Ikasi: The Moral Ecology of South Africa’s Township Youth – Sharlene Swartz

Description

Condition:Very good

218 Pages, Paperback, 23.5×15.5×1.5cm

This book provides an engaging account of the moral lives of young black South Africans once the struggle against apartheid ended and took away their object of political resistance. It shows how partial-parenting, partial-schooling, and pervasive poverty contributes to how a group of young people construct right and wrong and what rules govern their behavior.

iKasi (the Xhosa word for township) offers a remarkable report of the author’s case-study, on what she terms ‘the moral ecology’ of a group of 37 young black people, who are aged between 14 and 20, and living in a township near Cape Town.

For this study, the author spent 17 months at their living-place and then returned twice over the following two years to the field. The purpose for the follow-up visits were to conduct ‘member-checks’, from which she received feed-back from the study’s participants concerning the preliminary conclusions of her research.