Ties that bind

Every human being is born into a family. In our culture everyone is born into a nuclear family as well as an extended family.

This ensures a large family tree with grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters and cousins. This is not forgetting the in laws.
This was to ensure that there was no orphan in our society. In fact the role of the extended family is to ensure that there are more people to care for one.
This was a structure that was set up by those responsible for our culture. This worked very well in the olden days when people still held firmly to these moral values and ethics of caring.

The extended family ensured that there was a broader base of human caring. It extended the cadre of people who took an interest in someone’s welfare outside the nuclear family.
The nuclear family is by definition a small hub of human beings and is constrained by size in its effectiveness.
True it is the first line of defence but on its own it can not provide the wider support necessary to support a human being.  

What has now transpired is that we have lost the extended family structure or at best have loosened the ties that bind. We are now more focused on the nuclear structure where it is mother, father and children, end of story. However all is, sometimes, not well even in this nuclear enclave.

Day after day one hears of feuds amongst siblings from one source. Brother fighting sister, usually, over financial resources.
What is mind boggling is how siblings can fight each other and not get along is beyond belief.
Everything says these should get along and support each other; however, this is not the case.

Nowadays it is common to find people from the same family not getting along. In fact the most ferocious feuds are perpetrated by persons of the same ilk. How it is possible for such a situation to exist is beyond belief. You find that when bereavement occurs a huge blown up fight ensues.
Fighting over burial rights has now become the norm. Instead of people making concerted arrangements to bury the dead it becomes time to wrangle over who is going to bury the deceased and where are they going to be buried.

Less time is spent crying and mourning the dead person than in trying to win in the fight.

Trips are routinely taken to the courts to resolve the impasse while the dead wait in the mortuary.
The wait sometimes takes weeks and months before resolution of the case.
What fuels these fights is usually centred on money. Where, the deceased, has financial resources, the more intense the fight. It is usually the ones not entitled to the inheritance who wage the war against the legitimate heirs.

Take the case of the deceased’s brother tussling over the brother’s estate with the widow.
In the brother’s view he is entitled to his brother’s estate because they are brothers and the wife is merely an interloper. The fact that his brother was married to the widow and she has children to support is immaterial.
The war wages on with some assets being physically removed from the widow’s control.

You find that, in some cases, the extended family is divided or is paralyzed into non action.
Because we have jettisoned the extended family we have weakened our support systems irreparably. In the case quoted above it is the duty of the extended family to intervene and right the wrongs being done in this case.

The aggrieved widow should be able to appeal to the extended family for justice and it should be accorded. However under the prevailing situation it cannot be accorded.
The disintegration of the family structure is detrimental to society. It has led to the irretrievable breakdown of the family, where core value systems and ethics have been eroded.

That is why today we have the worrying case of child headed households. With the extended family structure in place it is inconceivable that all the relatives of these children are dead.
It may be true that those from the nuclear family have all died, but it is not true that all their relatives are dead. It would be impossible that both their maternal and paternal trees have all been felled. Some viable members still exist, however, they do not want to assume responsibility for these orphans.

Take a case when lobola would have to be paid for one of these orphans the relatives would suddenly come out of the wood work to claim the bounty. So, not everyone is dead.
With the breakdown of the family we lost family values of respect for those older than oneself as well as for self. Children have now been brought up not respecting elders outside their own home.

Whereas before children belonged to the community and could be disciplined by all, they are now perceived to belong to their nuclear family. No one outside their own family can discipline them.

One now finds shocking displays of this disrespect. For instance when one boards a bus or kombi one finds old men and women standing up while school going children sit on chairs.
Some parents, in support of this disrespect, will argue that my child has paid a fare and is therefore entitled to a seat.

Payment of a fare is no justification for the disrespect exhibited by not giving a seat to an elderly person.
The breakdown of the family and the discontinuation of the extended family are regrettable indeed and through this loss we have lost the basis of being a firm society.

If we would resuscitate the tenets of what our culture was based on there would be hope for solving some of the social ills that beset us.

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