circumstances of strain and overcrowding, family life suffered considerably.

The collapse of social control over the youth was one of the major problems facing the working class, as their culture began to buckle in both rural and inner-city areas.... As the new housing-pattern dispersed the kinship network, so the isolated family could no longer call on the resources of the extended family or the neighbourhood. The [nuclear] family itself became the sole focus of solidarity. But this meant that problems tended to be bottled up within the immediate interpersonal context which produced them.... Pressures gradually built up, which the new nuclear families were unable to deal with. The working-class household was thus not only isolated from the outside, but also undermined from within.(20)

A comparative survey of Coloured families in two areas of Cape Town demonstrated the effect of this. In one area, Harfield, the community had not yet been moved; the other, on the Cape Flats, contained many relocated families.

There was no creche in Harfield.... In total 95 per cent of children under 16 were taken care of within extended families, the remaining number being minded by friends ... [O]n the Cape Flats a high percentage of children under 16 received no parental care during the day, while a very small number were placed in creches.... Of the sample, 44 per cent of the Cape Flats mothers were working, and 25 per cent were raising a family without a husband.(21)

Furthermore, the strain on better-off families would have been increased with the loss of their civic rights as ratepayers, no longer able to elect representatives to the City Council. In so far as this had bolstered community cohesion and therefore concern about "what the neighbours thought," its abolition would have removed yet another prop for parents desperately trying to retain familial control.

Similarly, where religious affiliations had been strongly focussed on a church or mosque, scattering the congregation across Cape Town's townships shattered the disciplinary controls of the religious community. The consequences were somewhat different for Christian and Muslim. For Christians, there were churches in the new townships which could be joined, although with strangers rather than their earlier close-knit congregations of longstanding. However, for the Muslims, who at that stage constituted a little less than a fifth of the Coloured population of Cape Town, the situation was made more difficult by a dearth of mosques in the new townships. Ironically, this very difference probably worked to the benefit of the Muslim communities. They had been strongly concentrated round their mosques in certain areas of the city: for example, in the suburb of Mowbray in 1960 approximately 39 per cent of the population was Muslim. Strong personal identification with particular mosques and a dearth of alternatives led Muslim communities to continue to centre their religious life around their original mosques, thereby retaining considerable cohesion even though geographically dispersed. This may well have contributed to the lower increase in illegitimacy among Coloured Muslims.

From 1955, the year Coloureds were removed from the Common Voters Role, the Medical Officer of Health for Cape Town began to publish separate figures for illegitimacy in each "population group," as well as comparing Whites and Non-Whites, as formerly. As can be seen from Table 1 and its graphic representation in Figure 1, until the early 1960s the illegitimacy ratio for Coloureds was static or, if anything, declining. The correlation with the increased disruption of Group Areas removals is marked, showing an alarming upward rise.

This is emphasized if placed against the median age of first marriage. A rise in this figure could be expected to produce a rise in the illegitimacy statistics, but, as Figure 2 shows, despite only a very slight increase in the age of first marriage until the 1980s, the illegitimacy ratio climbed dramatically.

Table 1

Official Illegitimate Birth Ratios, Cape Town, 1955-1990

Year   White   Coloured   Asiatic   Black

1955    2.7      23.9       0.3     34.4
1956    3.0      22.9       0.6     36.4
1957    3.6      24.5       0.6     32.9
1958    4.0      23.5       1.3     30.2
1959    4.1      23.5       0.0     32.4
1960    4.0      23.1       2.4     31.9
1961    3.8      23.2       0.8     32.0
1962    3.9      23.4       2.9     32.9
1963    4.7      24.1       2.0     29.7
1964    4.8      25.0       1.9     33.2
1965    4.6      26.4       1.2     33.0
1966    5.9      27.6       1.4     34.7
1967    8.3      29.1       2.0     38.6
1968    9.4      29.4       2.0     43.8
1969    7.0      30.4       1.5     47.2
1970    7.2      31.2       2.0     48.4
1971    6.8      30.9       0.7     48.0
1972    9.2      33.6       1.1     53.1
1973   10.1      35.9       2.4     53.2
1974    9.8      36.3       7.5     55.2
1975    9.6      38.0       4.2     57.4
1976   10.5      39.5       3.0     58.2
1977    9.8      39.3       1.8     61.0
1978    8.2      39.6       1.5     61.7
1979    9.9      39.2       3.1     63.4
1980   10.5      38.1       2.7     61.2
1981    9.4      37.7       1.4     58.8
1982    8.7      38.1       1.6     60.8
1983   11.2      41.0       3.6     63.1
1984   10.3      40.3       2.2     64.0
1985   10.4      40.0       3.4     64.2
1986   11.3      40.2       2.1     66.2
1987   17.1      43.1       9.7     67.4
1988   17.3      42.5       8.3     67.6
1989   17.3      44.4       6.4     68.2
1990   19.6      44.0       7.3     69.8

Source: Cape Town Medical Officer of Health Reports

Moreover, as the impact of the "Swinging Sixties" did not reach South Africa until quite late in the decade, this cannot be a major cause of the rise in Coloured illegitimacy, which was already clearly evident several years before.

2. Those Classified as Asiatic under Apartheid

Such an argument, however, raises questions about the Indian community, a section of Cape Town's non-African population deeply affected by Group Areas removals and classified as "Asiatic." Most were traders, many with small, corner shops. It was necessary for their business activities that they be dispersed throughout the city, accessible to their customers. The Group Areas removals to two small and outlying areas of Cape Town, where they were expected to live and trade, destroyed Indian businesses to a large extent, and Indian business displacements considerably outnumbered those of any other group.(22) For their families, this was disastrous in more than the obvious economic sense. An Indian girl traditionally grew up strictly chaperoned, any employment being that of helping in the family business, from which, on marriage, she would move to that of her husband. With the collapse of so much economic activity in the community, many girls were forced out into factory work, mixing in less chaperoned circumstances with others from outside the Indian community. In an attempt to obtain information on this and other aspects of recent Cape Town history, interviews were conducted with a range of community leaders, and life histories have been accumulated over the past thirteen years. Informants spoke of a rise in illegitimacy within the community, but were unable to quantify it. As can be seen from Table 1, however, the pattern would seem to be of two sharp increases in 1974 and 1987, the first of which is difficult to explain in terms of obvious socio-political events. An examination of the actual figures, as opposed to the ratios, however, reveals that the spectacular five point increase in illegitimacy in the small Indian community was caused by an increase in illegitimate births from six in 1973 to eighteen in 1974. Similarly, the rise in the 1987 ratio reflects a rise in actual illegitimate births from one in 1986 to eleven in 1987.(23) In so tiny a community very small increases cause large fluctuations in the illegitimate birth ratios; but, as the figures do not show the same consistent increases as the Coloured statistics, it would seem that Group Areas removals did not have the same effect, possibly - as suggested by our interviews - because family controls were not disrupted to the same extent despite the changes in work patterns. All Indian families having been moved into two small areas of the city, family and community proximity no doubt reinforced patterns of respectability. Religious discipline, both within the majority Muslim and small Hindu communities, played an important role in this respect. Interviews suggest that the rise in illegitimacy at the end of the decade may have been influenced by the increasing rapprochement between Indian and Coloured young people as the political revolt of the youth led to far more social mixing ethnically than had occurred before.

3. Those Classified as African under Apartheid

It is difficult to get a true picture of African illegitimacy and the effects of apartheid legislation on it - at least in the early period - as population statistics for Africans were defective. However, from 1936 there is evidence of increasing numbers of Africans drawn to the city, with at least 18,500 in Cape Town in 1939 (according to the census), 38,000 by the end of the war, and 65,000 by 1955, four-fifths of whom lived in squatter camps as a result of the housing shortage.(24) Unfortunately, not only were head-counts of squatters unreliable, but so too were those for occupants of recognized housing. City Council boundaries were to blame. In 1927 a new location, Langa, had been officially opened by the City Council to enable it to clear all Africans from the city and Ndabeni (the latter wanted for industrial development). A second township, Nyanga East (later simply Nyanga) Native Location, was proclaimed in 1946 but was on Cape Divisional Council land and did not appear in the City Council figures. (The administration of Cape Town and its surrounding area was divided between these two authorities on the basis of a complicated map that had developed for ad hoc reasons.) On the other hand, when the estimated shortage of African housing reached 7,000 dwelling units in 1954, the African township of Nyanga West, later named Guguletu, was proclaimed and included in City Council figures. By 1954, therefore, considerable numbers were subsumed under the category "Non-White" in the Cape Town figures, but the figures did not include many living in the area.

From our interviews, however, it is abundantly clear that, disruptive as apartheid policies in Cape Town were for the family life of those classified as Coloured and Asiatic, they were most disastrous for the "Bantu" (Africans). Not that African family life had been exempt from attacks nationally or in Cape Town before 1948: forced removals to outlying areas, harassment of squatters, and restrictions on the influx of African women had all been enforced by law. But the extent of the legislation and its enforcement which the Nationalist government introduced were unprecedented. The intention was to restrict African access to urban areas to those who were either born in them, employed there for fifteen years or continuously resident for ten, the dependent of such a person, or an annual contract worker (who was not allowed to bring his wife or other dependents). Thus the Native Laws Amendment Act (Urban Areas) of 1952 removed the right of Africans to be in urban areas unless they fell within one of the exemptions. The same year the Native (Abolition of Passes and Documents) Act tightened up the requirement that Africans should carry passes at all times to prove that they qualified to be in an urban area, or face summary arrest. In 1955 the situation in Cape Town became exceptionally difficult for Africans, with the introduction of the Coloured Labour Preference Area policy, which precluded Africans being given a job in the Western Cape if a person classified as Coloured was available for it. These laws, in combination with various others, were used to prevent large numbers of Africans from acquiring or retaining urban rights in Cape Town, and left them as "illegals" in the city.

From 1955 large numbers of African squatters were uprooted from sites around Cape Town, and those who did not qualify in terms of the new legislation were endorsed out of the area. Men who qualified to be in the city were accommodated in single-sex hostels, there being no family homes available and no finances for building them. As a "qualified" man's wife could not be legally resident in the area unless he had township accommodation for her, such women were prevented from acquiring urban rights themselves, and many families were unable to live together legally.

This did not mean that families ever willingly accepted separation. Thus even at the end of the 1960s an economist surveying the hostels in Langa, having described them as "a bleak, wind-swept area with hardly a blade of grass and not a flower between all the buildings," commented, "the most disturbing feature ... is the large number of children living there"(25) - and living there illegally. Quite how disturbing for established values hostel life was, and continued to be, emerged from the many expressions of parental concern about the impact of such living conditions on their children, as expressed to a researcher in hostels outside Cape Town some twenty years later.

Here children do not know the things that men should do and the things that women should do. It is important for us to teach them these things so they will know how to live when they are older. But it is very difficult to teach them in the hostels. (Mrs Qiqimana: Parental interview)

Or, one of many other anxieties:

There is no space for private things. There are no doors. Sometimes a man is washing and his daughter enters without calling. Then she sees the underparts of her father. Children lose respect for adults when they see these things. Sometimes people sleep together. The children see it and then they do it themselves outside. (Mrs Mbewu: Parental interview)(26)

Unsatisfactory as such conditions were, worse was the shadow of deportation and separation which threatened such families throughout the apartheid era. As the 1960s progressed, the laws controlling the right of even those families legally in the city to remain in it were increasingly strictly applied. If, for example, a qualified man lost his job, his wife and children were immediately endorsed out, often to rural areas suffering severe economic hardship, where they did not know anyone and where the husband no longer had family or none that would welcome unknown extra mouths to feed.

As loopholes were discovered, new legislation, notably the Bantu Laws Amendment Bill of 1963, was introduced to try to close them and extend the government's policy. Although greeted by widespread protest, the Bill eventually became law, and was consolidated as the Bantu Labour Act of 1964. The name was derived from the labour bureaux it instituted, which replaced the municipal authorities as the bodies with control over all movement in the urban areas, including that of non-workseekers. But in addition the Act, inter alia, prescribed all towns and cities in South Africa as White urban areas, and removed the existing rights of all Africans to be there, since even those who qualified for permanent exemption under the earlier legislation could now be endorsed out in certain circumstances. African women were to be admitted to urban areas only if their labour was needed, and neither they nor their children could remain with a legally resident man unless they had entered the area legally themselves. With the passing of the Act, which was immediately enforced, the way was open for a renewed attempt to clear Cape Town of all but a small permanent African population, and even that was rendered desperately insecure under the new law.

In 1966 the government froze African labour quotas for employers, despite the economic boom in progress, and no African women at all were allowed to enter the area as residents or even workseekers. By that year it was estimated that there were 27,000 single male contract workers in Cape Town, generally on one-year contracts, almost 70 per cent married and most housed in primitive and greatly overcrowded single quarters in Langa, where many were arrested and prosecuted for the offence of "harbouring" visiting wives. The proportion of men to women in Langa was more than 10:1.(27)

Such circumstances of forcible family disruption would seem to be a recipe for a rapid rise in illegitimacy, quite apart from any other influences, but an examination of the statistics for the 1960s revealed a correlation exceeding our prognosis.(28) For the first decade for which figures were available, from 1955, the ratio of African illegitimate births showed, if anything, a downward trend. In 1966, for the first time, it exceeded the 1955 figure, and from then it increased by leaps and bounds (see Table 1 and [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]). Oral evidence and the scanty literature on Langa paint the picture of change in clearer detail. Interviews of elderly people in the 1980s and 1990s(29) produced reminiscences of how in the 1920s African girls in Cape Town were regularly examined for virginity, as was done in the country,(30) and how fights would break out between families when a girl was found to be no longer a virgin and her family accused another of being responsible for her condition. A knowledgeable informant pinpointed the early 1930s as the time when moral attitudes really began to change, which she attributed to the failure of mothers to "look after girls". A study of Langa published in 1947 described most married couples there as married "in the country under tribal conditions,"(31) but noted that there were already clear signs of diminishing parental control of daughters.

The ideal among all sections of the community is that a girl be a virgin at marriage. In practice, however, many girls are not chaste at marriage.... The physical examination of girls has been given up in most cases although in isolated cases mothers, assisted by older women, still examine their daughters; other mothers whose daughters are still immature say that they will examine them when they grow up. Mothers, when asked why they do not examine their daughters, say that the examination is uncivilized and old-fashioned, while girls it is known object violently to the examination. Informants stress unanimously that the abolition of the physical examination of girls is the chief cause of their misbehaviour; girls no longer fear that their immorality will be discovered and seducers escape paying the fine. At the same time girls often complain that men who take them to dances, concerts, and other entertainments insist that they should allow them to have connexion with them, and that if they refuse they are accused of depriving the men of their normal rights; men are said to resort to great lengths of physical violence to make girls comply with their wishes, and many girls protect themselves only by saying that they are menstruating.(32)

Not surprisingly, the study went on to report that:

Illegitimate children are found in all types of homes; they are present in the homes of the uneducated and comparatively uncivilized, as well as in the homes of teachers, clerks and other leaders of the community. Very few instances of illegitimacy occur among the parent generation, and most occur among the daughter generation.... Illegitimacy occurs mostly among girls of sixteen years of age or older, although I came across some mothers who were thirteen and fourteen years of age.(33)

Apart from the breakdown of parental control, the author singled out "the failure of the old tribal sanctions to operate under the new conditions presented by town life.... In the location ... the unmarried mother is not ostracised and scorned and continues her social activities in the normal way."(34)

A second study, conducted in 1960, mentioned a "high" illegitimacy rate (which was running at about 30 per cent in that period, according to our figures) and pointed to the similarity with other rapidly urbanizing societies (such as eighteenth-century London), but described a fairly small-scale society where rural traditions were still strong, especially among the large migrant population; men tended to know such details about other inhabitants as who had or had not been circumcised. Illegitimacy or bearing and begetting illegitimate children carried a stigma among the large number of middle-class people, and even lower-class "townees" married, their wives being expected to settle down and become respectable. Many behaviour patterns favoured men having girlfriends and illegitimate children, irrespective of whether they had wives or not, but upper-class girls were expected to behave better than lower-class ones.(35) This growing class division in behaviour may have reflected an increase in locally educated adults; Langa's first high school had been established at the end of the 1930s. The picture that emerges of Langa until the early 1960s is of a society undergoing considerable changes as its members urbanized at different rates, but of adjustment rather than disintegration in new circumstances.

To understand the complexities of the Cape Town situation that followed, it is useful to compare it with that of East London, a smaller city but one where the much-researched African population was also very largely Xhosa-speaking, with the migrants coming from relatively nearby African "reserves." East London was also affected by apartheid but not by the Coloured Labour Preference Area policy that dictated the extremes suffered by Cape Town.

There have always been Africans in East London since its inception some 130 years ago. A study of conditions there in 1936, before the policy of apartheid was instituted but when the effects of town life had had more than half a century to manifest themselves, showed that already "there [was] a very strong feeling among middle-aged and older people that all [was] not well with the rising generation."(36) It was believed that there had been a general loss of control of parents over their children. Although ukumetsha(37) was general among both Christians and pagan young people, there was much premarital pregnancy in both groups. The author reported that:

The sanctions for laws regulating the relations of the sexes which formerly existed under tribal conditions are not operative in town. There is no mourning when an unmarried girl bears a child, no physical examination of girls, no handing over of a beast by which the right of a young man to (uku)metsha with a girl is recognized.... Informant after informant mentioned as a main cause of the increase in premarital pregnancy the poverty which makes it necessary for girls from the country to go to town to work, and for mothers of families living in town to take employment and so leave their daughters unsupervised.... Under the new economic conditions the marriage age of girls is going up, averaging about 22 instead of 16 to 18 as in Pondoland [a Xhosa-speaking rural area]. This I believe to be a contributive cause to the increase in premarital pregnancy.(38)

In 1961 a further study of the consequences of urbanization in East London was published, with a second edition in 1971.(39) It again found a high rate of illegitimacy, which the authors attributed to the Xhosa philosophy of sex, operating in an urbanizing society which was losing its traditional disciplines:

All Xhosa, including the Christians, regard sexual satisfaction as a normal requirement of every adult, whether married, unmarried or widowed. Sexual contacts (they feel) have to be regulated not because they are intrinsically evil or dangerous, but in order to avoid infringements of existing rights.... [S]exual liaisons - outside marriage - are practised and tolerated in the country hardly less than in town. They are part of Xhosa tradition. It is not because fornication (as Christians would call it) arouses any horror in itself that town gets branded as an immoral place. Rather it is because of differences in etiquette and in the degree of supervision and regulation.... The most significant symptoms of moral breakdown in the sexual life of town are two, according to Xhosa ideas. The first is the discarding of regulations by which country people (Red especially)(40) try to prevent premarital sexual activity from resulting in pregnancies. This slackening is felt to contribute to the enormous illegitimate birth-rate for which town is notorious. The second arises from the fact that unmarried lovers, in town, can do something which is virtually impossible in the country, namely stay together under one roof as a domestic unit.(41)

The authors described how, while School Xhosa girls were enjoined not to fall pregnant before marriage, in contrast to the Red girls they were given no clear guidance on how pregnancy was to be avoided. Unlike the 1936 findings:

Ukumetsha is out of fashion. It has been condemned by Church teaching as obscene, unnatural, and sinful, while at the same time the young School people themselves have learned to disparage it as old-fashioned, "dirty", and "not much fun", compared with full intercourse. A School girl who wants to safeguard herself by limiting the sexual contact to ukumetsha will be stigmatized as "blind" (old-fashioned). Her choice, then, is between complete abstinence (as enjoined by the Church) and full intercourse without benefit of contraceptive techniques (except coitus interruptus). Modern contraceptives are unknown unless to a tiny handful of highly Westernized women.

Then there are the town-born Xhosa. Their standard for both sexes, it appears, is to practise full intercourse from puberty onwards. Abstinence and ukumetsha are almost equally out of the question.(42)

Yet, despite this picture, the East London illegitimacy ratio for Africans declined over the period, from a peak of 59.5 in 1962, to 50.8 in 1971, for instance (which was a slight rise after a low of 47.9 in 1969). In Cape Town, on the other hand, the opposite trend is clear: from 32.9 in 1962, to 53.1 a decade later, rising to 69.8 in 1990. (The recent statistics for East London are unreliable, so we have not used them.)(43) As, according to the Mayers, the use of modern contraceptive methods is unlikely to account for the decline in East London illegitimacy ratios, it would seem that societal control in some form was reasserting itself.(44) Whether, had apartheid been imposed in Cape Town under similar conditions to East London, similar trends would have developed in the 1960s, can only be a matter for speculation. Cape Town, however, was to bear the brunt of apartheid's attack on the African family. Family stability in particular had little hope of surviving the increasingly concentrated force of legislative and administrative measures deliberately designed to destroy existing African families there, and to stop new ones taking root in the city, as even the following abbreviated catalogue indicates.

As the government's aim was to prevent men acquiring residence rights and so qualifying to import their families, from 1967 the way in which the labour regulations were enforced in Cape Town was changed. Many men in regular Cape Town employment found that, after their normal visit home to the country at Christmas to see their families, they were endorsed out. All years accumulated towards permanent residence (and its concurrent right to join the housing queue and eventually bring one's family to town) were lost, and they had to join the rural labour queue to obtain urban jobs as migrant labourers. For those still in jobs, a new strategy discounted any years worked for a firm which then amalgamated, changed hands, or moved to a part of the Cape Peninsula which fell under the Cape Divisional Council rather than the City Council. Men with residence rights lost them if they left Cape Town on long leave; loss of residence rights disqualified a man from obtaining family housing. In 1968 further measures aimed at replacing the permanent African labour force in the urban areas with migrant labour: all African men between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five in the rural areas had to register as workseekers at newly established labour bureaux, and all work or even work-seeking would be allowed only through them. As a result, no man from the rural areas could ever hope thereafter to qualify for urban residence rights by dint of obtaining a job in the city. Given the distance of Cape Town from the African areas to which Cape Town men's families were confined, men generally could visit home only once a year for as long as they remained employed in the city. The strains this placed on family relationships, both spousal and parental, have been extensively documented.(45) Not surprisingly, the migrant hostels usually illegally accommodated large numbers of women and their children, but most of the women were not wives. And although marriage remained the ideal, increasing numbers of women in Cape Town never married, particularly as marriage to a man who did not have urban rights would deprive a woman who did of hers.(46)

Women were particularly targetted for deportation, as they were regarded as the source of the population increase in the urban areas. Housing regulations were stringently enforced to oust widows and their children from their houses, since housing permits were issued only to male heads of households over the age of 21 and not even women who qualified for residence in their own right were eligible. Women who had not registered in Cape Town by 5 June 1952 were endorsed out, whether or not they qualified for permanent residence, and although the Black Sash Athlone Advice Office arranged for a test case on this to be fought right through to the Appellate Division, the case was lost. As a result of all these legal disruptions of family life, it became ever more difficult for any African woman to acquire permanent residence rights unless she could prove that she had been born in Cape Town and had never left it. Indeed, as the 1967 date approached on which the 1952 urban Areas Act had offered permanent residence rights for all who could prove fifteen years' continuous residence, the pace at which people were endorsed out was stepped up further. By 1967, 70,000 people, three-quarters of them women and children, had been moved to rural resettlement camps which rapidly became notorious for their abject poverty, disease, and starvation.

From the 1970 general elections, emphasis in policy changed from racial apartheid to ethnic apartheid, with the creation of self-governing "homelands," and later "independent" African "states." That year the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act provided that every African in South Africa would become a citizen of a homeland. This was used to justify the removal of Africans from White cities, the total freeze on the building of African family housing, and the introduction of yet more measures to extend the Minister of Bantu Administration's powers. Increasing numbers of children and adolescents - boys and girls - were deported to the rural areas under various provisions, and the harassment of women continued.

Yet despite this, the African population of Cape Town began to mushroom as more and more illegal squatter camps developed around the city. The reality of the failure of the government's resettlement policy left many, particularly deported women and children, with no option but starvation in the rural areas or an illegal return to the cities. Other families, already in the city but unable to obtain legal housing for which they qualified, joined the squatter camps illegally. In the mid- to late-1970s a number of the approximately 50 camps around Cape Town were bulldozed, a practice which increased after the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act came into effect in 1977, several being demolished amid the winter downpours of 1977, including Modderdam with some 15,000 inhabitants. One camp, Crossroads, survived after years of harassment, as a result of a combination of local and international outcry and the political fall of the then Minister of Plural Relations. However, although many "illegal" families and individuals were thereby saved from deportation, the agreement left latecomers to the camp still vulnerable, and proved very divisive of the close-knit Crossroads community that had developed in the process of fighting for survival. The camps were all on Divisional Council land and, given the way in which illegitimacy figures were collected,(47) births of people living there were unlikely to appear in the City Council illegitimacy statistics. Neither were those of the township of New Crossroads, which was subsequently built amid much recrimination, nor the huge new development of Khayelitsha, established in the 1980s largely as a site-and-service scheme some 30 kms from Cape Town, in the teeth of African opposition. However, all formed a background to the growing anger and violence that escalated throughout Cape Town's African population.

The effect this had on youthful attitudes and family discipline is evident in a host of research interviews, but perhaps the clearest indications came in 1976 and again in 1985-86, when Cape Town's black youth participated in the national explosions of rebellion by South Africa's school-goers (many in their early twenties). In both instances the youth specifically rejected their parents as compromisers and "sell-outs" for not rebelling more violently against their oppression, and in 1986 calls were made for African girls to have babies "for the revolution."(48) However, although the rhetoric was extreme and illegitimacy figures increased for those years, the rise was less spectacular than might have been expected. By then Cape Town's African inhabitants had for more than a generation experienced extreme and escalating family insecurity, and from research interviews it seems that the sexual revolt advocated may in fact, if not in rhetoric, have been little different from existing behaviour. Indeed, it is possible that the disruption of schooling and commerce may have played as great a role in the increases as the slogans. With little else to do or hope for, motherhood may have been an inevitable - and even a desired - consequence for many girls, irrespective of their or their partners' political opinions. Similarly, many other factors that encouraged illegitimacy among urban Africans throughout South Africa interacted with the extreme disruption of African families in Cape Town to produce an illegitimacy ratio among the highest in the land.(49) It was still rising sharply when, in 1991, the government ceased to classify births - and hence illegitimate births - by race.

Conclusion

From the above, it can be seen that family patterns in South Africa among the most disadvantaged sections of the population have been singularly subject to the vagaries of legal regulation in the last 45 years. After 185 years of slavery and indentures, it took many years before marriage, as opposed to informal liaisons, became widely accepted in the Coloured community as essential for respectability, but with greater prosperity, the trend of descending illegitimacy ratios would probably have continued. This is likely to have been even more the case in the Asiatic community, as a result of religious constraints and their generally higher economic status. However, the enormous upheavals in community and family norms induced in Cape Town by the Group Areas legislation disrupted all such developments; one consequence was the rising illegitimacy ratios.

In contrast, Africans came to Cape Town from communities with well-established mechanisms for preventing illegitimacy and a high regard for family life and discipline. While research has shown that the impact of urbanization interacted with existing mores to produce a high illegitimacy ratio, it may be asked whether this would have continued had urbanization eventually led to increased prosperity among urban Africans. All such considerations are academic, however, in the light of the impact of legislation over the past 45 years, particularly in Cape Town, which has had disastrous effects on family life and its protection.

Since 1985 it became increasingly impossible to maintain apartheid, and in February 1990 the State President affirmed its imminent demise. Elections for a new regime took place in late April 1994 and apartheid was officially abolished. However, the backlog of housing needed, the dire economic situation, and above all, the extent to which Coloured and African community and family structures have disintegrated,(50) make a reversal of current illegitimacy trends unlikely in the near future. Predicting the longer term is much more complicated. Apartheid and urbanization have irrevocably changed all sections of the nation, and the restoration of "traditional" African society - and the family in particular, with its extended format and internal controls - is most improbable. Although the law has had a major effect in reshaping family structures, this has been generally inadvertent. Attempts at social engineering by means of the law have almost invariably produced unforeseen consequences, one of the most notable causes being the resistance and resilience of the individuals who form families; another the failure of the legislators to take into account the viewpoints of groups (other than their own) affected by the laws. These remain important considerations in a future South Africa: the legal system is a very blunt instrument for building, as opposed to destroying, complex social institutions.

Future policy will most immediately need to concentrate on remedying the consequences of current family breakdown in terms of provision for single-parent families and childcare.(51) However, although urbanization has led to greater uniformity in family patterns amongst the various sections of the population, a number of differences in the nature of, and emphasis on, codes of belief and behaviour survive. Thus, for example, the very high value Africans in particular still attach to children must be taken into account in assessing the possible effects of greater provision of contraception, which involves not only questions surrounding attitudes to children, but also to masculinity and sex education. (Likewise, such attitudes are relevant for the criminal law on issues like abortion and infanticide.) Any government will need to take into account, rather than underplay, such still existing differences when it formulates its family policies.

With time, hoped-for greater prosperity may have its normal effect of reducing the birthrate for all sections of the population, but there is no guarantee that the illegitimacy ratio will decrease. The pattern of illegitimacy prevalent in Europe, with high levels occurring in stable, two-parent but unmarried families may become more common. However, this is a very different phenomenon from current illegitimacy patterns, where the overriding problems are those of poverty, inadequate childcare, lack of discipline and suitable role models, psychological difficulties, and stigma. It is these problems that any future government must address if it is to prevent the country from facing a further downward spiral of family disintegration.

Centre for Socio-Legal Research Private Bag Rondebosch South Africa 7700

ENDNOTES

The research for this paper was sponsored by the Human Sciences Research Council, the British Academy, and the Nuffield Foundation, to all of whom we are most grateful. Our thanks, too, to Dr Kenneth Hughes for comments on an earlier draft.

1. The project, on changing patterns of illegitimacy in South Africa, is being conducted at the Centre for Socio-Legal Research at the University of Cape Town.

2. C. Saunders, "Africans in Cape Town in the Nineteenth Century: An Outline," in C. Saunders and H. Phillips (eds), Studies in the History of Cape Town, vol. 2 (Cape Town, 1980), 32. However, according to official figures, in 1899 there were estimated to be only some 1,600 Africans within the actual Cape Town municipal area.

3. Between 1901 and 1925 African areas of housing were not defined as falling within the municipal boundaries and were not included in the "Coloured" figures for Cape Town. From 1925 the African townships were tabled separately, but Africans living in Cape Town were included in the "other than European" or "Non-European" category which was used from 1925 for Cape Town.

4. While abortion and infanticide no doubt played some role in reducing the illegitimacy ratio, the incidence is impossible to quantify. Court records suggest that relatively few made use of these options. See S. Burman and M. Naude, "Bearing a Bastard: The Social Consequences of Illegitimacy in Cape Town, 1896-1939," Journal of Southern African Studies 17 (1991): 379, 387.

5. The Civilized Labour Policy of 1924, which privileged White labour over Non-White, forced Coloured and African unskilled labourers out of work: D. Pinnock, "From Argie Boys to Skolly Gangsters: the Lumpen Proletariat Challenge of the Street-Corner Armies in District Six, 1900-1951," in C. Saunders and H. Phillips (eds), Studies in the History of Cape Town, vol. 3 (Capetown, 1984), 135.

6. E.g., report of the Select Committee on the Regulation of Wages (Specified Trades) Bill (SC4-1917), 22-3: evidence of H. Beynon, Labour Officer.

7. M. Adhikari, "Let Us Live for Our Children": The Teachers' League of South Africa, 1913-1940 (Cape Town, 1993), 16.

8. Ibid., 154.

9. S. Patterson, Colour and Culture in South Africa: A Study of the Status of the Cape Coloured People within the Social Structure of the Union of South Africa (London, 1953), 147-52.

10. A. G. Weiss, "The Cape Coloured Woman: within an Industrial Community and at Home," (M.Soc.Sc. Dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1950), 44-5.

11. In the nineteenth century at the Cape racial categories gradually came to predominate over earlier distinctions. European, Hottentot, Kaffir, Coloured (also known as Mixed), and Malay all came into common currency. Asiatic became another category as Chinese and Indians were brought into the country. In the course of the first half of the twentieth century the term 'Kaffir' was replaced by Native.

12. This Act divided the population into three categories: White, Coloured, and Native. The Group Areas Act of the same year introduced a fourth provisional group: "any group of persons which is ... declared to be a group." In terms of this, a proclamation, No. 123 of 1967, divided the Coloured category in South Africa into seven sub-categories: Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Chinese, Indian, other Asiatic, and other Coloured; and the General Laws Amendment Act of 1968 subsequently validated this.

13. The Nationalist government initially came to power in 1948 with only the most slender of majorities, but (partly by dint of redelimiting the constituencies) proceeded to increase its majority with every subsequent election.

14. For a description of the proclamation of Group Areas in Cape Town, see J. Western, Outcast Cape Town (London, 1981), chapter 5.

15. Centre for Intergroup Studies, Group Areas, Occasional Paper No. 7 (Centre for Intergroup Studies, University of Cape Town, 1983), 12-14.

16. A. Younge, "Housing Policy and the Housing Shortage in Cape Town: 1942-1980," Africa Perspective 21 (1982).

17. The Theron Commission Report (1976: paragraph 4.13), as cited in Centre for African Studies, Group Areas, 16. Professor Erica Theron, who chaired the Commission, proved to be an unexpectedly outspoken critic of government policies on the Coloured people.

18. Centre for Intergroup Studies, Group Areas, 17.

19. Theron Commission Report, chapter 9.

20. D. Pinnock, The Brotherhoods: Street Gangs and State Control in Cape Town (Cape Town, 1984), 56-8.

21. Ibid., 57-8.

22. Western, Cape Town, 81-3.

23. However, the fact that both White and Coloured ratios also rose considerably in this period may indicate that the widespread demonstrations that took place in 1986, a year of revolt by the youth and considerable social insecurity, also found expression in ways other than violence. The ratios may also have been slightly affected by the removal of most of the disabilities of illegitimate children, as a result of the passing of the Children's Status Act in 1987. For the details of legal changes, see B. Clark and B. van Heerden, "The Legal Position of Children Born Out of Wedlock, in S. Burman and E. Preston-Whyte (eds), Questionable Issue: Illegitimacy in South Africa (Cape Town, 1992), 36-63.

24. C. Saunders, "From Ndabeni to Langa," in C. Saunders (ed), Studies in the History of Cape Town, vol. 1 (Cape Town, 1979), 199.

25. F. Wilson, Migrant Labour (Johannesburg, 1972), 73.

26. S. Jones, Assaulting Childhood: Children's Experiences of Migrancy and Hostel Life in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1993), 131-3.

27. Figures from Hansard 2, 1968, 409, given by J. MacRobert, "'Ungadinwa Nangomso - Don't Get Tired Tomorrow': A History of the Black Sash Advice Office in Cape Town 1958 to 1980," (MA Dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1993), 78.

28. We attempted to control the ratios by examining them against the figures for unmarried African women in the child-bearing years, and the age of first marriage. However, official statistics for illegitimate births and unmarried women were not compiled using comparable racial categories for most of the period. Age of first marriage figures were not compiled for Africans. The issue of whether the illegitimacy statistics are misleading in including de facto marriages in the early stages of bridewealth payment has been extensively canvassed in the light of what written sources are available, and research interviews. Unfortunately this is not a question looked at by earlier writers, and available studies on other parts of South Africa are not necessarily a guide: Xhosa requirements on how much bridewealth must be paid before a marriage is considered to have taken place have until recently been stricter than those of, for example, the Tswana or Sotho. Research interviews indicate that current procedure in collecting statistics would probably exclude virtually all births from the illegitimacy statistics where any bridewealth had been paid. See S. Burman, "The Category of the Illegitimate in South Africa," in Burman and Preston-Whyte, Questionable Issue, 21-35; S. Jones, "Marriage Transactions among Xhosa in a Country Township, Past and Present," preliminary draft of paper in preparation, 1993; cf., J.L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, "The Management of Marriage in a Tswana Chiefdom," in E. J. Krige and J.L. Comaroff (eds), Essays on African Marriage in Southern Africa (Cape Town, 1981), 29-34.

29. By Sandra Burman, conducted as part of earlier studies on family patterns in Cape Town.

30. Describing the situation at the end of the 1960s, the anthropologists Philip and Iona Mayer wrote: "the object of inspection (a practice now almost obsolete) was to discourage girls from indulging in full sexual intercourse as against ukumetsha, external intercourse. In ukumetsha - intercourse 'between the thighs' as Xhosa say - the girl is not supposed to take off her undergarments, and her technical virginity should be safe." (P. Mayer and I. Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen: Conservatism and the Process of Urbanization in a South African City [Cape Town, 1961, 2nd edn 1971!, 253.)

31. R. Levin, Marriage in Langa Native Location, Communications from the School of African Studies, University of Cape Town (Cape Town, 1947), 9.

32. Ibid., 30. The fine mentioned was the customary law fine for seduction.

33. Ibid., 31-2.

34. Ibid., 32.

35. M. Wilson and A. Mafeje, Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township (Cape Town, 1963), 13-81.

36. M. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa (London, 1936, 2nd edn 1961), 477.

37. See note 30.

38. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 481-2.

39. Mayer and Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen.

40. "The People known as ... 'Red people' ... are the traditionalist Xhosa, the conservatives who still stand by the indigenous way of life, including the pagan Xhosa religion. 'Red' Xhosa are not just a few picturesque survivals: on the contrary, they are a flourishing half of the Xhosa people today, ... The antithetical type, ... 'School' people ... are products of the mission and the school, holding up Christianity, literacy and other Western ways as ideals. 'School' people ... are not just town people or people under town influence. The town Xhosa do in a broad sense belong within the 'School' category, but theirs is a separate branch of School culture with a flavour all its own.... Red Xhosa rustics and School Xhosa rustics, both attached to their own distinctive ways of life, are both faced with the need to make adjustments in town." (Ibid., 4.)

41. Ibid., 252-3.

42. Ibid., 254. This picture of uninhibited sexual relations was confirmed by Pauw's research in East London in the early 1960s, and research in Johannesburg in the 1950s. B. A. Pauw, The Second Generation: A Study of the Family Among Urbanized Bantu in East London (Cape Town, 1963, 2nd edn 1973); L. Longmore, The Dispossessed: A Study of the Sex-life of Bantu Women In and Around Johannesburg (London, 1959).

43. Personal Communication: Department of the East London Medical Officer of Health.

44. There are, of course, many other factors which fall outside the ambit of a study of Cape Town but which could have influenced the figures in East London to some extent, and not all towards a reduction: for example, the method of collecting or compiling the statistics; changes in maternity facilities available to Africans within the city limits; a particularly influential church movement favouring total sexual abstinence; an increase in town in the proportion of "Red" people, particularly "Red" girls better instructed in traditional methods of avoiding pregnancy; a change in the number of illegal abortions; a decline in the total number of legitimate births in town, either from married couples having smaller families or married women going to their husbands' rural families to give birth, which would be increasingly likely if the proportion of "Red" migrants from nearby areas rose as a result of influx control, as foreseen by the Mayers (Townsmen or Tribesmen, 70). In the light of some of these possible influences, the decline of the East London figures is all the more remarkable.

45. E.g., Black Sash Advice Office Reports, Athlone Advice Office; P. F. Reynolds, "Men Without Children," Carnegie Conference Paper No. 5, Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa, 1984.

46. For a fuller discussion of the legal complications introduced into family relationships by influx control, see M.L. Dixon, Do Blacks Have a Right to Family Life?, Occasional Paper 1 (Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1981); S. Burman, "The Interaction of Legislation Relating to Urban Africans and the Laws Regulating Family Relationships," Acta Juridica (1984).

47. For a full discussion of the collection methods and reliability of the illegitimacy statistics for Cape Town in the 1980s and 1990s, see Burman, "The Category of the Illegitimate."

48. E.g., H. Bradford, "Herbs, Knives and Plastic: 150 Years of Abortion in South Africa," (paper presented at the Africa Seminar, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1990), 14: "During the 1976 uprising in Cape Town, one of the students' demands was 'Everybody get pregnant or we'll be wiped out' - and birth control was on the boycott list together with Bantu Education."

49. Making exact comparisons of illegitimacy ratios for the various South African cities has been impossible, given varying provision of maternity facilities, and hence accuracy in collecting the statistics, as well as such regional differences as which African areas fell within the city limits, how far the city was from where the local African population regarded as home, and where local women, especially married ones, were expected to give birth. For a discussion of factors encouraging illegitimacy which are common in urban African communities, see E. Preston-Whyte and M. Zondi, "African Teenage Pregnancy: Whose Problem?" and E. Nash, "Breaking the Cycle: Psychiatric Aspects of Illegitimacy," both in Burman and Preston-Whyte, (eds), Questionable Issue.

50. One indication of this is the steadily rising number of street children in Cape Town. In May 1985 there were approximately three hundred (W. Scharf, M. Powell and E. Thomas, "Strollers - Street Children in Cape Town," in S. Burman and P. Reynolds (eds), Growing Up in a Divided Society: The Contexts of Childhood in South Africa [Johannesburg, 1986], 262.) Three years later this figure had risen to over six hundred (Weekend Argus, 1 July 1989) and to approximately 2,500 in 1995 (Peninsula Times, 1 Feb. 1995). In both 1985 and 1989 about ten per cent of these children were girls.

51. However, the problem is so vast that the economy could not at present bear the costs of adequate maintenance grants even for all needy illegitimate children. See e.g.C. Simkins and T. Dlamini, "The Problem of Supporting Poor Children in South Africa," in Burman and Preston-Whyte, (eds), Questionable Issue, 64-76. Solutions will therefore require radical rethinking. See S. Burman, "Capitalising on African Strengths: Women, Welfare and the Law," in S. Bazilli (ed), Putting Women on the Agenda (Johannesburg, 1991).