INSTITUTIONALIZED CHILD CARE IN URBAN SOUTH AFRICA

Christianity served as a driving factor behind imperialism and global expansion, mission
work focused on these “undeserving poor” populations of colonized territories began to
proliferate as well.
Present Day Associations
To this day, faith-based organizations maintain the majority of OVC institutions
across the developing world. Writes Jacobi (2009)–
“[Religious presentations] shaped ideas about orphans throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries and has obscured our view of actual orphans and
orphanages. In early modern times, orphanages successfully reared generations of
children to be future citizens and useful members of their communities.”
Outside of an exclusively religious sphere, the sympathy-inducing perception of
orphans has been perpetuated through popular culture. Popular literary works, perhaps
most notably Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, began to routinely cast orphans in a central,
protagonist role. Authors including Eliza Haywood and Tobias Smollett used the
orphan’s uncertain status to generate obstacles related to property and identity in order to
drive their stories’ plots. (Nixon, 2011) The orphans found in British novels is subject to
harsh treatment by their institutions, which were set in impoverished, urban locations.
Since the publication of these novels, the role of the orphan protagonist has
further developed as a common narrative device. The orphan hero began to appear across
a variety of mediums. Shortly after the Great Depression, the title character of the comic
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