The death of a family member due to Aids is often only the first, and not the worst, ordeal the survivors have to face, an anthropological economist said on Tuesday.
”We are seeing households seriously weakened,” Catherine Cross of the Human Sciences Research Council said at a seminar in Pretoria.
”The sequence goes from Aids to poverty to land snatching to dispossession…
”Dropping out of the community is the final risk to Aids survivors.”
Particularly when a youth took over as head of a rural household, there was a big risk that the family might lose their land tenure rights, she said.
Cross conducted a study among Aids-affected households in KwaZulu-Natal, 20 of which were in a peri-urban area 24km from Durban.
Although the concept of child-headed households was commonly used, she did not find any households headed by a child under the age of 16, she said.
Households headed by 16- to 25-year-old males were found though. Female orphans were generally absorbed into other households.
According to Cross, the term ”child-headed” was probably used because many rural communities regarded anyone who had not yet married or had children of their own, as a child, she said.
The community near Durban where she did some of the research also did not regard such youths as fit to be given the right to the land their late father had occupied. They were deemed to be unreliable until they were married.
The community did not want to see them holding land rights either.
”If households don’t keep the right to land, they don’t have the right to exist.”
Someone who merely rented a room was not regarded as a citizen of the community, Cross said.
Another problem was the vulnerability of youth-headed households to land-snatching by unscrupulous guardians, or even impostors pretending to be their guardians.
Traditionally, there was a custom that dictated how to take care of orphans. The more recent past, however, saw the emergence of dishonest guardians who took over the land and assets left by someone who had died due to Aids, and put the children out on the street.
They might even lose their government grants to uncles — either real or bogus ones — who had suddenly turned up after the death of the parent, she said.
To counter the drop in income due to the death of a member of a household, a substitute had to be found for the income that person had brought in. They had to get all able-bodied members of the household to earn some money to sustain it.
”Peri-urban households hit by Aids often fail in both respects.”
Of the 20 households, the proportion of potential earners who did bring in money, dropped from 60% before the Aids death to 42 % afterwards, Cross said.
”Youth households are often made up of unmarried brothers and sisters, all or nearly all unemployed,” she said.
”Rising unemployment makes decent jobs hard to get.”
The response of a household depended on the authority of its head.
”Women heads and youth heads have less capacity to promote cohesion.”
Women and youths as heads of households were not regarded with the same authority as men, so it was more difficult for them to mobilise all those who could, to contribute to the income of the family, Cross said. – Sapa