The book focuses on generational and gendered tensions as markers of social divisions and transformations as we investigate how such tensions and relationships are reimagined and reborn with new meanings in the post-independent period. We explore the mechanisms that produce change. Whilst we recognise the significant shifts in political and legal periods, we foreground the changes that individuals make on the ground as they decide to marry, leave marriages or become parents. Although in this book we examine generational and gendered relations, it is critical to highlight that for black people in South Africa, these relations have been underpinned by a long history of racialised oppression. Generational and gendered relations for black people in South Africa are intimately affected by the racialised social disruption.

In the last part of this chapter, we provide a historical overview of how the negotiations of customary practices have shifted through time and have been shaped by the exploitation of black people through the colonial and apartheid periods. This book demonstrates how ‘traditions’ of privilege were legislated and engineered at specific precolonial, colonial and postcolonial moments to favour the colonial state, chiefs, male elders and younger men. South African family life and the regulation of customary practices were radically transformed by British colonialism which fundamentally shifted gender and generational relations. We unpack how men and women negotiated customary practices at different historical moments and ascertain what this tells us about social change in the present. The volume is not a history of negotiating custom but acts as a contemporary set of studies that are deeply informed by historical questions.

This volume does not try to reveal the intricacies of customs, nor does it try to ascertain customary law. Instead, it examines power relations in negotiating customary practices in an ever-changing political economy. The book directs people away from focusing on specific customs in isolation and shifts attention to thinking about customs more generally. We recognise that there are significant local variations in negotiating customary practices, both in the past and in the present. Some of the variations relate to the intricate nature of custom itself, some to the specific local politics of the locality and some to normative values regarding domesticity, traditional leadership, Christianity and so on. For example, Cousins (2013) noted how two neighbouring areas, under different traditional authorities in rural Msinga in KwaZulu-Natal, adopted fundamentally different approaches to the rules about women accessing land, where unmarried women in one area were permitted to access land yet unmarried women in the other were not. No attempt at full representation of regional, ethnic, or thematic coverage is made and given the diversity of subject matter, the chapters are relatively diverse in their content. They are, however, united in attempting to reveal how power oscillates in gendered and generational negotiations of custom. Whilst each chapter discusses the unique features of its local context, the volume’s broader context is the political economy and legal change in South Africa at large.

When we started this book project, we expected the law to feature more prominently in thinking about social transformations, social justice and particularly the impact of the Constitution of South Africa (1996) on people’s everyday life. However, this was not the story we were told in the narratives of people negotiating customs in the post-apartheid period, whose experiences lie at the heart of this book. Here we focus on the ways that customs are contested in ordinary spaces in which people live their lives. Although state law features as a set of resources, materially and discursively, what matters to people are the social relations embedded in the negotiation of custom. We argue that their effects on gender and generational relations are as important as understanding ‘the law’. We, therefore, foreground negotiations and changing kin relations, whilst considering the social significance of the law (and state) on the shaping of domestic relations.

The main argument of the book is that divisions and struggles within families are not new; what is new is the kind of divisions. New state regulations and social protection systems (for example, the democratisation of social grants to reduce poverty) since 1994 and the co-occurring process of deindustrialisation, has created change in the bases of inequality and power and has challenged former hierarchies. Through the evidence in the chapters, we argue that rural black women are reclaiming power whereby women effectively contest and challenge social, legal and cultural constraints. This is occurring at the same time as many black men in society are facing rapidly changing economic opportunities and high levels of unemployment which shifts the basis of patriarchal power once held. We argue that women contest patriarchal power by drawing on customary law with the support of state intervention, through state law and social protection mechanisms, in a context of deindustrialisation. We outline how the power women hold has shifted in different ways over time from precolonial, through colonial and into the present time. As an important part of the argument, we demonstrate how women’s power in negotiating customs employs previous repertoires of strategies to resist others’ power and assert their own power. Furthermore, we argue that even when state laws have been reformed to enable gender equality, there are still tensions between genders and generations as the older generations in some areas are losing parental authority and power over the regulation of their intimate lives.