INSTITUTIONALIZED CHILD CARE IN URBAN SOUTH AFRICA

Most children at the center did not move around as much as Xolani, but the list of
places where he has lived reflected the diversity of the places where the children come
from. When I asked many of the children where they were born, I received a wide variety
of answers. Many were originally from townships around the Greater Johannesburg Area.
Others said they were from completely different regions of South Africa, commonly
mentioning the provinces of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
During a more playful interaction with the teenagers, in which I traded Spanish
vocabulary for Zulu words, I discovered the extent of the children’s linguistic
capabilities. Most of them were able to speak two or three languages, and could
understand far more than they let on. I also learned that the language I typically heard
used for interpersonal communication was not simply Zulu with the insertion of various
English words, but a more varied style of code-switching. Marc, himself a Xhosa,
explained to me how this did not impede communication. “Xhosa and Zulu are almost the
same,” he told me. “We can understand each other with little effort. You can tell that
these tribes used to be one at some point.” He went on to explain the categorization of
South Africa’s official languages into groups based on similarity. Pastor Mike later
informed me that the center cared for a set of four Sotho siblings, not just from a separate
tribe but from a different country altogether.
The children at 5Cees came from all over South Africa, and Marc mentioned that
this was reflective of Johannesburg and the Gauteng Province as a whole. Unlike other
regions of South Africa that are mostly populated by one tribal ethnicity, Zulu in Kwa-
Zulu Natal for example, or Xhosa in the Eastern Cape, Johannesburg was an area where a
wide mix of ethnicities from all over Southern Africa were present, with no obvious
77