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'Grannies': Fosterage and Fertility Among the Mende of Sierra Leone
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16410 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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5 / 1989 |
4,892 Words |
| Author
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Caroline Bledsoe
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For many second major focus of field research in Africa, I chose Sierra Leone, a small country bordering Liberia where my husband and I had worked several years before. We were accompanied by our three and a half year-old son and moved into a comfortable house in a rural community in a beautiful upland area of the Eastern Province.
As people came to know us, I was surprised at how many times a certain question arose, even from those who regularly saw our conspicuous trio walking about town. Often, eyeing our one visible son, they would ask me: "How many children do you have?" They expected to hear that I had at least one other child back in the United States: perhaps a baby I had left with my mother and quite possibly an older child as well who was staying with an uncle to attend school. When they learned that this one child was indeed my only offspring--and might well be the last--the typical reaction was shocked disbelief. Why stop at one, they demanded, when other people can help you raise as many as God gives you?
As recently as twenty-five years ago, experts predicted that such areas as Southeast Asia and Latin America would sustain their high birthrates until population cataclysms forced them to curtain growth. Yet today, most of the major world areas have begun to decrease their fertility rates. Asia's total fertility rate, the number of children a woman normally bears, has fallen to 4.3 children per woman, and Latin America's to 3.7 (The rates in North America and Europe currently lie at 1.8.)
Only in sub-Saharan Africa do fertility rates remain high. West Africa's total fertility rate is 6.5 and central Africa's is 6.0. East Africa has a total fertility rate of 7.0, the highest in the world. These rates remain high in the face of modernization and urbanization, which usually decrease the usefulness of children as farm workers and raise the cost to parents of rearing and educating them.
Anthropologists and demographers are beginning to realize that prenatal methods are not the only means of regulating family size and composition. In Africa, the parents who biologically bear children are not necessarily the ones who bear the economic consequences of raising them.
In Sierra Leone, a small country on the coast of West Africa, many people have responsibility toward, and can demand benefits from, children. Although few children are adopted in the legal sense, many are fostered: sent away from their natural parents to be raised or educated. They can be brought back to parents when needed or even sent out to other guardians for different purposes. Fosterage, then, is an adjustment to family size and composition that is done after children are born. It can be done and undone a number of times, even with the same child, to meet new circumstances. The possibility of regulating reproduction socially through fosterage minimizes the cost of raising children.
This article describes some of the most important changes in Mende efforts to educate older children. But it focuses on older rural women--called "grannies" in the local idiom--whose economic situations are most vulnerable to the march of urban progress. One of the most interesting facts about grannies is that they commonly take in the small children of younger urbanites. Why do they do this? What do they gain from it? What is the wider
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