RR13X.book Page 1 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM RESEARCH REPORT NO. 131 AFRICAN FAMILIES IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT Edited by Göran Therborn Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Uppsala 2006 RR13X.book Page 2 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM Indexing terms Demographic change Family Family structure Gender roles Social problems Africa Ghana Nigeria South Africa African Families in a Global Context Second edition © the authors and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2004 Language checking: Elaine Almén ISSN 1104-8425 ISBN 91-7106-561-X (print) 91-7106-562-8 (electronic) Printed in Sweden by Elanders Infologistics Väst AB, Göteborg 2006 RR13X.book Page 3 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM Contents Preface . 5 Author presentations . 7 Introduction Globalization, Africa, and African Family Pattern . 9 Göran Therborn 1. African Families in a Global Context. 17 Göran Therborn 2. Demographic Innovation and Nutritional Catastrophe: Change, Lack of Change and Difference in Ghanaian Family Systems . 49 Christine Oppong 3. Female (In)dependence and Male Dominance in Contemporary Nigerian Families . 79 Bola Udegbe 4. Globalization and Family Patterns: A View from South Africa . 98 Susan C. Ziehl RR13X.book Page 4 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM RR13X.book Page 5 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM Preface In the mid-1990s the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (Forskningsrådsnämnden – FRN) – subsequently merged into the Council of Sci- ence (Vetenskaprådet) – established a national, interdisciplinary research committee on Global Processes. The Committee has been strongly committed to a multidi- mensional and multidisciplinary approach to globalization and global processes and to using regional perspectives. Several collective studies have come out of its work: Globalizations and Modernities. Experiences and Perspectives of Europe and Latin America (1999), Globalization and Its Impact on Chinese and Swedish Society (2000), The New Federal- ism (2000), all published by FRN in Stockholm (in English), and Globalizations Are Plural, a special issue of International Sociology (Vol. 15, No. 2, 2000). Selected papers from the conference on Asia and Europe in Global Processes, held in Singapore in March 2001, will appear in Göran Therborn and Habibul Haque Khondkar (eds), Asia and Europe in Globalization: Continents, Regions and Nations, published by E.J. Brill, Leiden. The present volume completes the regional perspective. The chapters in this report derive from a conference at the iKhaya Guest Lodge and Conference Centre in Cape Town, 29 November–2 December 2001, organized together with the University of Cape Town. A companion volume, also published by the Nordic Africa Institute, deals with economic issues (Globalization and the South- ern African Economies, edited by Mats Lundahl). Uppsala, December 2004 Göran Therborn 5 RR13X.book Page 6 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM RR13X.book Page 7 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM Author Presentations Christine Oppong is Professor of Applied Anthropology at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. In the eighties and early nineties she was a gender population and development specialist at the ILO in Geneva. She is currently co- coordinator of an interdisciplinary research and graduate training program, together with Bergen University, on Globalization and Changing Cultures of Survival and Care: the case of Ghana. Göran Therborn is Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Uppsala University. His most recent book is Between Sex and Power. Family in the World, 1900–2000 (London, Routledge, 2004). Bola Udegbe is senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Her specialisation is women’s studies, gender attitudes, leadership, socio-psychologi- cal aspects of gender issues in work place and impact on policy. She was awarded a senior Humanities fellowship in 1999 at the Institute for the Study of Gender in Africa (ISGA) in the James S. Coleman African Studies Center of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she worked on Nigerian proverbs as sources of con- ceptualisation and the meaning of gender. Susan C. Ziehl is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Industrial Sociology at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. Her main research and teaching area is Family Sociology with specific emphasis on household struc- tures, marital status and family law. Her publications include: Population Studies (Oxford University Press, 2002) and “Forging the Links Globalization and Family Patterns”, Society in Transition, 2003, 34(2). 7 RR13X.book Page 8 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM RR13X.book Page 9 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM Introduction: Globalization, Africa, and African Family Patterns Göran Therborn Family relations have a small-scale, local intimacy, which is often placed in contrast, positively or negatively, to the Big World and its economics and politics. However, family, sexual, and gender relations are also, and increasingly, affected by global pro- cesses. By waves of birth control and family planning, by international gender dis- course, sustained by trans-national organizations and movements, by the spread of contraceptives and of sexual models. By trans-national economic developments and crises, by international political pressures, by the spread of epidemics, like HIV/ Aids. Here we are therefore looking at African families in an explicit global frame- work. Globalization is a buzzword that is being used under all conceivable circum- stances. We are living in an ‘era of globalization’, where the four corners of the world have come together, where commodity and factor markets are strongly inter- linked, where technologies spread from more advanced to less advanced regions, where information travels virtually instantaneously, where financial capital moves in milliseconds, where economic policies in different countries tend to be more and more entangled with each other, where political systems spread, mainly from the western democracies to other parts of the world, where different cultures borrow elements from each other and fuse them, where legal systems clash and influence one another, where traditional family and gender patterns are broken up as a result of foreign influences, where religions confront each other, and so on. There is virtually no end to the list, and it is difficult to resist global influences. Nostalgic romantics do it, and incite others to join them, pretty much like the prim- itive rebels of Eric Hobsbawm, and governments like that of North Korea, with its single, preset radio channel, which manage to block the flow of information from the outside, but for how long? Even the dark side of globalization, international ter- rorism, rides the crest of the wave and makes liberal use of the technologies that have contributed to shrinking the world. The tide is irresistible, and whatever ideo- logical views you hold, it cannot be met in an ostrich-like fashion, but you must tackle the problems it creates (and make use of the promises it makes) in a head-on conscious fashion. The actors in this globalized setting are as many as the forms that globalization assumes: firms, workers, farmers, international organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the many dif- ferent specialized agencies of the United Nations system, international non-goven- 9 RR13X.book Page 10 Monday, November 14, 2005 2:20 PM Göran Therborn mental organizations, churches, consumers of information spread via more or less global mass media, music listeners, art viewers, book readers, internet users … Again, there is no end to their number. A problem with this variety of forms and actors is that it is not at all clear what globalization means, or rather, it means very different things to different people. It all depends on the particular setting and circumstances. Globalization is not global- ization, but globalizations, and globalizations are plural, not singular. They are eco- nomic, cultural, social, cognitive, normative, political; you name it. Once again, the diversity is overwhelming. A second problem with the globalization concept is that very frequently, global- ization is implicitly thought of as a state: the current state of the world at the begin- ning of the twenty-first century. This, however, is a misconception. Globalization is not a state; it is a process. It is the process that created the globalized world, and this process cannot be understood, except in a historical perspective. We need to come to grips with the very mechanisms that brought us to where we are today. In the present work we will define globalization, or globalizations (the two terms will be used interchangeably) as the processes creating tendencies to a world-wide reach, impact and connectedness of social phenomena in a wide sense and a world-encom- passing awareness among social actors. Globalization in History With this perspective it is possible to identify a number of major globalization waves or episodes across the history of mankind. The first consisted of the diffusion of world religions and the establishment of civilizations covering major parts of the continents. The main period extended from the fourth to the eighth centuries AD. This was the period when Christianity gained a strong foothold in the European continent and established outposts in Africa and India. Simultaneously, the other world religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, expanded