Introduction
When we asked about child fostering in Chiawa, Zambia, the community development officer batted our questions away. It was, she said, ‘the African way’ of child rearing. This reflects the way in which adults generally present their care of other people's children as unremarkable, rooted in a sense of collective identity (‘they are all our children’) and a generalized web of reciprocity (‘you never know who is going to take care of the other one day’). This was, however, at marked odds with the ways in which some people characterized their times as a child in other households as involving mental and physical hardship, discriminatory treatment, and sometimes exploitation and/or deliberate cruelty from foster or step-parents. As one man described it: ‘They were using me as a ladder.’
This divergence of views within the local context mirrors broader contestation over the moral status of practices variously termed fostering, adoption, child circulation or child mobility, which are widespread across Africa.Footnote 1 For some they are a front for trafficking, a ‘worst form’ of child labour, while for others they represent an expression of kin-based solidarity, a means to strengthen or extend kinship ties, or to provide a step towards a better life (Boyden and Howard Reference Boyden and Howard2013). This diversity reflects differences across contexts and in the terms on which children's mobility occurs. But it also relates to the way the issue is framed, and whether this appeals primarily to more ‘local’ or ‘global’ points of reference. Globalized discourses of abuse and rights leave little room for nuance and ambiguity, and localized studies of fostering practice have tended to emphasize either its social functions or assert its embedding within the ‘moral economy’, implying settled and shared meanings.
This article investigates the movement of children between households as a site of moral complexity within ‘the local’. In particular, it explores how people navigate the tension between the common or collective interest conjured by the claim that ‘they are all our children’, and the divergent or contradictory interests suggested by both parental anxieties and childhood experiences of suffering. We propose the concept of moral navigation to convey the active negotiation of contingent relationships that people describe in their accounts of children's movement between households. While our primary focus in this article is on parents’ exercise of moral navigation, our interviews make clear that children also engage in it. Moral navigation, then, is a kinaesthetic, practical exercise that shapes selves, relationships and the moral universe, in and through the give and take of goods, labour and care.
The article draws on life history interviews with adults, augmented by a survey, conducted in two three-month rounds of field research in Chiawa, in 2010 and 2012. We present three main perspectives: recollections of times in childhood spent away from birth parents; birth parents’ reflections on having a child living with others; and adults’ accounts of taking in children who are not theirs by birth. Through these, we explore the variability of forms of children's movement between households; diversity in the terms on which people engage in these relationships; and how people navigate tensions between common and divergent interests.
The location of our research, Chiawa, is a game management areaFootnote 2 adjacent to the Lower Zambezi National Park, with a population of 11,000.Footnote 3 Children move households within Chiawa itself and between Chiawa and other districts, including the capital, Lusaka.Footnote 4 In almost all cases they move among kin. Sojourns range from short-term visits to effective adoption. Chiawa is an area of great contrasts, with luxury safari lodges and agri-business plantations alongside villages in which people use very basic implements to farm largely non-irrigated land that is vulnerable to drought, flooding (if the dam upstream opens its sluice gates) and predation from wild animals. One in five of the men we spoke to (but none of the women) worked in a safari lodge, mainly in domestic service on short-term and insecure contracts. A small proportion, mainly women, did very low-paid work on commercial farms, while others eked out a living doing petty business or odd jobs. During our research, local amenities were basic: a primary health centre; an agricultural extension office; a community development office; one community school, four primary and two high schools; and churches. Major markets, hospitals and government offices, and some jobs, lay across the river, accessible only by a ferry that ran from dawn till dusk.Footnote 5
Moral navigation
‘Moral navigation’ builds on Vigh's discussion of ‘social navigation’ – ‘the practice of moving within a moving environment’ (Vigh Reference Vigh2009: 425). ‘Social navigation’ denotes how people constantly modify their plans and activities, opening up in turn new contexts of possibility in response to the changeability of the social and political dynamics within which they seek to survive and strategize for the future. ‘Moral navigation’ extends this concept in two key ways. First, we argue that such variability and uncertainty are evident beyond the circumstances of conflict and migration covered by Vigh's research. Where people face material scarcity and limited state support, even in more socially stable contexts such as rural Zambia, people's welfare and well-being depend critically on their ability to manage relationships (White Reference White2017; Gough and McGregor Reference Gough and McGregor2007; Gough and Wood Reference Gough and Wood2004). As relationships are live, dynamic and subject to change, this similarly requires an active and responsive mode of being.
Second, Vigh (Reference Vigh2009: 423) describes social navigation in instrumental terms:
People are continually taking bearings with respect to changes in the socio-political environment and constantly seeking to make the best of emergent social possibilities in order to direct their lives in an advantageous direction.
Where the primary environment that must be negotiated consists of personal relationships, we suggest that this misses a critical dimension. Here, what matters is not simply social but moral navigation: the pursuit of what ought to be, demonstrating one's belonging and status within a moral community by fulfilling one's responsibilities, seeking to ensure that others also do what is right. Attending to the moral in this way does not assume, as Mattingly (Reference Mattingly2014: 11) points out, that people are good, but that ‘moral striving seems to matter a great deal to people in all sorts of societies’.Footnote 6 Seeing moral navigation as a part of everyday practice accords with recent moves in anthropology to emphasize ‘ordinary ethics’ (Lambek Reference Lambek2010), rather than envisaging a distinct moral domain, or focusing on the role of moral norms in enforcing the social order.
Moral navigation describes the activity involved in piloting the flow of interdependence that characterizes lives and livelihoods in contexts such as Chiawa, with its negotiation of competing moral projects and tensions between personal and collective interests. It rests on a relational understanding of the self as essentially forged in and through relationships. Such a view of the self is widely held in the ethnography of Southern Africa and beyond (e.g. Cliggett Reference Cliggett2005; Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2001; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2015; Shipton Reference Shipton2007). This is expressed in the celebrated South African saying ‘A person is a person through other people’ (Thornton Reference Thornton2017: 3) and means that ‘the well-being of one depends on the well-being of others’ (Jackson Reference Jackson2011: 73).
Shipton (Reference Shipton2007) uses the notion of ‘entrustment’ to describe the pattern of giving, receiving, lending and sharing goods, people – including children – and animals, which he observed among Luo people in Kenya. He emphasizes that entrustment and obligation ‘are not just practical matters but moral and sometimes aesthetic ones as well’ (ibid.: 12). When it comes to children, boundaries are fluid between material and non-material, allowing the same activities to be variously viewed as work, play or learning, and the same relationships to be characterized as exploitation or apprenticeship. This clearly resonates with global disputes regarding the moral status of fostering, noted above. Beyond exchange or reciprocity, entrustment reflects a broader obligation ‘to pass along: to continue a lineal or “vertical” flow’ (ibid.: 207) both among those now living and between those who have gone before and are yet to come.
In Chiawa, kinship provides the idioms of belonging, responsibility and entitlement that shape and animate this flow. Current kinship studies explore relatedness in terms of social practice (Carsten Reference Carsten2004). Rather than a given set of immutable ties, this renders kinship ‘a mobile, dynamic and creative practice of relationship’ (Notermans Reference Notermans2008: 357). The emphasis on ‘doing’ kinship (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2015: 134) resonates well with our stress on moral navigation.
While the statement ‘they are all our children’ conjures the unity of kin, in practice kin relations are complex and filled with tension. Crehan describes a ‘web’ of kinship among Kaonde people in north-western Zambia, in which:
Obligations that are at one and the same time vague and diffuse, yet wide-ranging and absolutely binding, cannot but open up a wide space both for resentment of expectations seen as unfulfilled and anxiety that indeed one has failed to fulfil one's obligations. (Crehan Reference Crehan1997: 201)
Such a context underlines the necessity of moral navigation, but also how fraught it may be.
Crehan describes how the moral universe sustained by kinship responsibilities that were at once malleable and compelling led to accusations of witchcraft when people perceived that ‘individuals substituted their own selfish greed for a proper concern for the well-being of their kin’ (Reference Crehan1997: 189). This echoes Geschiere's (Reference Geschiere2013) contention that fears and accusations of witchcraft among close family members in many African societies reflect ‘the dark side of kinship’. In his study of an Ngoma tradition in South Africa, Thornton (Reference Thornton2017) extends this concern with the dark side to ontologies of relational being. While relational being is often presented in positive terms, it also means that people exert a lasting influence on and are ‘inescapably exposed to each other’, an exposure that can weaken life and lead ultimately to sickness and death (ibid.: 3). Fear and suspicion of witchcraft were everyday topics of conversation in Chiawa. But the idioms of moral navigation and the moral universe it construed were themselves subject to competing claims. ‘Low’ narratives of evil charms, malevolent powers and treacherous deceit did battle with ‘high’ narratives of faith in God's provision and reliance on God's will, often within the same person's discourse, and sometimes in the same conversation.
Moral navigation, then, is directed towards one's own self, one's relations with others, and the wider universe that guides the ethics of behaviour. In this article, our concern with the movement of children between households means that we concentrate mainly on interpersonal relations. While we touch on the other dimensions, we do not discuss them in any depth. Our primary focus concerns the negotiation of personal and collective interests. Conventionally, as in the opposition between egoism and altruism, these are seen as contradictory. Alternatively, some constructions of relational selves see the personal interest as simply being identified with or submerged within the collective: the individual effectively disappears (Triandis Reference Triandis1999). In Chiawa, however, as we describe more fully later in the article, the pursuit of personal interest is seen as carrying the seeds of contradiction but is regarded as proper when it contributes to the common good. Moral navigation therefore aims to curb tendencies towards contradiction and ensure that personal benefit is pursued in ways that converge with broader collective interests. This applies to monitoring one's own actions and attempting to shape the ways in which these may be interpreted by others. It also involves endeavouring to shape the behaviour of the people with whom one interacts.
Moral navigation and child fostering in Africa
Ethnographic accounts of fostering differ according to geographical location, the circumstances of families, and whether birth parents, foster parents or children themselves are the main informants. Nonetheless, two general observations can be made from the African literature. The first is a historical tendency for some forms of mobility to decline, as households become increasingly nuclear and growing emphasis on schooling means that urban parents in particular are unwilling to have their children spend extensive time with relatives in the village (Alber Reference Alber2004; Archambault Reference Archambault2010). This is countered, however, by a second, contradictory tendency: the effect of HIV/AIDS, which has left large numbers of orphaned children to be accommodated – if possible – in the houses of kin (Ansell and van Blerk Reference Ansell and van Blerk2004; Bawa Yamba Reference Bawa Yamba2005).
Trends in the study of child fostering reflect developments in research about kinship more broadly. Early work on fostering in British social anthropology concentrated on its effect on child development and social reproduction (Goody Reference Goody1982), while the French structural approach stressed its role in making alliances between households (Alber Reference Alber2018). As introduced above, more recent studies have emphasized the flexibility of relatedness and the ‘doing’ of kinship. The circulation of children provides an ideal focus for this in many ways, as a visible practice through which relations among kin are cemented and augmented. Reece (Reference Reece2015) provides a valuable caution, however: in Botswana, the circulation of children can also produce relational distance and differentiation.
Studies since 2000 have placed increasing emphasis on the affective side of fostering. Brown (Reference Brown2011) describes how fostering involves suffering for both children and their mothers, and the cultural hope that such hardship will strengthen a child's resilience. Verhoef (Reference Verhoef2005) identifies three models of relations between foster and birth parents, involving very different constellations of force and consent, pain and happiness, solidarity and contradiction. Echoing the introduction to this article, Notermans (Reference Notermans2008) foregrounds children's stories of emotional hardship against the generally positive representation of fostering as strengthening kin alliances.
There is surprisingly little explicit consideration of the moral dimensions of child fostering. Instead, these remain implicit – concealed, for example, in frequent mentioning of children being taken from poorer kin in order to relieve them of the costs of childcare or being sent to help out elderly grandparents, or in drawing attention to the suffering of children and families, particularly in the context of HIV/AIDS. Exceptions include Bledsoe (Reference Bledsoe1990a), who states that Mende people in Sierra Leone see children's hardship in being fostered as an important moral education, building fortitude. Alber (Reference Alber2018) notes that, in Benin, people talk in normative terms when asked why fostering has occurred, but in socio-economic terms when asked about a particular child. Hunleth makes the link to morality explicit in summarizing Hansen's (Reference Hansen and Fetter1990) archival research in Zambia, which showed that, while people may not always have treated children well:
the ideal of kin generosity in sharing children across households and providing for the children of kin was a principle through which people assessed the strength of their relationships, their own virtue, and the virtue of their kin. (Hunleth Reference Hunleth2017: 54–5)
Where morality emerges as a central focus, this typically involves a negotiation – or clash – between local and global norms. Renne (Reference Renne2005), for example, describes how foster parents can find themselves accused of enslavement, as encounters in Nigeria with colonial and development discourses have led to ‘reassessments of moral parenthood’ (ibid.: 77). Leinaweaver (Reference Leinaweaver2008) describes how child circulation is a critical livelihood strategy among the Ayacucho in Andean Peru, its emotional costs accepted as a moral sacrifice by parents and children hoping for a better future. The practice, however, is condemned by the state and non-governmental organizations and regarded as one of the ethnic markers of ‘poor Indians’.
The relative scarcity of explicit attention to the moral dimensions of child fostering may be in part because these are taken for granted. The location of fostering within the ‘domestic’ context of family and kinship has historically placed it within an assumptively moral sphere, ruled by norms of altruism or extended reciprocity rather than self-interest or direct exchange. Analysis has therefore sought to de-naturalize some of these associations. Bledsoe (Reference Bledsoe and Penn Handwerker1990b) provides an influential early example, locating fosterage within a political economy of power and resources. Such an approach can dissolve moral dimensions of relationships into a front for ‘real’ material or political interests (Robbins Reference Robbins2013). However, seeing kinship as a creative social practice, a matter not of systemic functions or automatic entitlements but of ‘idioms for making demands or asserting claims’ (Bledsoe Reference Bledsoe and Penn Handwerker1990b: 82), opens the possibility of exploring the distinctive forms those claims can take. While kinship may not provide a natural ‘moral community’ of automatic inclusion, it undoubtedly acts as a vector for some of the most profound moral connections (Sahlins Reference Sahlins2013). The movement of children activates, extends, cements, demarcates and potentially threatens the networks within which people can make the privileged claims that invoke the shared identity and givenness of ‘family’ relations. Such a sense of essential connection is a critical ground of moral force.
Methods
The issue of children's movement between households emerged within a broader mixed-methods study of poverty and well-being. The full dataset comprises surveys with an average of 390 people in each round of fieldwork, plus forty-six case study life histories. Respondents were adult household heads, male and female, with husbands and wives interviewed separately. Approximately 25 per cent were divorced or widowed women heading households, so around 60 per cent of both surveys and case studies were with women. The field research was led by Shreya Jha, supported by a team of three local peer researchers. They were joined by a research assistant recruited in 2010 from the UK, and in 2012 from Lusaka. Ethics clearance was given by the University of Bath (UK) and the University of Zambia.
While some statistics are presented from the 2012 survey, this article draws mainly on the case studies. Their sampling was purposive, using the survey to identify respondents whose experience spoke most clearly to our core research questions, while retaining a balance of demographic and other characteristics. Experience of children's mobility was one of our sampling criteria. The case studies were undertaken through life history interviews. These took a conversational style, simply inviting interviewees to recount their own stories, as we wished to understand their perspectives in as near to their own terms as possible. Some were conducted in a single sitting of an hour or two, but many were spread across several sessions, yielding many hours of recordings. Interviews were either in English or translated simultaneously and transcribed verbatim. Informed consent was gained at the outset of each session and reconfirmed verbally at regular intervals during extended interviews. All names have been changed, except for those of the research team.
Our primary analytical approach was narrative analysis, which enabled us to locate particular experiences within the broader context of individuals’ lives and to trace the narrative thread of interviews and their shifts in energy, emphasis and representation (Riessman Reference Riessman1993). The interviews were coded by theme. These were both substantive (e.g. childhood experience of parental death or marital breakdown) and concerning narrative logic (e.g. the tendency to respond to a question about emotion with a reference to something material).
There are two clear limitations to this methodology. The first is the absence of interviews with children, since we had not set out to study children's mobility. The second is our dependence on interviews. This prevented us from observing directly how well what people said matched their actual practice, or the daily interaction between children and those parenting them. Our conversational style, however, did allow us to probe areas of ambivalence and to notice where people seemed hesitant to express particular views. For example, before recounting difficult experiences in others’ households as a child, people would often seek reassurance that it was acceptable to voice criticisms of others. Querying discrepant accounts given by the same person on different occasions also provided insight into some slippage between normative accounts and practical experience.
Children's movement between households in Chiawa
In Chiawa most people are of Goba ethnicity, although Goba constitute only 0.2 per cent of the Zambian population as a whole. Kinship among Goba people is based on dual descent and marriage involves payment of bridewealth (see also Dover Reference Dover2001). In practice, the ways in which marriages take place vary considerably, with payments and formal ceremonies sometimes happening only many years after people have begun living together, if at all. Fathers are required to pay to ‘redeem’ their children, to ‘buy’ them from the matrilineal for the patrilineal descent group. When financial and ceremonial formalities are not completed, this can set up serious ambiguities of belonging, both for children and for women, especially if the marriage ends. Gender and marital status were strong predictors of economic and social marginality, with women heading households alone significantly worse off than others.
According to our 2012 survey, 29 per cent of under-nineteen-year-olds living in the (229) households were not children of the household head. Of these, 45 per cent were grandchildren of the household head, and 28 per cent were nieces and nephews. There were slightly more females than males living with grandparents, at a ratio of 7:5. As observed elsewhere, these were predominantly younger children, generally aged six and under. Nephews and nieces tended to be older, with prevalence highest among fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds. There were twice as many nephews as nieces. It is common for households to both give and receive children. Forty per cent of households recorded at least one member who was currently not living at home. Fifty-three per cent of non-resident members were children of the household head, and 46 per cent were students.Footnote 7
There are three main ways in which children move between households in Chiawa. In the first, children move to help kin or improve their chances of success in life. This is the primary form discussed in the literature (see, for example, Serra Reference Serra2009). The main purposes are to access education, to secure basic welfare, and/or to provide labour or care to the receiving household. Movements may range from a short holiday to many years’ stay. In Chiawa, unlike the situation in Benin noted by Alber (Reference Alber2018), there is no requirement that a girl should go to a female relative or a boy to a male, although a girl would not stay with an unmarried man, unless he were her own brother.
The second mode follows the ‘naming’ of a new parent after the child's birth parent has died. This is a traditional way of consolidating the kin group and ensuring care for surviving dependants. If a man has died, the one named would typically be his younger brother, and for a woman her younger sister, provided that they are themselves social adults. The high prevalence of HIV/AIDS means that care has needed to be found for large numbers of children, and the middle generation of families can be critically thinned. Cousins of the dead may now also be named, to keep children in touch with a broader range of kin, as well as to widen the pool of potential guardians. Grandparents may also take in orphans, to lessen the strain on the intermediate generation.
Third, children need to make their place in a new household when one of their birth parents remarries following the other's death or marriage breakdown, or a man takes a second or third wife. While this is not generally discussed as part of the same phenomenon, from a child's perspective it has many similar characteristics: one's emotional place and practical entitlements and responsibilities have to be significantly renegotiated in a new household with different relational dynamics. In our survey, 21 per cent of married men recorded an earlier divorce, and 5 per cent widowhood, with similar figures for married women. However, comparisons with qualitative interviews suggest that these figures overestimate marital stability, with previous relationships and polygamous marriages significantly under-reported (see also Dover Reference Dover2001).
Women expressed contradictory views regarding children and remarriage. Several said that they had not remarried for fear that a new husband would not support their children. Some women had left their children with natal kin when they remarried. Other women stated the need for someone to look after their children as the reason for remarriage. People emphasized separation from mothers, rather than fathers, as the key factor affecting quality of care. Anxiety and regret that a new spouse was not caring appropriately for stepchildren were also expressed by remarried men.
The community development officer's assertion of ‘the African way’ of child rearing reflects the dominant moral framing of children's movement in Chiawa. There is no special term in Goba: people simply state that their child is living with a relative or friend. In the interstices there is some admission that others’ children are not viewed quite as one's own. For example, some say that they hesitate to discipline others’ children, because they are more likely to react badly. The Chiawa narratives suggest that it is possible to move beyond either accepting the dominant view at face value or rejecting it as a mask for underlying contradictions. Like Shipton's (Reference Shipton2007) idea of ‘passing along’, in Chiawa people believe that helping others now brings the potential of some return later, as one plays one's part in the broader web of (generalized) reciprocity. In place of either a simple unity or contradictory interests, moral navigation is therefore required to ensure convergence, in which personal benefit is realized in and through providing for others. The value of generalized belonging is also evident in the norm that birth and foster children should enjoy equal entitlements. Moral maturity is seen to be expressed in the ability to accept and adjust to the way things are.
Irene exemplifies this pattern. Aged forty, she lived with four birth children aged fourteen to six, plus a niece and nephew. She also had two grown-up sons and two married nieces, whom she had brought up after their mother died. Talking of the older cohort, she described how she wanted ‘to bring unity within the children’, ordering them simply by age, not wanting them to think about who had been born to whom. Her explanation of why she took in the younger children exemplifies the notion of convergent interests, combining compassion with the hope for some reciprocal return:
I think I look at two things … one, because they don't have any person to take care of them … and two, maybe one day they are going to keep my children or maybe they will keep me as well.Footnote 8
Living in other people's households
The life histories show marked change and rupture in childhood. This is both geographical – most people lived as children in several different locations – and relational, as parents died, divorced or remarried and children spent time in the homes of kin and/or as stepchildren. Of the forty-six case studies, eighteen recounted at least one relocation following the divorce or death of a parent. Interestingly, there is no discernible pattern by age, suggesting that, while HIV/AIDS has increased the chance of losing a parent in childhood, this is by no means a new phenomenon. However, there is a clear gender effect. While for girls mobility tended to reflect the happenchance of life, for boys it was also related to schooling. This reflects the greater value given to boys’ education in the previous generation. Most of the mobility was adult-led, but in some cases children themselves took the initiative (see also Notermans Reference Notermans2008; Reece Reference Reece2015). Examples included running away to live with an aunt to avoid going to school, and staging a ‘strike’, or refusing to eat, go to school or work on the farm, to secure a transfer from an intolerable situation. These suggest that children themselves engage in moral navigation.
It is difficult to gauge the quality of care from these accounts. Of the twenty-one case study interviewees who spent time away from home in childhood, most did not comment on the quality of care, with only seven explicitly mentioning maltreatment. The real incidence of suffering is likely to be higher, as social norms value harmony and militate against voicing such complaints. Even those who described some carers as unkind or exploitative, however, clearly distinguished these from others who treated them well. The fact of moving households does not in itself appear problematic. It should also be noted that some relationships with birth parents were at best highly ambivalent, especially those with fathers who had married again.
A marked feature of childhood stories is for the main villains to be the spouses of blood relatives (including stepmothers), with the immediate kinsperson presented as kind but ineffectual and dominated by (usually) his spouse. This pattern of blaming spouses of kin is interpreted by Notermans (Reference Notermans2008) as evidence that foster parents discriminate not between their own and foster children, but between children of their own and their spouse's lineage. We are less sure whether this reflects real differences in behaviour or conventions about where blame may be laid.
A further characteristic of these accounts is that, even in the worst cases, there was an acknowledgement of ongoing relationship. Several expressed gratitude to carers who had enabled them to develop, even in some cases where they had been ill-treated. People might admit that they had not seen the uncle or aunt for a long time, but this was always expressed with regret. Again, this might reflect social conventions rather than genuine sentiment, but it nonetheless reinforces the strength of the moral idiom of kin-based relationality.
The story of Thomas illustrates both the shifting nature of relationships and the moral character of the navigation involved. Thomas's father was the youngest of five brothers, the others of whom were all in salaried employment. The older brothers convinced Thomas's father to leave school and look after their parents and the farm, promising that, in return, they would ensure that his children were educated well. Things did not go to plan, however, and ultimately Thomas was the only one to receive the promised support. Living with his paternal uncle some 250 kilometres from home from age nine to eighteen enabled him to complete his schooling. But Thomas was also seriously mistreated by his uncle's wife, made to work long hours in her house and business, restricted from playing with other children, underfed and constantly scolded.
When Thomas returned home he assumed responsibility for his mother and six younger siblings, whom his father, a heavy drinker, had not managed to send to school. His second brother and their eldest sister's husband also helped out. While appreciating this support, Thomas described his state of mind in dark terms:
This is the thing that motivates my life the most … anger and fear. Anger of the fact that my father followed what his brothers told him and here we are now suffering … and also fear of being thought a failure is also motivating me.Footnote 9
While Thomas sought to assert a virtuous self, showing generosity towards others, he was dogged by a fear of moral failure – that he, like his father, would drink away his children's chances in life. In part this reflects a more general tension between ethical norms to extend provision and the precarity of local livelihoods. But it was also deeply personal, his attempt to steer a virtuous course made fraught by the shipwreck of others’ moral projects, leading to a profoundly troubled sense of self.
The birth parent
The strength of norms governing kin-based responsibilities for children is such that adults’ accounts of their care of non-birth children are rather formulaic, making it difficult to explore the space between norm and practice. The nearest foster parents came to admitting a less than happy relationship was when they blamed the children for bad behaviour. The narratives of parents whose children were being looked after by others present a far fuller account of the dynamics of fostering relationships, revealing considerable ambivalence and complexity. Among the forty-six case studies, twelve had at least one of their children living with other kin. In this section we consider four contrasting cases that speak to our second issue regarding the terms on which people engage in moral navigation.
‘A child is like a football … you have to pass to friends in order to succeed’Footnote 10
This was the rationale Samuel gave for children's movement. Far from wealthy, Samuel was nonetheless someone of consequence in the community. As he lived some distance from the high school, several of his children lived with others. Having suffered himself as a child separated from his mother, he kept in close touch. The exception was one daughter whom he had sent further away, in part to help an elderly cousin, but more to disrupt an affair that he feared would result in his daughter getting married too early. Samuel constantly monitored how the children were doing, nurtured the relationship with their caregivers, and would seek to move them elsewhere if they were not doing well. It was, however, a delicate balance. Since his elderly cousin had taken his daughter in, even Samuel sending money for expenses could be viewed as criticism, implying that she was not being adequately provided for. Moral navigation is an art of compromise. Sometimes when his children raised problems, Samuel said, he needed to counsel them to endure and obey their new parents, rather than forfeit their education by returning home:
Sometimes you pretend all is well. Sometimes you have to pretend that certain situations are just OK when they are not.
This indicates how tensions can exist between moral projects, and how contexts involve tangible constraints. Samuel's duty to relieve his children's hardship was at odds with his responsibility to ensure that they were educated well. The limited options meant that a less than desirable situation had to be endured, but this also afforded the children moral training in learning to accept and adapt to what could not be changed.
Deborah's pattern of fostering was rather similar. Deborah was thirty-nine, a widow, with a strong narrative of self-assertion and self-reliance. All three of her children were in school. Deborah nursed her husband for eleven years until his death, and then discovered she was HIV-positive herself. When we talked with her she was on antiretroviral therapy. Where for Thomas the challenge of providing appropriately for children evoked self-doubt, for Deborah it elicited moral courage:
I think what gives more faith in myself is the way that I look at life, the way I do things especially … the most important thing is I value the life of my children … because I look at myself as one [person]. If I don't do it, if I don't have faith in what I am doing, I don't [have] faith in myself … how am I going to support my children? Because for now although I am a single woman my children are happy. I am able to find the few things that they need at school.Footnote 11
Deborah became the main earner during her husband's illness and over the years had pursued many different enterprises. Her self-reliance did not mean complete independence, but engaging in relationships to achieve her goals. All three children were living with kin, but on quite different terms. Her son was with her late husband's brother in Lusaka. This was Deborah's initiative and she bore all expenses. She kept in close touch, sending anything he needed through a friendly bus driver. Her elder daughter was with Deborah's mother. She was not doing well at school and Deborah hoped to bring her home. Her younger daughter was with Deborah's brother in the nearest large town. Deborah resisted this at first but then accepted it; she saw her daughter frequently and was satisfied that she was well looked after.
The narratives of Samuel and Deborah show the capable exercise of moral navigation, discharging the responsibilities of parenthood through strong, deliberative action in a relational context. A degree of entrepreneurial flair has enabled both to achieve economic viability. This was combined with high levels of social dexterity, which they applied to identify opportunities and navigate effectively the relationships these involved, not only tending links with foster parents, but also constantly reinscribing relations with birth children. The next two cases show how different relations can be when entered from a position of weakness.
‘They will forget I am their mother’
Gloria was in her early forties and recently married to her third husband. Of her three children, only one was still with her. Her story of how this occurred constitutes an extreme end of the spectrum of a general ambivalence about agency. In parents’ narratives, it was common for children just to be ‘taken’ by aunts or uncles. Most frequently, children simply did not return home after a visit to kin (see also Verhoef Reference Verhoef2005). Sometimes staying on after a visit appears as the child's agency, but it can sound more like kidnap, especially where children pass between parents after marriage breakdown.
Gloria left her first husband because of his jealousy and violence. She later agreed that the two children she had with him should visit his brothers and their paternal grandmother. However, once the children were there it seems that they were held hostage, perhaps in an attempt to get Gloria to return to the marriage. She visited three years in a row. After two years of being prevented from seeing the children, on the third she threatened legal action so was finally told that while her son was staying with an aunt, her daughter had been put in an orphanage.
The orphanage authorities accepted that Gloria was the girl's mother but counselled her to leave her daughter with them to complete her schooling. Gloria thus faced a tension between competing ethical projects: her responsibility to see her child educated was at odds with her wish to keep her close and her fear that the core connection between them might be lost. Her resolution of this dilemma was both practical and moral. On the one hand, Gloria explained that, although it hurt that her daughter was in an orphanage, at least she knew that she was keeping well. On the other, Gloria emphasized how her daughter had promised ‘I will come back to you, I know you are my mum,’Footnote 12 giving reassurance that the bond between them was still strong.
Faith's situation was the most vulnerable of the four, and her view of her child's mobility the most ambivalent. It was after her husband's funeral in 2000 that his niece took Faith's son – then aged nine – to live with her. Faith was at first relieved: she didn't know how she would support her children and the niece had a prosperous business. Faith was glad that her eldest son was getting an education and admitted that he might not have done if he had stayed with her. His close connections with the wealthier relatives also meant that he could seek help from them in times of trouble. Among her five children, he was the only one who she was confident would do well. Faith hoped that he would get a good job and be in a position one day to change all of their lives. But she also feared that she would lose him, that he would take the other family as his own.
A strong sense of moral ambivalence ran through all of Faith's interviews. She was both grateful to her husband's niece and also suspicious and fearful. For example, she expressed the common concern that her son would not feel able to ask his foster mother for what he needed. This apparent focus on the material points at least as strongly to the love and closeness implied by children's requests and adults’ accession to them (see also Coe Reference Coe2011). It thus emphasizes the moral uniqueness of mother–child relations, taking precedence over material differences in the capacity to provide for children's needs.
In an earlier conversation, Faith suggested that she felt in her niece's debt. When queried about this, however, she took a different line:
What will happen is that they would not like my son to come to me. They would prefer for him to be closer to them because then when he is employed he will support them. That will somehow pay them back for having supported his education.Footnote 13
When questioned on this inconsistency, Faith repeated the assertion that in all cases families who foster children have some expectation of return. Her tone suggested clearly that she saw this as a case of personal interests that were contradictory, rather than convergent, as the foster family's gain would be the birth family's loss.
The terrain that these parents negotiate is at once practical – how to ensure the best care for their children – and deeply moral, cross-cut by the potential conflict between contradictory and convergent interests. A sense of ethical tension thus pervades all the narratives. However, there is a marked difference between the relative social and economic strength of Samuel and Deborah and the vulnerability of Gloria and Faith, and this clearly structures their scope for navigating their children's mobility. Personal and geographical closeness are also significant. Faith's fear of losing her son reflected his location in Lusaka, with kin of her husband rather than her own. Gloria seemed relatively assured, perhaps because the orphanage presented no direct rival to her identity as mother. Deborah was the happiest, both because she regularly saw her younger daughter, and because she was very close to the brother with whom her daughter stays.
The extent to which people are able to exercise moral navigation also reflects their status relative to that of the household in which their child stays. Samuel was the most explicit about his own moral action. In part this reflected his characteristic presentation of self, but it was also because the households where his children stayed were of similar, or lower, social and economic status to his own. Faith was both the most socially marginal and the one whose child was in a household most different to her own. Her ability to exercise moral navigation was thus severely limited. Instead, she was the most explicit in fearing the breakdown of a moral relationship, that the foster family would use her son simply for their own advancement.
Taking in a child
The negotiation of social obligation and moral sentiments in the context of limited material resources is the dominant theme in people's description of how they came to care for children who are not their own by birth. Eighteen of the forty-six case studies were caring for children of their siblings, offspring or cousins. The majority of reasons for taking in children were compassionate – their parents had died or were not in a position to look after them due to poverty, sickness or lifestyle. The same household might comprise both orphans and non-orphans. It is hard to draw the strict divisions found in some literature between ‘crisis’ and ‘non-crisis’ or orphan and non-orphan fostering, except that there seemed to be a tendency for non-orphan children to move from village to town or from a more remote to a better-served village (see also Alber Reference Alber2004). This may reflect the hopes for advancement that drive non-orphan fostering, while with orphans the concern is for more immediate welfare. Two children were sent by their parents to look after grandparents.
As introduced above, the practice of ‘naming’ involves elders nominating someone at the funeral to take on the name and thus the children of the person who has died. Neither the person named nor the children are consulted, unless the children are grown up. In deciding whom to name, the main considerations are the personal qualities and moral character of the person, not their material circumstances. The critical thing is that the person be seen to have a heart for others. Whatever one's financial interest and capacity, let alone one's desire, one's moral and social status within the kin group would be compromised by a refusal. Like others who have been given a name, Joseph, our lead peer researcher, described how he tried to resist it, but the elders simply insisted. The twists and turns in his description convey how trapped he felt and the sanctions against expressing this, and the difficulty of navigating that sense of moral balance:
It is quite tricky in the sense that support becomes difficult even if you have one child you are taking care of, especially looking at the economic situation especially here in Chiawa. And then eventually you are not prepared, you are given these children so somehow it becomes difficult although we say it is easy. It is quite difficult to say it is difficult because you feel people might say that you don't want to look after the children, so even though the difficulty is there you say it's OK because you want to let people see that you want to keep the children, but inwardly you feel that you can't look after the children.Footnote 14
This statement arose when Joseph was acting as interpreter for Jonnathan, the research assistant from Lusaka. The person being interviewed was Pamela, a divorced woman who lived with her younger sister and elderly mother, plus three children of her own, a niece who had come to help with her mother, and a nephew whose mother had died. At the time of the interview (2012) the youngest child was twelve, the oldest twenty-one, and all but the oldest were in school. Jonnathan repeatedly tried to get Pamela to assess the ‘extra’ children in cost–benefit terms. Were they a burden? Did they help with work? Were girls or boys more useful? Pamela, however, persistently resisted: ‘You are just looking after your relative's child so you don't think much about money. You just think that things will sort themselves.’ Joseph then stepped out of the role of interpreter and became informant to give Jonnathan something of what he was looking for. This interchange indicates the strength of the norms of moral acceptance – Pamela admitted to protesting against being named but gave as her only reason that she did not like these old traditions. Joseph, as a much more assured social actor both in the community and in the research project, was ready and able to give a more complex and nuanced account.
Conclusion
This article has explored the movement of children between households as a site of moral navigation. This draws attention to the character of relationships as mobile, live, evolving entities that need to be negotiated responsively in real time. It highlights how this cultivation of relationships is not simply instrumental but moral, deeply articulated with people's sense of what is right and their place in a broader moral order. It locates the negotiation of morality and ethics in the materiality of exchanging goods, labour and care, which in turn shapes selves, relationships and the moral universe. In conclusion, we reflect on the shape of moral navigation in the context of children's movement between households in Chiawa: the variability of relations involved; diversity in the terms on which moral navigation occurs; and how people understand personal interest and its relation to the collective good.
Moral navigation describes the kinaesthetic, practical activity involved in cultivating relationships in contexts where lives and livelihoods depend on complex webs of interdependence. It is not limited to the movement of children between households. However, in Chiawa at least, the movement of children provides a particularly intense focus for it. The desire to be a good parent is central to ethical dimensions of subjectivity and personal aspirations to live a good life. Children constitute dense signifiers of well-being, as sources of comfort and inspiration to keep going in the face of adversity, the focus for personal ambitions and satisfaction, and shaping perceptions of self-worth. This indicates the importance of children themselves, but also invests them with a symbolic power that may be used for other purposes. In particular, in a context where people hesitate to voice directly individual desires, references to children can provide a vital idiom for speaking of the self.
The discursive centrality of children notwithstanding, their movement between households is not without risk. Schooling may not be provided, and/or unreasonable amounts of labour may be demanded. Foster children may experience neglect or even deliberate cruelty, in an apparent universal of human relating, that tensions and frustrations are transmitted into violence on subordinate bodies. People describe how they felt emotionally abandoned in childhood, believing that birth parents could not love them, as they didn't come to save them from intolerable treatment. Birth parents suffer the loss of their children's companionship and worry about their children's welfare, and mothers talk of the fear that children ‘will forget I am their mum’. Even if the move proves to be an economic success, there is a risk of relational failure if the child comes to attach to a different family than that of his or her birth.
Accounts of children's movement between households are patterned by lineage and contrasts between paternal and maternal kin, although social practice may not accord with these cultural templates. Intertwined with this, the interviews show two key principles at work: proximity and power. Close relations between foster and birth parents – whether through kinship, geography, cathexis or a combination of these – make navigating the relationships much more straightforward. It is as if the proximity tethers the relationship, reducing the scale of variability, both because underlying bonds are stronger and because people are better able to tend them, as they can stay in closer touch. Gender, plus marital, social and economic status, are vectors of power that significantly affect the terms and character of interdependence and interaction, cutting across normative representations of kin-based unity and common interest.
Processes of moral navigation are related, but not reducible, to these underlying structures, as people constantly respond to shifting personal and social relationships, adjusting their own gait as required. Where geographic, lineage and economic distance are compounded, the scope for a birth parent to exercise moral navigation is very limited, resulting in a deep sense of ambivalence and vulnerability. This contrasts with those who are better placed and can offset geographic and relational distance by maintaining frequent contact and support. While we have stressed relational fluidity, therefore, this needs to be balanced with an appreciation that, for many people in many contexts, relational rigidities seem more apparent. The degree of flexibility enjoyed in relationships may itself be an expression of social power.
The shared responsibility invoked by the claim ‘they are all our children’ reflects a more general idiom of common belonging and identity among kin that is rooted in a relational construction of the self. This generates an understanding of personal interests that transcends the opposition commonly drawn between self and other, egoism and altruism. Instead, the tension that must be navigated lies in the way in which personal interests are pursued: whether at the cost of others’ well-being, or enabling a mutual or collective advantage. This echoes Thornton's (Reference Thornton2017) discussion of the moral ambivalence of the ‘exposed being’ associated with relational selves. The potential for contradiction, for personal interests to be expressed in ways that result in others’ harm, is always present. At its darkest, this leads to accusations of witchcraft, and the commonly expressed fear that: ‘You never know what is in people's hearts.’ However, personal interests are not in themselves negative. Rather, the ideal is that they are expressed in ways that are convergent with the well-being of others within a broad-based cycle of reciprocity, as Shipton (Reference Shipton2007) puts it, continuing the flow. The pursuit of personal interest is thus understood as proper, rightful or virtuous when it is realized through and feeds back into engagement in the loose-weave give and take of kinship exchange.
The statement ‘they were using me as a ladder’ provides an example of this ambivalence in the moral character of personal interests, which may be expressed in contradictory or solidary ways. The man who said it was reflecting on his recognition as a child that each year his foster family had invested in cattle on the back of his labour, while he saw no benefit. For him, this constituted a violation of the moral rules that ought to have obtained, the nurturing that a child ought to be able to expect in the house of kin. It therefore affirms the same moral universe as ‘they are all our children’, but one in which what ought to be does not govern what is, and a critical distinction arises between ‘one's own’ and ‘other’ children. The temptation to favour ‘one's own’ children, which is widely recognized, is a key form in which the personal interest has the tendency to detract from the collective good.
Other narratives suggest a different set of tensions, in which the moral desire to take in orphaned children does battle with other ethical commitments to care for one's existing children, which precarious livelihoods make it difficult to fulfil. Such predicaments provide opportunities for cultivating virtue, both in oneself and in training children to accept hardship and endure. Rather than being set or given, moral navigation constitutes a kinaesthetic, practical exercise, involving the skilful navigation of tensions between interests that carry the potential both for convergence and for contradiction, both within and beyond the self.
Having considered the micro-dynamics of fostering relations, it is worth zooming out for a moment, to consider children's movement in Chiawa as a single network or ecosystem. This reveals scarcity as a primary engine propelling current practice, visible through all the particular interactions of the individuals involved. Children move between households in the hope of gaining better access to resources. This may be geographic, as there is no appropriate school nearby, but it is generally (also) economic. As Reece (Reference Reece2015) warns, it would be a mistake to reduce the circulation of children simply to the political economy context, but cultural practices also respond to present contingencies. Perhaps it is at this level that claims of ‘the African way’ come into their own, in enabling us to see child circulation in Chiawa as a collective attempt to manage high dependency ratios, in part due to HIV/AIDS, and to ensure that as many children as possible do as well as they can, in a situation of generalized precarity.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to Joseph Kajiwa, Stephen Kalio, Kelvin Matesamwa, Jonnathan Mtonga, Goodson Phiri and Susanna Siddiqui for research assistance. Also to Daniel Wroe, Julie-Soleil Archambault and to the three Africa reviewers for very helpful comments. The research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council/Department for International Development Joint Scheme for Research on International Development (Poverty Alleviation) grant number RES-167-25-0507 ES/H033769/1 and by British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship SF150070.
