“The Inimba It Cuts”: A Reconsideration of Mother Love in the Context of Poverty

• Published in: Ethos (Berkeley, Calif.) Calif.), 2018-09, Vol.46 (3), p.330-350
• Main Author: Rubin, Sarah E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Argumentation; Children; Love; Morality; motherhood; Mothers; Personhood; Poverty; Scarcity; Self concept; South Africa; Women
• ISSN: 0091-2131; 1548-1352
• DOI: 10.1111/etho.12210

Considerations of motherhood in contexts of poverty often explore how material scarcity transforms or degrades women's capacity to love or nurture their children. In this article, I focus on Xhosa mothers who live in the extreme poverty of an urban township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, and how they struggle with the decision to send their children to be raised by other mother‐figures. My argument reveals that the Xhosa idiom inimba offers three models for mother love, but poverty exacerbates the contradictions between the models and intensifies the moral dilemma of sending. I demonstrate how, for these Xhosa township mothers, poverty intersects with mother love in unexpected ways whereby the model itself is not remade or profoundly transformed, rather the moral stakes seem higher for the mothers who perceive mother love as crucial to their children's well‐being and integral to their selfhood as good mothers. In developing this argument, I aim to further our understandings of poverty and the complex ways that they intersect and interact with cultural models and practice.