HOW AFRICAN IS SOUTH AFRICAN CHILD CARE PRACTICE ?

Comment in the social media this week posed the question of the cultural relevance and so the effectiveness of South African child and youth care practice for black African children and young persons. The question was directly asked whether the present model, the "Circle of Courage" was a cultural fit as an  assessment profile and planning tool for the Black African child and whether it is now time for South Africa to find its own indigenous model that takes African traditional spiritual and other cultural practices into account.
A follow up comment contrasted the writer's perception of the culturally pervasive temperament of say, a Zulu child or young person with that of a Native American child from which the model originated  and so again the question of an African cultural fit.

Apart from the obvious euro-centric or "foreign" practices in some residential services such as language and food, the absence of interventions relating to traditional spiritual and cultural thinking around issues of healing, life events and causality were identified. One post merely said,"Spirituality as Therapy....my soon book.....a PhD"  That's all.... Simple but powerfully said.

I once asked Martin Brokenleg about the apparent absence of a spiritual component in the Circle of Courage. He said " It's there. Its a thread , you have to look for it.. It's not directly articulated in the book." I would think that is is most likely to be found in the Belonging quadrant but then also in any of the other three. 

The social media post suggested that the Circle of  Courage works better for the black African child if it is linked to the Bronfenbrenner ecological system of child development. Makes sense. In Bronfenbrenners 5 layers of ecological developmental influence, there is a circle of ecological influence which he calls the macro-system. This is the big world of the child which then shapes the child's development and includes societal and cultural attitudes and values as well as the economic and political social ecology. There is no doubt the prevailing cultural thinking (including spirituality) has a cascading effect into the child's community, immediate family ecology, into child rearing practices and home.

The question though, is whether the micro-system of the Treatment Centre and its culture is in anyway congruent or reflective of it. I think that religious and spiritual thinking is central to a black African child's meaning making and interpretation of life events.

John Mbiti, a highly respected African philosopher writes  "Because  traditional religion permeates all the departments of life, there is no formal distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the religious and the non-religious,between the spiritual and the material areas of life" He goes on to give examples of where traditional spirituality is carried by Africans - into the fields ,the beer party, the funeral, the school, the examination room, the houses of parliament.
By implication it is then carried into the Childrens' Home.

Lovemore Mbigi agrees ..." in spite of colonial domination ", he adds.

This is my observation as well......when good things happen, when bad things happen, when a baby is restless and crying a lot,when there is gain, loss, even for others, the African way is to find meaning , to interpret the signs, and to do so spiritually.

It was Tom Garfat in his doctoral thesis who said that an intervention is only as effective as it is experienced as effective. (by children and young persons then) 

I am as concerned as the social media posts that we can pay lip service to, or ignore the seminal place of spiritual and religious thinking in our interventive plans. For me, this has to do with the centrality of causal thinking in the child's Africanness If we dont address the perceived causality then our interventions and our models are out of kilter with the child's reality. They cannot be experienced as effective by the child.

I think that the time is right now for child and youth care in South Africa to put together distinctly African models for the ssessment and interventions....an African "circle of courage"