Eating From One Pot

As poverty and unemployment deepen in contemporary South Africa, the burning question becomes, how do the poor survive? This book provides a compelling answer. Based on intensive fieldwork, it shows how many African households are on the brink of collapse. That they keep going at all can largely be attributed to the struggles of older women against poverty. They are the fulcrum on which household survival turns.
Eating from One Pot describes how households in two different areas in KwaZulu-Natal are sites of both stability and conflict. As one of the interviewees put it: “We eat from one pot and should always help each other.” Yet the stability of family networks is becoming fragile because of the enormous burden placed on them by unemployment and unequal power relations.

Publisher: Wits University Press
Year of Publication: 2011