ABSTRACT
“I am a ‘witch doctor’,” 70-year-old Khume told me, sitting outside his thatched sleeping-hut in a poor, remote village in South Africa. By using the blunt English term ‘witch doctor,’ Khume emphasized his commitment to traditional culture, which he also displayed by vehemently opposing trousers for women, having three wives, and sleeping in a thatched hut across his compound from the cattle kraal. But Khume also drove a pickup truck, owned a bar that he protected with a rifle as well as witchcraft, and had for 27 years worked 400 kilometers (250 miles) away from the village at Johannesburg’s International Airport. The fathering of Khume and two of his sons illustrates four crucial features of fathering in Southern Africa: physical separation of employment and family, economic inequality and uncertainty, vulnerability of small families, and the importance of family connections outside the nuclear family.
