Durban - The steep price of lobolo in KwaZulu-Natal may be why the province has the country’s smallest proportion of African women ever married, research by a local academic suggests.
University of KwaZulu-Natal professor and National Research Foundation (NRF) research chair Dori Posel probed why African women were less likely to marry than women of other races, and why, when African women did marry, they did so at a far older age.
That African women were far less likely than Indian or white women to be currently or previously married was a national trend.
In trying to explain it, Posel looked to apartheid legislation and the long periods for which migrant labourers were separated from their partners.
However, even with the end of all restrictions on migration and urbanisation, marriage rates continued to fall throughout the post-apartheid period, and the gap between races in marriage rates widened.
Other studies had suggested that, with growing levels of education and more employment opportunities for African women, attitudes to marriage had changed.
But in her analysis of the data, Posel found that high percentages of young African men and women wanted to marry.
“Highlighted in a number of mostly recent studies is that economic constraints may delay or inhibit the ability of African men and women to marry,” Posel explained.
There was a link between the economic status of African men and the likelihood of marriage.
“First, African men who are married earn considerably more, on average, than other African men who are identical in other respects such as age, education and where they live,” Posel explained.
While the availability of unmarried men relative to unmarried women was expected to influence marriage rates, Posel and fellow UKZN researcher Daniela Casale investigated this and still concluded that the likelihood that an African woman married was not so much influenced by the number of unmarried men, but more by the quality (economic status) of these men.
A similar relationship did not exist among white men and women.
Enter lobolo as a possible explanation.
Studies over the past two decades pointed to the rising costs of lobolo, which seemed to be particularly high in KZN, and had been associated with the “commercialisation” of the “highly valued and respected tradition”.
Posel and three other researchers interviewed Zulu men and women living in Durban to find out why, if people wanted to marry, the price of lobolo was not lowered.
“Our research suggests that lobolo confers significant social status on the men who pay it, and on the women for whom it is paid – and that the payment of lobolo is therefore intertwined with men and women’s sense of their self-worth,” Posel said.
“As one of the study participants said: ‘I am not just a R10 000 woman’, while another remarked: ‘If the husband had paid lobolo, he would know that he has worked hard to be with this woman, and he would think twice to mess it up’.”
Given the financial obstacles to marriage, Posel thought it curious that more unmarried couples did not chose to simply live together.
But her research also suggested that in the Zulu community cohabitation, even after the couple had a child, was unacceptable.
Posel argued that low marriage rates were important to understanding child poverty.
Low marriage rates were one of the main reasons why the majority of African children in South Africa were far more likely to live with their mothers than with both parents, or with their fathers.
“Children are more likely to live in poverty where it is a woman who is the primary income provider. Women earn less in the labour market,” Posel said.
The Mercury