Chapter 3

N considering headship of the household we have been led into an examination of the organizational features of the household group as a functioning system, and one of the primary fields which this organization comes to life is in the handling of everyday economic problems. It is also in this field that many of the interrelations of the household to the wider social system are most clearly seen, and to some extent we shall try to keep these two aspects separate for the purpose of analysis.

Since it is common practice in British Guiana to refer to a ‘Negro peasantry’ and make the assumption that villages are peasant communities, composed of small farmers and their families struggling to make a living from the soil, it is necessary to stress time and again the fact that the household in a rural Negro village community is not by any means the kind of corporate productive unit encountered in the general run of peasant societies. It is not tied to a farm which is the basis of its existence, and the productive activities of its members do not fall into place as parts of a total pattern of exploitation of a natural environment. For any particular household the overriding consideration is the acquisition of cash income, and cash is in turn the means of acquiring necessary goods and services. Subsistence crops and the unsold portion of products accruing from agricultural activity generally, are regarded as supplementary to the money income of the group, in the same way that kitchen garden produce is regarded in this country. A striking example of the truth of this statement is to be seen in the fact that all magical practices concerned with acquiring wealth are directed towards getting money, or ‘gold’, and not towards ensuring the productivity of farms or the increase of animal stock.[i] No instance of anyone employing any kind of supernatural aids to farming was encountered during the course of field-work. On the other hand, rational techniques for improving the yields of farms and the quality of produce are extremely difficult to introduce into the Negro communities, and the methods of agricultural production are just about as rudimentary as they could be. This is a generalization of course, and the few exceptions to the rule do not invalidate it. Where better methods are employed one’s immediate reaction is to find out if the operator is a non-Negro, and in the majority of cases this is so.

Men are expected to earn money. Within the context of the household this is easily their most important function in the economic field, and to this end they spend considerable periods of time away from the house, and in most cases, away from the village. The occupations which they pursue are such as to preclude their working in family units with a degree of authoritarian control over a team of sons. Furthermore the avenues of employment which are open are mainly for unskilled labour where there is very little differentiation in rates of pay as between one man and another, irrespective of age.

After leaving school at the age of 14 or 15 years a youth continues to do odd jobs on the farm lands and around the house, as well as taking care of stock. These are all jobs he has been introduced to since his boyhood, and which he is able to do with a minimum of direction from his father. He may begin to work at a trade as apprentice to a carpenter, tailor, blacksmith or shoe-maker, and if he does, it is most unlikely that the man he will work with will be his father. He gets no pay apart from an occasional ‘pocket-piece’ from his master, and it is more than likely that he will only be one of a number of ‘apprentices’. In any case it is only in a minority of cases that he will persevere and become a full-time tradesman himself. There is no rigid apprenticeship system which requires a tradesman to serve his time before becoming a recognized craftsman, just as there is no overall standard of skill in the various trades. A youth is much more likely to flit from job to job in the village and spend only a small part of his time working with his master. The village tailor in August Town had various boys ‘apprenticed’ to him, but one did not often find them in the shop, and it is significant that the tailor had plans for his sons to take up quite different occupations.

By the time a young man reaches the age of 18 to 20 years, he is ready to begin earning money in the same way as the adult males. He goes to work on the sugar estates, or moves to the bauxite mines in search of a job. The money he earns does not come under the contro1 of the male head of the household to which he belongs, and any money he contributes to household expenses is given to his mother, presuming of course that she is alive, as in a typical household.

A man sets up his own household when he is able to assume responsibility for a spouse and children, and assuming responsibility means providing a house, food and clothing. That he delays this move for a considerable period of time is clear from the previous chapter, and the fact that Perseverance men establish separate households at an earlier age than in the other two villages demonstrates that the difficulty involved in a man’s accumulating enough money to provide a house is not the only operative factor. It is certainly one factor to be considered and is often enough advanced as a reason for delaying the establishment of a separate household.

The observed fact remains that the majority of young men remain nominal members of their parents’ households during the whole of their twenties. This does not mean that they are living at home during this period though, and in the case of August Town, one of the most noticeable facts about the village is the almost complete absence of young men, the majority of them being at the bauxite mines. There they can earn relatively high wages, but more important still, they are responsible for themselves. They no longer depend on their fathers to provide for them, and they can actually contribute to their mother’s support. If the mother is sole head of the household then the son will feel a definite pride in being a major contributor to the running of the household, and he will in all likelihood assume responsibility for the payment of the rates on the land and in many ways take the place of the male head of the group. Such a state of affairs will often lead to his postponing the setting up of his own household, based on a conjugal tie, until his mother dies. There are a large number of female household heads who depend mainly on their sons for support in this way and the sons may have a number of children of their own with a woman, or women, with whom they have never lived.

Once a man does marry or set up a common law union he tacitly accepts a responsibility, and this is stressed much more than his acquisition of rights over the woman’s services. In courtship young men boast to their girl friends of their ability to take care of them and provide them with all kinds of luxuries, and engagement is marked by the presentation of gold jewellery to the girl.

The requirements of a small sized family in the way of cash are considerable, relative to the normal sources of income. It is estimated that a household group consisting of two adults and three children needs approximately $8.00 per week (at the time of the study) in order to maintain even a low standard diet. The following day’s menu for a group consisting of two adults and three children gives some idea of the amount of money required for a fairly typical day’s food consumption for the average village family.[ii]

This menu takes no account of such essential items of domestic requirements as matches, salt, pepper, kerosene oil, soap, starch, coals for ironing, and so on, and even when these have been added we have only covered a sector of the total budget for the group. Of course many families are unable to spend so much every day, even when all the mechanisms of credit and petty trading are in operation, and they have to forgo the evening meal, making do with a hot, sweet, drink only. Other families are able to afford more, and such items as eggs, cheese and fresh meat appear in their daily diet now and again.

The mistress of the house receives money and garden produce from her spouse, and she is solely responsible for its management once it has been handed over to her. Because men’s incomes tend to be irregular, women’s expenditure is equally unplanned, and unplannable. In Perseverance there is more regularity in this respect since men will send money home regularly during the cane cutting season, but even here amounts vary according to the availability of work. In August Town men often divide their time between estate work and their farms, and although the time spent on the farm will ultimately bring some return it does not come in fixed amounts. Consequently women have to resort to various expedients to stretch their purchasing power over time. Obtaining credit at the shops is one obvious method, and this is an extremely common practice. However, the debts never assume an unmanageable size, and they are usually fairly short term. Indebtedness to shopkeepers rarely comes up as a problem in any of the villages studied and this is in quite sharp contrast to the situation in many of the East Indian communities. Another method of spreading purchasing power over time as well as through the community is the great volume of internal petty trade. The buying and selling of farm vegetables in small quantities serves this purpose admirably, for a villager will readily buy a few plantains, or a coconut, or a few greens from another, even though she has some on her own or her husband’s farm. She does this to ‘help out’ her neighbour, knowing that she will be able to sell something herself when the need for a little ready cash arises. This is quite a different process to the marketing of surplus produce, and the often quoted remark that West Indians seem to live by taking in each other’s washing is not so far from the truth in so far as it refers to these mechanisms of distribution of resources.

This small scale buying and selling within the village gradually shades off into slightly more specialized women’s trading. The making of cassava bread is one of the more common activities and a woman will gradually become known as a regular maker of these flat dry cakes, made from grated cassava baked on a kind of griddle. Another woman may become known as a cake-maker, and her services may be in demand for weddings and parties as well as for her regular baking for Saturday sale. One woman in August Town used to make ice-cream regularly each Saturday evening and others manufacture black-pudding and ‘souse’ (pig’s trotters, pig’s head or cow’s cheek, pickled).

When a woman first sets up house with a man it is extremely unlikely that she will participate in any of these money making activities. The accent is upon the ideal pattern of the man being wholly responsible for her maintenance, and in any case it is most likely that any trading she did previously was under her mother’s guidance and control. She may have worked for cash on the sugar estates, in domestic service or in some other occupation particularly if she had children, but this ceases, ideally, when she enters a conjugal relationship. For one thing it is an adverse reflection on the man’s ability to maintain his spouse if she goes out to work, and in one case a man who had been living with a woman for many years beat her when he discovered that she had been out collecting crabs with the idea of selling them. Not only did he beat her but he released the crabs, and this was so intolerable to the woman that she left him to go to her natal village until he went and begged her to return.

The fact that there are children to be cared for is an important consideration, and once a woman is mistress in her own house she pretty soon has her hands full. The following is a broad outline of the normal daily routine for a woman running her own household.

This is the normal time of rising though some women may rise earlier, particularly if they have to cook food for their spouses to take with them to work. On rising women usually bring a bucket of water and bathe, or they go and bathe in the trench before it is fully light. As soon as it gets light at around 6.30 a.m. they start the fire (or ‘catch fire’) to make ‘tea’. This usually consists of a drink made from ‘weed’ (wild plants), or cocoa, or drinking chocolate made locally and sold in the shops at 2c per stick, or most common of all, what is known as ‘milk tea’. This is merely hot water with a little milk and sugar and spice added. All hot drinks are referred to as ‘tea’ and tea itself is known as ‘green tea’. Very few villagers drink coffee or ‘green tea’ unless they belong to the better-off group such as teachers. Rice porridge, boiled cassava or plantain, cassava bread, shop bread or ‘bakes’ (which are simply cakes of flour fried in oil), may be eaten with the tea.

Whilst the tea is being made all except small pre-school age children are made to get up, and they carry out various odd jobs such as feeding fowls and bringing in goats and pigs or going to the shop to make odd purchases. Cows are usually milked by men or older boys.

Before eating, the children are sent to bathe in the trench, or from a bucket in the yard, and the smaller ones are bathed and dressed by the woman.

Food is shared out to the children by the woman who cooked it, and they are sent off to school. The very small children are then bathed, dressed and fed before the woman eats her own food and washes the dishes. At least once every week and usually twice, clothes have to be washed, and the clothes are starched, and then ironed, on the two succeeding days. The house itself is scrubbed once every week, and sometimes twice, except in Perseverance as we have mentioned already (Chapter 2).

Around this time the fire is lit to cook ‘breakfast’ which is the main meal of the day. The few women who have to go out and work for wages during the day will cook early in the morning and leave the food for the children to share themselves when they come home from school. Whilst the breakfast is cooking, the woman will find some odd job to do, and breakfast is served when the children come from school at 11.30 a.m.

Breakfast. The children are almost invariably fed first, and they will eat quite separately from the adults, spreading themselves around in groups based on age and sex. They frequently quarrel about who has most and may try to steal each other’s food. If the male head of the household is in for breakfast he eats separately. Men and women never eat together. The exceptions to this rule are so few that they are insignificant. The natural consequence of the fact that everyone eats separately is that food is not always eaten hot. Quite often a little food is left in the pot for later and this is referred to as ‘bambye’ which is probably a corruption of ‘bye and bye’. After breakfast the washing up is done by the older girls, and the children go back to school at 1 p.m.

The afternoon is the time for a little leisure and for visiting friends or relatives. Daughters visit their mothers, and, as everywhere, women gossip and discuss their neighbours’ shortcomings. This is not the sole afternoon occupation though, for there is ironing and mending to do, cassava bread to be baked, and most important of all firewood to be collected. This is collected in the bush on the fringe of the village, or from wild trees in the cultivation area, and although boys often go to collect firewood, it is primarily a woman’s job.

The children come home from school and change into old clothes before being set to do odd jobs such as bringing water, going to the shop, sweeping the yard and so on, after which they are free to play. A light lunch may be eaten at 3 p.m. consisting of ‘bambye’ or cake bought from a cake shop. Preparation for cooking the evening meal begins around 4.30 p.m., though on many days nothing is prepared save another ‘tea’.

After the evening meal is over and the dishes are washed the whole household may congregate and talk over the day’s happenings, or tell ‘Nancy’ stories, but more often than not the adult males will go out to meet their friends on the public road or in the cakeshop, where men play dominoes or cards. At around 8 p.m. the ‘beddings’ are spread for the children who gradually go off to sleep, and everyone is in bed by 9 or 10 p.m., unless there is some special event such as a dance, political meeting, wake, wedding, or other public function.

This is merely a bare outline of the more important tasks women have to perform as housewives, and it pre-supposes that there is a husband or common-law husband earning enough money to keep the group going. Complications arise when the man is unable to earn enough to carry out his obligations, and when this happens the man often just disappears, or at least goes off to some other area in search of work, leaving the woman to manage as best she can. For a man to feel that he is quite unable to support his spouse and children is intolerable, for this is his main distinguishing feature as a husband and father, and the males’ constantly expressed fear of women as robbers can be seen as a sort of defence mechanism against this ever present possibility of failure on their part to provide for their families.

In households where there is no man present as male head several situations may exist. A female household head who is a widow or common-law widow probably receives cash from her adult children. In addition she may have daughters and their children living with her in which case there is probably some cash income from the fathers of the children, no matter how sporadic it may be. This money is paid to the mother of the child, who gives the mistress of the house either a part of the money, or buys food herself to hand over for the common pot. If the father of the child contributes no money, then it is not unusual for the maternal grandmother to assume full responsibility for the care of the child, including buying its clothes (see Chapter 6). This is all the more likely if the child’s mother has left the village or has left a child behind when she goes off to set up house with a man. However, the child’s mother will generally attempt to raise enough money to contribute a fair share of the cost of keeping it, and more particularly will she endeavour to buy the child’s clothes. In order to do this she may go out to work, either on the sugar estates or in domestic service, or she may take odd jobs carrying earth for the contractors who burn heaps to make brick for the road. In such a situation there is always a delicate balance between the amount of money the young woman can earn or acquire to contribute to the support of her child, and the degree of authority she exercises over it, or the amount of ‘motherhood’ she can claim in relation to it.

A woman who is left alone with small children is in a much more difficult position for she has to raise cash as well as try to look after her children, and the likelihood is that she will not only work for pay, but she will also have a series of liaisons with men who give her presents in exchange for her sexual favours, if she is young enough. She may have men coming to live with her, but such unions are generally short-lived owing to the fact that the man never really becomes effective head of the household in a situation where the young woman already has a large measure of independence. Such women may depend on a brother for occasional help but there is never any suggestion that the woman is being kept by her brother.

It is clear that in any household group there is always one woman who is the manager of the internal economy of the group and this is a part of her general function as a leader in domestic activities. In Bales’ terminology relating to small group interaction patterns (Bales 1953: 144–5), she would be primarily an ‘expressive leader’, but she is also an ‘instrumental leader’ in many important respects. Instrumental leadership may be divided amongst a number of individuals at certain stages of the development of the household group, but the role of husband-father as head of the household, responsible for the group and being the chief provider of cash and economic resources is well established in the system and those households which are headed by females are almost by definition without a male head Thus women will often say that they are poor and have to work hard because they have no husband to take care of them. The absence of a male is thought of as a deficiency in this sense.

At this stage it will be useful in presenting a picture of the over-all configuration of the household economy to examine one or two particular cases selected on the basis of the type of household group involved and its stage of development.

The first case is that of a household group consisting of a man aged 46 years, his wife aged 40 years and eight children ranging in age from 18 months to 13 years. They live in a three-roomed wooden house which has a corrugated iron roof and an attached kitchen, but the house is very sparsely furnished and the floor of the bedroom needs repair. It was built in 1936 and is now beginning to deteriorate. The head of the household owns the house and the lot on which it stands, and he also owns two other unoccupied house lots in the village, the three having a total area of .549 acres. He also owns two beds of land in the cultivation area. The first has an area of .992 acres and half of it is planted in corn, the other half being abandoned to bush. The second is .278 acres and is planted in mixed provisions for household use. In addition to this the head rents 1.5 acres of rice land on an adjoining estate, and this is all planted in rice. The rental for this land is $6.00 per acre per crop, and since only one crop per year is planted the rent paid is $9.00. Once the crop has been reaped the owner is free to rent it to someone else for the small crop, or to graze cattle on it, so that the tenant only has rights to the use of the land for that period during which his rice is actually growing on it. The wife of the household head has planting rights in a Perseverance cultivation lot which is registered in the name of her mother’s sister’s daughter. This woman (the title holder) does not live in the village and so the land is used by the head’s wife and her brother. The total area of the lot is 1.462 acres and the head’s wife has about one quarter of it planted in rice, the rest being planted by her brother.

The total amount of land operated by this household (actually planted) is then, approx. 2 acres of rice land, .278 acres of mixed provisions and .496 acres of corn. Scattered throughout the holdings mentioned (including house lots), are twenty coconut trees, two orange trees, ten banana trees, eight mango trees and two star-apple trees. The household group also possesses eight goats and twenty fowls of which ten are hens over 6 months of age. They possess no other livestock.

Just in front of the house is a small cake shop operated by the head, or his wife, in which they sell bottled drinks, cakes, bread, matches, cigarettes, sweets, and various home-made drinks such as ginger beer. This shop makes a maximum profit of $4.00 per week. The household head refers to himself as being a carpenter, but in fact he rarely works at his trade. He spends most of his working time on a fishing boat which operates from the village, fishing offshore and selling the bulk of the catch in Georgetown. For this he gets a share of the cash made on the catch, and this may amount to as much as $15.00 to $20.00 in one week though the pay fluctuates considerably according to the catches and the market prices, and according to the amount of time which has to be spent on repairing nets. Since this man does not own the boat he need not always join the crew as there are other men who can take his place on some trips, and in any case he rarely spends more than three or four days per week on the boat. His wife does not normally work for money apart from keeping an eye on the cake shop, but during the rice harvest she works as a cutter, and during November 1952 she made $14.00 at this work.

The family has very few debts. The head owes $10.00 to the Co-operative Credit Bank which he borrowed to help to pay for planting his rice, and he will pay this back out of the proceeds from the sale of padi, plus an interest of 3½ per cent per annum. The wife has a small running debt with the grocery shop which she clears every week if possible, and this rarely exceeds $5.00. The head has $60.00 in the Post Office Savings Bank which is a reserve in case of sickness etc., and he also keeps a canister with money which is used for running expenses. Two of the children have sums in the School Savings Society of $1.68 and $1.00 respectively. The wife has no savings of her own, generally spending what money she gets almost as soon as she gets it. She estimates that she needs to spend $14.00 per week on food etc. for the whole family, over and above that which comes from the farm. From the 1951 rice crop they reaped sixteen bags of clean padi, of which ten bags were kept for domestic consumption and seed, but in 1952 they planted a little more, though the unfavourable weather conditions meant that the yield was approximately the same. During November 1952 the head’s wife spent $17.48 on clothes for herself and the children, and the bulk of this was money she earned by cutting rice.

Other expenses for the whole household were such things as rates, which amounted to about $17.00, and the rent for the rice land which is another $9.00. During the 1952 rice harvest the head had to pay men to assist him with the beating of the padi as well as paying cutters, and his total expenditure on this was in the region of $50.00.

Small subsidiary sources of income are from selling farm produce such as coconuts, bananas, corn, and an occasional goat or fowl. Over a whole year it is doubtful whether the total income from these sources amounts to more than about $100.00 at the most. What is quite clear is that the household cannot function at its present level without the wages of the household head. If for some reason he loses his job on the fishing boat he will have to go and seek work on the estates or elsewhere. This man has worked on the estates and in the gold fields at one time or another, and he does not regard his job on the boat as his permanent job. It is just the thing that he is doing at the moment. In fact he considers himself to be a carpenter and this is undoubtedly what he would put down on any census return as his ‘occupation’. This is a family where the woman is still largely dependent on her husband’s earnings, but even so she organizes the whole of the spending for the household in connexion with food, and her own, and the children’s clothes. The head takes care of the farm and all expenditure connected with it, and he gives his wife money as he can afford it and as she needs it. She has very little scope for earning money herself, apart from during the rice harvest, and if she needs clothes or wishes to travel to see a relative or buy a present for someone, she either has to ask her husband for the money or take it out of the money she handles for the housekeeping. Eight children and two adults consume quite a large quantity of food and there is very little margin for extra expenditure. Her husband has one outside child towards whose support he contributed a little money until the child was 16 years old, and that was an extra drain on the income.

The second case is a household with a female head who is 52 years of age. She is illiterate and was very uncertain about the dates of the birth of her children, and even her own age. However, she got her first child when she was very young, certainly before she was 18 years old, and when she became pregnant she went to live with the father of her child. They lived together for 22 years in a common-law union and during this time she had eleven children, of which four died, three of them in infancy. Her last pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage at 5 months. Shortly after this her common-law husband left her to go and live with another woman in the same village, and she says that he was beginning to be very troublesome and she got tired of the way in which he would be perpetually going about with other women. For the past twelve or thirteen years she has been running her household alone, and it now consists of herself, her two adult daughters who are 21 and 23 years of age, and four small children. Three of the children aged 8, 4 and 1 year are the children of the elder daughter, each one having a different father, and the other one aged 9 years is the child of the daughter aged 21 years. The head also has two sons aged 21 and 17 years, both of whom work away from the village, sending no money to their mother, but they come home occasionally and help her with the farm work, and they do give her presents now and again with which she buys clothes. Another daughter lives in a small house on the same lot with a common-law husband, but she cooks separately and runs a separate household.

The house is a two-roomed thatched cottage with a separate kitchen, all in a bad state of repair. There are no furnishings apart from a small wooden bench and an old wagonette which serves as a table. The lot on which the house stands belongs to the head, and this is the only house lot which she owns. Her own estimate of the value of the house is $20.00. She has recently bought .845 acres of land in the provision area, but has not yet obtained title to it. This is planted in mixed provisions and scattered over the lot are eight coconut trees, four mango trees, one star-apple tree, and there are forty banana trees planted. This woman also rents two acres of rice land on an estate which is three or four miles from the village, and she pays $8.00 per acre per crop for it. In all then, the household group cultivates .845 acres of mixed provisions and two acres of rice. The household head also owns one pig, one donkey, two hens and five dogs, and she possesses one hoe, one cutlass and an agricultural fork.

This household depends to a large extent on the produce of the farm for food, but even so it is estimated that they spend about $4.00 every week on food from the shop. Some of this money comes in the form of intermittent payments for child maintenance from the fathers of the daughters’ children, which theoretically totals $8.00 per week for the four children. However, these payments are not regular, and one of the fathers went to prison during the period of the study for failure to pay, being many months in arrears. Neither of the adult daughters has a regular job, but all three women work on the farm, and they will take odd jobs such as carrying wood or cutting rice whenever they can get them, which is not often. The bulk of the cash comes from the sale of provisions and bananas, which the household head takes seven miles to market on a donkey cart. During the crab season which lasts from mid-July to mid-September, the whole household group catches crabs on the village foreshore and the head carries them to market. Crabs bring a fairly high price, selling for as much as twenty cents for three or four crabs. The money obtained from the sale of produce and crabs is almost invariably spent as soon as it is obtained. The general practice is for women to crowd the stores on market day buying cloth and various items of clothing with the money they have made. Some food, such as fresh meat or fish, may be bought and a little money will be saved for the food requirements of the next few days, but certainly this woman spends most of her money as soon as she gets it, and she is fairly typical in this respect. No member of this household group has any savings.

The household head used to operate as a village midwife, but this source of income has stopped since a government midwife began to work in the district. Despite the poverty of the group, the head is renowned as a woman with taste for clothes and she somehow manages to buy these fairly regularly. She does not buy clothes for her daughters’ four children, for each daughter gets whatever she can from men friends or the fathers of their children for this purpose. The head owes $65.00 to the Co-operative Credit Bank which is the outstanding balance of a loan contracted for the purpose of repairing the house, and for paying for the provision land which she finally bought. She has no debts at the shop, and always tries to pay as she goes. Her two daughters often do the cooking and they also buy food as it is required with any money they may have. She is generous to her daughters when she has money, and out of $70.00 she made from the sale of padi in 1952 she gave them $10.00 each to buy clothes. They, of course, contributed their labour freely during the cutting of the rice.

One cannot draw up a precise balance sheet for the income and expenditure of a group such as this, for existence is a continuing process and resources are balanced against expenditure in a complex and piece-meal way. This woman has managed, and manages, to keep a household together and she does it effectively despite the low standard of living which the group enjoys.

The final case we shall quote is slightly more complex, and although the family still belongs to the village group, and the lower class, it is in the slightly ‘better off’ category now. The household group consists of a man aged 57 years, his wife aged 52 years, and eight children ranging in age from 28 years to 8 years. The group occupies two house buildings, but one is practically unfurnished and merely serves as a dormitory for the older sons, having only one room. The other building has two rooms and an attached kitchen, and is reasonably well furnished with a large double bed, washstand and trunks in the bedroom; table, four chairs, a small sideboard and a meat safe in the living room. Light is provided by a wick-burner oil lamp, and cooking is done on an open hearth in the kitchen. There is also a pit latrine, a bathroom, a rice room and a small animal pen on the lot. The head of the household is a ‘driver’, or contractor, on a sugar estate about ten miles from the village, and this is a fairly permanent job. Tasks such as trench cleaning or making up dams, cutting cane, etc., are given to this man by the European manager or overseers, and he in turn employs labourers to carry out the work. The estate authorities pay him for the job, and he pays the men according to the amount of work each one has done. Two sons who are members of the household group, aged 28 and 25 years respectively, work regularly for their father and he pays them in exactly the same way that he pays al1 the other men working under his command. One other son aged 17 years does not work on the estate as yet, but he has a part-time job delivering newspapers which brings him $3.00 per month. The head’s wife sometimes does washing in order to earn a little money for her own personal use. Some friends of hers take in washing from the East Indians of a neighbouring village, and they will always give her a part of the total if she wants it, and she does her share in their yard, not at her own home.

It was impossible to ascertain how much money is earned each week by the head of the household, partly because the amount is irregular, and partly because he only spends a portion of his income on his family. At the time of the study there was a 21-years-old daughter (unmarried and childless) living at home, and she was doing most of the cooking and running the finances for the feeding of the group. Every week the head of the household would bring approximately $7.00 worth of food from a shop on the estate where he worked, and in addition he handed over about another $7.00 in cash to the daughter for the purpose of buying food. This was rarely handed over in one sum, but was given in smaller amounts spread over the week. The head also gives his wife $3.00 per week for her own personal use. There is a household canister which contains money which, theoretically is kept in case of sickness, but it acts as a central fund, and also serves in some sense as a symbol of the authority of the household head. The head himself puts varying amounts of money into this canister. Sometimes he will put as much as $10.00 per week, or he will put in a lump sum when he sells a pig. The two adult sons earn between $9.00 and $15.00 each week during the busiest seasons on the estate. The eldest son contributes absolutely nothing to household expenses, nor does he give any money to his mother. He often sleeps away from the house with friends and never seems to save anything at all. The other adult son pays nothing towards food, but he gives his mother $1.50 every week for her personal use, and he also puts between $3.00 and $5.00 per week in the canister when his wages are good. In addition to this he ‘cares’ one of his younger brothers aged 13 years, buying most of his clothes and school books and giving him small sums of money to spend on sweets, etc. He also has a bank account of his own and takes a great pride in saving. The 17-years-old son who delivers newspapers puts the bulk of his money in the canister.

This is a household group with a relatively high, and comparatively stable, income, but even so we can see that both income and expenditure is diffused according to the various statuses and relationships within the group. The head is personally responsible for paying the rates on all the land (three house lots and one provision bed), and the provision of food for the group is unequivocally his responsibility. The one provision bed is worked by the adult son who contributes to the group canister, and the produce is used by the group. This son also keeps fowls but those are his own private property and the money he obtains by selling them, and their eggs, is his alone. The canister in this household is a stable core of the whole economy in one sense, but the fact that the only person who is allowed to take money out of it is the head himself, emphasizes his authority. The daughter who was doing most of the housekeeping could ‘get away’ with removing small amounts from the canister for food, but this was only because she was a great favourite of the head, and she never abused the privilege by taking too much or too frequently. The head’s wife always knew how much was in the canister, and when the head removed a large amount in order to pay for timber to build a new kitchen for one of his ‘girl friends’ in another village, his wife created a great fuss. She was particularly indignant because part of the money had been obtained from the sale of some pigs which she had originally bought with her own money. Because the head paid for the feed for these pigs he had claimed them as his own, but she did not consider that this gave him the right to spend the money from their sale on anything except the needs of his own household group. Money from the canister would be used for buying clothes for the children, except for the boy who was being kept by the adult son. The head’s wife bought her own clothes and she also bought most of the clothes for her favourite daughter aged 10 years out of her own money.

The head always kept a great deal of his earnings for himself and he had quite a number of ‘outside’ children which he helped to support. At the time of the study he had a paramour with whom he would spend several nights per week, and his wife accepted the situation, though she never hesitated to complain about it in public. If he ever failed to give her the weekly allowance which she considered her due, then she would certainly create a great fuss and make life as unpleasant as possible for him, even to the extent of ‘shaming’ him by complaining to his European employers.

Although this woman handled practically none of the money used for the day-to-day running of the household, there was no doubt that she was the centre of the household group, and she was its main unifying force. Even her married daughters looked to her for guidance, and when they were hungry or short of money they would come to her for food or small gifts of cash. They would also ask their father for money, and he would occasionally give them a little.

This household is not a ‘farming’ family at all, and although the head keeps a few pigs and goats (there are seven goats which nominally belong to an eight-years-old son, but the head decides when they shall be sold and receives the money from the sale), and one son keeps fowls and works a small bed of provisions, the group would not be considered a ‘farm family’ even for the purposes of the agricultural census (carried out by the Economics Division of the Department of Agriculture; see Blaich 1952). The total income of all members of the group is higher than for most village families and yet this household is not differentiated in any way from the poorer families. Its members share the common village culture and participate in all normal village activities. It does not use its cash income to build up an accumulation of ‘display’ possessions such as furniture, a radio, etc., and the household dwelling is indistinguishable from any other of its type. Nor is the money used to purchase more land, and land has very little value as capital unless it is actually being worked, in this village at any rate.

These three cases have been cited in order to give a concrete demonstration of the way in which domestic economy is organized. The three households are not necessarily ‘typical’, but the manner in which they handle their finances and resources is comparable to that obtaining in the majority of lower-class rural Negro homes.

The manner in which the household group organizes its expenditure and the tastes and consumption patterns of its members are of importance so far as the total economy of the colony is concerned. All we can do here is to indicate very briefly the main outlines of the patterns of consumption which seem to throw light on the value system of these groups.

Food must necessarily account for a large part of household expenditure, but there is a very marked tendency to maintain a fairly uniform diet, and whilst extra luxuries such as canned meat and cakes may be bought when money is more plentiful, the main items on which extra income is spent are clothes and rum. Saving for the sake of saving is not a characteristic of most villagers, and once a certain amount of money has been accumulated it is usually spent on something or other. The principal occasions on which food luxuries are bought are parties of various kinds, and the concept of the appropriate foods to be eaten on these occasions is fairly rigid. Chicken curry and rôti (the local name for East Indian bread, or chapati), chow mein made with chicken, cake and ice-cream together with ginger-beer, aerated drinks and rum are the standard party fare, and it is significant that these items do not come within the local conception of what constitutes ‘food’. In August Town the term ‘food’ is reserved for staple items such as rice, and ground provisions’ and it would include curry eaten with rice as well as other dishes served with rice and provisions. Even in households with a higher income level, including the schoolteachers’, there will not be a marked difference in basic diet even though it may be better balanced and contain a higher proportion of meat, butter, eggs and milk. For any given household then, food consumption varies within fairly narrow limits both as regards variety and quantity, and this is borne out by the statements of the storekeepers as to the commodities which they can profitably stock. The occasional purchase o f a luxury item such as Ovaltine or Marmite, does not invalidate this generalization, and odd expenditure on expensive items such as this is fairly rare.

The purchase of houses must be regarded as a special form of expenditure, incurred at infrequent intervals, and requiring a fairly sustained effort in accumulating the necessary capital. We have already pointed out that the building of a house is usually spread over a period of time, and the money is usually earned outside the village. Building probably occurs with greater rapidity at times of relative prosperity, and when wages were high during the war there was undoubtedly an increase in the number of new houses erected. Loans for this purpose are to be had from the co-operative credit banks, and probably a majority of the loans issued by these banks are used for building new houses or extending and repairing old ones.

The payment of rates on land, and houses (in the case of Better Hope), is a recurrent form of expenditure, on the whole paid unwillingly and on threat of the loss of lands or property. In August Town and Perseverance many men clear their debt to the local authority by working on the village projects instead of handing over cash. Provision is made for villagers to make periodic part payments, and whilst this is not an uncommon practice, probably the majority of land holders wait until ‘crop time’ when they can pay off outstanding debts to the local authority out of the receipts from the sale of padi. Payments of this nature, rates, purchase price for houses and land, expenditure on labour and materials for farming, are primarily the responsibility of men, either in their rôles as husband-fathers or as sons, but this is not to say that women do not sometimes undertake them all.

Expenditure on furnishings for the home varies considerably as between households and at various times of the year. In the houses of members of the higher status group such as schoolteachers one may expect to find considerable elaboration in the interior decoration of the home. Most of the pieces of furniture will be bought in Georgetown or New Amsterdam, and the whole scheme of furnishing will be in accordance with urban middle-class standards. In the majority of village households the furnishings will be made in the village or by carpenters and cabinet-makers in neighbouring villages A few pieces of furniture may be bought in town from one of the cheaper dealers. The uniformity in design of furniture throughout the whole of British Guiana is a fact worth noting. Locally made basket chairs are widely used by the lower-class and these tend to be almost standard design, the only difference being between four-legged and rocker chairs. Wooden chairs made from local woods usually have a woven seat and once again are made in exactly the same pattern by almost all cabinet makers, this time being made as rockers, armchairs or armless. These chairs are more frequently used by the higher status rural households or by the urban middle-class. In poorer homes the old-fashioned ottoman with a wooden un-upholstered seat is commonly found, together with locally-made ‘straight chairs’, or boxes used as seats. Small sideboards or ‘cabinets’ are frequent items of furniture and the possession of drinking glasses glass dishes, etc., which are usually displayed on top of the cabinet is fairly general (see Chapter 2). The standardization of furnishings is of course paralleled by the standard design of houses (see Chapter 2), and it seems likely that uniformities of this nature go hand in hand with the lack of status differentiation and social mobility and are not merely a sign of lack of ability to execute new designs.

At holiday times, and particularly at Christmas, houses are thoroughly cleaned, furniture is varnished, and curtains are made for the windows. It is also at holiday seasons that new items of furniture are likely to be acquired, and knick-knacks to adorn the ‘cabinet’ may be purchased.

Cash which is surplus to immediate requirements for food, rates and miscellaneous household expenses such as soap, kerosene, coals, starch, etc., is most frequently spent on rum by the men, and clothes by the women. Women budget for the children’s school books, slates, etc., and make sure that they have shoes and decent clothes to go to school in. Money spent on court cases, doctors’ fees, and on consulting obeah men is in the nature of emergency spending and may either be taken from the ‘canister’ or raised by borrowing, pawning gold jewellery, by withdrawing cash from a ‘box’[iii] or from the P.O. Savings Bank if an account is held. It may also be raised by selling livestock if the person possesses any.

There are not a great many alternative ways of spending money. Diet, house furnishings, entertainments, church subscriptions, and running expenses for the farm are all more or less uniform, or at least vary within relatively narrow limits throughout the main village group. Practically all money is spent within the village, or in the case of men, close to where they happen to be working. Expenditure tends to be immediate rather than planned over a period of time and this is consonant not only with the irregularity of income but with the system of values which lays stress not upon status differentiations and hierarchical mobility, but on immediate satisfactions and ‘living well’ with neighbours, friends and fellow villagers.

It would be desirable to conclude this chapter by presenting some kind of quantitative picture of household income and expenditure. However, the difficulties involved in collecting anything like an adequate sample of household budgets in this particular society, carefully recorded over a long period of time, were too great with the limited resources available. A series of budgets were collected in August Town but they have unfortunately been lost. The kind of study necessary in order to arrive at precise numerical formulations has been carried out by Mr. K. Straw in Barbados (Straw 1953). All we intend to do here is to present a schematic outline of the principal sources of household income, and to list the principal categories of household expenditure. This is a very generalized list, and it applies particularly to the main Negro section of the village population unless otherwise indicated. We have already listed the principal occupations in Chapter I and so there is no need to recapitulate them here (see Chapter 1).

Even where persons are renting a house in the rural areas, the proportion of income spent on rent and rates is still fairly small. Even a moderately sized house of the type that might be rented by a head-teacher would only cost between ten and fifteen dollars per month, and a small two-roomed house would only cost about four or five dollars per month. Rents are somewhat higher in Better Hope than in the other two villages. Rent and rates on cultivated land represent part of the working costs and they are usually paid out of the income from the sale of produce. Where a household owns land which is not being cultivated then the rates on this land form a drain on the household income.

This is not a recurrent form of expenditure, but small amounts will be spent on repairs and the purchase of cooking utensils etc., from time to time.

Most villagers collect their own firewood, and light is normally provided by small kerosene lamps using perhaps two pints of oil per week, which costs about fifteen cents. Most houses keep a low light burning all night.

This is a major item of expenditure for all families and accounts for a considerable proportion of the total income being the next largest item of expenditure after food.

The amount of money spent by men on rum is fairly high especially at holiday times. Tobacco does not constitute a major item and there are few heavy smokers in the villages. The shops often sell cigarettes in ones and twos rather than by the packet, even though they only cost about seventeen to twenty cents per packet of twelve cigarettes. Entertainments involving the spending of money are relatively few. Dances, concerts, and church fairs occur infrequently and only in Better Hope do persons go to the cinema. When a family can afford it, they will hold birthday parties which involve fairly heavy expenditure for it is obligatory to provide the guests with rum and luxury foods such as cake and ice-cream.

Expenditure on all these items is really emergency spending, and if the household group does not have enough money saved up, or does not get enough from the burial society in the case of death, then the money may be borrowed or raised by selling stock, pawning jewellery, etc.

Men spend quite a lot of money on travelling in search of work, and a certain amount of money is spent on travelling to visit relatives in other parts of the colony.

Only households in the higher status groups such as school teachers have domestic servants. The general rule is to employ one young woman who acts as cook and general servant. The servant is provided with food and paid a small wage, sometimes as low as four dollars per month.

This is extremely low. Farmers possess the bare minimum of tools and there are no tractors or mechanical farm equipment owned by any Negro farmers in any of the three villages.

If savings are taken over a long time span of say one or two years, they tend to be very low indeed. Short-term saving for a specified end is the rule and saving for the sheer sake of accumulating money, or for long-term goals, is rare.

This list covers most of the principal items of expenditure for the average village family and gives some idea of the fluidity of the economic situation, which makes it difficult to speak of ‘weekly’ income and expenditure. Both income and expenditure are balanced out over much longer and irregular periods of time.

[i] There is a widespread belief that when the Dutch were in possession of the colony, many of the planters used to bury hoards of gold coins, and that with supernatural help, particularly in the form of spirit possession or through dream messages, it is possible to discover these hoards of ‘Dutch money’.

[ii] During the course of the field tour in August Town, a series of daily household budgets were collected and for some households they extended over a period of two months. Unfortunately these have been lost, and the case presented here is one of a small series collected in Perserverance. It would correspond fairly closely to the food consumption of a household in either of the other two villages.

[iii] The institution of ‘throwing a box’ is a method of obtaining credit. A number of people undertake to make regular periodic contributions to a ‘box holder’ and each time the contributions are made, one of the participants draws the whole amount. Similar institutions have been described for Africa and other parts of the West Indies. See Bascom 1952 and the correspondence columns of Man (Vol. LIII).