Introduction

This article fills gaps in the literature on later-life care derived from the overwhelming focus on women as carers and older people as receivers, not providers, of care, as well as the analytical disembedding of care from wider social processes. These foci are driven by perspectives that position later life as a social welfare problem. No matter how well meaning, they objectify older people, obscuring their involvement in the production of care. Most problematic is the pushing of the wider economic determinants of care and caring outside the analytical frame, leaving few explanatory options other than the assumption of later-life frailty and the failure of younger generations (family or the state) to address the consequences of age-engendered physical and cognitive deficits. Such approaches often call for greater formal care provision, irrespective of its applicability in the context studied.

We propose a historical and phenomenological approach to counter paternalistic and stigmatising perspectives on care. Using the example of Lesotho’s former mine workers in the Republic of South Africa (RSA), we focus on masculinity and men’s participation in care from a life-course perspective. The latter demands the tying of men’s experiences to social, economic and demographic dynamics. This approach not only fills the many silences on men’s participation in the production of care, particularly that of older men, but also demonstrates that concepts of care and caring are historically specific, responding to class-specific contexts (Locke, 2017). In resource-poor contexts, such as rural Lesotho, a labour migrant’s regular remitting is critical to care provision. We argue for a tripartite conceptualisation of care production: anchoring care via resource provision, direct care work and accepting care.

We undertook in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nine former miners, aged 58 to 80, living in Lesotho, a small country encircled by the RSA, for which Lesotho serves as a labour reserve. We situate older men’s experiences of care within an extended discussion of shifting economic contexts in order to demonstrate how these impact masculine ideals and gendered and intergenerational relations. Taking a phenomenological approach reveals that the way in which the extant literature understands care, caring and carers is not universal. Nor is it necessarily effective for framing policy on later life if the policy objective sits anywhere along the trajectory of deprivation reduction, widespread well-being or social equity. We raise an inescapable, but universally disregarded, methodological issue: while research on the ‘problem of later-life care’ posits this as the crux of the population-ageing conundrum, all work on later-life care is subject to survivor bias, as it investigates the lives of the people who survived to age 60 or 65. In contexts where a large proportion of the population depend on family care yet family networks are devastated by morbidity and excess mortality, policies on later-life care, well-being and social equity cannot separate care needs from cutting early mortality.

Conceptualising care and masculinity

The conceptualisation of care in policy-orientated research is dominated by a European/North American sociological model that presents highly specific social arrangements as the norm, despite the discrepancies with practice (Hareven, 1994; Moen, 2013). The model is rooted in a heteronormative, breadwinner vision of family-based gender roles, where men earn cash incomes, while women undertake ‘non-productive’ family care work. This model generalises practice established in Europe, where better-off women did no paid work. A strategy of accumulation by dispossession, first applied to rural populations in Europe between the 12th and 19th centuries, drove families off the land, pushing women and children into waged labour, factory production and mining. This strategy of accumulation was applied to most of the globe between the 18th and 20th centuries. The resulting restructuring and re-valorising of social organisation and social relations privileged production for the market over production for use. This artificial division of a unified system of production marginalised the economically essential but unmarketised care work needed to produce a labour force in comparison with the heavyweight constructs of ‘the economy’ and gross domestic product (GDP).

This distorted conceptualisation of the economy underpins policies promoting women’s education and ‘productive’ economic participation (Luci, 2009). Rather than challenging the association of women with caring, policies attempt to reduce women’s care role, utilising ‘empowerment’ as the pathway to lowered fertility (Halfon, 2007). This places the care of older people, imagined as inevitably infirm, as an imminent policy issue. The conundrum of who will care for older people is contested in multilateral institutions and national legislatures: do older people have a right to care, and who is responsible: the individual through lifetime savings, the state, family or estate beneficiaries? At the policy level two concepts of later-life care are evident. First is a concept of ‘care’ that is expanded from a needs-based to a rights-based perspective: from bodily maintenance to meeting emotional and psychological needs, and the right to social participation and self-direction, as can be seen in United Nations policies. This expansion of the conceptualisation of later-life care sits in contradistinction with a second, economistic, view of later life under capitalist production in which older people are positioned as no longer able to generate an economic surplus, as a brake on women’s labour-force participation and as a burden on the public purse. UN policies call for multi-institutional collaboration to promote healthy ageing (WHO, 2020). This positions older people as a burgeoning new market for private sector services or relegates them to unpaid family care if they cannot access state or marketised care. These approaches overwhelm the emerging literature on the extent to which older women are themselves carers (Cantillon et al, 2021) and the paucity of literature on older male carers (Block, 2016).

This study stepped back from a preconceived model of what ‘care’ is and who does it. In broadening our understanding of care, we wondered how men would understand and relate to care, having spent much of their lives away from home as boys and men. This spurred us to theorise what makes care possible and how migrant men would be positioned in that making. We conceptualised care as involving three dimensions: (1) anchoring care, (2) direct care work and (3) receiving care. We see each as an active engagement in care. Anchoring enables care; it ranges from funding care to sharing workloads, thereby enabling someone to do direct care work, which might range from bodily care to companionship. The recipient of care does not just receive care but allows care to happen; they allow a carer to care, which may be as socially and psychologically significant for the carer as it is for the person receiving care. Finally, the person being cared for may be funding or enabling care for themselves, and for others, while also doing direct care work for someone else. Any person could be involved in all these roles and activities across their life course and in relation to a range of people.

We thought that this conceptualisation would overcome the limitations of the way in which care has been approached from a gendered (read, women-centred) perspective. It was not enough. Our research participants made it clear that our approach remained too closely tied to the reductive view of care found in bodies of literature unable to grasp both more encompassing motivations and more nuanced manifestations of care. What is needed is an approach that prioritises what participants count as care and caring in the specific contexts that they face. We found that for Lesotho’s older mine workers, foundational to care was caring, that is, being attentive to the well-being of others, be that of people, animals or the land, and attending to that well-being. This approach reveals the causes of later-life inequalities, without resorting to stigmatising accounts of neglect and changing values.

There is little research on how the majority of men, particularly in the Global South, are disadvantaged in complex ways over the life course and the repercussions these disadvantages have for family and kin (Vera-Sanso, 2005). By taking a life-course perspective that ties life experience to wider social and economic histories (Bengtson et al, 2005), the research demonstrates how particular generations of men who responded to institutional arrangements between South Africa’s² mines and the government of Lesotho, in order to anchor care in a labour-reserve economy, were denied the resources and protections that their labour should have afforded them and their families. This raises the question of the extent to which masculinity theory, such as Connell’s hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005), can produce a critically valid analysis of gendered identities and relations in a labour reserve long subordinated to its neighbouring capitalist economy.

Why Lesotho?

The scale of male labour migration to RSA raises questions about how the three dimensions of care (anchoring care, direct care work and receiving care) are negotiated with family and relatives during long-term absence, irregular return and mid- and later-life reunion.

Methodology

Between November 2021 and January 2022, Thandie Hlabana, who was born and brought up in Lesotho, interviewed nine former mine workers aged 58–80.¹ We sought participants who had returned to Lesotho at different stages in their career as mine workers (young, midlife and later) to understand how their career in the mines affected their positioning within care production and acceptance. One-to-one semi-structured interviews were conducted in Sesotho and translated into English in Lesotho, with the objective being to understand how older men’s experiences of care and caring varies, and to do so through a constant comparative analysis (Glaser, 1965), using participants’ conceptual categories. This objective required a small number of participants with varied experiences of care and caring. The participants were identified through a purposeful snowballing technique, with the help of Thandie Hlabana’s acquaintances in a semi-urban area on the outskirts of Lesotho’s capital, Maseru. These acquaintances were interviewed by Thandie Hlabana; they introduced her to two others in the same suburban area and to five former miners in two remote mountain villages in Leribe District and Mohale’s Hoek District. The interviews covered early life, migration history, family and community relations. The study was described to participants as a study of care, using the Sesotho term ‘tlhokomelo’, which is a widely used term with the central meaning of ‘to care’ and ‘to take care’. It connotes a range of attitudes and activities necessary to taking care, including ‘being aware’ (as in being attentive and empathetic), supervision and maintenance. The interviews were lightly guided in order to reveal older people’s conceptualisations of care and relations of care. Participants were asked, ‘Who do you care for?’, and thereafter, ‘Who cares for you?’, in relation to their lives before, during and after migration. No definition of care was suggested. The objective here was not to impose a definition that may mean little in a context where large swathes of the population face the interlocking economic and health insults described earlier. The analysis was driven from a phenomenological approach, where an analytical framework emerged through the key themes that participants raised in response to the research questions: ‘Who do you care for?’ and ‘Who cares for you?’

Underpinning the participants’ responses was a philosophy not dissimilar to that discussed by Harry Frankfurt (1982: 271), whereby people make things important to themselves by caring about them: ‘Caring about something [somebody] connects us actively to our lives in ways which are creative of ourselves.’ Frankfurt argues that caring is not just creative of ourselves; rather, it demands an object of care that a person can care about. The chosen object of care ‘is not irrelevant or arbitrary’ (Frankfurt, 1982: 271). This suggests that caring shapes both us and how we are seen by others, which moves caring from a private or personal activity to a public, socially regarded activity that may become subject to institutional (state and disciplinary) oversight. It necessarily implies that being chosen as the object of care is also creative of identity. In this way, the interviews revealed much more than how older men are positioned within the tripartite model of anchoring care, direct care work and receiving care. Going beyond the context of gendered care and family relations, participants chose to situate caring within the wider social processes of self–society relations, economic relations, citizen–state relations and national identity.

Table 1 sets out key information about the research participants. The oldest was born in 1942 and the youngest in 1964; all had children prior to the introduction of free primary education in 2000. Participants with no or little education came from families that relied on boys herding to help support the family. The longest-serving miner (P9) was born in 1944, having started mine work at the age of 15 in 1959 and left at age 60 in 2003. The shortest-serving miner (P7) was too traumatised by “people … trying to kill me” to return to the mine after burying his mother, aged 18. His period in the mines coincided with the violent miner clashes of the early 1970s (Horner and Kooy, 1976). In RSA, provident funds were introduced for black miners in 1989; yet, many miners received neither their provident fund nor disability compensation (Ehrlich et al, 2021), which compromised their capacity to establish livelihoods for the extended period between the end of their mining career and the age-70 threshold of Lesotho’s Old Age Pension. This, alongside widespread retrenchment in the 1990s, forced households to be reliant on another person to raise a cash income, for example, a son going to the mines or an older miner’s wife going to RSA to join the informal workforce on farms or in domestic service (Ulicki and Crush, 2000). Educated daughters and sons migrate to the city (Maseru) for work. Internal and external migration, plus the impacts of HIV/AIDS, TB and other mining-induced non-communicable diseases, can leave older men caring for a range of children, including siblings’ children. Analysing the commonalities and differences in mine workers’ experience of care and caring requires a life-course approach that ties lived experience to real-world social, economic and political histories (Bengtson et al, 2005).

Responsibility versus masculine care and caring across the life course

In order to generate a framework for understanding contingent real-life relations, researchers pursue a sorting process (who is responsible for what) in order to produce a model of society that they and policymakers can utilise. Policy-orientated research that wishes to apply a masculinity lens frequently heads down the ‘responsibility’ route to generate an impersonalised consensual narrative (for example, Tseole and Vermaak, 2020). The difficulty with a gender-role lens is that it accepts first-order principles as reflecting the social order, rather than seeing them as politicised discourses that people mobilise in order to shape and justify social relations, and to control access to resources. Such accounts work to produce that which they claim to find, through the effects of authorised knowledge and policy development.

Yet, normative models of social relations do not capture how research participants P1–P9 viewed their own lives. Instead of describing their motivation as driven by responsibility, they emphasised caring. Their markers of care were caring enough to risk their lives in the mines and to live in difficult conditions in order to provide the basics for their families. They cared enough to send the majority of their income to a range of relatives (grandparents, parents, wives and siblings). They cared enough to return home to Lesotho and to still be with their wives. In their narratives, men who did not care enough did not return, and men who had not cared enough in prime age reaped the consequences in later life.

These quotes demonstrate four things: first, the difficulty of securing the basic necessities; second, children should be free of worry; third, care spurs and demonstrates a masculinity rooted in the capacity to endure for the sake of others; and, fourth, for these men, masculinity is not competitive. Rather, care was about meeting litlhoko tsa mantlha (‘basic needs’), a term used by all participants, which was elaborated as sufficient food, clean and untorn clothing, and education in such statements as: “I had to start working from a very tender age…. I really wanted my children to be educated because I was unable to get educated” (P3); and “I saw how my sisters would feel uncomfortable being among their peers by not having as decent clothes” (P6). Throughout the interviews, the goal of care was securing a basic standard of dignity and an avoidance of falling below that standard – an achievement in the extremely constrained circumstances that this generation faced. P4 summarised the goals and achievement: “In life, the most important things are to have your own home and educate your children. These are the most important things a man would feel really proud to have achieved.”

Care and caring are not limited to relations based on kinship but provide a framework for discussing employer–employee relations (discussed later) and human–land–animal relations. As herders, boys and men cared for their own and other people’s cattle and sheep; this was both work and an attachment. Basotho men define themselves by their love of their animals (P1, P2, P3) and express sadness at not being able to keep animals in urban areas (P3). One 61-year-old, who described himself as “not working”, cares for 105 sheep, two horses, eight cattle and three donkeys (P8). They care for their farms (P2, P6, P8). Wives care for their vegetable gardens, with the help of older men (P3). Older men and women together build and care for houses to rent out (P3, P4). P3, whose wife broke her leg, cares for her by taking on the care work that she did for him. Older men whose sons, daughters-in-law or younger brothers had died, migrated or travel long distances for work within Lesotho cared for their children, for example: checking that they were eating, that their school uniform was neat, clean and repaired, and that they were studying (P1, P2, P4, P8); and, when needed, doing the cooking and clothes washing, though generally that was rarely needed (P1). They paid for their parents’, siblings’, wives’ and children’s basic needs, including food, clothing and education (all barring P7). As the eldest son, they cared for married sisters by sending them maize and other crops (P2). They paid for their siblings’ children’s education (P1, P8, P9). As a chief, they cared for their whole village (P1). In all this, older men identified caring as the motivating reason for work: for herding when young; for working in the mines; for working in later life; and for participating in direct care work. Throughout, their goal was, and continues to be, meeting the ‘basic needs’ of their family: enough to eat, education and simple clothes – that which would be called ‘basic rights’ in development circles.

These men were caught in the long-term pincer movement of economic and political forces that demanded cash while providing the people with no reliable means of sourcing it except through migration, or attaching themselves to other away-from-home work like herding. Cash was needed to buy basic goods and the means of subsistence, including seeds and fertiliser, which were not securable within a nation stripped of most of its fertile land. To care, men (once they reached the stipulated weight threshold of 70 kg) had little choice but to leave for the mines. The marker of masculine adulthood, that is, getting married and having a house of their own, required proof of the capacity to care for a family – in particular, through the payment of mahali (‘bridewealth’). Barring P7 and P3, all participants saved over two years in the mines to raise cash-based mahali. P3 saved for his mahali through herding for 11 years. All participants, barring P7, were driven to the mines to anchor the families’ care needs. This is why P7 never married, traumatised by the experiences in the mines, he did not return to build up the savings to marry. The tragic irony of being born a man in this generation is that adult masculinity was predicated on establishing and caring for a marital family; yet, for the vast majority, this could only be achieved by leaving their family for nine to 12 months at a time. Miners could expect to live like this for 20–44 years. Early return was due to family or own ill-health, both mental (P7) and physical (P4). P9’s experience of returning home to nurse his brother, which lost him his job and blacklisted him for further mining contracts (because he overstayed), is not likely to have been unusual with the extent of AIDS and TB in Lesotho. It fits the picture evident in every participant’s narrative: severe poverty drives fathers, siblings and sons to the mines, and family networks manage as best as they can in the context of Lesotho’s historic and continuing political economy.

Men of this class and age were creating their identities through care: ‘Caring … connects[s] us actively to our lives in ways which are creative of ourselves’ (Frankfurt, 1982: 271). Caring makes people persons; it defines the type of person they are. P7 was unable to establish himself as a man with the capacity to manifest care; he remains a social child. P5, through demographic contingency (he had neither living wife nor son) had to move to his daughter’s home where he was unable to work; he could not care for himself nor her. He was waiting on the Old Age Pension, a man in limbo. As Frankfurt argues, caring is not just creative of ourselves but demands an object of care that a person can care about, and the chosen object of care defines the carer and the cared for. In anchoring, overseeing and directly providing for the care of grandparents, parents, wives, own children, grandchildren, siblings and siblings’ children, labour migrants were establishing themselves as lynchpins, that is, as key persons within social networks irrespective of age and irrespective of whether they were physically present or not: “I worked hard to get out of the hole [and joined mining management] so that I could earn more money. This meant I was able to care for more people” (P8). They cared: they anchored care, they oversaw care, they directly provided care and they did so across the life course. Care and caring defined this cohort’s masculinity.

Receiving and reciprocating care

In relation to families, participants’ exemplifications of the care they received were simple and mundane due to the resources for care being limited. What was striking was the recognition that care was an expression of caring, not a duty based on generational or gendered hierarchy. Being afforded hlompho (‘respect’) frequently came up; again, not as a duty, but as demonstrating an empathetic recognition of what the miners had gone through in order to care for their families. Underpinning this was a strong sense of reciprocation, though not in the legalistic sense of ‘generational contract’. The latter is a policy-driven device to blame younger generations for shortcomings in care while assiduously disregarding the key policy question: the economic and demographic underpinnings of care provision. Instead of a contractual exchange, marital and kin relations are described by participants in terms of open reciprocity underpinned by empathetic understanding and mutual dependence. Open reciprocity is dependent on giving without an expectation of return (Graeber, 2001).

Care was evaluated in terms of outcome. When answering the question, ‘Who takes care of you?’, we expected participants to focus on family care. However, several participants also discussed the mining companies’ care of miners. Working conditions in the mines “differed from place to place” (P3). Mines in which participants were neither injured nor sick demonstrated that the mining company cared for them (P1). Whereas in others, “Going down the pit did not assure one returned” (P3), with RSA’s gold mines being among the world’s deepest. P6 lost his leg in a mining accident. The lack of caring in the mines extended to being robbed (P5), to people wanting to kill them (P7), to being uncertain that remittances would be received and feeling “grateful” that they were (P5). Considering how tied to adult masculinity mining is for anchoring care, P1 made a revealing statement regarding measuring care: “[My wife’s] love and care even convinced me that being home was much better than being at the mines.” Similarly, the measure of whether men were taken care of, including late in life, was amply summarised by P2: “If I weren’t taken care of, I would surely have left home.”

The nuance here is significant: it is not his wife’s respect for himself that P5 is referring to; rather, she gave him the respect of the community. Similarly, with no other means to demonstrate their care, “My sisters used to help with my laundry” (P9; also P7). In contexts where people have limited clothing, no running water and are engaged in physically intensive work, being well laundered makes a strong statement about a man’s domestic relations, kin support and capacity to manage. The importance of laundry, which men did for themselves in the mines, and its difficulty is highlighted by P5, who is widowed and financially dependent on his working daughter: “The only thing I struggle with is my laundry, but not always since my daughter helps me at times. As for cooking and other household chores, she does them, and all is well.”

Participants identified factors that contributed to their being cared for as a miner and in later life. These centred on having created an alliance with their wives over the course of their marriage. While in the mines, they would make plans together that wives would put in place, including overseeing children’s education and ensuring that they are aware of their father’s care. After returning from the mines, the alliance was exemplified by working together. “Going to the fields together” (P5), building and repairing houses together, and “being supported during difficult times”, such as when miners were on strike or “expelled from my work” (P5), were cited as examples of care. Insightfully, P5 said that when they ran out of money, before either he or his wife was eligible for the Old Age Pension, his wife “supported me and told me that it is important that we accept ourselves since there is no longer any stream of income. I therefore accepted and stayed home to help her with some basic chores like collecting firewood and other things.” This was possible because they had no other demands at home, unlike P1, P2, P4 and P8, who were all supporting grandchildren and siblings’ children. However, it was only sustainable while P5’s wife survived; as a widower, he joined his daughter’s multigenerational household, adding a fourth generation.

This brings us to the limits of care provision for older people in later life: not all families have boy children; not all families have children that survive into later life; many families are effectively skip-generation households; and, centrally, incomes must be sufficient to support oneself and others. With 50 per cent of the population below the poverty line, high youth unemployment, mining retrenchments and increasing female migrants earning gender-discriminated incomes, it is clear that searching for examples of long-standing family-based later-life care for older miners is to miss the point. Older miners are not supposed to survive into late life – a statement that makes sense if we face the fact that economies are designed (purposely or not) to make some people live, while allowing others to die. The tragedy of this generation is that despite the predations of the ‘bargain’ made with RSA’s capital and Lesotho’s government, the Old Age Pension does not arrive before they die. Even when it does, it relies on children supplying groceries (P9) – should there be surviving children able to do so.

Conclusion: Survivor bias

This account captures the structural issues this generation faced, having been born into a dependent labour-reserve economy that developed RSA and Lesotho but punched holes into their kin networks, ending up focusing vice-like pressure on a very few people as the availability for work declines and narrows towards female workers who receive gender-discriminated wages. All the while, the concentration of pressure on a smaller number of workers is veiled by the ideology of ubuntu and its unquestioning assumption that people will be adequately supported by their kin, which they might be if their kin network has not been demographically and economically decimated.

P4’s analysis and the evidence on male mortality and suicide rates, especially in middle age, provides a plausible explanation for the research team’s inability to locate people who need long-term care. Sitting at the fulcrum of the way in which a subsistence economy, compromised through historical and contemporary structural factors, is harnessed to a capitalist economy that externalises the costs of labour reproduction by pushing them back onto the labour force itself sharply reduces the likelihood of men surviving into later life. Hence, focusing on later-life care as a period in which older people need the care of younger people misses the point. In a callous system of extreme exploitation, caring is the way to establish a valued identity, a bearable existence and the mutual trust and support on which open reciprocity is based. In all this, everyone pulls their weight: men, women, young and old. The means for the majority of Lesotho men to establish this valued identity expelled them from their homes and communities, distanced them from the means of controlling how that identity was received, and demanded that they cooperate with their wives and families, while putting their health and life at risk. By acknowledging survivor bias in contexts where accumulated disadvantage produces excess mortality, thereby undermining support networks, the primary policy issue is economic security and ensuring that everyone has a later life that might, or might not, require care provision.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.