The Broken Circle – Restoring the South African Family

Among the many cruelties of apartheid, few cut deeper than the deliberate fracturing of black family life. Generations of men were torn from their homes by the migrant labour system, forced to live in single-sex hostels while their wives and children remained hundreds of kilometres away.

The family, the moral and emotional foundation of every society, was the first casualty of the system that sought to control bodies by breaking bonds.

Half a century later, we find that this damage was not an episode; it became an inheritance. A study by the University of Cape Town, that this newspaper reported on last week, reveals that only one-in-three South African children live with both biological parents. It is a statistic that reads like a quiet national emergency. In 2022, just 33% of children shared a household with both parents, 44% lived only with their mothers, and 20% with neither.

These numbers are not just data points. They are the story of a country that has never truly repaired its most sacred institution. The chains of apartheid’s labour system may have been broken, but their consequences live on in the dispersal of families, in the silence of absent fathers, and in the slow erosion of belonging that has become a feature of childhood itself.

The study’s findings cut across race, geography, and class, yet they remain most acute among the poor. In the wealthiest households, 73% of children live with both parents; in the poorest fifth, that number falls to 17%. In the Eastern Cape, one-in-three children live with neither parent. The pattern is clear: poverty and family dislocation reinforce each other, leaving children without the security that nurtures ambition and discipline.

It is no coincidence that the collapse of fatherhood runs parallel to the collapse of educational performance, the rise in youth crime, and the epidemic of gender violence. A child who grows up without the daily presence of both parents grows up in a moral vacuum that no state agency or grant can fill. The home is the first school of order, affection, and responsibility. Without it, social decay becomes inevitable.

Government policy has often treated family breakdown as a private matter, something beyond the reach of state concern. That is a grave mistake. The strength of a society lies not in its slogans but in its homes. A policy framework that truly seeks national renewal must prioritise family stability as the foundation of human development; through housing design that supports family co-residence, economic incentives for parental unity, and programmes that restore the dignity of fatherhood.

South Africa has rebuilt courts, universities, and parliaments, but it has never rebuilt the home. That is the unfinished business of freedom.

To restore the South African family is to heal the nation’s deepest wound. Without that, all our progress stands on sand.

Pierneef was a South African landscape artist, generally considered to be one of the best of the old South African masters.