CHAPTER V

THE TIME FACTOR IN RELATION TO THE STRUCTURE OF THE HOUSEHOLD GROUP

DEVELOPMENTAL SEQUENCE OF THE HOUSEHOLD GROUP

HE real starting point of the development of all household groups is the birth of children, and it is around their care and protection that domestic relations tend to crystallize.  Some writers on the West Indies have tended to place the primary emphasis upon the marital relationship, and to classify households according to the type of conjugal union (or absence of it), on which they are ‘based’ (See Henriques 1953 and Simey 1946).  We are approaching the problem from a somewhat different point of view in that we are stressing the functions which all household groups fulfil, and examining the various constellations of relationships which exist within these groups at different stages of their development.

Men build houses, or sometimes rent them, and then bring a woman to live there as a wife or common-law wife.  The couple may have children in common already, in which case the formation of a household group had in some senses been anticipated with the birth of their first child.  On the other hand, they may have no children when they set up house, but the assumption is that they will have children eventually, and from an analytical point of view one might say that a household group in the real sense of the term has not come into being until this condition has been met.  In practice we find very few couples living together without children unless the children are grown up and have dispersed, and a couple who do not produce offspring of their own often adopt children.  It is when a household group becomes differentiated by moving into a house on its own that we can see it most clearly, and this is particularly true in a society where it is not considered normal for a young couple to live with their in-laws.

From another point of view, households come into being when sons and daughters break away from their family of orientation, and this is a matter of some importance since we do not get the development of large joint families which include the spouses of the children of the founding couple.  There is a tendency for children to be borne by a young woman whilst she is still in her parents’ home, and before she has established a real conjugal relationship, and this must be regarded as an important feature of the system.  Some of these children may be fathered by a man with whom the girl will set up a household later on, but not necessarily.  The fact that such children are not sharply differentiated by any stigma of illegitimacy involving social disabilities is perhaps a crucial feature of the system.  We shall deal with these two points later.

Although we have said that the real starting point of the development of household groups is the birth of children, it is much easier for us to observe the point at which a household group actually becomes physically differentiated from other groups by establishing itself in a separate house, and in fact we have taken this as our working definition of what constitutes a household.  If we are at pains to point out that this event of moving into a new house is only one stage in a gradual severance of the couple from their families of orientation, and in their establishment of a definite relationship to each other, it is because we wish to dispel the idea that the event is a precipitous one.  It is quite remarkable that there is no ritual connected with a couple’s setting up a new household together by moving into their own dwelling.  One day they are living separately, and the next they are living together, and unless they got married immediately prior to setting up house together, there is no social recognition of the fact.  In the case of a couple getting married the ritual is associated only with the fact of their getting married, and once again it is highly significant that there is very little development of the idea of a honeymoon which would stress the fact of the newly married couple’s exclusive sexual rights over each other, and their new social relationship as a separate unit.

Practically all houses are built by men prior to, or soon after they enter a conjugal relationship involving common residence.  We have taken common residence as our criterion of marriage and common-law marriage, because it almost invariably coincides with marriage anyway, unless the couple are separated or one of them is temporarily away, and because it is only in the context of common residence of some sort that the mutual rights and obligations of a common-law couple become explicit.  A man and woman who do not live together and yet have established an enduring relationship involving the birth of several children will have very close ties and mutual expectations, but until they begin to live together these ties will not have the stamp of authenticity, and it is doubtful if much is to be gained by coining a new word for such a relationship.  In Perseverance one hears the term ‘frenning’ which is common in Trinidad also (See Braithwaite 1953: 122), but in August Town it is customary to use the term ‘keeper’ to indicate both common-law unions involving common residence and those few cases where a man and woman have a well established relationship without living together.  The dividing line is difficult to draw precisely, because the building up of such relationships is a gradual process, and moving into a house together is just one point on the line of development.  Here we are not dealing specifically with marriage and mating and so we can ignore these considerations for the time being and work on our original assumption that common residence is a basic criterion of an effective conjugal tie.

In a sample of forty-four houses in August Town, selected at random using a table of random numbers, twenty-eight had a male head and sixteen had a female head at the time the survey was made.  Of the houses occupied by household groups with a male head, all but one had been built by the head himself.  In the odd case the man had inherited the house from his father but had renovated it himself and this involved quite extensive work.  All but four of the houses had been built during the past twenty-five years and ten of the twenty-eight had been built since 1940.  The value of the forty-four houses in the sample varied from 40 dollars to 1,800 dollars, and the money to build them had been acquired in the following ways in the case of those households with a male head.

Method of acquisition of capital for house building

                                                                                         Number of cases

Working in gold or diamond fields                                      6

Working in balata fields                                                          1

Working on American bases during the war                        2

Working at the bauxite mines                                                 6

Working on sugar estates                                                         5

By farming and particularly rice cultivation                         2

By teaching                                                                                 1

By working as a shop assistant                                               1

By working as a railway porter                                               1

By working as an assistant to a land surveyor                      1

By burning earth for the Public Works Dept.                        1

By working driving cattle from the Rupununi                      1

These must not be thought of as mutually exclusive categories of income sources, and in fact informants would indicate the main source of the capital for building their house and then almost invariably add, ‘and by working all about’.  When it is considered that the process of building a house is often spread over a period of more than a year, it will be realized that income may be obtained from several sources during this time.  In one of the above cases a man who was working at the bauxite mines was assisted in financing the building of a new house by his wife who worked as a dressmaker.

Of the sixteen houses with a female head of the household group, seven of the women inherited the house from their husbands or common-law husbands.  In five cases the house had been built by the woman’s sons, or with the help of her sons.  In these cases it is quite likely that the woman inherited a house from her deceased spouse, but that it was broken down to make way for a new house the building of which was financed by a son, or sons.  One woman had bought the house she was living in when she returned to her natal village after having lived in her husband’s village until he died.  One woman was blind and lived alone in a small house given to her by her brother.  Two women had financed the building of their houses by their own efforts, but in both cases the houses were not very valuable, one of them being estimated as being worth only $20.00.  Of all the houses in the whole sample, only two were more than fifty years old and one of these was the house bought by the woman who had returned to her natal village on the death of her husband.

The picture presented by this sample is fairly clear.  The building of houses is financed largely by men, and particularly by men who are taking on the role of husband-father.  The fact that the building of some houses is financed by men in their rôle as sons tells us something of the strength of the mother-son bond, and we shall have more to say of this later.  What we have tried to do so far is establish the fact that the wage-earning activities of men are of primary importance in the establishment of household groups within a separate dwelling.  The age at which men do establish these new dwelling groups is usually somewhere in the 30+ age-range, except for Perseverance where it tends to be earlier (see Chapter 2).

It is in the stage of the early development of the household group that we get the greatest incidence of occurrence of the nuclear family as the dwelling group.  Out of 184 households with a male head in August Town, sixty-two consist only of the nuclear group of a man, his wife or common-law wife and their own children, and these couples are mostly in the 30–50 years age-range.  If we count those households with children of one or both of the conjugal pair by different mates, and those where there is just a couple living together alone, then the total comes up to eighty-four, the majority of which are again in the 30–50 years age-range.  This pattern of distribution also holds good for the other two villages.

This helps to demonstrate a fundamentally important fact about the family system as a whole, namely that at some time during her life, almost every woman is in a relationship of dependence with a man to whom she is in the status of wife or common-law wife, and it also helps to demonstrate that nearly every household group goes through the stage of being a nuclear family group at some time during its existence.

We are perfectly aware of the fact that we are in some senses transforming a pattern of synchronic distribution of types of household group into a pattern of distribution along a time axis, but there is some justification for this in that the age of the household head is in fact a point on a time scale, and our observations are backed up by individual life histories.  Under actual field conditions it proved extremely difficult to get detailed histories of particular households as opposed to individuals, and it has been felt to be more satisfactory to deal with distributions which could be actually observed and did not depend on the memories of informants, particularly relating to their childhood.  In a system such as this, where there is a fair amount of movement from household to household, and accretion and shedding of members of the household group, there tends to be selective remembering concerning the exact constellation of kinsfolk who were members of the household group when the informant was a child.  On the other hand, the case histories of individuals and the general comments of informants do not suggest that there was any great difference in the general pattern of domestic life say fifty years ago.  It therefore seems justifiable to regard existing households as representing different stages of development though it is less accurate than actually observing a developmental sequence over a period of years.  We have tried to present as clear a picture as possible by combining observed distributions with a case-history approach.

To return to our argument, we can see that it is precisely during this period of the early development of the household group that women are tied to the home, bearing children and rearing them, and this is the period when they are most dependent on the support of their spouse, and most subservient to his authority in the home.  On the other hand, this is also the period during which men spend a considerable amount of time working away from home and they do not take any significant part in the daily life of the household.  They rarely play with their children, and they spend a considerable portion of their time outside the home in the company of other men.  There are no tasks allotted to a man in his role as husband-father beyond seeing that the house is kept in good repair, and providing food and clothing for his spouse and the children.

Even at this early stage of development, the household group may begin to accrete members who do not belong to the nuclear family. One finds juvenile brothers and sisters of the head’s spouse, some times children of a dead sister, and what is more significant is that it is usually at this stage that collateral kin of the head himself are incorporated in the group.  This helps to bear out our contention that it is at this period of development that the authority of the male head is most pronounced.  We might also mention that the relations of spouses at this stage are very little different whether the couple are married or 1iving in a common-law union.  Contrary to reports from other parts of the West Indies, where it has been reported that common-law unions are marked by a greater degree of equality between spouses than in a marital union, our data would indicate that if anything, a woman in the status of common-law wife is even more subject to the authority of her partner than in the case of a married woman.  This is particularly true if the woman has small children, for if her common-law husband deserts her, she will not be able to claim maintenance for herself as a married woman could and since she has small children it would be difficult for her to go out and work.  Of course, if there are no children to consider, then the case would be different, but there are very few couples living in common-law unions who do not have children.

There are certain cases where a woman who owns her own house or even 1ives with her parents, forms liaisons with men who come to live with her, and these are sometimes very unstable, the woman having a high degree of independence.  This type of union would perhaps correspond to Henriques ‘Keeper family’ as opposed to his ‘Faithful Concubinage’ which corresponds more closely to our common-law marriage (Henriques 1953: 105).  We have not felt it necessary to designate this kind of union by a separate term, as it is not of very frequent occurrence, nor does it seem to constitute a generically different type of family.  It is really a marginal case of the normal development of household groups and will be treated as such.  It may be that in Jamaica or in urban areas of the West Indies generally, it occurs with much greater regularity but there are not enough adequate data to assess this, though if it could be established that the regularity of its occurrence under urban conditions is very high it would perhaps throw interesting light on the whole problem of the relation between development of household groups and other factors.  We can only work in terms of the material from our three villages in view of the inadequacy of comparative data.

The incidence of infidelity on the part of women in this early period of their conjugal careers seems to be extremely low, even when their spouses are working away.  Once a woman has gone to live with a man she will tend to be faithful to him, and this is particularly true if she has small children.  His rights over her sexuality in return for supporting her are socially recognized, though if no children are born the likelihood of infidelity is considerably increased.  Men on the other hand are frequently unfaithful, even at this early stage, and if they are working away they will often have another woman and may father a series of ‘outside’ children, mainly with single girls.  Even within the village they may have affairs with other women, and the jealousy of wives and common-law wives often results in their consulting an Obeah man for the purpose of working sorcery against the other woman, or using magical means to recover the undivided attention of their spouse.  In the case histories, one rarely comes across a man who has left a wife or common-law wife on account of her infidelity, but there are many cases of women leaving their husbands or common-law husbands because they have too many other women.  However, it must be remembered that this may be a rationalization resorted to when other factors have predisposed a couple to break up their union.  Infidelity on the part of men tends to be tolerated or not tolerated by the woman according to whether she can afford to dispense with the man’s support.  A man’s infidelity does not break up the important unit of the family, which is the woman and her children.  On the other hand, a woman who is unfaithful to her husband or common-law husband runs the risk o losing her claim to his support and of breaking up her relations to her children.  In a few cases observed in the field where a woman has had an open affair with another man, her husband or common-law husband has kept the children, perhaps taking them back to his mother’s home if they are very small.  From this point of view it is quite clear that a woman has far more to lose than a man if she has ‘outside’ affairs, and consideration for her children militates against her being unfaithful.

As the household endures through time and the children get older, the woman becomes more and more the focus of the group, and she acquires more and more authority in the home.  She becomes the mistress of a household group in a much more real sense than she was when her children were small, and her authority derives largely from her status as a mother.  When her adult children begin to work it is to her that they give money, not to their father, though they will begin to help with the farm and the rice work, particularly in the period when they are too young to go off to the bauxite mines or work on the sugar estates, or in other wage-earning occupations.

Women who are approaching the menopause (and very few women have children after they are 40 years old) quite often begin to embark on minor economic enterprises of their own.  Quite frequently their spouses disapprove of this but unless the family is particularly well-off, in a comparative sense, it is unlikely that their disapproval will carry much weight.

Households with heads in the age range over 45 years begin to take on a more complex character in terms of composition.  Daughters’ children begin to appear and less frequently, sons’ children.  Also from now on the number of households with female heads begins to increase, as does the number of widows and common-law widows.  This is clearly shown in Tables X to XV, where the distribution of the population of all three villages by age and conjugal condition is shown.  (In the case of Better Hope the figures refer to a random sample of eighty-four households.)*  The discrepancy between the number of widows and the number of widowers is striking, but this is accounted for by two facts.  In the first place the survival rate of women to old age is higher than that for men, as can be seen if the number of persons of either sex over 60 years of age is compared.  In August Town there are forty-two males over 60 years compared with 60 years of age is compared.  In August Town there are forty-two males over 60 years as compared with one hundred and one females.  In the Better Hope sample there are fourteen males compared with nineteen females, whilst in Perseverance there are seventeen males to twenty-two females.  This higher survival rate of women as compared

*Explanatory note.—These tables include several cases which have been rejected from other calculations but this does not affect the distribution significantly.  It should also be noted that there is a possibility of error in the case of males in the category of single father, since some men will not acknowledge paternity of their children.  However it is doubtful whether this error is very great, and it would only involve a transfer from the category of ‘single’ to that of ‘single father’.  In the tables referring to females, it is possible that some of the women listed as single have had abortions, but where a child has actually been born, even if it was a still-birth, they have been listed as mothers.  Here again it is in the two categories of ‘single’ and ‘single mother’ that the greatest possibility of error arises.

with men is a feature of the whole colony, and has been clearly worked out in the 1946 Census Report (Census of the Colony of British Guiana, 9^th April 1946.  Government Printer, Kingston, Jamaica 1949).  The other fact to be considered is that a widower is more likely to enter a new conjugal union than is a widow, who usually continues to run her household alone, having no more than odd affairs with other men after her husband dies.

Abbreviations used in these tables are as follows:—

S = single; S.F.  or S.M.  = Single Father or Mother; Mar.  = Legally married.  C.L.M.  = Common-law married, W.  = Widower or Widow, C.L.W.  = Common-law widow or widower; Sep = Separated from legal spouse, C.L.S.  = Separated from common-law spouse; Div.  = legally divorced.

A woman’s elevation in status to titular headship of a household usually comes about through the death of her husband or common-law husband, and from the age of 60 years onwards there are forty-nine female heads of households in August Town as compared with forty-eight male heads.  Whether her husband or common-law husband dies or not, a woman with her children, some of whom are adult or adolescent, and established in her own household, is in a very secure position and this seems to be quite irrespective of the type of conjugal union she enjoys.  The composition of the household group at this stage of its development is not so complex as has been sometimes suggested, and a careful examination shows that there are quite definite processes of selection involved. [1]

Daughters’ children constitute the largest single addition to the nuclear family, and in many cases they are assimilated to a filial relationship to their maternal grandmother.  These daughters will normally live at home with their mothers, particularly if they are young, and during the birth of their first few children.  They may go away to work in town or near to one of the larger estates, and in villages such as Queenstown on the Essequibo Coast we find that this migration of young women is the normal thing.  In the three villages with which we are dealing, it is not normal and most young women will only leave the village to enter into a conjugal relationship.  A girl’s first child is often the result of a rather casual affair and if later on she enters a more permanent liaison with a man with whom she eventually goes to live, she may leave her first, or first two or three, children with her mother, who then rears them as if they were her own.  In this way many women effectively extend their period of functioning motherhood beyond the point where they are biologically capable of bearing children.  If the daughter should die, even if she has gone to live with a man, her children will usually be taken over by her mother, or in later life by the dead woman’s sister, particularly if the mother is dead.  A woman will also take in her sons’ children especially if their own mother has gone to live with another man or has died.  However it must not be thought that a woman who goes to live with a man will not take her children by previous lovers to live with her, for in fact she often does.

Unmarried sons stay on as nominal members of their family of orientation even when they begin to go to work away from the village, but although they usually send money home to their mothers or otherwise assist in the maintenance of the household, there is no well-defined place for them in the family group except as sons who are obliged to show deference to their mother.  It is mothers who often show jealousy when their sons contemplate breaking away and getting married, and cases occur of women resorting to some form of Obeah practice to try to prevent their sons leaving their home.  On the other hand, sons will rarely have an open breach with their mothers and even after they do set up their own household they continue to send money and gifts to them if they can afford it.  The tie between mothers and adult daughters is effected more through their common interest in their children and their solidarity as mothers, whereas the mother-son bond finds maximum expression in economic co-operation of some kind.  We saw earlier that sons help to build houses for their mothers, and they may also take on the responsibility for the payment of rates on their mother’s land if she is left alone without a spouse.

Not all adult daughters bear children whilst they are in their mothers’ home, and some are married off quite young, sometimes by means of arranged marriages.  Some daughters have only one or two children whilst they are living with their mothers, but a few stay on, bearing their children and eventually inheriting their parents’ house without ever entering a conjugal relationship involving common residence at all.  In August Town there are sixteen female household heads who had never been in a conjugal relationship involving common residence with a man.  In Perseverance there were none.

Not all women who attain old age manage to gather around them a household unit consisting of their children’s children and other kin, and some are left alone, but if they have had children at all, they will probably be supported by them.  In August Town there are more men living alone than there are women, and this is a reflection of the difficulty men experience in holding a household together on the death of their spouse, or after they separate.  As a matter of fact the majority of them are men who are left alone because they are separated, and they may pay a woman to wash for them, and eat with a relative.  One or two widowers do manage to keep their household together particularly if one of the daughters is old enough to take care of the smaller children, and in these cases one often finds that the old man is well-loved both by his children, and by his grandchildren when they come along.  The tension in the husband-wife relationship has been removed, and the old man becomes the centre of affective ties in a way he would rarely be were his spouse alive.  If he lives on until his great-grandchildren are born into the household (which is rare), he not only comes to occupy a place of affection, but in many ways he is himself treated as a child, being chided by his grand-daughters as they would speak to a child.  He is also careful not to annoy them by doing anything wrong, but of course his age means that he is expected to be a little perverse sometimes.  He will nurse, and play with his great-grandchildren, and they in turn treat him with a marked sense of equality.

It is clear that as soon as a daughter in a nuclear family type household begins to have children she is the potential focus of a new household group, though its emergence as a separate unit may be considerably delayed, and the fact that some of her children may be left behind in her parents’ home means that that household unit gets an extension of life as an effective child-rearing group.  The functions of motherhood are prolonged for older women, though their sexual functions as wives tend to cease from the menopause onwards.  If women are the potential foci of household groups, men are the potential originators of such groups by virtue of their functions as providers, and builders of new houses.  (It should be noted that when we refer to men ‘building’ new houses, in the majority of cases we mean that they finance the building of new houses, and they will almost always have to pay for labour.)

At this stage of the discussion it will be useful to examine a few specific cases of households at different stages of the developmental cycle in order to see how the processes we have described work out in practice.

Case No. 1

John Richmond is 33 years old, his wife Emily is 28 years and they live in a two-roomed mud-thatched house with their three children aged 13 years, 11 years, and 7 years.  He divides his time between fishing and working as a cane-cutter on an estate, where he spends the whole week during the cutting season, only coming home at week-ends.  He would spend more of his time operating his fishing boat, but he never has enough capital to see him through the periods when his fishing net gets damaged by large fish such a sharks, and he is forced to go to work on the estates in order to accumulate enough capital to enable him to repair the nets and begin operating again.

He and Emily began their relationship in 1935 (it is now 1952) and at that time they were both living in the homes of their respective parents.  Their first child was born in 1937 but it died when it was only one month old.  In 1938 John bought a piece of land which had belonged to his mother and her siblings jointly, and he built the present house at a total cost of $45.00.  In 1939 Gertrude the eldest daughter was born and in 1940 John and Emily began to live together in this house with their daughter Gertrude.  In 1941 their son Robert who is now 11 years old was born, and in 1943 and 1945 two more children were born but neither survived infancy.  In 1946 Gwendoline who is now 6 years was born, and then followed two still-births in 1949 and 1951.

John and Emily lived together in a common-law union from 1940-4 and then they got married in church.

This case illustrates the way in which a new household may be set up after a couple have begun to have children in common whilst living separately.  Both John and Emily were unusually young when they set up house together, and Emily in particular began her period of childbearing at a very early age compared to most women.

Case No.  2

Stella Parris is 21 years old and she is living alone 1n a one-roomed house whilst her husband is away working at McKenzie City.  She has only been married for a few months and the marriage was arranged between her husband and her parents, she only having seen him twice before she married.  Her parents are alive and living in the village but she has moved into this small house lent by her mother’s mother’s brother.

This is a potential nuclear family and represents what is considered to be the ideal form of starting a new household group.  The girl was a virgin when she was married and much was made of this during the wedding ceremonies.

Case No.  3

Sybil Brown lives alone in a two-roomed house.  She is 24 years old and has been married for 6 years, though her husband works away at Bartica as an electrician at the moment.  Her first child was born whilst she was still living with her mother but she married the child’s father James Brown the following year and went to live with him.  A second child was born the following year but it died when it was 4 years old.  James Brown’s mother asked that the first child be allowed to go and live with her because she wanted a companion and help around the house and so the child is now being reared by its paternal grandmother.  A third child was born to Sybil before the second one had died, but this last child was a very sickly infant and it was cared for by Sybil’s mother who has kept the child since then.  After the second child died, Sybil was left alone whilst her husband was away but she is expecting another child soon.

Case No.  4

William Jones and Mary Johnson live in a two-roomed thatched house in a common-law union.  He is 42 years old and she is 38 and living with them are Ronald Thompson, Mary’s first child by another man, who is 25 years old, John, Eunice and James Jones the last three children of William and Mary, who are 17, 15, and 12 years old respectively.

Mary Johnson had her first child when she was only 13 years old and she was living in her mother’s home at the time.  Her mother didn’t approve of Thompson, the father of the child, and so Mary broke off her friendship with him.  The following year she became friendly with William Jones and when she became pregnant for him, William moved in to live with Mary and her parents.  This was because he had no home of his own, but two years later he managed to build a little house and they moved into it.  Besides the four children who now live with them, they have three other daughters, the eldest of whom is married and the other two are living in common-law unions.

This case is in Perseverance and we shall have more to say about Perseverance later on, but it is included here to show how a woman will take her children by previous lovers with her when she moves into her own household.

Case No.  5

Agnes and Matthew Jackson are 51 and 56 years old respectively.  Agnes grew with her mother and maternal grandmother as a child but when she was 15 years old she ran away from home and came to the village with Matthew.  She did not live with him at first but stayed with an older woman who she used to help in the house.  She didn’t get her first child until she was 20 years old and when she became pregnant she went to live with Matthew in their own house.  They lived together for nearly four years before he married her.  She has had nineteen children for her husband in all, but nine of them died and she has difficulty in remembering the order of birth.

Her husband has had several ‘outside’ children.  The first one was born before he took up with Agnes.  He never recognized it as his own and it grew up with the name of its mother’s husband.  After he began to live with Agnes he was still carrying on an affair with a village girl and he had three children by her in all, one of which died.  He had another child by a woman in another village where he worked and he contributed to the support of that child.

Agnes raised all her own children herself and, as she says, she never had time for much else because sometimes she would have two children within one year, so rapidly did pregnancies follow each other.

Her eldest daughter who is now 31 years old, got her first child when she was 17 years old and at this time her own mother was still bearing children.  The child lived with its mother and maternal grandmother for the first two years of its life and was treated exactly as a child of the older woman.  It called her ‘Mama’ and its own mother by her christian name, ‘Julie’.  When the child was 2 years old it was sent away to live with its paternal grandparents, but it has always been a frequent visitor in the home of its maternal grandparents and still continues to use the terminology it used during the first two years.  It calls its paternal grandparents ‘Auntie’ and ‘Uncle’ which happen to be the terms by which they are generally known in the village as a whole.  This elder daughter later went to live with another man and they eventually married and now have five children.  They live in a house which is quite close to the house of Agnes and Matthew and these children are very frequent visitors in the home of their maternal grandparents, and they play with and mix on terms of absolute equality with Agnes’ own younger children.  They all call Agnes by the term ‘Ma’ and call their own mother ‘Julie’.

Agnes’ second daughter also got her first child whilst she was living at her parents’ house and it too was assimilated to a filial relationship with its maternal grandmother.  This daughter then went away to live in Georgetown for about four years and during this time she had two children for another man, but they both died.  On her return to the village she went to live with the father of her first child and they now have five children including the first one who is now living with them.  These children now call their own mother ‘Mother’ and call their maternal grandmother ‘grandma’, including the first one which grew with Agnes.

Case No.  6

Richard and Amelia Edwards are 58 and 52 years old respectively and live together in a two-roomed wooden house with twelve of their children and grandchildren.  He works for the local authority and sometimes on the sugar estates as a shovel-man and also plants rice of which he has fourteen acres under cultivation this year (1952).

Amelia had one child for another man before she became friendly with Richard, and this daughter, who was born when Amelia was 18 years old, is now married and living at McKenzie City.  She was reared by Amelia’s mother and never lived with Richard Edwards.  Richard himself had two children with two women he met whilst he was working in other parts of the country in his youth but they both died in infancy.

Richard and Amelia became friendly in 1919 and in 1920 their first child was born.  At this time Amelia was living with her mother, her father being dead, and Richard was nominally living with his mother and her husband, he being his mother’s first child by another man.  They continued to live separately until 1927 and during this time Amelia had three more children for Richard and then they moved into a partially completed house where they are now living.  The house was finally completed in 1930, but meanwhile they got married, in 1928.  They were neighbours even before they became friendly and they built their house close to Amelia’s mother’s house and to Richard’s sister’s house, his mother having died by this time.

There are five of their daughters living with them at the present time (Amelia having borne fifteen children in all for Richard, of which eleven are still alive), the youngest being 8 and the eldest 22 years old.  All their sons have dispersed, one being common-law married in the village and the other two are working at McKenzie City.  Amy is the eldest daughter living at home and she has four children all living with her, and she got these children by three different men.  Her last two children are by the same man, and it looks as though there is a good chance of her settling down with him as soon as he can provide a home for her.  Joyce, the second daughter living at home, is only 16 and she hasn’t had any children yet.  However, she has been carrying on a surreptitious affair with a married man and her parents are thinking of sending her to live with an older sister at McKenzie City to preclude the possibility of her getting a child for this man.  The next younger sister, Winifred, is only 15 but she already has two children for a young man in the village.  The first time she became pregnant her mother gave her a good beating, but it didn’t prevent her doing the same thing again and when she gets older she may go and live with this young man, or marry him, if they are still friendly by that time.  The two youngest daughters are 12 and 8 years old and they are both going to school.  In addition to the grandchildren we have already mentioned, there is another child of one of Amelia’s and Richard’s married daughters. This daughter left home when she was quite young to go to live in New Amsterdam and she had three children by different fathers before she married.  She has kept her first two children with her and Amelia is looking after the third, though the child’s mother sends money for its support.

There is no doubt that in this household Amelia is the real power centre.  Richard earns money only sporadically and when he does he spends a great deal of it on rum.  He is responsible for the rice cultivation, but when it comes to harvest time, the daughters on their own initiative set out to do the cutting when he is negligent and spending his time with his friends.  Amelia sometimes goes herself to collect provisions from the farm and she earns money of her own by making and selling cassava bread.  She also has her own fowls and ducks.  Her sons send her money now and then, and the daughters whose children are living with Amelia all give her money which they receive from the fathers of their children.  Amelia is a competent resourceful woman and she shows no signs of deference or subservience to her husband and quite often berates him for his laziness and shiftless habits.

This case illustrates quite clearly the type of situation one often finds in households where the woman has passed her child-bearing period and consolidated her position as authoritarian mistress of the household.  She could get on quite well without her husband, but they maintain a reasonably amicable relationship and don’t interfere unduly with each other’s sphere of activity and interests.  It is unlikely that they would ever separate now, for they have achieved a working relationship where each knows what is expected of the other and makes the best of it.  The man is undoubtedly in a marginal position, but if on an odd occasion he were to take any of his friends home with him, his wife would keep out of the way and not obtrude on his party.  Actually I never knew him to do this during the year I was in the village.

Case No.  7

Florence Chester is a 52-years-old widow living in her own home with two of her daughters, two grandchildren, three of her sister’s sons’ children and one adopted boy who she refers to as a ‘distant relative’s child’.

Florence was married when she was 21 years old and her husband had three children by three different women, two of them after he had married Florence, but when he was working away in other parts of the country.  Florence’s first three pregnancies resulted in abortions and it was not until she was 24 years old that her first child was born.  She subsequently had three more children, her last being born when she was 30 years old.  Her husband died in 1939 when she was 39 years old.  Florence’s sister Ermiline died leaving three boys and Florence took them over and reared them alongside her own.  They are all grown up now and have left home but one of them has sent his three children to Florence since his wife is dead.

Florence’s own two daughters who are living with her are both adult and the elder of the two has two children for a man who was working close to the village for some time.  The younger daughter has a steady job as a servant in a neighbouring village.

In this case we can see how a woman will take over her dead sister’s children and rear them as her own, and how they in turn will send their children to her when misfortunes occur.  This is also a fairly typical pattern for a female household head at this stage of her life.  The next case shows a household that is almost completely at the end of its developmental sequence.

Case No. 8

Margaret McDougall is an 84-years-old widow drawing a government old age pension of $3.00 per month.  Her daughter Jane and Jane’s son Norman, live with Margaret in her two-roomed cottage.

Margaret was born in 1868 in August Town and she says that her mother was the daughter of a pure Ibo, her father’s father was a Congo, and her husband was a Cromanti.  Her father’s father came direct to British Guiana from Africa, though she never actually knew him.

Her first child was born when she was 18 years old and was still living with her mother, but after the birth of their second child, George McDougall, the children’s father, married her and they came to live in their first mud-thatched house on this same lot.  The land did not belong to them, and to this day she has to pay 25 cents per month rent to the owner, who lives in the village.  This absolves her from having to pay the rates, however.  They subsequently had five different houses on this same lot, each old one being broken down as the new one was built, until finally this board house was built in 1918 at a cost of $200.

Margaret had twelve children in all and she now has forty-six grandchildren and at least thirty-two great-grandchildren, many of whom live in the village.  However, she doesn’t see a great deal of them and she can’t by any means remember them all and even has difficulty in recalling all her grandchildren.  Many of her great-grandchildren are the children of grandsons and therefore they have no real tie with her, being bound up in their mothers’ families rather than their fathers’.

Her daughter Jane, who lives with her, is 44 years old and she lived for some years in a common-law union with a man, bearing three children for him before they separated, and he subsequently married another woman.  The eldest of Jane’s children works away at Kwakwani and the youngest was taken by its father.  Jane’s middle child lives with her and he is 15 years old and already helps her with the farm.  Jane herself is a hard worker and besides running a farm she works on the sugar estates as a labourer.  When her mother dies she will become head of the household in her own right and will probably build up her own group around her.

During her lifetime Margaret McDougall has reared many children both her own and those of her daughters but they are all grown up and dispersed now except Jane her youngest daughter, and the household is really at the end of its cycle of growth and decay, it being only a matter of time before its final dissolution with the death of Margaret.  The new household with Jane as head will have grown out of the old one in a sense, but Jane has had her own history as a mother and it is really more correct to think of the two as overlapping in time than as being continuous.

In these eight cases selected from the field-records we have been able to see some of the ways in which actual households are constituted and some of the life experiences of their members and it would be possible to include all kinds of variations from the general pattern to illustrate special points, but this would fill several volumes.  What we have done is to pick some key stages in the developmental cycle to show that our abstract principles do work out empirically in a very clear way.

THE LIFE-CYCLE OF THE INDIVIDUAL

In order to round out our description of the family system and the developmental sequence of the household group, we may now consider the development and life experiences of the individuals who go to make up the household group.  This is merely introducing a new perspective, and it must be emphasized that we are primarily interested in the way in which individuals fit into the social structure rather than in their development as personalities in the psychological sense.  We shall therefore concentrate on the way in which individuals come to exercise claims and responsibilities, and have these exercised against them.  It should also be mentioned that our neglect of the extremely interesting aspects of customs connected with childbirth, and the various rituals involved in rites-de-passage, is deliberate, and we shall only have space to outline those which seem most relevant to our field of interest in this book.

Birth

In days gone by childbirth was exclusively a village affair, and older women acted as midwives (‘Nanas’ or ‘grannies’), practicing with a moderate degree of skill, a good deal of empirical knowledge, and using a great many magical and supernatural aids.  Today, the villages are served by trained midwives, and infant welfare and maternity clinics offer both ante-natal and post-natal care.  A government health visitor pays periodic visits to expectant mothers, and to mothers with infants.  Many village women go into hospital to have their babies but the majority still bear them in their own homes.  Under normal circumstances a woman bears her child in the house in which she is living, though a few married or common-law married women go back to their mother’s home for the actual birth.  More usually the woman’s mother comes to her house to take over the responsibility for the running of the household during the confinement.  Women carry on with their normal work right up to the onset of labour pains, and I have seen women in an advanced stage of pregnancy going off to cut firewood in the bush as usual.

As soon as the labour pains start, the woman is confined in the bedroom, and she usually lies on the floor where rice bags, covered with a sheet or with clean flour bags, have been spread.  The older women who are present quite often sprinkle rum around the room as an offering to the spirits of the dead ‘house-people’, and this is done even in the presence of the government midwife who always refers to such practices as ‘superstitious nonsense’.  No men are allowed in the room during the confinement, and most of the women present will be close consanguineous kin of the woman, or neighbours.  If the woman is married and on good terms with her mother-in-law, then she will probably be present to help.

During labour the woman is given thyme-leaf tea to drink and the ‘grannies’ would assist the birth by manipulation, and by pressing the abdomen.  Oil was also introduced into the vagina, but these practices have diminished considerably under the influence of the trained midwives.  During one account of childbirth given by a woman, the informant said that the woman in labour often shouts and struggles and calls for her mother, or her husband.  If she calls for her husband the older women tell her to call on God, and don’t bother with her husband.  This statement is an interesting example of the differential attitude to male spouses on the part of younger and older women. [2]   The importance of the father of the child in the whole affair is clearly shown in the custom of giving the woman a piece of his sweaty clothing to smell if the delivery becomes very difficult.  This symbolizes very clearly the recognition of the father in relation both to the mother and child, despite the maternal bias, and it should be noted that this recognition is quite independent of whether the couple are married or not.

After delivery both the child and the mother are bathed in warm water in which both rum and silver money have been placed.  The cord is severed and the placenta is buried in the house-yard with the cord uppermost.  Salt may be sprinkled on it, supposedly to prevent the mother becoming pregnant again too quickly.  Very often a coconut tree is planted over the spot where the cord is buried and this gives the new born individual a point of territorial reference.  The symbolism of umbilical-cord burial is freely used, and I have heard a woman refer to her husband’s fondness for drinking and staying out of the home by saying, ‘His navel-string is buried on the public road’.  Hot stout mixed with ground black pepper, or ginger tea, is often given to the mother after she has given birth, and this potion may be drunk every morning for nine days.

For nine days after delivery both mother and child are confined to the bedroom in which birth took place.  The windows and all cracks etc. are blocked up, and visitors are strictly limited.  It is increasingly common for mothers to come out of the room after only one or two days, but under no circumstances is the child brought out before the ninth day, lest it catch ‘cold’ and die.  On the ninth day the child is dressed in its very best clothes, brought out into the sun and carried around the village to all friends and relatives of the parents.  It is the mother’s duty to carry the child to its paternal grandparents first.  As the child is presented to its kinsfolk and neighbours they customarily place a silver coin in its hand (see Rattray 1927: 59–62).

The custom of giving ‘day-names’ to children has practically died out, but an old woman in August Town gave the following as the customary names given to children according to the day of the week on which they are born.  The Ashanti day-names as given by the Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language are added for comparison (Christaller 1933: 599).  The August Town names are spelled as my informant spelled them.

AUGUST TOWN DAY-NAMES      ASHANTI DAY-NAMES

Sunday           ..          Quashie         Quashba        Kwasi             Akosuwa (=

                                                                                                                        Akwasiba)

Monday         ..          Juba                Koto               Kwadwo        A’dwowa

Tuesday         ..          Kwamna        Bani                Kwabena       Abenaa

Wednesday               Kwakoo         Kuba              Kwaku                       Akuwa

Thursday       ..          Yao                 Yabba             Yaw                Yaa (Yawa)

Friday            ..           Cuffy              Feba                Kofi                Afuwa

Saturday        ..          Hamba            Kwami           Kwame          Amma

All village children are christened in church irrespective of the marital status of the parents, or whether they are church members or not.  A woman who is unmarried will usually ask a friend who is a church member to take her child to church for her, but this is the only difference to be detected in the baptism of legitimate and illegitimate children.  Two persons, one of either sex, are asked to stand as god-parents and one always endeavours to choose god-parents who are slightly better off than the child’s own parents. [3]   To this end, school teachers are often in great demand as god-parents.  After the baptismal ceremony, a party may be held (known locally as a Condel) to which friends and relatives of the parents are invited.  This follows the traditional pattern of village parties, but the child takes no particular part in the proceedings, and may not even be mentioned unless speeches are made congratulating the parents on the christening of their child.

Breast feeding is the general rule with all rural mothers and the child is fed whenever it cries or is thought to be hungry, though a few mothers have now adopted the feeding schedules recommended by the Infant Welfare Clinics.  Almost from birth, the infant’s diet is supplemented with thin gruels and various infusions known as ‘tea’.  Starches such as arrowroot starch, or finely mashed potato, are mixed with warm water and fed to the infant from a bottle.  Bottle feeding is not widely used as a substitute for breast feeding, but merely as a supplement when the infant seems hungry.  Children are weaned at 9 to 12 months as in other parts of the West Indies, and the process is a fairly abrupt one.  The nipples may be smeared with bitter aloes or animal dung to make them distasteful to the child, or alternatively the child may be sent away from the mother for a few days (see Kerr 1952: 35).  To stop the flow of milk women resort to various forms of sympathetic magic such as dropping a little of the milk into an ants’ nest, or hanging a piece of cork on a string around the neck.

Let us now go back and consider more carefully the significant events in the first year of life.  Even before the child is born difficulties may have arisen over the question of its paternity, and if it is a girl’s first pregnancy then she may quite easily have had trouble in effecting her change of status to that of a mother.  The question of recognition of paternity is an important one, not because it will affect the jural status of the new-born in any major way, but because it is a social norm of great importance that every individual must have both a mother and father.  There is always recognition of a genitor, and no individual was ever encountered during the whole of the field-work who could not name a father.  Even the most promiscuous young woman has a pretty good idea of the person who is most likely to be the father of her child, and even if the man refuses to recognize paternity, and the girl does not ask the court to establish it, there is still an overwhelming tendency for a father to be assigned to the child by public gossip.  In any case, where a child is born to an unmarried woman, the name of the father is omitted from the official register of births even where the man clearly recognizes paternity.  In a few marginal cases, the father himself may go to register the birth of the child and insist that his name is entered, but this is extremely rare. [4]   Where paternity is recognized then the child is almost always known by the father’s surname.  In a few cases the child takes the mother’s surname, but even in these cases when the child gets older it will have a father assigned to it even if it never sees him, or knows very little about him, or is not even sure of his name.  In short, it is inconceivable that a child should be fatherless, no matter how vague the father-figure may be, and in the overwhelming majority of cases the father is known and recognized by the whole community, even if he does not support the child and does not live in the village.  By the time the child has reached school age, its father has generally been established, and his name, in the form of the child’s surname, is entered in the school register in all but a very few cases.  The importance of this cannot be stressed too much, for we must never lose sight of the emphasis which is placed on paternity, and the fact that the social norm is for every individual to have a father-figure.

The parturient woman is normally surrounded by her own family particularly her mother, maternal aunts, sisters, etc., as well as neighbours, but if she is married or living in a common-law union she generally gives birth in her own home, and only in a minority of cases does she actually go back to her mother’s home.  None the less, it is significant that the child is born into a situation where the principal actors are his maternal kinsfolk.  The importance of the paternal interest in birth is clearly shown by the various customs which assign the father a definite place in the proceedings.  His mother may be present to help, particularly if the conjugal bond is well established.  A piece of his sweaty clothing is used if the delivery is a difficult one.  He should be the first to be told of the birth and the sex of the child, etc., and it is to his parents that the child should first be carried when it is brought out for the ninth-day ceremonies.  Even elements of the complex generally known as the couvade are not entirely absent, for it is often said that the father may get toothache or pains at this time, and if he does ‘he is helping the mother to bear the pain’.  This is hearsay evidence and no father was ever observed to react in this way.

There is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that the eight days confinement of the mother and child after birth, and the subsequent emergence on the ninth day is of Ashanti origin, but the custom also ‘works’ in a very real way in its contemporary setting.  The ceremony of carrying the child around the village to be given gifts of money is a means of establishing its social ‘birth’ and starting off a whole series of relationships which will grow in importance as the years go by, and of course the whole complex could be analysed according to van Gennep’s schema, with the seclusion of the mother and child as his rites de séparation and de marge, and the nine-day ceremony as his rite d’aggrégation (van Gennep 1909: 57–93).

The christening and baptismal ceremony completes the social ‘placing’ of the child and the acquisition of god-parents ties him into the wider community of the village.  Christening is not only a family affair, for it brings the child into the life of the church which is homologous with the life of the widest social system in which he is likely to participate, and it is essentially a public ritual.

Childhood

During the early stages of its life, a child has considerable freedom and experiences few restraints.  It is fed when it is hungry and although it wears nappies of some sort during most of the first nine months or so, it is given no toilet training until it is about 2 years old, and rarely punished for messing the floor of the house until it is big enough to use the latrine at about 5 years of age.  The young child is never far away from its mother or mother-substitutes, and we have already mentioned the manner in which the maternal grandmother sometimes takes over the mother rôle.  Contact with the father is usually limited to receiving small presents, on the one hand, and regarding his presence as the signal for silence and restraint on the other.  Many children grow up without even seeing their father, but this does not mean that they never experience the idea of a father-figure.  To begin with there is the general social acceptance of the ideal that every individual has both a mother and a father.  We have already seen that almost every woman lives with a man at some period of her life and usually this is when her children are small.  Even if she does not live with a man she will almost inevitably have semi-permanent liaisons with one, or several during this period.  If the biological father of a child lives in the same village, then the child will be sent to visit his home now and again or will at least know him as an individual.

At the age of six, all children are sent to school, and here the child is caught up in an almost perfect model of the ‘ideal’ family pattern.  All schools are presided over by a headmaster who is the ultimate source of discipline and authority.  In the lower classes of the school, the child is taught by women teachers.  It is beyond the scope of this study to enter into a discussion of the educational system as exemplified by the village schools, but it is vitally important to bear in mind the fact that there is this institutionalized educational system which performs so many functions.  Apart from indoctrinating the pupils with the values of the total social system and teaching them its culture, it acts as a sort of age-grading system and provides a reference of social maturation. [5]   The strict authoritarian attitudes of the male teachers with the marked accent upon physical punishment and beating, provides a sharp contrast to the absence of a strong father-figure in the family system.  Observation during the fieldwork leads to the conclusion that fathers beat their children very infrequently and certainly much less frequently than do mothers and mother-substitutes.  Despite this fact, adults always contend that the younger generation is ‘lawless’ because they are not punished in the same way that they (the adults) were when they were small.

Miss Kerr contends that the normal pattern in the West Indies is for the father to be a fantasy figure, and if the father is not there then the child feels unjustly treated, and may even go so far as having guilty feelings over having got rid of him (Kerr 1952: 168).  The important thing, however, is that there is a father-figure and that for the majority of children he is a very real person.

Sex distinction in the sense of differential activities for boys and girls is accentuated from about 8 or 9 years onwards, and at about this age children begin to sleep on different mats according to sex and age differences.  Girls begin to participate more fully in the activities of the women, and to take part in the household tasks, whilst boys are given odd jobs helping with livestock, in the gardens and rice-fields, etc.  Of course they are still attending school and any work they do is because they are under parental control and obedience is obligatory.  There is no question of their being ‘paid’ in the way that children are often paid for doing odd jobs for their parents in England or North America.  At this stage of development, boys and girls still play together, particularly in the traditional semi-formalized or formalized children’s games, but the growing awareness of their differential sex rôles is exemplified in the growing reserve with which they tend to treat each other.  Boys take great care that their sisters shall not step over them whilst they are lying on their sleeping mats, since they believe that this will make them stupid or harm them in some way.  Girls begin to develop a sense of modesty much earlier than boys, and they take care to bathe or dress in private whereas boys will bathe openly until they are 12 or 13 years old.  Boys at this age or even a little older begin to show antagonism towards girls by ‘pulling their breasts’ and then running away.

The idea of male antagonism towards women is highly developed, and is reflected in the Que-que songs, many of which narrate the sexual hostility of a man (see Chapter VII).

Sanko lick he lova pon the dam—De gal a holla murder.

Bip-bap police a come—de gal a holla murder.

Sanko hol the gal ‘pon she breast—De gal a holla murder.  etc.

Or

Anyway Sanko meet you—lick you down,

Anyway, anyway—lick am down.

Don ka a dam top an all—lick am down.

The above two fragments are typical of this type of song, but in fact inter-sexual relations rarely, if ever, approach this type of aggressiveness.  Rape is virtually unknown, and in those cases where it is alleged, it usually appears that the girl has consented to intercourse and later built up a fantasy of being attacked, particularly if she feels she may be discovered.  In practice, men usually approach girls by ‘begging’ for ‘a lil’, rather than aggressively taking the initiative.  This type of institutionalized aggression fantasy may of course represent a reaction formation to the close dependence relationship to the mother-figure, but sex antagonism of this type also has other functions as Nadel has pointed out, and there are many ways in which this antagonism is expressed in Guianese Negro society (see Nadel 1954: 179)

The age at which children leave school is usually around 15 years, but some children begin to stay away earlier than this, in order to do jobs around the home or on the farm.

Adolescence, Courtship and Marriage

As Miss Kerr has pointed out for Jamaica (1952: 80) it is an outstanding fact that the transition from childhood to adult status is almost imperceptible, and is marked neither by initiation rites nor by a period of participation in what might be termed an ‘adolescent culture’ (see Parsons 1949).  For the growing girl, the onset of menstruation and her gradual incorporation into the domestic tasks forms a focus for her maturity, and once she starts to have children her transition to the status of ‘mother’ is well under way, though not necessarily complete.  For the boy there are no such well marked physiological changes to punctuate the progress of his maturity, and it is interesting to note that one often finds it extremely difficult to ascertain the ages of men from either their deportment or their behaviour until they become really old.  Once a boy has become enmeshed in the wage-earning system he is in a sense ‘mature’, and ‘becoming a father’ is of far less importance than is the fact of ‘becoming a mother’.  For a young man, the tie to his mother which involves him in contributing money to her support is not easily broken, and he may go on living with her even when he has fathered several children.  It is interesting to note that many young men decide to get married after having been away from the village for some time, and whilst it might be argued that they are able to earn money outside the village and thus begin to think of setting up a household, it is also worth bearing in mind the fact that leaving the village in search of work has something in the nature of an initiatory experience about it.  From August Town the majority of young men go off to the bauxite mines as soon as they are about 18 or 19 years old, and there they are free to feel grown up and responsible for themselves.  When they come back to the village at holiday times they are easily distinguishable with their berets, sun glasses, long coats and narrow bottomed trousers: the hall-marks of the smart young city man, or the ‘saga boy’ of the local dialect.  They clearly recognize their earning power, and hence their spending power, to be a mark of attraction to the girls, and when an auction sale was held at the Congregational Church in August Town after the harvest festival, it was the young men from McKenzie and Kwakwani who happened to be in the village at the time who took the leading part in the buying, often giving their purchases to their girl friends who were watching on.  The dances which are held in the village schools also provide opportunity for the young men to demonstrate their generosity by buying cakes, ice-cream and drinks for their sweethearts, and the girls are highly critical of any signs of meanness or ‘cheapness’ in the young men who are competing for their favours.

There can be very little doubt of the fact that the majority of young women are eager to marry and set up their own household, but at the same time they expect a prospective husband to be able to support them, and the fact that they are able to work themselves for cash wages (except in Perseverance) and enjoy a sense of security in their mother’s home, means that they can easily postpone marriage.  Young men are far less eager to marry or set up house, for it means that they have to provide a house, as well as support for a wife and family, and in any case a young man feels a duty towards his mother whom he is in all probability helping to support.  If young men are reluctant to marry, they are certainly not reluctant to have affairs with young women, and they form attachments which often result in pregnancy.  In this eventuality it does not by any means follow that the man will be expected to marry the girl.  He will certainly be expected to support the child if he is able, and he may continue his attachment to the girl, and other children may be born.  Once he has accepted responsibility for the child he has some sort of a tie with its mother and the relationship may endure until they can set up house together, probably in a common-law relationship.  On the other hand, the pregnancy itself may precipitate an estrangement, particularly if the man denies paternity and the girl has to apply to the court for an affiliation order.  In this way a young woman may bear several children for different men until she finally finds a partner with whom she establishes a lasting relationship.  It should be borne in mind that a woman has claims for financial support for her children on all the men for whom she has borne children, and if she attempted to procure abortions before her first child was born she is much less likely to attempt to do so afterwards.  After a young woman has begun to have illegitimate children she does not suddenly become less eager to marry, but she is likely to realize that she can only achieve this end by means of establishing a quasi-marital union first.  The type of marriage entered into by a young childless woman is different in that it is often mediated through her kinsfolk and those of the young man, and certainly involves the man in making formal approaches to the girl’s parents (see Chapter VII).  In such cases the idea of romantic love may play some part in the relationship of the young couple, but the main consideration is the man’s ability to take care of the girl, and provide her with a home.  In both marital and common-law unions, men expect their spouses not to work for wages, for since the man has accepted responsibility for a spouse and her children, it is a reflection on his ability to fulfil the responsibility if she then continues to work.  There are cases of course where the woman does still take jobs, and at rice harvest time it is recognized that any woman can work for money without her spouse feeling ashamed, but apart from this, the principle is very generally recognized.  When a married or common-law married woman does work for her own money, it is generally a sign of her attitude of independence, and not of her desire to contribute to the joint income of the house, and thus permit a higher standard of living for the household group as a unit, as is often the case in higher status groups.  The insistence of the man on his spouse not working outside the home must be regarded as an attempt on his part to stress the basis of his authority as the provider for the group, and in this respect it is highly significant.

Entering a conjugal union does not mean that ties with the parents are broken, though inevitably they are considerably weakened.  The whole ceremonial of marriage including the Que-que serves to emphasize the new relationships created by the marriage, but the full effect of the ritual is only seen in those cases where persons marry before having lived together in a common-law union.  Even in these cases the separation of the spouses from their respective families is not so complete as in many societies, and even if one of them has to go off to live in another village, the visits to their mother will be frequent.  Moving into a house together is the main event in the development of any conjugal union for it is only at this stage of such a relationship that the responsibility of the man and the dependence of the woman become unequivocal.  He has accepted the rôle of husband and the duties that go with it, and she has accepted the obligations that flow from having someone to ‘mind’ her.  Previously she accepted the control of her mother, and father perhaps, but there is a clear social recognition that ideally she now comes under the control of her husband.  The fact that such control is not embodied in a clear-cut set of rules, legally prescribed and enforced by strong sanctions, is important.  A mother never completely relinquishes her claims on her children, and between spouses there is a recognition of each other’s duty towards their respective mothers.  The balancing of the conflicting obligations to the spouse and to the mother is a difficult matter and a man is always suspicious of his spouse’s alliance with her mother, particularly where the couple are still childless.

Not all persons enter conjugal unions involving common residence, and there is sometimes a persistence of a sibling group as a co-residential unit.  In one such household in August Town, two brothers and two sisters aged 65 and 49 years, and 70 and 57 years respectively, lived together as a household.  Both the sisters had children and the household was enlarged by the addition of the following persons.

Daughter of sister No. 1 (70 years), aged 33 years.

Daughter of a dead sister, aged 23 years.

Three children of a sister’s daughter, aged 9, 7 and 5 years.

The two sisters functioned as the effective heads of the household, and the younger of the brothers was extremely sickly, did not work, and was consequently almost wholly dependent on his two sisters.  The other brother was recognized as the nominal head of the household, but he had a house of his own which he used as a dormitory and this he regarded as his own house as opposed to the family house in which he only had a joint interest.

This type of situation is not common, and there would normally be a tendency for such a unit to break up into several households once the mother of the group of siblings had died.

Old Age

Old age does not automatically confer honour and elicit respect, for the increase in years does not bring an increase in responsibility, in the number of offices held, or in the exercise of leadership.  A majority of men manage to consolidate their position as head of their household group and although their wives become the effective managers of the household, they continue to run the farm, manage the stock and perhaps work for cash wages as well.  Unless a man becomes sick and weak he continues to work no matter how old he is, and one sees men of 80 years of age going off to their fields every day.  On the whole men die at an earlier age than women as we saw earlier, and if a man’s spouse pre-deceases him, then it is likely that he will enter another union (see Chapter II).  For a widower the task of keeping an existing household together is a difficult one, and in the few cases where it is accomplished there is usually a daughter, a sister or a grand-daughter who stays on as the real manager of the household.  Some men live alone even when they are very old, a few are sent to the poor-house in Georgetown, and occasionally an old man who has been deserted by his children is taken in by non-relatives when he becomes ill.  Men do not look forward to old age, and they often express their fear that their children will ignore them.  Their interest in sexual intercourse continues and the fear of impotence is strongly felt.  This cannot be regarded merely as a ‘biological drive’, but must be seen as a means of expression of the desire to assert masculinity.  From puberty to death, men are preoccupied with proving their potency and men who have never fathered a child will often claim responsibility for a pregnancy when it is very unlikely to be true.  For a man to be the genitor of many children, or to ‘have children all about’ is a matter for pride rather than shame, for it proves that he is a ‘man’, strong and virile.

For women the situation is far different.  As a woman gets older her position as the focus of a household group is consolidated and she is respected as a mother and a grandmother.  It is very unlikely that she will be neglected in her old age or infirmity, and not many women are left to be cared for by strangers or sent to the poor-house in Georgetown, as men sometimes are.