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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Crisis or management? Teenage pregnancy in Nyanga, Cape Town
| Panel |
34. Post-apartheid: ethnographies of the South African transition
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| Paper ID | 525 |
| Author(s) |
Mkhwanazi, Nolwazi
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Worldwide, early childbearing is associated with poverty and poor health. In sub-Saharan Africa early childbearing is also associated with an increased vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. In the last decade many development, population and reproductive health organisations have called on developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa to address the reproductive needs of adolescents as a strategy to fight both poverty and HIV/AIDS. In South Africa, the state, national and international NGOs have translated these calls to mean that teenage pregnancy is an undesirable phenomenon. The majority of studies in South Africa conclude that early childbearing is not only undesirable, but that it is also physically, socially and economically deleterious. These studies which burgeoned in the 1980s borrowed heavily on the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have been used to explain the occurrence of teenage pregnancy in Europe and North America. As a consequence such studies overlooked the specificity of early childbearing in South Africa. Furthermore, these studies overlooked the webs of social relations that were created, consolidated or challenged by the occurrence of teenage pregnancy. Using ethnographic, historical and theoretical material the author presents an alternative understanding of teenage pregnancy. Her findings demonstrate how people living under conditions of extreme hardship make sense of the high prevalence of teenage pregnancy. Furthermore, the author suggests that even though early childbearing was considered a ‘crisis’ for the individual and families involved, in Nyanga East (the township where the research was conducted) that crisis was often effectively managed at the social level in a ways that positively transformed the lives of the young women involved.
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