It takes a village to raise a child: everyday experiences of living with extended family in Namibia

Abstract

The family is the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of children. The Namibian Constitution protects the family, without specifying what �family� means�which allows for legal concepts of family to evolve to fit social realities. The caring for children, most commonly by extended family or kinship carers is widespread and a practice acceptable in most Namibian cultures in the spirit of Ubuntu. This article foregrounds the importance of carer-child relationships in the care provided by extended family for children who do not live with their birth parents. It further investigates children�s everyday understandings of what family means to offer a multiplicity of experiences of child fosterage practice. These are presented from a range of carers and children within the fosterage context and considered within children�s unique and positive relationships within their families.

“Not Everyone Can Become a Rocket Scientist”: Decolonising Children’s Rights in Ethnic Minority Childhoods in Norway

“…However, with attention to the ubuntu worldview, there are different lenses of interpretation. The African proverb "it takes a village to raise a child" expresses the communality of childrearing in line with the philosophy of ubuntu (Leonard et al 2022). Considering all members of the family as family, including children's parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, siblings, and their families, Muchanyerei (2020) emphasises how concepts such as the "extended family" in the African context can be criticised as being a Western and divisive concept.…”

“…When Sadja's father left them in the care of their "auntie", he might have relied on family to care for his children, as is common and valued. The practice of fosterage, bringing up children one did not give birth to, is widespread on the African continent (Twum-Danso 2009), and such arrangements are preferred to institutional childcare arrangements (Leonard et al 2022). As expressed in Sadja's narrative, their situation was instead interpreted as unstable, discontinuous, and destructive.…”

Experiences of family carers of older people in marginalised communities in Namibia

“…In their introduction to an article on extended families in Namibia, Leonard et al (2022) state that the Namibian Constitution includes a principle to protect the family (our emphasis). The authors challenge the notion of a singular family, noting that in Namibia, family membership and living arrangements are diverse and fluid.…”

“…Namibia has the highest rates of child fostering in Africa, with up to 40 per cent of children not living with their biological parents (Brown et al, 2020). Fostering is negotiated by elders and is viewed as a culturally appropriate form of family life, in which resources and childcare responsibilities are shared (Brown, 2013;Leonard et al, 2022). While the cultural script of fostering is that all children in a house are treated equally (Brown, 2013), there are gaps in knowledge of the extent to which such distributed care for children fosters a setting of care for older adults.…”