Ngecha: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change

NGECHA: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change

edited by Carolyn Pope Edwards and Beatrice Blyth Whiting

University of Nebraska Press

ngecha

NGECHA A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change

edited by

Carolyn Pope Edwards and Beatrice Blyth Whiting

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

© 2004 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America



library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Ngecha : a Kenyan village in a time of rapid social change / edited by Carolyn Pope Edwards and Beatrice Blyth Whiting. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 0-8032-4809-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Rural development – Kenya – Ngecha. 2. Women in rural development – Kenya. 4. Family – Kenya. ies.

3. Rural women – Kenya – Ngecha.

5. Kenya – Rural conditions – Case stud-

i. Edwards, Carolyn P.

ii. Whiting, Beatrice Blyth.

hn793.n44n44 2004 307.1'412'0967626–dc22 2003021832

contents List of Illustrations

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List of Tables

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Acknowledgments

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Opening: ‘‘New Dawn’’

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1. Background and Contexts Carolyn Edwards and Beatrice Whiting

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2. The Village and Its Families Beatrice Whiting and Carolyn Edwards, with Ciarunji Chesaina, John Whiting, John Herzog, and Dorothy Herzog

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3. The Historical Stage Beatrice Whiting, John Whiting, John Herzog, and Carolyn Edwards, with Arnold Curtis

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Interlude: ‘‘Let Women Be Supported’’ 4. Women as Agents of Social Change Beatrice Whiting 5. Changing Concepts of the Good Child and Good Mothering Beatrice Whiting, with Ciarunji Chesaina, Grace Diru, Jonah Ichoya, Priscilla Kariuki, Violet Nyambura Kimani, Irene Kamau, Rose Maina, Wanjiku Munge-Kagia, Jane Mwangi, John Whiting, Thomas Landauer, and Lynn Streeter

91 93

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6. The Teaching of Values Old and New Ciarunji Chesaina

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7. Aging and Elderhood Frances Cox, with Ndung’u Mberia

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8. The University as Gateway to a Complex World Carolyn Edwards, with E. G. Runo and Ezra arap Maritim 9. Ngecha Today Violet Nyambura Kimani

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Closing: ‘‘Hope on the Horizon’’

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Contributors

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Index

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illustrations fi gure s Fig. 1.1. Kenya and its Central Province

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Fig. 2.1. Section of land belonging to one of the largest of the sublineages in Ngecha

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Fig. 2.2. Two homesteads in Ngecha, with genealogy of residents

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pho t o graphs Chapter 2 Ngecha center

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Ngecha tinsmith’s shop

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Dressmaking

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Ngecha post office

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Mud-and-wattle and modern wooden rectangular houses

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Woman making a basket

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Naomi Muthoni in 1968

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Outdoor game at the Ngecha Nursery School

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Mother and baby bringing fodder for family cow

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Boy serving as nurse to younger sibling

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Young girls role-playing feminine activities

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Boy constructing car from pieces of wire

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Woman preparing mashed vegetables

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Father arriving home from work

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Chapter 3 Gichuru Harambee Secondary School

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Girls reciting at Ngecha Nursery School

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Chapter 4 Girl hauling empty water barrels

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Boy carrying water

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Women and children waiting to buy water

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Chapter 6 Boy helping care for his family’s livestock

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Chapter 7 Old man who had attended mission school

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Old woman with her grandchildren

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Older married couple

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Elderly man

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Chapter 8 The University of Nairobi in 1970

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Rural boarding school

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Chapter 9 Tigoni House

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Some women who participated in the 1968–1973 study

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Donkey-cart owner fetching water from the town borehole

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Homes

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Milk cows

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tables Table 2.1. Comparison of Three Groups of Ngecha Households Selected for an Intensive Study of Family Life

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Table 2.2. Education of Men and Women in the Sample

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Table 2.3. Employment of Fathers in the Sample

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Table 3.1. Education of Men and Women in Ngecha

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Table 3.2. Description of Children Attending the Ngecha Nursery School in 1968 and 1973

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Table 5.1. Good and Bad Characteristics for Children

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Table 5.2. Relationship of Mothers’ Education to Their Choice of Valued Traits

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Table 5.3. Relationship of Fathers’ Education to Modernization and Mothers’ Choice of Valued Traits for Children 131 Table 5.4. Indicators of Modernity in Ngecha

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Table 5.5. Relationship of Mothers’ Choice of Valued Traits with Modernity

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Table 5.6. Mothers’ Judgments of the Origin of Children’s Character Traits

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Table 8.1. Description of the 19 University Students 218 Table 8.2. Interview Dilemma and Probing Questions

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acknowledgments This work resulted from long-term collaboration between senior and new investigators from different disciplines and local college graduates who first joined the project as research apprentices. At the time, the Social Science Research Council was encouraging funding agencies to back comparative projects led by experienced investigators. The Ford Foundation in 1954 chose John W. M. Whiting, Irven L. Child, and William W. Lambert to initiate a systematic study of comparative child development. The Ngecha project, in turn, was financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York under a collaborative arrangement, directed by Robert A. LeVine and John W. M. Whiting, for field studies of child development in West and East Africa. The funds supported the project house and meeting place and subsequent graduate study in the United States for promising students interested in further research training. In 2003 the Human Relations Area Files in New Haven, Connecticut, took over the archives of the original data and unpublished reports and published the behavior observations on CD-ROM for scholarly use. This volume presents the results of the research work of more than 20 Kenyan (University of Nairobi) and U.S. graduate students working with senior investigators. The study illustrates what an international and intercultural team can accomplish when focusing on different aspects of community life, employing a range of research methods, and bringing in the talents of young apprentices who emerge as research scholars. Most of the photographs, exemplifying the beauty and value of photographic documentation for ethnographic research, are the work of Frances Cox, professional photographer, commissioned by the Child Development Research Unit. The images in chapters 3 and 4 are by Sayre Sheldon, one of the founders of Women’s Action for New Directions (wand). Those in chapter 8 were taken by Carolyn Edwards, and those in chapter 9 portraying Ngecha today were contributed by Violet Nyambura Kimani.

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Acknowledgments The three eloquent poems, ‘‘New Dawn,’’ ‘‘Let Women Be Supported,’’ and ‘‘Hope on the Horizon’’ are reprinted with permission from Hope on the Horizon: Essays on the Status and Liberation of African Women, published by Impact Associates, Nairobi, Kenya, copyright C. Chesaina Swinimer 1994. We are grateful to the writer for use of her creative work. Chapter 5 is adapted from an earlier journal article by Beatrice B. Whiting published in 1966 under the title ‘‘The effect of social change on concepts of the good child and good mothering: A study of families in Kenya,’’ Ethos, 24(1), pp. 3–35, and is used with permission. Thomas Landauer, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Lynn Streeter graciously provided previously unpublished data on Ngecha children’s developmental quotients that offer important information about the relation between changes in maternal behavior and child outcomes. We wish to thank Dr. James Kagia and his wife, Wanjiku, for their contributions and support. Dr. Kagia was a member of the staff of the Community Health Division of Nairobi University Medical School, and he set up and ran a medical clinic for the families who participated in our study. Wanjiku, now the director of education for the Human Development Network at the World Bank, was a research apprentice in the project and came for two different academic years of study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was available to advise us when we needed information about the village and some of the mothers. We also thank the University of Nebraska–Lincoln students who provided wonderful help in many aspects of the work involved in preparing this manuscript for publication, including Myesha Albert, Maria T. R. de Guzman, Amy Highby, Lisa Johnson, and Wenli Liu. The team of undergraduates from the psychology department who compiled the observations included Melissa Kobus, Nicole Miller, Jennifer Tuel, Melissa Lynn Freyer, Lanette Christiansen, Jessica Ranjbar, Lacy Gacke, Emily Eisenhauer, Carolyn Connelly, Natalie Kovtun, Andrew Kovtun, and Megan Husset. We especially appreciated the help by Thomas Weisner, University of California–Los Angeles, Marianne Bloch, University of Wisconsin– Madison, and John Herzog, Northeastern University, in providing extensive and careful criticisms on the manuscript, and Robert A. LeVine

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Acknowledgments and Robert Ferguson, both at Harvard University, for intellectual support and advice along the way. For timely help in preparing the final version of the manuscript, it is our pleasure to thank Laura Lanfranchi. Bob Burchfield did a masterful job of copyediting, and Linnea Fredrickson of the University of Nebraska Press guided the book to publication. Our deepest gratitude goes to our husbands, Richard Edwards and the late John Whiting, for many direct and indirect contributions to carrying out this project. A final note. Beatrice Whiting died on September 29, 2003, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was very satisfied that this book had been completed and would be part of her legacy. This book is dedicated to the memory of Beatrice Whiting, John Whiting, and all of the others, now passed into history, who participated in this book. As Violet Kimani said of Beatrice Whiting, such people do not die in her culture. They remain as ‘‘living dead,’’ and their contribution remains to all those who are by extension their offspring.

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ngecha

new dawn She walks tall Among the men Now smilingly Now confused She walks tall Among the men Straight on Straight on Why the introspection? Why the confusion? Why the poise of ambivalence? She walks tall Among the men Now smilingly Now confused She walks tall Among the men Ready to welcome A new dawn. Ciarunji Chesaina

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Background and Contexts Carolyn Edwards and Beatrice Whiting

Ngecha, with an estimated population of 60,000 in 2002 but only 7,000 in 1973, is situated in the Central Province of Kenya in the fertile foothills of the Nyandarua Range (Aberdares) on the edge of the Rift Valley. At an altitude of 6,000 feet, its climate is temperate and mild yearround. Gikuyu lineages came to settle the land around Ngecha in the last decades of the nineteenth century during a late chapter in the great migration of Bantu peoples who first moved into the Central Highlands of East Africa around 1500. The region’s beauty and desirability also attracted the British and other European settlers who poured into Africa during the early part of the twentieth century in search of estates on which to raise coffee, tea, and cattle. The first European missionaries arrived around the same time, also drawn by its prime location 20 miles north of Nairobi, close to the trans-Kenyan railroad that connects the coast with Lake Victoria and Uganda. The missionaries introduced schools along with the Christian religion. In the following years, more and more land was alienated from the Gikuyu lineages who had settled Ngecha but who were now squeezed into an area that British colonial authorities demarcated as a native reserve. When Kenyans achieved their independence in 1963, the new national government converted the native reserve into a fourth-level administrative unit called a location. (The levels are province, district, division, location, and sublocation.) The location of Ngecha included the village and its surroundings, the village of Kibuku, and seven sections of farm homesteads owned by members of the named Gikuyu patrilineages who had migrated from the area around Mount Kenya.

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Background and Contexts The town of Limuru, made up of a railroad depot with a Bata Shoe Factory and pork processing plant, a government district office, and a small hospital, lies six miles to the northwest of Ngecha. Five miles to the east sits the town of Tigoni, which in 1968 was primarily a European residential area surrounded by tea estates and the fields of the Rockford Flower Company. It was in Tigoni that Beatrice and John Whiting found a home large enough to house both the field director and resident student assistants of the Child Development Research Unit (cdru) and to serve as a meeting place for the numerous expatriate investigators engaged in related research or projects in other parts of Kenya. Today that same house is the home of the Centre for Health and Behaviour Studies of the University of Nairobi, directed by Violet Nyambura Kimani, one of the original assistants and a contributor to this volume. Along with the village of Ngecha, Nairobi and the nation of Kenya have grown tremendously. Indeed, Ngecha is now a true suburb of Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya and home to an estimated 2.5 million people in a country of about 30 million (Blacker, 2002). On the eve of national independence, the city’s population was 266,794 within a country of 8,636,263 (Kenya Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, 1964; Survey of Kenya, 1970). Kenya’s national growth rate has exceeded 3% per year; total fertility is unlikely to level out at fewer than three births per woman (Blacker, 2002). Forty-two African ethnic groups are named in the Kenya census listing, and the Gikuyu are the largest with about 20% of the total population. (‘‘Gikuyu’’ is the indigenous spelling of what is also commonly referred to as ‘‘Kikuyu.’’) The Gikuyu people generally occupy the administrative area called the Central Province, which is bounded by Nairobi to the south, Mount Kirinyaga (Mount Kenya) to the north, the Rift Valley and Nyandarua Range (Aberdares) to the west, and the Mbeere Plain falling to the great port city of Mombasa and the Indian Ocean on the east. This book is a case study of a five-year period (1968–1973) in a particular Gikuyu community living through the processes of rapid social and technological change. It describes the proximate mechanisms by which a farming community changed into a community of wage

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Fig. 1.1. Kenya cities, towns, and provincial boundaries, with inset showing Central Province and the area around the community of Ngecha. (Kenya map from Leo, 1984, adapted from Kenyatta by Jeremy Murray Brown, Dutton, 1973. Inset map based on project archives and map of Central Province, Survey of Kenya, 1970, p. 11.)

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Background and Contexts earners. Reflections on the status of Ngecha in 2002 are provided in the final chapter. The book is written and interpreted by Kenyan and American women and highlights the role of women in the transformation of culture.

Why This Book? The research was a project of the cdru, set up in 1967 at the invitation of Arthur Porter, the principal of University College, Nairobi (later to become the University of Nairobi), and affiliated with the Faculty of Education. The project was financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York under a charter that called for the investigation of child development and mothers’ socialization practices as observed and recorded in homesteads. The observations were made by trained Gikuyu students from the University of Nairobi who lived in the project house in Tigoni and who usually spent daylight hours in the Ngecha community, returning in the later afternoon to code their observations and discuss their findings. Interviews were collected, and several tests were administered to young children. In studying the socialization techniques of the mothers, particular attention was given to mothers’ beliefs about the nature of children, the traits they wished for their children to possess, and their concepts of a good child. Eventually, the cdru changed its mission, evolved into the Bureau of Educational Research under entirely Kenyan auspices, and was incorporated into Kenyatta University (Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1979; Jefferson, 1976). The overall goals of the project were to define the critical cultural dimensions that explain important normative characteristics of adult and child behavior and to search for independent variables at the cultural level (dimensions such as the roles and settings that children occupy, the company they keep, and the activities they perform) that are most powerful for explaining parent and child behavior around the world (Weisner & Edwards, 2002). Beatrice Whiting and Carolyn Edwards (1988) analyzed the social behavior of children, using observations from Ngecha as well as from other communities in Kenya and around the world, to show how children’s age, sex, and daily activities influenced their social development. For example, children who were more active in household work (child care, food preparation, gar-

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Background and Contexts dening) demonstrated significantly more nurturant and prosocial behavior and less dependency (B. B. Whiting, 1983; see also de Guzman, Edwards, & Carlo, under review). In most communities, girls participated more often than boys in household and subsistence tasks and at a younger age (B. B. Whiting, 1983; de Guzman et al., under review). Those children who attended school and had frequent opportunity to play in groups of same-age peers were more dominant, competitive, and rough-and-tumble in their play, suggesting that the introduction of schooling and increased opportunity for same-age peer group play led to changes in their social behavior (B. B. Whiting, 1983; de Guzman et al., under review). The Ngecha behavioral observations have now been published in electronic format so that others can examine them (B. B. Whiting, Edwards & de Guzman, 2003). Additional studies by project members focused on Ngecha infants (Leiderman et al., 1973; Leiderman & Leiderman, 1977), toddlers (Edwards & B. B. Whiting, 1993), and the aging (Cox with Mberia, 1979). John Whiting and Carol Worthman examined adolescence, initiation, and the male life cycle (J. Whiting, 1981; Worthman & J. Whiting, 1987). Herzog (1973) studied Ngecha youths’ ratings of their self-concepts, as related to both initiation status and high school attendance. John Whiting (1981) focused on the development of Ngecha boys as they matured into manhood. Recognizing the problems faced by some American males making the transition to adulthood, he speculated that Gikuyu initiation ceremonies facilitated all the key transitions in the male life cycle. The next step involved turning attention to the range of experiences of Ngecha women, and it was here that the effects of rapid social change were so striking that they clearly became the foreground (B. B. Whiting, 1977, 1984; B. B. Whiting & Edwards, 2002). New technologies and educational and economic opportunities encouraged or required the village women in particular to extend into new realms their managerial and problem-solving skills, originally developed growing up in large families and doing responsible work as children. The mothers’ style of interacting with their children (B. B. Whiting & Edwards, 1988, chapter 3) was high in prosocial task assignment and low in sociability and information exchange, but this style was mutable and

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Background and Contexts could be changed to encompass new goals, such as the basic support of formal schooling by seeing that children got to school and had time for homework. Between 1968 and 1980 we (Beatrice Whiting and Carolyn Edwards) had the opportunity to get to know 14 Kenyan university women who have now become professional career women. In 1968 the majority of the women were students at University College in Nairobi, and they were members of the first generation of their rural communities to attend college. During the time we did research in Kenya, the project employed nine of these women as apprentices who worked with us on our study of child development. Three of these nine as well as three apprentices who had worked on other projects later studied at Harvard University and earned advanced degrees. All now have professional careers. They are successful lawyers, university professors, or professionals in government. Some are senior executives at international organizations. One served as a high commissioner from Kenya to another African nation. (In addition, during the same years, many male Kenyan university students worked for the project, making valuable contributions to research efforts; for example, see chapters 7 and 8. The absence of discussion of these men in this chapter should not be construed as denigration of their efforts to many components of the project.) Our contact with these women over a period of years stimulated us to speculate about the characteristics that made these Kenyan women into successful pioneers. What in their experience and training facilitated their adjustment to the urban, capitalistic society of the new nation of Kenya and made it possible for them to adjust with seeming ease to international settings? How different were these women from their mothers and grandmothers? How did rural women in Ngecha cope and adapt to their rapidly changing environment, taking into account the needs of their children, husbands, aging parents, and others for whom they were responsible? Perhaps Kenyan women have always been trained to adjust to change. History tells us that they are descendants of the great migratory wave of Bantu peoples who traveled across the continent from West Africa colonizing many areas as they progressed. The Kenyan assistants and collaborators were indeed pathbreakers able not only to work alongside American-style researchers

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Background and Contexts (professors and students) but also to move into the international scene in American and European graduate schools. Living in and through transformation and progress in the lives of women has been central to our personal experience as well. Beatrice Whiting, born in 1914, was among the first women to obtain a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University, and Carolyn Edwards, born in 1947, came of age professionally during the American feminist revolution of the 1960s. Each of the editors is ‘‘acutely aware,’’ as Wandibba (1997, p. 329) wisely comments, that ‘‘the images and models with which [we] select and interpret fieldwork data’’ are the ‘‘product of our personal biographies and the scholarly traditions within which we try to communicate the results of our work.’’ Though we realize that our own experiences, training, and biases necessarily motivate and frame our selection and presentation, we have tried to provide descriptions, background information, and findings that are both sufficiently detailed for alternative interpretations and conclusions to be drawn and sufficiently rich and complex for the material to raise its own questions and not just tell ‘‘our’’ (authors’ and editors’) versions of the story.

Theoretical Perspective In the 1960s and 1970s countries all over the world were adjusting to economic and social change. Ever since nations in Africa threw off the vestiges of colonial government, adopted formal schooling, and joined the global economy based on wages and markets, women have been critical players in responding to changing conditions; creating new strategies for gaining access to and control of resources such as soils, water, and woodlands (Thomas-Slayter et al., 1995); and shaping new family lifestyles. The importance of their role as agents of change in Kenya has become increasingly known and documented. As a major example, the availability of food depends to a large extent on women’s efforts to produce, process, market, and prepare it. Women have been a dynamic force in shaping the social system and in making their own history, as argued by Ahlberg-Maina (1991) in her study of the response of women’s groups to family planning. Women’s participation not only in economic activities but also in po-

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Background and Contexts litical and social organizations has transformed their relationships to the state and to community institutions and has changed the nature of men’s and women’s roles and the meanings of gender, as documented by case studies of the rural livelihood systems of six Kenyan communities (Thomas-Slayter et al., 1995). Women have entered formal education at every level (Bloch, Beoku-Betts, & Tabachnick, 1998) and have used their agency to offer their children educational and economic opportunities, as demonstrated in Kiluva-Ndunda’s (2001) study of the experiences of the women of Kilome. They have had difficulty entering the male-dominated structures and processes of government (Nzomo, 1997), achieving equality mainly in education (Bloch et al., 1998; Chesaina Swinimer, 1994). The laws of inheritance and property rights frequently have disfavored them (Nasimiyu, 1997), but they have exerted strong influence through participation in self-help organizations and women’s associations (Ahlberg-Maina, 1991; Hill, 1991). New women’s organizations have been established, and older ones have increased their activity and impact (Chesaina Swinimer, 1994). High-profile women leaders have emerged in the areas of education, research, politics, law, and business. Very little of the literature, however, focuses on the influence of women as agents of social change in their roles as mothers (B. B. Whiting, 1984). Only a few publications document Kenyan women’s changing experiences of their sexuality and reproductive decisions (but see Davison, 1989; S. LeVine, 1979) and their evolving goals for parenting their children toward survival, economic productivity, and personal achievement (R. A. LeVine, Miller, & West, 1988; R. A. LeVine et al., 1994; Munroe & Munroe, 1984). These show that women have reframed their parental belief systems (Harkness & Super, 1995; Harkness, Raeff, & Super, 2000) in negotiation with their cultural surroundings. From a family adaptation perspective, they have struggled with difficulties in workloads, health, and living conditions (Weisner, Bradley, & Kilbride, 1997). Nevertheless, they manage to cooperate with others to construct meaningful and sustainable daily routines and activity settings for their children, mediating between their own resources and constraints and their children’s developmental experiences (Gallimore, Goldenberg, & Weisner, 1993). Robert LeVine reminds us of the following point: ‘‘Humans do not blindly follow a ge-

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Background and Contexts netic or cultural code in their parental conduct but are rational actors who adjust their behavior to the risks and the benefits they perceive in the environment of child care. As the parents of a given community modify traditional formulas for child care, they help redefine ‘‘custom’’ as adaptive practice rather than arbitrary tradition’’ (R. A. LeVine et al., 1988, p. 3). Thus if one considers the allocation of responsibility for the raising of children, women, in their nurturing and teaching roles as mothers, emerge as central protagonists setting the future agenda of their country. A woman’s ability to make viable adjustments for herself and her children is an important component of the family’s success in coping with new situations. As pragmatic parents, women, guided by their perception of the direction of change, reshape their priorities and their socialization practices to prepare children for adult lives much different from their parents’. As Stamp (1995) argues, the bedrock of agency in the Kenyan state today is the ‘‘multiple subjectivity’’ of rural women as mothers, daughters, sisters, traders, and farmers.

Ngecha: A Case Study We doubt that there is any society that does not change to some degree from one generation to the next, but some time periods evidence especially rapid transformations. The twentieth century was such a period for both Africa and the United States. In attempting to understand the history of Ngecha, we were able to use primary accounts by Kenyatta, Leakey, Hobley, and others as sources of insight and as a baseline to focus our attention on domains that were particularly subject to change. Working with Kenyan collaborators and acknowledging a set of guiding theoretical assumptions for the interdisciplinary study of child development (B. B. Whiting, 1980; R. A. LeVine et al., 1994), we set up the study by selecting three groups of Ngecha families differing in the degree to which they were participating in innovative social and economic lifestyles. Comparing these families sharpened our identification of changes that were in process, allowing us to explore the behavior of mothers and children and identify new types of behavior as well as changes

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Background and Contexts in mothers’ value priorities. We could see how technological innovations, the introduction of cash crops, the introduction of schooling, the emergence of urban centers with wage-earning jobs, and the formation of a national government influenced the behavior—and the values and beliefs—of adults and children. We could attempt to identify these catalysts for change and the strategies adopted to meet the challenges. Our team could finally get an intellectual grasp on the changing ideas and values of not only parents but also of the aged and the educated young people entering adulthood. We could try to understand the stories and information provided by interviews with women and men in order to present as accurate and complete a picture as possible of the changing context. Thus, throughout the book, we have brought together complementary images, voices, and empirical observations to portray Ngecha adults and children. Our portrayals are ultimately integrated by and thus distilled though the eyes of American researchers who were themselves living in a period of social change, characterized also in part by women’s freer entry into universities and professions still predominantly the domain of men. In previous publications we, together with our colleagues, presented descriptions of Ngecha children and adolescents (B. B. Whiting & Edwards, 1988). In this volume, however, we turn our attention to the range of experiences of Ngecha women and continue a line of argument begun by Beatrice Whiting decades ago (1973, 1977) concerning changing lifestyles in Kenya, specifically, how these conditions invited women in particular to redefine and reapply their managerial and problem-solving skills, developed in large families with complex household economies, into new realms. Among the concomitants of a market and wage economy were increasing isolation of nuclear families, shifting roles for men and women, and weakening ties to the extended family, increasing the burdens and constraints on Ngecha mothers as well as transforming the decisions made by young adults and the aged. In extended, unpublished interviews at the University of Nairobi, Gikuyu-speaking women articulated to us such themes as: educated women’s responsibilities to the family; autonomous control of their own money; conflict between the self-aspirations and the demands of parents; relations with aging

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Background and Contexts family members; changing structure of Kenyan family life and marital relationships; and the tensions between European and African familial and religious values. The contexts of support for the elderly were also in flux throughout Kenya. Elderhood was no longer a privileged status, yet individuals retained their resilience and capacity to adapt. Many described poignantly the hardships of old age, but in their spirit and adaptability they also revealed how particular life experiences in earlier years prepared them for old age in a changing society where new pressures introduced disruption to the expectations of many. As mothers of young children, Ngecha women became agents of social change. They emerged as central protagonists setting the future agenda of their country by preparing the children for wage-earning jobs that required schooling. Mothers rearranged their own value priorities and altered their aspirations for their children’s educational and occupational outcomes, and this led to conflicts between new and traditional values. They also displayed a marked resourcefulness in finding opportunities to make money through cash cropping and other entrepreneurial activities, attending secondary or technical school, and responding to the new national politics and culture. Able to take risks and innovate, these women were pathbreakers in family adaptation. The essays in this book show how the process of change impacted the daily lives of women and children, how it was seen by the women who were important actors in the process, and how their actions in turn may have influenced processes of change at both the local and the national levels. The women’s experiences document the kaleidoscopic nature of culture change and indicate how a change in one aspect leads to unplanned consequences in another set of cultural practices, beliefs, and values. Kenya, in the first years of the twenty-first century, faces crisis-level problems on many fronts—economic, fiscal, environmental, political, and medical. Ethnic/tribal polarization has deepened, even though human-rights activists, church members, ethnic/tribal and class-crime victims, and members of Parliament have attempted to resist it (Klopp, 2001). Land pressure has increased relentlessly. Market-oriented policies have not produced self-sustaining growth and development (Orvis, 1997) but rather land grabbing by the powerful (Klopp, 2000).

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Background and Contexts There is much repressed anger in Kenya because of corruption and deteriorating socioeconomic conditions (Inter-Church Coalition on Africa, 2000). Family breakdown is revealed in the increasing numbers of single mothers, destitute children, orphans, and street children (Kilbride, Suda, & Njeru, 2001). In the area of family, however, evidence of decline is balanced by evidence of continued strength and resiliency (Swadener with Kabiru & Njenga, 2000; Weisner, Bradley, & Kilbride, 1997). Ideals of reciprocity within the extended family, respect for elders, lifetime interconnection with parents, and responsibility for younger siblings remain powerful cultural models rooted in the past and carried forward into the present. Families in general, and women in particular, remain the proactive initiators and managers of change that they were in Ngecha from 1968 to 1973. The African family circumstances described in our study suggest that the institutional structures of Kenyan families are becoming more diverse but are still highly salient; that some functions (support and care for children, care of the elderly, control of property, access to health care, and nutritional status) are as strong as ever, although they are changing in form and perhaps are not as homogenous or as reliable as previously; that the state affects the economy and polity differently than it directly impinges on the domestic world; and that family life has become increasingly unstable more because of migration and fertility change than from a change in the values of familism per se (Bradley & Weisner, 1997, pp. xxii–xxiii). As women editors and field-workers, we sought to analyze and understand how women coming out of such rural villages as Ngecha were able to become successful not only in local society but even in international society. As we explored the lives and experiences of Ngecha women, what began as an ahistorical comparative study evolved through its own scientific and intellectual momentum into a case study with a strong historical component (Edwards, 2002). As we learned more about the women, the effects of rapid social change were so striking that they demanded our attention. Of course, every society undergoes change over time, but the decade following independence in 1963 was a time of especially rapid transformation in Kenya. To make sense

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Background and Contexts of the behavioral observations and interviews from 1968 to 1973, it became necessary to look more deeply into the history of the Ngecha region to provide insight and establish a baseline; this analysis enabled us to identify the domains of daily life that were changing most drastically, the most powerful catalysts for change, and the strategies adopted by the women to meet these challenges. Primarily a story of resourcefulness and dignity in the face of challenge and opportunity, this portrait of Ngecha may serve as a microcosm of changes taking place throughout Kenya during a fascinating moment and also as a description of what came to the village along with schooling, urban centers, markets, a wage economy, land and population pressures, and new technologies. Our hope is that this book will be of interest to the children and grandchildren of the citizens of Ngecha and of the women who worked with us and collaborated in the interpretation of the behavior observed and the interviews conducted. These generations may want to know about the lives of their forebears. It is a history book written not by historians but by members of the cdru who observed 42 mothers in Ngecha as they went about their lives and brought up their children.

Outline of the Book The opening chapters introduce the village and its history. To present women’s role in the transformation of culture, chapter 2 begins with a basic description of Ngecha from 1968 to 1973, its demography, settlement patterns, and economics and subsistence, introducing the pioneering women who are the focus of the book and sketching the typical daily routine. Chapter 3 presents a résumé of the history and culture of the Gikuyu as described by authorities such as Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the nation of Kenya, and L. S. B. Leakey, the famed anthropologist who grew up alongside traditional Gikuyu and recorded their descriptions of their culture. We describe the original arrival of the Bantu people in the Central Highlands and in the Ngecha area, the traditional Gikuyu lineage and age-set systems, the historical status of women, contact with the British through Kenyan independence, and the introduction of formal schooling to Ngecha. These historical data

15

Background and Contexts serve as a baseline for analysis of change during the period we worked in the community. The remaining chapters concern changing lifestyles and values. Chapter 4 describes the catalysts for the changes that were in process in technology and in the social structure, and it focuses on the women’s reaction to change. We document the shift from an agrarian to a wageearning economy, with its implications for women’s workloads, which were simultaneously impacted by improved access to water and fuel and by increased involvement in cash-crop farming and other entrepreneurial activities. We explore women’s initiative and enterprise but also document the difficulties and resource constraints that women faced. Chapter 5 focuses on the mothers’ values, concepts, and behaviors. It describes their changing values and goals as they experienced change and accepted the importance of schooling for success in the new wage economy. Changes in maternal behavior are described, and, in a postscript, previously unpublished data are presented showing the positive relationship between family modernity scores and children’s cognitive outcomes (developmental quotients). Chapter 6 reinforces the message of the changing teaching of values by examining the oral and written texts used to educate Gikuyu children. The first section of this chapter describes teachings that relied on stories, proverbs, and songs; the second section examines how ideas of morality were presented to Ngecha children in the schoolbooks they read during the research study. Chapter 7 turns to the other end of the lifespan and portrays the effects of changing times on three groups of Ngecha’s aging population: elders, elderly, and the old. The authors compare the life reflections of these three groups of progressively less active, less involved women and men and provide insights into the changes brought by a wage-earning economy to those vulnerable to loss of care-giving support because of ill-health or poverty. Chapter 8 looks at young adults and examines how the rising generation in Gikuyuland was trying to reconcile the value alternatives made available by changing times. The chapter focuses on inner conflicts and reflective reasoning, presenting illustrative material from interviews with University of Nairobi students from various Gikuyu communities in the Central Highlands. The students discussed ethical values, choices, and

16

Background and Contexts considerations concerning parent-child authority and husband-wife equality issues and obligations in the face of changing times. With their exceptional academic success and intellectual training, these young adults were articulate, self-conscious, and reflective communicators in our cross-cultural dialogue, although probably not representative of the full range of age-mates throughout the country. Finally, chapter 9 concludes the book with Kimani’s present-day perspective on the community of Ngecha and its changes since the time of the original research project, emphasizing issues related to health, nutrition, and social and economic status.

References Ahlberg-Maina, B. (1991). Women, sexuality, and the changing social order: The impact of government policies on reproductive behavior in Kenya. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach. Blacker, J. (2002). Kenya’s fertility transition: How low will it go? Report to the Expert Group Meeting on Completing the Fertility Transition, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations Secretariat, New York, 11–14 March 2002. Bloch, M., Beoku-Betts, J. A., & Tabachnick, B. R. (Eds.). (1998). Women and education in sub-Saharan Africa: Power, opportunities, and constraints. Boulder co: Lynne Rienner. Bradley, C., & Weisner, T. (1997). Introduction: Crisis in the African family. In T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, & P. L. Kilbride with A. B. C. Ocholla-Ayayo, J. Akong’a, & S. Wandibba (Eds.), African families and the crisis of social change (pp. xix–xxxii). Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Carnegie Corporation of New York. (1979). An impossible dream? Child Development Research Units of Kenya and Nigeria. Carnegie Quarterly, 27(4), 1–7. Chesaina Swinimer, C. (1994). Hope on the horizon: Essays on the status and liberation of African women. Nairobi: Impact Associates. Cox, F., with Mberia, N. (1977). Aging in a changing village society: A Kenyan experience. Washington dc: International Federation on Ageing. Davison, J., in collaboration with the women of Mutira. (1989). Voices from Mutira: Lives of rural Gikuyu women. Boulder co: Lynne Rienner. de Guzman, M. R. T., Edwards, C. P., & Carlo, G. (under review). Provincial behaviors in context: A study of the Gikuyu children of Ngecha, Kenya.

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Background and Contexts Edwards, C. P. (2002). Evolving questions and comparative perspectives in cultural/historical research. Human Development, 171, 307–312. Edwards, C. P., & Whiting, B. B. (1993). ‘‘Mother, older sibling, and me’’: The overlapping roles of caregivers and companions in the social world of twoto three-year-olds in Ngecha, Kenya. In K. MacDonald (Ed.), Parent-child play: Descriptions and implications (pp. 305–328). Albany: State University of New York Press. Gallimore, R., Goldenberg, C. N., & Weisner, T. S. (1993). The social construction and subjective reality of activity settings: Implications for community psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 21(4), 537–559. Harkness, S., & Super, C. (1995). Culture and parenting. In M. Bornstein (Ed.), Handbook of parenting. Vol. 2. Biology and ecology of parenting (pp. 211–234). Mahwah nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Harkness, S., Raeff, K., & Super, C. (Eds.). (2002). Variability in the social construction of the child. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, No. 87. Herzog, J. D. (1973). Initiation and high school in the development of Kikuyu youths’ self-concept. Ethos, 1(4), 478–489. Hill, M. J. (1991). The Harambee movement in Kenya: Self-help, development, and education among the Kamba of Kitui district. Atlantic Highlands nj: McGraw-Hill. Inter-Church Coalition on Africa. (2000). Kenya in 1999: A human rights report. Which way forward? Composed by the iccaf Kenya Reference Group, Toronto, Ontario, Canada ([email protected]). Jefferson, M. E. (1976). Creative philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation and Africa, 1953– 1973. New York: Teachers College Press. Kenya Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning. (1964). Kenya population census 1962: Tables. Nairobi: Directorate of Economic Planning, Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning. Kilbride, P., Suda, C., & Njeru, E. (2001). Street children in Kenya: Voices of children in search of a childhood. Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Kiluva-Ndunda, M. M. (2001). Women’s agency and educational policy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Klopp, J. M. (2000). Pilfering the public: The problem of land grabbing in contemporary Kenya. Africa Today, 47(1), 7–26. Klopp, J. M. (2001). ‘‘Ethnic clashes’’ and winning elections: The case of Kenya’s electoral despotism. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 35(3), 473–517. Leiderman, P. H., & Leiderman, G. F. (1977). Economic change and infant care in an East African agricultural community. In P. H. Leiderman, S. R.

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Background and Contexts Tulkin, & A. Rosenfeld (Eds.), Culture and infancy: Variations in the human experience (pp. 405–438). New York: Academic Press. Leiderman, P. H., Babu, B., Kagia, J., Kraemer, H. C., & Leiderman, G. F. (1973). African infant precocity and some social influences during the first year. Nature, 242, 247–249. Leo, C. (1984). Land and class in Kenya. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. LeVine, R. A., Dixon, S., LeVine, S., Richman, A., Leiderman, P. H., Keefer, C., & Brazelton, T. B. (1994). Child care and culture: Lessons from Africa. London: Cambridge University Press. LeVine, R. A., Miller, P. M., & West, M. M. (Eds.). (1988). Parental behavior in diverse societies. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, New Directions for Child Development, No. 40. LeVine, S., with LeVine, R. A. (1979). Mothers and wives: Gusii women of East Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Munroe, R. H., & Munroe, R. L. (1984). Children’s work in four cultures: Determinants and consequences. American Anthropologist, 86, 369–379. Nasimiyu, R. (1997). Changing women’s rights over property in western Kenya. In T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, & P. L. Kilbride (Eds.), African families and the crisis of social change (pp. 283–298). Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Nzomo, M. (1997). Kenyan women in politics. In M. Gwendolyn (Ed.), African feminism: The politics of survival in sub-Saharan Africa (pp. 232–256). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Orvis, S. (1997). The agrarian question in Kenya. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Stamp, P. (1995). Mothers of invention: Women’s agency in the Kenyan state. In L. Gardner (Ed.), Provoking agents, gender, and agency in theory and practice (pp. 69–92). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Survey of Kenya (1970). National atlas of Kenya. (3rd ed.). Nairobi: Kenya Government. Swadener, B. B., with Kabiru, M., & Njenga, A. (2000). Does the village still raise the child? A collaborative study of changing child-rearing and early education in Kenya. Albany: State University of New York Press. Thomas-Slayter, B., & Rocheleau, D., with Asamba, I., Jama, M., Kabutha, C., Mbuthi, N., Oduor-Noah, E., Schofield-Leca, K., Wamalwa-Muragori, B., & Wanjama, L. (1995). Gender, environment, and development in Kenya: A grassroots perspective. Boulder co: Lynne Rienner. Wandibba, S. (1997). Changing roles in the Bukusu family. In T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, & P. L. Kilbride (Eds.), African families and the crisis of social change (pp. 332–340). Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey.

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Background and Contexts Weisner, T. S., & Edwards, C. P. (2002). Introduction to the theme issue honoring the contributions of Beatrice B. Whiting. Ethos, 29(3), 239–246. Weisner, T. S., Bradley, C., & Kilbride, P. L., with Ocholla-Ayayo, A. B. C., Akong’a, J., & Wandibba, S. (Eds.). (1997). African families and the crisis of social change. Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Whiting, B. B. (1973). The Kenyan career woman: Traditional and modern. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 208, 71–75. Whiting, B. B. (1977). Changing life styles in Kenya. Daedalus, 106(2), 211–225. Whiting, B. B. (1980). Culture and social behavior: A model for the development of social behavior. Ethos, 8(2), 95–116. Whiting, B. B. (1983). The genesis of prosocial behavior. In D. Bridgeman (Ed.), The nature of prosocial development (pp. 221–224). New York: Academic Press. Whiting, B. B. (1984). Woman’s role in social change. Cultural Survival Quarterly, 8(2), 43–45. Whiting, B. B., & Edwards, C. P. (1988). Children of different worlds: The formation of social behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Whiting, B. B. (Au.), Edwards, C. P. (Ed.), & de Guzman, M. (Comp. in collaboration with Kobus, M., Miller, N., Tuel J., Freyer, M., Christensen, L., Ranjbar, J., Gacke, L. M., Eisenhauer, E., Connelly, C., Kovtun, N., Liu, W., Kovtun, A., & Husset, M.). (2003). Ngecha, Kenya, behavior observations. Collected by Beatrice Whiting and research collaborators in 1968–1972. New Haven ct: Human Relations Area Files Press (CD-ROM format). Whiting, J. (1981). Aging and becoming an elder: A cross-cultural comparison. In J. G. March (Ed.), Aging (pp. 83–90). New York: Academic Press. Worthman, C. M., & Whiting, J. W. M. (1987). Social change in adolescent sexual behavior, mate selection, and premarital pregnancy rates in a Kikuyu community. Ethos, 15(2), 145–165.

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2

The Village and Its Families Beatrice Whiting and Carolyn Edwards, with Ciarunji Chesaina, John Whiting, John Herzog, and Dorothy Herzog

Editors’ Note: This chapter combines the accounts of many individuals who studied and recorded the daily routines of the people of Ngecha. Beatrice Whiting encouraged all of the students, as ethnographers, to record how children and adults spent the hours of the day; where they were; whom they were with; the activities, ages, gender, and kinship relationships of those they were with; and which activities were in progress. Ciarunji Chesaina (1975) did the first descriptive analysis of the mothers’ typical daily routines. John Herzog made the initial demographic and economic survey of the area (Whiting & Herzog, 1975) and collected information on the history of schooling and education in Ngecha (Herzog, 1975). Later, Sayre Sheldon was escorted through the area so that she could take photographs. The photographs by Frances Cox capture vividly the contours and details of everyday life in Ngecha, people’s individuality, and the energy, humor, and pleasure with which most people animated even their most usual and repetitive activities. Carolyn Edwards reworked the material, also drawing on the portrait of Ngecha mothers presented in Whiting and Edwards (1988).

The Study Sample In 1968, five years after Kenyans seized their independence from the British, Ngecha was a small community of 5,500 on the outskirts of Nairobi. I (Beatrice Whiting) recall my first encounter with it. It was the rainy season, and the clay roads challenged our driving ability even in our Land Rover, like the icy roads of New England that I was used to. Before reaching the town, we passed the intersection where a road led northwest to the old railroad town of Limuru. We approached the

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The Village and Its Families town down a steep incline, then climbed to the top of a ridge, passing by the homesteads of the Kangethe, the sublineage of the Thaara patrilineage (Mbari-ya-Thaara), one of the first lineages in the area, which was established at the end of the nineteenth century by scouts from the east. The homesteads of the Kangethe appeared to be about 10 acres each, separated by fences. The living structures were set back from the road and were surrounded by gardens and pastures. We continued into Ngecha, approximately five miles from our destination, the house in Tigoni. The town, later the location, of Ngecha had been formed by the British during the Land and Freedom Movement (called the Mau Mau rebellion by the colonials), the Kenyan struggle for independence. During the declared State of Emergency, 1952–1959, scattered homesteads were constricted by the colonial government as a way of isolating the village supporters from the forest guerillas (Curtis, 1975). Visible dissenters were silenced or detained. Squatter families were brought in from the Rift Valley and eventually settled on quarter-acre lots laid out in a grid pattern on single-lane dirt roads. In 1968 the town consisted of a large open-market central square surrounded by stores and by the shops of a blacksmith, tinsmith, mason, carpenter, tailor, butcher, barber, dressmaker, and shoemaker, as well as by a hotel, tearoom, dairy cooperative, post office, petrol station, and the town well. The residential section of town, almost entirely to the east of the center, was laid out on a grid, with each block divided into quarter-acre plots—the houses close to the road, the gardens behind the dwellings. The shops were joined in a continuous row on each side of the street. They had stucco facades, often brightly painted, tin awnings, no windows, and a central double door that opened wide enough to display the wares inside. At one end of town, on a single-lane dirt road, was the chief ’s office in a building owned by the Kenya African National Union (kanu), the major national political party. There were also a bus stop, the Ngecha Nursery School, and the Ngecha Primary School, which residents called New Ngecha. At the other end of town were a large stone Protestant church and a building that had housed the original primary school (called Old Ngecha). In 1973 when

22

The Village and Its Families the New Ngecha school was built, the old building then became the Gichuru Harambee High School. Continuing through town, we arrived at the crossroads near the bus stop, where one road led south to the market town of Wangigi and the other road ran west to Muguga, a railroad station, and to the main Nairobi–Rift Valley road. A single-lane road, just wide enough for a small car, passed through the farms of the Igi patrilineage (Mbari-yaIgi). In the rainy season the ruts in this road could be slippery, and kind women would help me lift my Volkswagen Bug when I succeeded in getting stuck. Homesteads in this area were built in the old style, round mud-and-wattle huts with thatched roofs. There were also a few of the humped-back zebu cattle that were being replaced by hybrid dairy stock. This first cursory view already suggested that there were at least three contrasting areas of Ngecha to be explored: the town, the Thaara area, and the Igi area. The farms of the Thaara patrilineage were closer to the all-season road to Nairobi, and men and women could commute more easily to the White Highland tea estates and to the homes of Europeans in the Tigoni area. It seemed that the families from the Thaara area might differ in lifestyle from the families living in the more isolated Igi section. Both sets of farm families also likely differed from the families living on small acreages in clustered housing in the center of Ngecha. John Herzog, then field director, with the assistance of a group of medical students from the University of Nairobi, completed a detailed survey of the families in the three areas. They gathered basic data, including the size of the landholdings; details of the composition of the homesteads; the genealogies of the homestead heads; numbers and ages of adults and children in each homestead; the residence of those who had left the family homesteads; the type of marriage of each homestead head, including number of wives and their residence if not on the homestead; residence of married children; yard and house plans of homesteads; crops raised; number and type of animals; and job and residential history of all the adult members of the homestead and their initiation status, church affiliation, and schooling history. Herzog added items that he thought might relate to changes in lifestyle, including dwelling type (round mud-and-wattle frame versus rectangu-

23

The Village and Its Families lar construction and thatched roof versus tin); ownership and size of rain barrels and household furniture; and presence of radios, bicycles, motorcycles, automobiles, kerosene lanterns, charcoal stoves, electricity, glass windows, newspapers, and books. In making comparisons among the households, ‘‘modernity scores’’ were developed that were a composite of some of these items (see chapter 5 for the relationship between mothers’ modernity scores and their interaction style with children).

Selecting a Sample of Participants for the Household Study On the basis of the 1962 Kenya population census of the entire location (Kenya Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, 1964), we picked a group of homesteads in the three areas: town, Mbari-ya-Thaara, and Mbari-ya-Igi. In choosing homesteads, we selected households whose members lived on contiguous land, knew the names of one another’s children, and appeared to share socialization practices. These constituted the ‘‘primary sampling unit’’ (psu). In Table 2.1 we have summarized some of the main characteristics of the three samples of mothers in whose homesteads we observed mothers’ and children’s behavior. There were 14 homesteads in town, 10 in Mbari-ya-Thaara, and 7 in Mbari-ya-Igi. As can be seen, the average size of land farmed was 5 acres in Thaara and 11.4 in Igi. This discrepancy in size appeared to be the result of the earlier division, by Thaara elders, of land among their sons. It was customary for a household head to divide his land among his sons on his deathbed, often blessing some sons and cursing others by disinheriting them. In Igi, fewer larger homesteads had been divided and registered in sons’ names. By 1968 some lineage lands had been divided among sons at the death of a father, and others were still owned by the original owners, senior heads of household. The amount of land owned by families in the country sections was largely fortuitous, depending primarily on their whereabouts during land consolidation when land claims had been processed, mapped, and registered. The country area holdings were awarded to men who were members of patrilineages that had been

24

Table 2.1: Comparison of Three Groups of Ngecha Households Selected for an Intensive Study of Family Life Area of Ngecha Mbari-ya-Thaara

Mbari-ya-Igi

Town

Number of homesteads









Number of mothers










Average size of plots

 acres



. acres

. acres

Percent polygynously married men

 (n=)


(n=)



Church affiliation of mothers: pcea Anglican Baptist Catholic Gikuyu Orthodox

 (n=

)  (n=
)  (n=

 (n=)


 (n=)  
(n=)  (n=)

 (n=)
 (n=)    (n=)

Percent with grandmothers living in the homestead

 (n=)

 (n=)

 (n=)

Percent with any other adult woman living in the homestead (e.g., co-wife)

 (n= )


 (n=)

 (n=)

identified with the area before the 1954–1957 registration. The plots assigned to these men varied in size from 2 or 3 acres to 23 acres, depending in part on the number of brothers who shared lands originally identified as belonging to individual mbari (patrilineage) elders. In addition, undoubtedly some owners had benefited from favoritism shown to some lineages that had sponsors in the colonial administration. Further subdivision of plots into holdings less than 4 acres was not allowed in 1968. The town households, with their small plots, often rented or owned additional plots of land outside the town. The average holding of town families was 3.3 acres. In 1973 we selected eight additional households because we found that we had undersampled families who had above-average income, especially in the town area.

25

Fig. 2.1. Section of land belonging to one of the largest of the sublineages in Ngecha. (Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Children of Different Worlds: The Formation of Social Behavior by Beatrice Blyth Whiting and Carolyn Pope Edwards, Cambridge: Harvard University Press © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.)

26

The Village and Its Families Six of these lived in town or immediately adjacent, and two others were large landowners from other sections of the Ngecha location. All of the sample families had children between the ages of 2 and 10 years. Of the 10 homesteads in Mbari-ya-Thaara, 4 were headed by polygynists (men with two or more wives), compared to 5 of the 7 in Igi. Figure 2.1 provides a sample map of a section of land belonging to one of the largest sublineages in Ngecha and shows all of the dwellings on it, including the senior man’s house, the three separate houses of his co-wives, and all of the little huts that were the adolescent boys’ and girls’ houses. Figure 2.2 shows how adjacent homesteads in Ngecha could be derived from splitting an original piece of land, resulting in two interrelated households, each with three generations. (The genealogies of the residents are also provided.) There were no polygynously married men in our town sample, and based on the 1962 census of the entire Ngecha location (Kenya Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, 1964), only an estimated 4% of husbands in town maintained a polygynist homestead, in contrast to 37% in the country sections. The two mbari also differed in their church affiliations. Table 2.1 shows that 87% of the 15 mothers in Thaara were Protestants: 11 were members of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (pcea), formerly the Church of Scotland, 1 was Baptist, and 1 was Anglican. Another 2 were members of the Gikuyu Orthodox Church, which accepted polygynists and initiated women who had been excluded from the other Christian churches. In contrast, 7 of the 13 mothers in Igi belonged to the Gikuyu Orthodox Church, 2 were Anglican, and 4 were Catholic. The fathers’ year of birth in the sample was a better predictor of their years of schooling than was their location in Ngecha (see Table 2.2). As is evident, all of the men born in the 1940s had completed primary school, and four had attended some secondary school. The greatest increase in years of schooling was between those born before and after 1919, with a steady increase in years of schooling for those men born after 1919. Of those born in the 1930s, 70% had five or more years of schooling. The women in the sample had less formal education than the men, but they were actually more highly educated than Ngecha-location women as a whole. (We selected this sample in order to be able to com-

27

Fig. 2.2. Two adjacent homesteads in Ngecha (top), with genealogy of residents (bottom). (Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Children of Different Worlds: The Formation of Social Behavior by Beatrice Blyth Whiting and Carolyn Pope Edwards, Cambridge: Harvard University Press © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.)

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Table 2.2: Education of Men and Women in the Sample Percentage with the following years of schooling: Year of birth

 years


– years

– years

– years

+ years

Males (n=)
–
 (n=
)
– (n=)
– (n=
)
– (n=)


.
 

   


.
 


.  


.  

Females (n=)

–
 (n=)
– (n=)
– (n=
)
– (n=
)

 

 



 


  


 
 

  


Note: The sample in this table is slightly expanded from that in Tables 2.1 and 2.3. It includes all the adults in the homesteads, not just the mothers and their husbands in the intensive sample.

pare years of schooling with our other predictors of change in lifestyle.) Table 2.2 shows that only among women born after the 1940s was there an appreciable number who had attended school. The percentage of women with no schooling dropped from 77% for those born in the 1930s to 25% for those born in the 1940s. Of the 16 women born in the 1940s, 4 had completed primary school, and 3 had further training (1 completed Form 2, and 2 had secretarial training). Adult education classes were popular among the women who had no schooling. Few of the sample families (only seven) depended solely on farming for their income; the source of outside income varied.Two in the Thaara area sold flowers in the Nairobi market, and some families in the Igi area sold vegetables and milk. One successful farmer also received a pension from the East African Power and Light Company, where he had worked as a line repairman for many years. By 1973 two additional Thaara men who had lost their jobs during the five-year study had reverted to trying to depend on farming. One town resident had a lumber store and was able to purchase land adjoining Ngecha and embark on dairy farming. In sum, about 20% of families in our sample were

29

Table 2.3: Employment of Fathers in the Sample Type of employment

Number of fathers (total n=
)

Cash-crop farmers



Self-employed

( store owners;
each truck owner, mason, carpenter)

Hired manual laborers

 (
each milker, cook, driver, tractor driver, watchman)

Wage earners (paid more than those above)

 ( clerks; electrician; telephone operator)

Salaried employees

 ( teachers; headman;  working at post office with specialized training; clerk at ymca; head of pyrethrum cooperative)

Unemployed



making most of their income by selling produce. It is probable that the young married sons with jobs were contributing part of their salaries to some of these homesteads. The job histories of the families reflected changes in the amount of schooling associated with the age of the household heads. After schools were first introduced, the curricula were limited, and men with four years of schooling were eligible only for manual labor jobs. With seven to eight years of schooling they were able to get work as clerks or receive special training to become an electrician or a driver. Early on, some men worked for the East African Railroad and the Post and Telegraph Company. Two had received advanced training, one in Great Britain. Table 2.3 lists the jobs of the household heads whose families were in the intensive sample. Three men owned stores that were earning a profit, one a small shop in Ngecha and the others in Nairobi. One other man had bought a lorry and was trying to start a trucking business. Including the carpenter, the mason, and the farmers, over a third of the men were self-employed. As can be seen, the sample also included salaried employees, such as two Ngecha teachers, the chief, and the chair of the local pyrethrum cooperative.

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The Village and Its Families During the years of our research, a number of families learned how to obtain government loans and buy land or shares in development schemes in the Rift Valley on properties formerly owned by Europeans. With the same spirit that had driven them outward during traditional times to settle new land, families from Ngecha bought and planned to buy new acreage. The farm families in our sample had adequate food to survive, but some of the households in town on quarter-acre lots were desperately poor. Unless a family could afford to rent acreage, the women could not raise enough food to feed their children. Two of the town women had steady employment: one on the flower farm in Tigoni, one as a housemaid. Several women frequently sold produce in the markets, buying it from Ngecha women and selling it in the markets in Ngecha, Wangigi, and Limuru. One woman took produce into the Nairobi market. Some women did occasional casual labor for neighbors or on farms three or four miles from Ngecha. Five of the younger mothers who had completed primary school and received further training had steady employment: one as a teacher in the Ngecha Primary School, two as nursery school teachers in Ngecha, and two as stenographers in Nairobi. Two women helped to sell in their husband’s store. All of the women had busy schedules with little leisure time. When not working in the garden or at jobs, they kept busy knitting clothes and making baskets. Nineteen women lived with their mother-in-law on the same plot. These older women had their own houses and, as long as they were able, their own gardens. Their grandchildren were welcome to visit and often came to eat. On those polygynist homesteads where the wives were compatible, women cooperated in child care as well as in the gardening. On the farms that still raised pyrethrum, seasonal workers were often hired to help with weeding and harvesting. Six of the young wives with steady jobs or whose husbands had good wages hired housemaids. Early in the research, we attempted to evaluate the amount of work that each mother performed, including the miles she walked every day to get water and fuel, the distance from her homestead of any garden she cultivated, the number of animals she was responsible for, the number of small children she had, and the amount of help she had.

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The Village and Its Families Using a highly complicated formula, each mother was given a score; in the end there was not a great deal of variation in the scores, although the types of work varied. Without more elegant estimates than we had, such as foot-pounds of energy expended, the scores proved useless. It is safe to say that all the mothers were hard workers, and there were some whose burdens seemed extreme. To complete this description of the women in Ngecha, we turn to two kinds of portraits. The first section briefly recounts the stories of two leading women. The second section provides a general picture, focusing on the ordinary daily routine of the Ngecha mothers who so graciously allowed us to enter their homes and their lives from 1968 through 1973. From the first we gain a detailed understanding of how certain Ngecha women could summon their personal resources— their bravery, fighting spirit, pragmatism, and initiative—to surmount problems and respond to unusual occasions. From the second we gain a feeling for the physical energy, endurance, and good humor that they mobilized everyday to feed their families and manage their daily routines.

The Leading Women of Ngecha Certain women in the community were especially respected, and they illustrate the types of women who were regarded by their peers as living up to the local standards of female success. They were the sorts who were members of the women’s council of elders, or nyakinyua. These women were sought after for advice and were expected to offer encouragement and help to others who were having trouble or needing to change aberrant ways. eunice muguru One such leading woman, Eunice Muguru, was an unusually competent mother and impressive manager of one of the successful small farms in Thaara. Exemplifying a respected woman espousing a quite traditional lifestyle, she had 11 children who lived with or near her, including her grown-up eldest son who had received a six-acre plot as his share of his inheritance. (This was unusual since most fathers waited until their dying days to distribute their land.) Eunice’s oldest children and

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The Village and Its Families their spouses helped her take care of her own youngest children, and she in turn was glad to give help and advice when asked. She kept all the children under her purview busily involved in garden work (maize, beans, pyrethrum, grasses, and flowers) and caring for the milk cow, but when arranging their chores and schedules she also made sure that their school attendance and studying remained priorities. As was usual in other families, she varied the tasks assigned to each child according to that child’s age, gender, maturity, understanding, and physical abilities. Eunice was Christian, and, in fact, the whole family belonged to the pcea. Her husband, Jeremiah Thaara, had once worked for a British family and had learned new skills such as Swahili, in which he was conversant. He expanded his farmland by buying acreage in the Rift Valley, and he put another woman in charge of it. This second woman was obviously his ‘‘wife,’’ even though their relationship was not mentioned when the census was collected because the church did not welcome polygyny. Eunice had no formal schooling, but she listened attentively to all radio programs that provided information about produce prices and conditions, which helped her figure out how much it cost to feed a child. She then calculated her family needs and varied the amount of products that she sold in the market depending on what she gleaned from the radio broadcasts or from the agriculture agent who had been trained by the former colonial administration. Because she was so busy, she had little time for socializing. However, she was a friendly and hospitable person who was always a pleasure to visit. She did not complain about the young second wife on the Rift Valley farm and even temporarily exchanged children with that woman when one farm or the other needed extra help or when the school in one location was noticeably better than in the other for a particular standard, or grade. Eunice enjoyed singing in church and participating in church work. She helped a particular young man who was getting in trouble in Nairobi go to another country to start over. She did so on the advice of the kiama, who arranged for one of his distant relatives already settled in that country to help the young man find work. When he returned, the man became involved in selling a new roofing material that was

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The Village and Its Families an improvement over sheet metal because it allowed gutters to catch rainwater in a large barrel, providing needed water for the household. naomi muthoni Naomi Muthoni, a modern example of a bold, pioneering woman, was one of the leading women in Ngecha. In 1968 I recognized her importance immediately; she was the only woman sitting with the male elders who presided at the baraza (public meeting) when we originally presented our plan of research and requested permission to work in the location. This account of Naomi’s life is based on conversations with her and with graduate students who had known her. Naomi was middle-aged when we met, a strongly built woman of medium height and upright posture. With her forthright and businesslike manner, she gave the impression of being a tough, responsible, significant person. We made a point of soliciting her help. She was known everywhere as one of the brave women who served as message carriers during the Emergency days of the Land and Freedom Movement (see chapter 3). Perhaps she had been one of those women so vital in keeping information, food, medicine, and guns flowing from the towns and reserves into the forest (Presley, 1992). Naomi refused to talk about her past, however, saying that it was necessary always to think of the present. She said that looking back would lead to strife and go against the spirit of independent Kenya, and it would be contrary to President Kenyatta’s exhortation to forget conflict and pull together in self-help (Harambee) groups for the welfare of the nation. Naomi became an ardent supporter of the Child Development Research Unit (cdru) and of the young research assistants who worked in the village. She liked and appreciated Beatrice Whiting and treated her as a leader of her group; yet Naomi was one of cdru’s severest critics as well. She wanted the people of Ngecha to profit from the presence of the cdru in the village. She gave advice freely to all cdru personnel and acted as a protective second mother to the young secondary and university students who were observing maternal and child behavior. Her sponsorship of the young women protected them from harassment by giving them the equivalent of family protection. The Kenyan appren-

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Top: Ngecha center. (Frances Cox) Center: The tinsmith’s shop in Ngecha center. (Frances Cox) Bottom: Dressmaking in Ngecha center. (Frances Cox)

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Top: The Ngecha post office. (Frances Cox) Bottom: Many large homesteads contained both traditional round mud-and-wattle houses and the modern wooden rectangular types. (Frances Cox)

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Top left: Women sought extra cash income through entrepreneurial activities like raising hens to produce eggs and making baskets to sell at market. (Frances Cox) Top right: Naomi Muthoni in 1968. (cdru Basic Data Archives) Bottom: Teachers used many outdoor games involving movement and songs to manage the large numbers of children at the Ngecha Nursery School. (Frances Cox)

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Opposite, top: A mother and baby bring fodder collected for the family cows. (Frances Cox) Opposite, bottom: Many girls aged about 6 to 10 years old served as nurses to their younger siblings. Boys would do the job if no girls of the right age were available. (Frances Cox) Top: Young girls enjoyed role-playing feminine activities they admired, as well as engaging in other forms of play. (Frances Cox) Bottom: A boy constructs a car out of pieces of wire. Making and racing wire cars were very popular among boys of all ages. (Frances Cox)

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Top: Preparing the evening meal usually included making the staple dish of mashed vegetables. (Frances Cox) Bottom: A father arrives home from his salaried job and greets his children. (Frances Cox)

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The Village and Its Families tices kept in touch with her at all times and treated her with respect and fondness. Naomi was a strong woman who combined intelligence, will, and a sense of responsibility with fighting courage. Born about 1911 near Nakuru in the Rift Valley, she ran away from home because her father had tried to force her to marry a man she did not like soon after her initiation at adolescence into womanhood through the traditional female circumcision ceremony (actually clitoridectomy; described in Davison, 1989). She went to Kabete, where the Church of Scotland Mission School was welcoming students, and there she completed three years of schooling (1926–1928). Naomi met and subsequently married her first husband at the mission church and gave birth to her first child. Evidently the marriage was not successful; two years later she married her second husband, Pharis Kahuria, who was then living and working in Elmenteita. She became the second wife of Kahuria, who was at the time probably living and working on a European farm as well as tending his own animals and raising maize for sale. Kahuria’s father was an important man, a member of a Ngecha lineage and a trustee of lineage land (murumati ). The father’s home had been an initiation place for the surrounding area, and he is said to have had six wives. In 1936 Kahuria moved his family from the Rift Valley back to Ngecha. Naomi shared the homestead that he established with his senior co-wife and their children. Kahuria continued to work in the Rift Valley, however, and was seldom in residence in Ngecha. It is not clear which of Naomi’s activities during the Land and Freedom Movement led to her arrest and detainment in October 1952, but it was most likely related to her role as a message carrier for the freedom fighters. Women were the backbone of the movement, providing a network that funneled supplies and arranged safe hiding places for the freedom fighters in the forest (Presley, 1992). Many of these women were arrested, detained, and interrogated, and some were imprisoned. Naomi spent six years in a detention camp. Many of these camps were compound facilities where women were required to work. The women were also submitted to a socialization process intended to persuade them to renounce the rebellion, and they had to attend classes in hy-

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The Village and Its Families giene, health, embroidery, and other practical topics (Presley, 1992). Perhaps in the camp Naomi also learned the teasing, playfully aggressive style that she used in socializing and negotiating with important men in later years. During the time that Naomi participated in the Land and Freedom Movement, her three eldest daughters married and moved away from Ngecha. Her youngest daughter lived in Ngecha, and Naomi felt she was neglected by her father. During the time of the Emergency, the family lived in the nearby Mahinga Emergency Village. When Naomi was released from detention, she returned to Ngecha. In 1956 or 1957 her husband bought a plot of land in the village, where he set up his two wives while he resumed his work in the Rift Valley. Naomi’s spirit and toughness, evidence of which dated from her running away from home and defying her father, continued to guide her life after the days of the Emergency. She had learned Swahili while in detention and acquired useful knowledge through discussions with other prisoners. As a reward for her role in the fight for freedom as well as recognition for her leadership ability, she became a representative of Ngecha at the district headquarters in Kiambu, and thus she was in a position to monitor new developments in the administration and in the economy. Naomi’s career after the period of the Emergency demonstrated pragmatism and entrepreneurship, two other characteristics we found common in Ngecha women. She had a keen eye for sizing up both the power structure and potential avenues for material gain, and she had the personal confidence to use her insights and knowledge for personal gain. For nine years Naomi lived in Ngecha with her co-wife. Her youngest daughter, who had been married in 1958, left her husband and moved back to live with Naomi and Naomi’s co-wife. Then in 1969 Naomi separated from her husband, who had sold the Ngecha house without consulting her. Naomi declared her independence by setting up her own household. She showed herself to be a successful businesswoman and was able to buy a house for herself and her daughter in 1967 with money she made as a trader. At the same time, she served as a representative of the kanu and as a member of the Ngecha Council. When we met her in 1968 she was a respected senior elder and recog-

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The Village and Its Families nized leader, although she was disliked by some for what they saw as her dominating ways. She attended the District Council meetings in Kiambu and sat with the village elders. After careful planning Naomi organized a group of women to purchase a large ranch in the Rift Valley. The history of this purchase began during the early years of independence, when President Kenyatta held Sunday receptions at his residence at Gathundu. Various locations sent representatives to entertain the president. Ngecha children performed dances and sang for him. Naomi organized a group of women who also frequently performed. Probably she planned in advance to use this connection to solicit Kenyatta’s support in procuring a loan. When a large farm formerly owned by Europeans came up for sale, she and the group, said to be as large as 200 women, used Kenyatta’s help to secure a loan and buy the farm. The women’s group founded a cooperative that raised and marketed avocados and tomatoes. A group of elder women did the planning for the ranch and arranged to assemble and organize members to work there when labor was required. All the land was owned by the women. During the period of our research, Naomi often traveled by bus to the Rift Valley, where she would call the ranch to send out a jeep to bring her to the ranch house so she could join the other leaders in planning and organizing the farm work. Naomi was constantly alert for useful information, listening to conversations while at Kiambu, sharing knowledge with the other leaders, and monitoring radio programs that discussed agriculture and marketing. Her knowledge of Swahili was essential for her success. For example, when she learned that the government was auctioning off cattle seized for taxes from Samburu men, Naomi and her colleagues hired a truck and drove north to the auction grounds and successfully purchased a truckload of cattle. When some of the cattle died, the women loaded them into a jeep and drove to the government veterinary in Nakuru for a diagnosis of the disease and advice on preventing it from recurring. The women’s frequent calls for services from the veterinary’s office led to the assignment of a Peace Corps volunteer to the ranch. Naomi was a successful businesswoman and was concerned about others. She was involved in a consideration of the revision of laws con-

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The Village and Its Families cerning the division of land and other assets at the death of a homestead head, and she advocated legislation to ensure that some assets went to widows of deceased sons of the head. She worked for the protection of mothers impregnated by men who refused to support their children. There is no doubt that she was a brave and competent woman; indeed, I left Kenya believing that there have always been many women leaders with such courage, pragmatism, ambition, and independent spirit.

The Rhythm of Daily Life To complete this portrait of Ngecha and its families, we now provide a general sketch of the typical daily routine. The rhythm of everyday life for women and children in Ngecha households revolved primarily around household work and schooling.The households were busy, productive units, with everyone contributing according to age and gender. morning routines on school days Farm families all over the world arise early, and those in Ngecha were no exception. The first person to arise, at first light between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m., was responsible for milking the cows. In many cases this was the mother, but in some households the job rotated among the older children, especially the adolescent boys. One of the children was sent off to take the milk to the dairy cooperative. The mother also lighted the fire and warmed water for her husband and children to wash their faces. While they were waking up and dressing, she prepared maize meal porridge and tea for their breakfast and heated up more water for washing the utensils at the end of the meal. She might prepare an egg for her husband’s breakfast, and she would serve him first, then the children, and herself last. Often the mother combined three simultaneous activities: nursing the baby, eating her food, and beginning to pick over the maize and beans to be cooked for lunch or dinner. After breakfast, members of the family moved in different directions. The schoolchildren got themselves ready and were off by 7:30 a.m. The nursery school children also left home after breakfast, each one taking a small chalkboard and a piece of chalk. The scheduled time

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The Village and Its Families for morning parade at the nursery school was 8:00 to 8:15 a.m., but a good number of the children arrived later. Some of them may have left home in good time but were distracted along the way (taking time to play with other children) and may have taken 20 minutes to cover a distance that should have taken 5 or 10. On especially cold or wet days, they may have left home late and not arrived at school until after 10:00 a.m., if they went at all. After the departure of the older children, the younger ones still at home sat a little longer warming themselves by the fire or went off to play in the yard or along the village road. If the father had a job outside the home and commuted daily, he also left at this time or even earlier depending on his schedule and how far he had to travel. If he did not have to leave the home, he either did tasks around the yard (such as repairing the fence) or left for the shamba (garden) or the market around 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. By 9:00 a.m. at the latest, the mother was finished with breakfast activities. She or one of the girls had washed the dishes, and if the younger children had not washed their faces along with the schoolchildren, they did so now. Food was put on the fire to cook, and the mother prepared to go to the shamba, usually with the baby on her back. She allocated to the children at home the jobs they needed to do while she was away, for example, tending the fire and cooking the food for supper. If there was food left over from supper the previous night, the children at home could eat it for lunch. Most of the time mothers wanted to put in at least five hours of work in the garden, and in half of the families studied mothers did not return home for lunch but instead worked straight through until early afternoon. Sometimes a woman would start to prepare supper and leave a pot ready to be set on the fire by whoever got home earliest, either herself or her older daughters. If the mother held an outside position, such as nursery school teacher, she followed a different routine. She usually had to depart early, and she would leave the infant and youngest children at home under others’ care, with plans to return at midday if she could. The mother also completed other errands before leaving. If the family did not have enough pasture for their cattle, she had to cut fodder for them. If the household was out of water, she had to fetch a barrel

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The Village and Its Families of it or arrange for it to be done. If she had a weaned toddler whom she did not want to take with her to the garden, she had to make food for that child and leave him or her under the care of the oldest children remaining at home. She preferred to use a six-to-eight-year-old girl as a child nurse but would call on a boy when a girl was not available. If she had a nursing baby (or a toddler not feeling well), she took that child with her to the garden. She also left messages with the young children for tasks to be done by the older children when they got home from school. Then at last she left for the garden, usually between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. morning play for young children at home While the mother was away, the oldest child in the home was responsible for looking after younger siblings, guarding the home, and tending the fire. Although the child was supposed to stay around the home, the company of other children attracted him or her to neighbors’ yards or, for those in the village, to the road. Most of this child’s time was spent in play, and younger siblings often came along and were watched over while they played. A baby could be carried on the older child’s back and get a chance to participate in games, as long as it did not cause the baby too much discomfort. An older toddler could be placed on the ground within sight so that the older children could play more freely. The child in charge made trips home as necessary. If the baby got hungry, the child would carry him or her home to be fed. The child might also need to go home to check on the fire or the general state of things. Whenever the older child rushed home, all the younger siblings trailed along, too. The young children engaged in many types of play. These can be described under the general categories of fantasy play, role-play, social play, physical horseplay, individual play, creative-constructive play, and play requiring competition (Edwards, 2001). Fantasy play was popular with children of all ages and both sexes. As an example, a group of children stood in a line of about three at a time inside a loop of string, which they held at their waists. They then ran, imagining that the loop was a car giving them a ride. This game

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The Village and Its Families was most popular with boys in the village area where the children had access to the road. Role-play involved children enacting a role that they had observed their parents performing in real life. Sex differences were clearly observable in this type of play. The girls enacted female roles, such as being a mother, while the boys played male figures, usually an influential or authority figure such as older brother, father, or askari (soldier or policeman). Boys also more frequently pretended to drive vehicles and smoke pretend cigarettes. Young boys and girls both enjoyed playing with gardening tools such as pangas (machetes) and jembes (hoes). The boys and girls shared the same playground spaces, but girls made sure they played in a corner out of the boys’ way, as the latter liked to tease them with such tricks as kicking their pretend cooking apparatus. Bloch and Adler (1994) appropriately describe this kind of role-play as ‘‘play-work’’ in their analysis of Senegalese children’s activity, because the young children displayed many instances of imitative ‘‘playing at work’’ that gradually and imperceptibly slid into serious work as the children grew older. Social play included a great deal of verbal and physical horseplay and teasing. When this went too far it sometimes turned into aggression, for example, when the child being teased took it too seriously and retaliated in a way that led to a fight. Fighting was highly discouraged by parents because it tended to build ill feeling between the families of the children involved, and so children who fought were reported to parents and then either warned or punished. Any passerby older than the children fighting was authorized to stop and punish them if necessary. Both individual and creative-constructive play included general manipulation of objects like sticks. Individual play can be distinguished from creative-constructive play because it is not aimed at constructing something. An example of creative-constructive play favored by boys was the making of surprisingly complex wire cars with handles from the local equivalent of baling wire and other scraps of industrial waste collected around the village. Boys of all ages loved to race their homemade cars along the roads and paths. Boys and girls built houses of sticks or mud, reflecting the cultural norm since traditionally both men and women in Ngecha worked at house building. Other examples of

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The Village and Its Families creative-constructive play included drawing in sand, constructing an object like a slide or swing, whittling or carving, knitting or spinning for pleasure, and playing with a store-bought toy creatively. Play involving competition included such activities as manipulating a cone with a string whip. The string of the whip was wound around the cone, and the latter was placed pointing downward touching the ground. The string was unwound suddenly, starting the cone to spin. The player hit the cone continuously so that it spun around and around without dropping. When the cone dropped, the player had to hand over the cone and whip to the next player. For all of these kinds of play, the play groups varied tremendously. In the more isolated farm households, children tended to play in their own yards and shambas in groups averaging about 3 children, usually all from the same household. In the late afternoons and on weekends, on public holidays, and during school vacations, the play groups grew to 5 children or more. In contrast, in larger polygynous or extended households or in homes where families related by kinship lived nearby, children’s play groups were naturally bigger and may have included as many as 10 children. The children in the village area were observed to form play groups averaging 13 children during the times of the day when the older children were off at school and 20 children during periods when the school-aged children were home. The members of these play groups were most often neighbors, since each child went to gather with others on the road closest to his or her home. The children usually split into subgroups of about 4, according to their interests. There were also differences in leadership between the neighbor-based play groups found in the village areas and those of the family-based play groups in the farm homesteads. In the village it was not usually clear who the leader(s) should be, and the largest boys struggled for overall leadership and dominance. On the farms, on the contrary, the oldest child present was unquestionably the leader of the group, even if that child happened to be a niece or nephew to the others. lunch and afternoon activities The children who had wandered from home to play returned between noon and 1:00 p.m. for lunch. They might then eat with whoever was

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The Village and Its Families there and then go back to the playground until later in the afternoon. Generally, each person ate lunch at his or her own convenience between 12:30 and 3:00 p.m. The children who had classes in the afternoon ate together around 1:00 p.m. and then went back to school. Most of the nursery school children were eager to get back and left half an hour to an hour before afternoon school started so that they could play while waiting for the teachers. Any children who had gone with their mothers to the shamba came home for lunch and did not go back. The mother might return home at 1:00 and then go back to the shamba by 3:00, staying there until 5:00. Milking time was 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. If there was no teenage child around the house at this time, the mother came home. One of the children took the milk to the dairy, as in the morning. Marketing time was between 3 and 4 p.m. Either the mother or an older child went to the market to buy or sell foodstuffs or firewood. Each week there were two market days, but most households went to the market only once a week. In the late afternoon the mother returned home. As she came into sight, the toddler who was left at home all day began to whine to be held. The mother cradled this child in her arms while engaging the older ones in sociable exchange of information. Had any stranger come to the home while she was gone? Had their father come home for lunch and asked after her while she was away? Had they had enough to eat? Meanwhile she tended the fire and made a snack for the young children of tea, porridge, roasted sweet potatoes, or roasted green maize. At the same time, she fed her youngest child, saying something like, ‘‘I see they did not feed you while I was away.’’ Then she might go off again to fetch water. At 3:00 p.m. the schoolchildren started to return home. First to arrive were the nursery school children released from afternoon program at 3:00. The older children returned between 4:00 and 6:00. Any other family members still working in the shamba got back home between 5:30 and 7:00, bringing with them items like grass for the cattle, firewood, and sweet potatoes and green vegetables gathered in the garden. The people from the shamba washed and rested while the mother or the girls or both made the final preparations for supper. They either

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The Village and Its Families reheated the food left over from lunch (adding green vegetables and bananas to the leftover maize and beans) or made a meal that was quicker to prepare, such as ugali (a thick maize-meal porridge). evening time During supper, served between 7:00 and 9:30 p.m., the children told each other their adventures of the day, teased one another, gave their mother any messages from the school, and sometimes complained about this and that. When the father arrived, he was given water to wash with and then served his meal. After eating, the mother washed the dishes and utensils and then washed herself. The father might spend the evening with the mother and children, or he might go off to socialize with his male friends in the village center. The family retired to bed between 8:00 p.m. and midnight, at each member’s convenience. The mother, first to arise, was usually also the last to go to bed; before she could sleep she had to organize the household and check that the children were still tucked under their covers. The younger children sometimes went to bed earlier than 8:00 p.m., and an early supper was prepared for them. special routines On certain days—for example, on weekends and school vacations—the routine was more relaxed. On Saturdays the schoolchildren tended to sleep an extra hour or two, so that all the activities of the day (except for milking) began between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. The mother still had to get up early, but this time between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. After breakfast she and the older children washed the school uniforms and other clothing. Children over 12 years of age often washed their own clothes, but the mother or an older sibling (usually a girl) washed those of the younger children. Preschool-age children were free from the schoolday responsibilities of watching younger siblings and tending the fire. They could freely play under the supervision of an older sibling. On public holidays (except for religious holidays) and on ordinary school vacation days, the routine resembled the typical Saturday, but this schedule changed on Sundays and on holidays requiring religious observance. These occasions offered the opportunity of attending

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The Village and Its Families church services. People frequently socialized after church. The older sons often disappeared from home the whole day. Other children went to Sunday school in the morning and resumed play in the afternoon. After the church service the mother also usually did household tasks such as cooking, mending clothes, and general housework. If she went out visiting she did not stay away from home the whole day, unless for a special occasion such as an occasional visit to her parents. She still had the milking to do, but usually a child delivered the milk to the dairy. Other changes in the typical routine came about due to weather. On certain days during the long summer rainy season, it became too wet to go to the shamba. People then spent the extra time chatting and warming themselves by the fire. The mother usually engaged in the same kind of jobs she did on Sundays and religious holidays, and she often asked the children to do some tasks for her in the home. At the other extreme, on certain days in December and January when it was very hot and dry, there was little work to be done in the shamba, and people spent less time there. Finally, there were variations due to special economic situations. In households without a big enough shamba to grow food for the family, the mother might go to work for wages for a neighbor or a farmer several miles away. In that case, she left home early to start work at 8:00 a.m. and did not finish until 2:00 p.m. The older children sometimes went off to work for money, too. In contrast, in wealthier households where there was hired help, the tasks of milking and taking milk to the dairy were delegated to employees, and the mother and children had more discretionary time. In households where market income played a significant role, the mother spent a minimum of three days per week on marketing business.

References Bloch, M. N., & Adler, S. M. (1994). African children’s play and the emergence of the sexual division of labor. In J. L. Roopnarine, J. E. Johnson, & F. H. Hooper (Eds.), Children’s play in diverse cultures (pp. 148–178). Albany: State University of New York Press. Chesaina, C. (1975). Daily family life in Ngecha 1968–70. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University; also hraf, New Haven ct.

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The Village and Its Families Curtis, A. (1975). Ngecha and others. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University; also hraf, New Haven ct. Davison, J., with the women of Murtira. (1989). Voices from Mutira: Lives of rural Gikuyu women. Boulder co: Lynne Rienner. Edwards, C. P. (2000). Children’s play in cross-cultural perspective: A new look at the Six Culture Study. Cross Cultural Research, 34(4), 318–338. Herzog, J. (1975). Education in Kenya. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University; also hraf, New Haven ct. Kenya Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (1964). Kenya population census, 1962, tables. Nairobi: Directorate of Economic Planning, Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning. Presley, C. A. (1992). Kikuyu women, the Mau Mau rebellion, and social change in Kenya. Boulder co: Westview Press. Whiting, B. B., & Edwards, C. P. (1988). Children of different worlds: The formation of social behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Whiting, J. W. M., & Herzog, J. (1975). Demography and economy 1968–1973. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University; also hraf, New Haven ct.

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3

The Historical Stage Beatrice Whiting, John Whiting, John Herzog, and Carolyn Edwards, with Arnold Curtis

Editors’ Note: This chapter draws from first-person accounts or encounters with Gikuyu life by Kenyatta (1962), Leakey (1977), Hobley (1910, 1922, 1970), and Routledge and Routledge (1910) and from recent integrations by historical authorities listed in the references. It was written in several versions and stages. Arnold Curtis (1975) gathered information to prepare an essay on British settlement and interaction between the Gikuyu and colonials in the areas surrounding Ngecha. John Herzog (1975) made the initial survey of the area and prepared the draft of the section on the history of schooling and education in Ngecha. The section on the age-grade and age-set system draws from John W. M. Whiting (1981), which was based on interviews with elders carried out by John Herzog with the assistance of Gikuyu students from the University of Nairobi and on interviews by Frances Cox and Ndung’u Mberia (Cox & Mberia, 1975; Cox with Mberia, 1977) with elders in Ngecha. The section on the status of women draws from an unpublished essay on models of Gikuyu women by Beatrice Whiting. Carolyn Edwards added information from recent publications and arranged and edited this final version.

The Arrival of the Bantu People in the Central Highlands prehistory Ngecha is situated almost in the center of the stage on which was enacted a major event in the drama of human evolution. The script has been deciphered by archaeologists, botanists, linguists, and historians. This magnificent spot is located on the southwestern edge of the Kenya Highlands. Olduvai Gorge, made famous by the discoveries illuminating the early evolution of the human species, lies 400 miles to

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The Historical Stage the southeast along the floor of the Rift Valley, which can be viewed from several hills in the community of Ngecha. Northward along the Rift lie Lake Elmenteita, Lake Baringo, and Lake Turkana, with their archaeological sites that inform us about early humans and their use of tools. Estimates of just when humans first used tools keep changing as new fossils are found and as more accurate methods of dating develop, but it is agreed that humanity has occupied this area for more than two million years. It is clear from the archaeological evidence that for most of this long period the inhabitants depended on hunting and gathering, supplemented in more recent millennia by fishing. Radiocarbon dating fixes the introduction of agriculture and pastoralism in the Kenyan Highlands sometime between 1000 b.c. and a.d. 1000. Skeletons excavated from burial sites indicate that these early farmers were Caucasoid rather than Bushmanoid. Archaeological evidence indicates that they also had herds of sheep, goats, and cattle that they milked. They buried their dead in cairns, practiced irrigation, and had a toolkit that included grindstones, pestles, earthenware pots, and stone bowls. From these artifacts it can be presumed that they raised grain crops—sorghum, eleusine (savanna grass), and millet (Posnanski, 1968; Sutton, 1968). The evidence indicates that these people migrated from the area later named Ethiopia, then occupied by a Cushitic-speaking Caucasoid people who practiced agriculture and animal husbandry, used irrigation, and buried their dead in cairns. Since the Cushitic-speaking people are credited with developing the age-set ( gada) system, which is still practiced by most contemporary Cushitic-speaking peoples, it is probable that the new actors on our stage brought this system with them (Muriuki, 1974). The Bantu adopted the gada system before they entered the Central Highlands, presumably from previous contacts with the Cushites, and it is described later in the chapter. It is an efficient political system for middle-level societies because it invests political authority in age sets whose members are drawn from a wide territory and from all lineages occupying that area, thus preventing the concentration of power in a single lineage or in a single locality. The distribution of grave sites during this period shows no indication of either

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The Historical Stage a social status hierarchy or a central place of political and economic power. Most of the archaeological sites so far discovered indicate that the Cushitic people occupied the Rift Valley and some of the surrounding highlands. Since they were pastoral as well as agricultural and had no efficient means of clearing the heavily forested areas until iron was introduced, it is not likely that they found the Highlands and the Nyandarua Range (Aberdares) to the north to their liking. Thus the Ngecha area was probably left to the hunters who had previously occupied it. In any case, this was the situation at the end of the nineteenth century when the Gikuyu and the British arrived on the stage. The Bantu-speaking people who arrived in Kenya about 1500 were the descendants of farmers who, at the beginning of the first century of the Christian era, lived in the southern part of Nigeria. They probably learned to cultivate bananas, yams, taro, coconuts, and other tropical plants introduced into Africa by the Malayans and thereby were able to expand into tropical areas of the Congo basin and to cross into East Africa. settlement of the central province area Between around 1500, when the Bantu group was reported to be in the vicinity of Mount Kenya, and 1900, the Gikuyu colonized extensive areas of what was to become the Central Province of Kenya. They adopted maize, probably imported by the Portuguese, who arrived in Mombasa in 1493 and brought with them seeds of this New World crop. The Portuguese also introduced new implements such as axes, bush knives, and the jembe (hoe), which permitted groups of Gikuyu pioneers to clear the rich and well-watered but heavily forested land in the highlands in the vicinity of Mount Kenya. The Bantu-speaking groups present in the vicinity of Mount Kenya around 1500 are believed to have moved north and west from the coastal region of Kenya. Oral tradition has it that the Gikuyu clans are direct descendants of the nine daughters of Gikuyu and Mumbi, who established the first Gikuyu settlement on the slopes of Mount Kenya (Kenyatta, 1962). Ngai, the Creator who divided the land among the people, gave the land in Meru, Embu, Nyeri, Murang’a, and Kiambu to Gikuyu.

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The Historical Stage At his death, this land was inherited by the nine daughters of Gikuyu and Mumbi and their husbands and progeny. Ngecha was in the southwestern part of Kiambu, bordered to the south and west by lands used by Masai herdsmen (see Figure 1.1). At the end of the nineteenth century it was one of the westernmost settlements of the Gikuyu. The Gikuyu lived in polygynous, patrilineal extended family homesteads (mucii ). The titular head of the homestead was the eldest male descendant of the founder of the homestead, which included his wife or wives and his married sons and their wives and children. Due to polygyny and high fertility, the homesteads frequently became crowded, and there was not sufficient land for all the women to have gardens on which to grow the food needed to feed their husbands and children. In addition, since the Gikuyu practiced fallow agriculture and pastured sheep and goats, they needed extra land to allow for the rotation of the gardens and pastures. Groups of related homesteads might spread out the entire length of one of the ridges descending from the highland watersheds of Mount Kenya and the Nyandarua Range. The homesteads on a ridge that recognized descent from the same founder identified themselves as belonging to the mbari (patrilineage) named for its alleged founder. These lineage groups were governed by the men’s council of elders of the homesteads (kiama). When a ridge became crowded, scouts were sent out to look for new land. The members of a mbrari were joint owners of a piece of land, or githaka, and each lineage had a leader who controlled the allocation and use of land (Leo, 1984). Land was redistributed each generation to members according to their needs. When the land became too overcrowded, the mbari had to acquire additional land or split up and have part of the group move elsewhere, thus leading to steady expansion of territory boundaries. Land was held in common but was assigned to individuals for use and control, and land tenure was therefore neither purely individualistic nor purely communal but something in between. The peopling of Ngecha probably replicated the settlement of many parts of Gikuyuland, as the children of Mumbi spread from their ancestral home on the slopes of Mount Kenya. Some of the Gikuyu pioneers moved into the heavily forested area of the ridges descending from the Nyandarua Range. There they encountered the Dorobo, a hunting

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The Historical Stage and gathering group, although there is some historical disagreement about the identity of the people living in Kabete when the Gikuyu arrived (Dundas, 1924; Hobley, 1910; Muriuki, 1974; Routledge & Routledge, 1910). At any rate, the Ngecha elders in 1968 claimed the original people were Dorobo and that a lineage descended from them still lived in the location. In fact, the term ‘‘Dorobo’’ was used in Kenya to describe many different non-Bantu groups who lived in the forest area as hunters and gatherers and were known for their skill at hunting elephants and gathering the honey that was prized for brewing beer. Some of these groups, particularly those known in Kabete as the Athi, were probably Masai tribespeople who had lost their herds through raids or epidemics of cattle diseases. Other groups were probably survivors of an ancient group of Gumba, Bushmanoid people who lived in the forest of the highlands of Kenya and intermarried with Masai and Gikuyu and adopted their ways of life. A typical Gikuyu scouting expedition usually included a leader with a group of junior and senior warriors. Having discovered a promising site and, if possible, having made friends with the Dorobo, the members of the expedition would build a large fortified village (kihingo), intended to include many homesteads. They made a clearing, felling the trees so that they would fall outward in a circle. The trees were not entirely cut through and thus formed a live hedge, which, when thorns and briars grew among the branches, was almost impenetrable. Small hidden gateways were left at the front and back. When such a fort had been built and friendly relations had been established with the Dorobo, the Gikuyu women, children, and elders would be brought to the new site. Generally the senior elder would stake claim for a section of farmland surrounding the village for his own use and that of his sons, thus founding a sublineage that maintained contact with the lineage of origin in earlier settlements. Landless scouts (ahoi ) from various unrelated lineages were permitted to join the kihingo and to squat on the land in return for helping in its defense. In addition, individuals could be ceremonially adopted into the lineage. According to elders interviewed in 1968 (Githuka, 1970), Gikuyu people had lived in Ngecha barely 100 years. The first settlers, arriving between 1870 and 1872, negotiated with a Dorobo elder named Kibo-

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The Historical Stage roro, said to control the land between Kiambu and the Rift Escarpment. Descendants of Kibororo still live and own land in Ngecha today. Ngecha residents regarded aboriginal Dorobo culture with a mixture of disdain (for its simplicity) and admiration (for its resourcefulness). Thus the Gikuyu movement into Ngecha occurred as the result of a series of economic agreements between ambitious and restless Gikuyu agriculturalists, on the one hand, and the receptive local Dorobo patriarch, Kibororo, and his offspring, on the other. Although an individual Gikuyu man often arranged for the transfer of lands, he usually did so on behalf of his mbari, and the subsequent settlement was invariably a family enterprise. The Dorobo viewed the advent of the Gikuyu as an opportunity to obtain quantities of sheep and goats, the flesh of which they prized, and to learn farming techniques. The Gikuyu were pleased to exchange livestock for land, as well as to marry their daughters to Dorobo men. In such cases land became an excellent medium of bride price, and the Gikuyu women taught their new Dorobo kinspeople how to farm. McIntosh (1968) says that the proto-Gikuyu absorbed Dorobo hunters but compensated them for the land they took over from them. The majority of the families in our study were members of the three oldest lineages, Mbari-ya-Ngecha, Mbari-ya-Igi, and Mbari-ya-Thaara. A particular descendant of the patriarch, Ngecha, utilized such connections with the Dorobo to buy land from Kibororo around 1850 (Githuka, 1970). We did not learn his name, but he was said to have been a Kamba married for the second time to a Gikuyu woman from the Fort Hall area. The pair later migrated to Kiambu, where they purchased land from the Dorobo between Banana Hill and Ndeiya. By 1875 the lineage named after Ngecha was well established. These first Gikuyu settlers were soon joined by invited members of related mbari and by groups from other mbari whose members had contacts among the Dorobo. The first members of Mbari-ya-Igi to come to Ngecha were the family of Matheri, who came about 1880. Kagunda, the first member of the Mbari-ya-Thaara lineage, and his four sons came the following year. The friendly reception accorded to unrelated mbari by the earliest settlers was doubtless influenced by Ngecha’s exposed position vis-àvis the Masai in the Rift Valley 10 miles to the south and to the presence

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The Historical Stage of a rival group of Gikuyu at Muguga, 2 miles to the west. There were frequent small raids (in both directions). From 1879 to 1892, during the periods of famine caused by drought, plagues of locusts, smallpox, and rinderpest (a virulent cattle disease), the Ngecha settlements were particularly vulnerable to Masai raids, and the Masai and the Southern Gikuyu fought a series of large battles against each other. In 1892 the Gikuyu put aside their usual unrest against the British troops stationed at Dagoretti and Fort Smith and called in the help of Imperial British East Africa Company troops to drive off a large Masai raid at Gichamu’s, near Mugaga (Curtis, 1975). A Ngecha elder claimed that several thousand Masai warriors were surrounded and slaughtered on the ridges immediately south of the present Ngecha marketplace. Thus the last decade of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth century were characterized by trouble and fighting between the Gikuyu of southern Kiambu and neighboring Gikuyu and Masai warriors and British colonials.

The Lineage and Age-Set Systems By 1885 Gikuyu farmers in the Ngecha area were growing millet, sorghum, maize, beans, sweet potatoes, yams, bananas, and sugarcane. Every homestead had sheep and goats and might also have a few native cattle. The early Europeans who visited the area between 1887 and 1892 reported that extensive land was under cultivation. Ludwick Von Hohnel, the first European to cross through Gikuyuland in the vicinity of Ngecha, approaching the area from the south in 1887, reported cleared land and gardens inside the forest fringe that sheltered well-hidden fortified villages such as the Gikuyu settlers built when they were opening up a section of the heavily timbered ridges. Beyond the fringe was open land, and ‘‘as far as the eye could reach stretched well-cultivated, undulating pasture-lands, which was a revelation to us, explaining the ease with which the Wagikuyu can supply the needs of the largest caravans’’ (Von Hohnel’s journal, cited in Leakey, 1977, vol. 1, p. 63). The homesteads of the families belonging to the same patrilineage often covered an entire ridge forming a sublineage (mbari) or a larger lineage (also called mbari). The mbari would be named after the pio-

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The Historical Stage neer founder. In 1968 the elders of the families we studied in Mbariya-Igi and Mbari-ya-Thaara could trace direct descent from the known great-grandfathers. Many of the mbari members still remembered the name of the location in Murang’a from which their founders had emigrated. The mbari were united through identification with one of the nine clans (mihiriga) founded by the nine daughters of Gikuyu and Mumbi. Genealogies collected in Ngecha in 1968 indicated that these clans were not exogamous (out-marrying); indeed, exogamous rules may never have been important. By 1900 the clans were no longer localized, if in fact they ever had been. The most important organizations that bound the mbari together were the age-set (riika) and generation system (Whiting, 1981). All mature male and females identified themselves by the year in which they were initiated and recognized a life-long bond with those initiated that year, considering themselves to be ‘‘brothers’’ and ‘‘sisters.’’ This identification was recognized in all Gikuyuland (Kenyatta, 1962; Leakey, 1977; Muriuki, 1974). ‘‘Among themselves, the members of an age set demanded and encouraged cooperation, solidarity and mutual help as a result of which an age group exhibited a strong sense of comradeship and fraternal egalitarianism. Indeed, riika mates looked upon each other as actual blood brothers or sisters, depending upon their sex, and behaved accordingly. The spirit of comradeship was so strong among riika ‘brothers’ that it occasionally even led to a sharing of their wives!’’ (Muriuki 1974, p. 119). All girls and boys were initiated into an age set and passed through the age grades, the boys from childhood to junior then senior warriorhood, then junior, senior, and ritual elderhood; the girls from childhood to maidenhood, then married woman, and finally older woman. Some of the older women thought to be particularly wise and knowledgeable were considered senior elders. The most important ceremonies were those marking the transition from boyhood to junior warrior and girlhood to maidenhood. These involved intensive education in the behavior expected of junior warriors and maidens. During the eight days of seclusion following the initiation rites of circumcision and clitoridectomy, there was intensive separate training of the girls and boys. As Muriuki (1974, p. 119) summa-

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The Historical Stage rized: ‘‘In the absence of any formal centres of instruction, initiation served as one of the main educational channels in Gikuyu society. This education was both practical and theoretical and covered such fields as tribal traditions, religion, folklore, mode of behavior and the duties of adults, taboos and sex. Also, the initiates were invested with important roles, responsibilities and privileges in the social system.’’ When a sufficient number of boys had been initiated, a regiment of junior warriors from neighboring ridges was formed. Theoretically, the junior warriors from all the ridges of Gikuyuland could be called upon to help their agemates in skirmishes with the Masai, which often involved attempted theft (by either side) of livestock. Sometimes also the youthful ‘‘militia’’ of one Gikuyu ridge and mbari launched a raid on a neighboring Gikuyu ridge with the goal again of capturing animals, often vexing the adults. Each regiment (also called riika) was composed of nine initiation groups. Since the initiation of boys did not occur every year, 12 to 14 years were usually required to form a regiment. Once a new regiment was formed, there was a period of four and a half years when no initiation ceremonies occurred. After this interim, which allowed for a new regiment to be trained, there was a changeover (maambura ma ituika). The senior warriors retired and became junior elders, and the junior elders moved up into the senior rank and became the leaders of all military operations. All males and females were also organized into one of the ‘‘generations,’’ called Mwangi and Maina. Every male became a member of one of these groups, inheriting the position from his grandfather. This resulted in father and son always belonging to a different generation and countering the lineage principle that had been central in Bantu social organization. Members of only one of the two generations could hold political office at any one time. The right of political power alternated with each generation, a span of approximately 35 years. Thus authority was vested in the Mwangi for 35 years, and then they had to step down and permit the Maina to take over. The changeover was accomplished by a large ceremony including all Gikuyu. The last changeover took place at the end of the nineteenth century. The changeover due to occur around 1930 was forbidden by the British colonials, who

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The Historical Stage had instituted an ordinance against large gatherings of Gikuyu. Even after the great changeover system was abolished, however, it left a cultural legacy (Whiting, 1981). It affected the growth of the Gikuyu elite in the twentieth century by setting in motion a system of relationships between and within alternating generations. Today, the Gikuyu of Kenya still practice circumcision of boys around the age of puberty in whatever region of the world they live (Malia & Mbito, 2002; Mbito & Malia, 2002). The great public events of song and dance that traditionally prepared the candidates have disappeared in the past 35 years. Circumcision has become an individual family event but still acts as a public ‘‘marker’’ of a life transition, with self-image implications, as it did in the 1970s (Herzog, 1973). In sum, the Gikuyu life cycle preceding and during the period of the research project was defined by the following features (Whiting, 1981, p. 88): 1. Each stage in life was clearly defined and ritually marked at each step, and the roles required of the occupants of each stage were clearly specified. 2. An extended period of role learning and activity preceded the two most important stages for men. A man passed through the novitiate stage of junior warrior before becoming a senior warrior and before moving from junior elder to senior elder. 3. The age-set system established a same-age/same-sex support group that remained in effect throughout one’s life span. 4. Both men and women interacted more and were more intimate with members of their age set than with their spouses. 5. A socially meaningful status was assigned to the aged of both sexes. 6. The local community, consisting primarily of male members of a patrilineage together with their wives and children, had generational depth and continuity. This provided a strong hierarchical support group that complemented the age-set system.

The Historical Status of Women Even in early times Gikuyu women were not the powerless, downtrodden figures that outsiders sometimes imagined them to be as they

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The Historical Stage saw them carrying heavy loads, managing many children, and sharing their husbands with co-wives. Louis Leakey, the famed Kenyan anthropologist whose family for two generations has made major discoveries about human evolution, grew up with Gikuyu friends and spent many hours recording the dictations of elders in a Southern Gikuyu community. He summarized his impressions of Gikuyu women: Although the Kikuyu women had no political rights, it would be utterly wrong to assume they had no influence and no status in the tribe. In a superficial examination it is true that the life of a Kikuyu woman seems to have been unbearably hard and dull. She appears to have had to shoulder the burden of all the hard work, much of her time being spent drawing water, cultivating the fields and carrying food home from them, preparing food for her family, and doing other hard and unpleasant work. Because by age-long custom it was the women and not the men who carried heavy loads, casual observers have formed the opinion that they were treated more as beasts of burden than as human beings. Because a woman was in many cases the wife of a polygamist, it is assumed that the Kikuyu wife was nothing more to her husband than a useful worker and someone with whom to satisfy his sexual desires. These assumptions, however, do not reflect the truth, as we shall see. (Leakey, 1977, vol. 1, pp. 9–10)

Leakey went on to point out that the women were not forced to marry against their will, that the senior wife had a high status, and that many rituals centered around women. He noted that once a woman became a mother, she was assured of honor and respect. He commented on the love and respect that sons bestowed on their mothers and on the duty of brothers of a deceased man to care for his widow. The history of the Bantu people in East Africa suggests that Gikuyu women were models of adaptability, adjusting to ever-changing situations as they migrated across sub-Saharan Africa. The women who survived the constant moving of the family groups into new areas must have been strong, competent, and pragmatic. The oral history of the migration of the Gikuyu into the Ngecha area tells of the marriage of the women to Dorobo men, the women given in marriage in exchange for land. These women are said to have taught the Dorobo how to grow crops. The accounts suggest that the Gikuyu mothers married

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The Historical Stage to Dorobos taught their children to speak Gikuyu and thereby played an active role in diminishing the use of the Dorobo language. Responsible for the early training of children, they transmitted Gikuyu beliefs and values. Charles W. Hobley spent many years as an administrator in East Africa during the first decades of the twentieth century and made extensive studies of the inhabitants. Noting that little had been published about Gikuyu women, he concluded, ‘‘The male African in his home life is not noted for persistent steady work; the women on the other hand are never idle, and are withal cheerful and uncomplaining about their lot, and not nearly as down-trodden as some people believe’’ (Hobley 1970, p. 276). William and Katherine Routledge (1910) published one of the earliest accounts that discusses Gikuyu women in some detail. Katherine Routledge spent several years living in Nyeri and was able to study the women without undue concern for British colonial policy. She described self-confident women who were esteemed for the role they played as the providers of highly valued children and the producers of the vegetables that were the major source of the food supply. She agreed with Hobley (1922) that the women worked hard, with little time for leisure between providing the water, fuel, and food for the household. They were also stoical and uncomplaining, accepting the division of labor that differentiated the women’s world and work from those of men. However, she stressed that they were not without rights. Her informants told her that they were not forced to marry and that they did not dislike polygyny. In fact, they preferred their husbands to have many wives to share the work. Their husbands consulted them on many matters, and their opinions were taken seriously. For example, in the case of disagreement between a man and the women of his homestead as to where to locate a house for a new bride, the husband would allow the women to have their way ‘‘because it is great work to have borned a child’’ (Routledge & Routledge, 1910, p. 138). Even women past the childbearing years were respected, as described in the following passages: The self reliance and dignity of the older women is remarkable. Such a one will come to pay a formal call at the camp, braving without a qualm

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Top: Education was sought after as the best means to future employment. The Gichuru Harambee Secondary School, which received additions and repairs as a community self-help project, provided opportunity for the many Ngecha students who could not obtain admission to a government secondary school. (Sayre Sheldon) Bottom: Teachers drilled children in language and other basic skills at school. Here girls recite patriotic poems and songs at the Ngecha Nursery School. (Sayre Sheldon)

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The Historical Stage the scores of porters, Swahili servants, and sentry on guard to converse through an interpreter with a foreigner, a proceeding which would surely strike fear into the bosom of many a middle-aged female at home. . . . There are not precisely ‘‘votes for women’’ as they do not take part in the judicial councils; but in one instance the head chief, Karuari, has appointed a woman to be his lieutenant in a district, where she reigns with much capacity, and diplomatically adds prestige to her position by dressing exceedingly well. (Routledge & Routledge, 1910, pp. 138–139)

Older women with leadership abilities became members of the women’s council (nyakinyua). In council meetings, the women elders monitored the younger women and could fine them for misbehavior (Hobley, 1922). Men feared the women’s kiama because they believed the women to have special power. The women’s courage and self-confidence were also evidenced by their role in trade. In 1887 Von Hohnel, who was traveling through southern Gikuyuland, reported that hinga, women who spoke two languages, frequently acted as guides for trading parties (Leakey, 1977, vol. 1, p. 59). Likewise, Joseph Thomson (1885) reported that women did the trading between the Gikuyu and Masai, there being an agreement between the two groups that women should not be attacked (Leakey, 1977). In later years brave Gikuyu women would play an active role in resisting the British and waging the fight for independence (Rosberg & Nottingham, 1966). The Land and Freedom Movement was strengthened because of female participation (Presley, 1992). The women acted as go-betweens and carriers of goods and firearms and provided a bold system of intelligence that was hard to eliminate (Konogo, 1987, p. 143). During guerrilla war in the forests, women took on new roles in support of men and alongside men (Clough, 1998). Women demonstrated courage, hardiness, risk taking, and even endurance under torture, and at least one freedom unit was commanded by a woman (Edgerton, 1989, p. 128). This carried from the forests into the camps, where women were among the strongest resisters (Presley, 1992). In 1963, when Kenya became independent, the new constitution gave women the right to vote. They still lived under the customary inheritance and divorce rules, however. They could not inherit land from their

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The Historical Stage deceased husbands, and in case of divorce, the customary law of many tribes, including the Gikuyu, gave the children to the father.

Contact with the British, 1890–1963 the british arrival During the time that the Gikuyu were in the process of settling Ngecha, a second group of newcomers, the British, arrived on the scene. The Gikuyu had been isolated from Arab slave traders because the early caravan routes passed through Kamba territory to the south of Mount Kenya. Not until the Gikuyu migrated south into the Kiambu-Nairobi area did they intersect the caravan route from Mombasa to Lake Victoria and come in contact with the traders and the Imperial British East Africa Company. During the 1890s the British decided to build a railroad across Kenya in order to protect Zanzibar, their port on the Indian Ocean. They also wanted to secure control of Uganda and the headwaters of the Nile, which they feared were threatened by the Germans. They planned a route through Nairobi, Kabete, and Gikuyu, the southernmost fringe of Gikuyu settlements. In 1890 the East Africa Company built the earliest British trading post at Dagoretti, in the southwestern district of Kiambu, eight miles south of Ngecha. This was transferred to nearby Fort Smith in 1892. In the late 1890s, as described earlier, there was constant unrest in the region. The employees of the East Africa Company and the Gikuyu and Masai engaged in continuous skirmishes with one another, and the area was afflicted by bad weather, insects, and disease. The Masai suffered the most, but for all groups these were hard times, and the death rate was high throughout the area. European settlers started arriving in the central part of Kenya in 1896 (Curtis, 1975; Sorrenson, 1968). By 1899 the Uganda Railroad was completed to Muguga and Limuru, just to the west and north of Ngecha. The commissioner for the East African Protectorate, appointed in 1902, had proclaimed that the land for one mile on either side of the line should be a railway zone. The British claimed that, with the exception of the area around the settlements in Gikuyu and Dagoretti to the

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The Historical Stage south of Ngecha, the land was vacant and no compensation was necessary (Curtis, 1975). The Gikuyu claimed that all this land belonged to them and that it was temporarily not in use because of the depopulation caused by the famine and smallpox epidemic of 1898 and 1899 (Sorrenson, 1967). To support the railroad, the British colonial government instituted an aggressive campaign to find white settlers for this area (Curtis, 1975). White immigrant farmers were sought, and many British and Boers were imported from South Africa. The land allotments were for 160 acres and could be increased to 640 acres, or one square mile. The immigrant farmers favored the fertile area in the highlands in the vicinity of Limuru, 10 miles north of Ngecha. The first white settler in the area, G. W. L. Caine, whose land was to the east of the Limuru railway station, planted tea in 1903. Sir Thomas Powell Buxton, a former treasurer of the Church Mission Society, bought land south of the Limuru station in 1902. Other European settlers followed, including the Italian Fathers of the Consolata Society, who established a Catholic mission at Limuru. In a short period of time, the white settlers in this vicinity, known as the White Highlands, experienced intermittent contact with the mbari who had settled in Ngecha. Interaction with these European farmers was to speed culture change in Ngecha. As early as 1908 and 1909 Ngecha men were working on Europeans’ farms. missions, schools, and taxes Missions followed the European settlers, and with them came not only Christianity but also the schools that were to revolutionize the Gikuyu way of life. The first mission station in the area was founded by the East African Scottish Industrial Mission in Gikuyu, eight miles south of Ngecha. Two years later the Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Committee (Presbyterian) took over the station and introduced schooling to Ngecha (see below). The Holy Ghost Fathers established a station in the town of Gikuyu in 1899 that was later transferred to the nearby town of Limuru and run by the Italian Fathers of the Consolata Society. In 1900 the Church Missionary Society (Anglican Church) established a mission at Lower Kabete that became the headquarters of the Reverend Harry Leakey (father of Louis Leakey), who set up a network of

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The Historical Stage small schools, including one on the Buxton farm in Limuru. The conversion of the Gikuyu to Christianity appears to have been rapid. The first baptism in Ngecha itself of local converts by the Scottish Presbyterians took place in 1919. Conflict arose, however, over the church’s disapproval of the practice of polygyny. The Christian churches stressed the importance of the sanctity of the nuclear family and the importance of children sleeping under the same roof with their fathers and mothers (Oliver, 1952). They disapproved of female initiation that included clitoridectomy. They disapproved of the dancing that was the focus of many Gikuyu ceremonies, an important art form, and a recreational pastime of the traditional culture. They disapproved of the sexual behavior of the young initiated girls and boys. In particular, they regarded as immoral a practice (resembling the colonial New England custom of ‘‘bundling’’) called ngweko, restricted intercourse among young couples who slept communally with each other in a special position that ensured that full sexual intercourse did not take place. Missionaries likely also were upset by the practice of nude dancing by the young female and male initiates. The Gikuyu reacted to this disapproval of their culture and rituals. As they became more familiar with the British settlers’ behavior and customs, their resentment of being treated as inferiors increased. Some converts to Christianity resented the fact that they could never advance to the top of the ecclesiastic hierarchies. Each year these irritations increased (Ogot, 1968; Ogot & Ochieng’, 1995; Rosberg & Nottingham, 1966). The conflict came to a head in the 1920s and led to the withdrawal from the Protestant churches of those Gikuyu who wanted to maintain Gikuyu cultural traditions. Independent churches were founded, one of which became the Kikuyu Orthodox Church, which cultivated contacts with the Greek Orthodox Church. Many Ngecha parents withdrew their children from the mission schools. As a counter move, the Kikuyu Independent School Association and the Gikuyu Karing’a Educational Association opened new schools. The labor policy that evolved over the first decades of the colonial government was particularly onerous to the Gikuyu. In 1902 the British colonial government had levied a two-rupee hut tax on all homesteads. The white settlers hoped that the need for money to pay this tax would

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The Historical Stage force the Gikuyu to work as laborers for them. In 1910 the hut tax was supplemented by a poll tax on all males who were not paying hut taxes. In 1920 an ordinance was passed requiring all males over 16 years of age to register at the district office and to bear an identification with fingerprints around their necks (kipenda, or goat bell) and a record of employment. Local chiefs, or headmen, were appointed by the colonial government to see to the collection of taxes, to report crimes to the District Commission, and to recruit and organize gangs of laborers for the construction of roads and other public works and even for work on private estates. Another set of grievances grew from British attempts to institute a system of local chiefs, who would be accountable to the colonial government. The concept of a location chief was foreign to the traditional Gikuyu political system. The mbari had always been governed by a kiama. Conflicts between individual mbari living in the Ngecha location were traditionally settled by open meetings of the elders from both groups.Under the colonial administration, the elders were seldom even consulted as to the selection of the location chief. Curtis (1975) comments that the authority of these chiefs was rejected by the elders and by the younger generation. They were often ruthless in conscripting labor and collecting taxes, using their authority for personal gain (Ogot, 1968; Ogot & Ochieng’, 1995). Curtis (1975) reports that in 1910 the governor of Kenya, Sir Percy Girouard, attempted to revive the kiama. The elders of this group in Ngecha were said to have ‘‘anointed’’ a man called Kangau, thus signifying their approval of his appointment as chief (Curtis, 1975, p. 11). However, this incident does not necessarily indicate the people’s general acceptance of the policy or their acceptance of the appointed chiefs. Grievances over the alienation of land that had started with the building of the Uganda Railroad and the immigration of the first white settlers continued to build throughout the century. The colonial government adopted policies based on erroneous beliefs about Gikuyu customs concerning land ownership. Drawing from their experience with chiefdoms in West Africa, the British colonials assumed that each ridge had its own chief, or headman, who administered clan land. They did not understand the structure of the mbari; they confused the clans

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The Historical Stage descended from the nine daughters of Gikuyu and Mumbi with lineages and wrongly assumed that the clans were landowning corporate groups. rising land pressure and unrest in ngecha The alienation of land from the Gikuyu was greatest in the region of the White Highlands. Early on, the European settlers imposed restrictions throughout the area that geographically separated them from Africans and Asians. Colonial policies prohibited Asians from owning farms and prohibited Africans from owning land outside of what later were designated as native reserves. Thousands of acres to the east and north of Ngecha were alienated from Africans, their homes and property burned and destroyed. By 1905 approximately 60,000 acres of Gikuyu land in the Kiambu-Limuru area had been alienated and taken over by European farmers (Sorrenson, 1967). The Kenya Land Commission later established that less than 4,000 rupees were paid to about 8,000 Gikuyu at the rate of 2 rupees per acre to compensate them for their land, and 3,000 Gikuyu received no compensation at all (Leo, 1984, pp. 37–38). Ngecha, surrounded on three sides by European farms, became a haven for displaced Gikuyu from the region. The colonial government made a first attempt at defining land that was to be set aside as native reserves, but in spite of that mapping, land alienation continued. Following World War II European settlers alienated more land for veterans and imposed more restrictions on the Africans. As the mbari population increased, Pax Britannica made it impossible for them to send out scouts to find and colonize new land that they could claim. Some families from Ngecha mbari did move into the Rift Valley to work on European farms. Two of the five elders in our sample in Mbariya-Igi, born between 1900 and 1920, grew up in the Rift Valley and worked there on European farms until the uprising associated with the Land and Freedom Movement. A third man worked on a Rift Valley farm for 20 years. In 1920, as the crowding increased, whole families moved west, settling on Masai land or on the farms of European families in the Rift Valley and surrounding highlands. Some, like the Igi men, were hired as agricultural laborers and moved onto European

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The Historical Stage farms with their families and animals. The owners of the estates allowed them to have land to garden and pasture for their animals. The laborers assumed that they could stay indefinitely, believing their relation to the landlord was similar to that of a traditional Gikuyu muhoi (landless man, here meaning tenant-at-will) to an mbari. Other families, known as squatters, moved onto open land that belonged to the Europeans, and their rights as squatters were even more tenuous than those of the hired laborers. Pressures for change began to build in Ngecha. From 1926 to 1928, in response to the increase in the number of students and the demand for a richer curriculum, the combined Protestant churches of East Africa missions built a new schoolhouse in Ngecha to replace the simple building constructed in 1920. The new school included an upper division offering an enriched curriculum. (This building was to become known as Old Ngecha when another school was built in later years.) During the same period, the neighboring European farmers, dependent on Ngecha labor and desiring to facilitate communication, supervised the construction of the first vehicular road from Ngecha to the mainly British settlement of Tigoni, linking the village to the settlers’ farms. By 1930 shops began to appear in the area that is now the center of Ngecha town. More men sought wage labor as farming became more difficult on the crowded land. A new wave of European immigrants, encouraged to settle in Kenya after World War II, added to the land pressure, and the European farmers in the Rift Valley began to tighten their control of the Gikuyu squatter farmers and restrict the number of cattle or cash crops that the Gikuyu could grow on the landlord’s acreage. It became impossible for the squatters to better their lot by working for themselves as well as for their landlords. Some of the Ngecha families who had moved west returned to the reserve around 1946. Life in the reserves was highly controlled (Leo, 1984, p. 5). The chiefs appointed by the colonial authorities maintained order, helped collect taxes, and recruited labor for the Europeans. They also were responsible for maintaining restrictions on commerce and agriculture, including measures intended to promote ‘‘correct’’ farming techniques. The reserves were not only crowded but also overfarmed. Beginning

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The Historical Stage in the 1920s the colonial government had attempted to institute programs to teach more efficient farming techniques. Their efforts, however, were limited to instructing a few individuals selected by the colonial agricultural officers from among the Gikuyu who had acquired large landholdings purchased from poorer members of the location. Cash cropping was encouraged; pyrethrum was introduced in 1944, and a dairy cooperative was organized. In the 1940s and early 1950s Ngecha was considered one of the most advanced communities in the colony. One man, the son of a muhoi, Mbari-ya-Thaara, completed eight years of schooling at the Old Ngecha Primary School, passed the exams, and spent a year at an agricultural college. He served as a government agricultural instructor between 1942 and 1955, when he was appointed chief of Ngecha, Rironi, and Kabuku. He made himself available to the people of Ngecha for advice and demonstrated some of the new agricultural practices on his farm. The introduction of cash crops provided the impetus for the consolidation of Gikuyu landholdings and the registration of title in the name of one owner. With the introduction of cash crops, it became clear that individual ownership of land was essential if farmers were to invest in dairy cattle, pyrethrum, or any of the various crops that the government recommended. Furthermore, the colonial government recognized that the Gikuyu inheritance rules should be modified to prevent the landholdings from becoming too small for success in the agricultural programs that it recommended. If all of a man’s sons had rights in the land, it would become fractionated. Proposals for land consolidation and the granting of land titles to individuals varied from year to year. Finally, in the 1950s land consolidation and registration began. There were endless disagreements regarding to whom titles should be granted. Land consolidation began in Ngecha in 1954 and was completed in 1958. Unrest increased after World War II, inflamed by the new regulations that clarified the impermanence of the land rights of the Rift Valley squatters. A program was instituted to move them back to the reserves from which they had emigrated. When the administration tried to return squatters to these crowded areas, however, the squatters were often not welcomed. As a result, many families found themselves land-

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The Historical Stage less. Some moved into the forests on the Nyandarua Range and, when the Land and Freedom Movement uprising began, joined the rebel forces. More self-confident and aware of the mechanics of the colonial government than members of some other tribal groups, the Gikuyu in the 1930s began to lodge many formal complaints to the colonial government. In 1932 the Kenya Land Commission was appointed to review claims for lost lands by 600 Gikuyu mbari. One of the claims for land close to Ngecha concerned a block of 945 acres in Tigoni, which was surrounded by European farms. Bitter disputes broke out between Ngecha neighbors about ownership of this parcel by the mbari. The commission recommended exchanging the land under dispute for land in Lari, north of Limuru. Some Gikuyu agreed to accept the commission’s recommendation, while others refused and continued to seek the return of the land. Those who supported the government’s policy became known as Loyalists; many of them later were allies of the British settlers and the colonial government during the Land and Freedom Movement uprising. In the meantime, new groups of Gikuyu educated in mission schools were beginning to organize to work for the inclusion of Africans in the colonial government. They became a voice for reforming land policy. Two of the most important associations were the Kikuyu Central Association (kcu) and the Kenya African Union (kau), later to become the political party Kenya African National Union (kanu). Trade unions promoted strikes to protest the low wages paid to African workers. One strike took place at the Upland Pork Factory in Limuru, where some Ngecha men worked. The residents of the Ngecha reserve were located in the heart of an area in which there was continuous conflict between the Gikuyu and the British settlers. As a result of the location of their farms adjacent to the White Highlands, the Ngecha residents had experienced more rapid social change than Gikuyu who had settled farther from Nairobi and the concentrated European settlement along the railroad. By the early 1950s Ngecha residents had benefited, as well as suffered, at the hands of the colonists. They had taken advantage of opportunities to attend elementary school. All of the men had some experience working

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The Historical Stage for Europeans. Several had worked for the railroad and the East African Post and Telegraph Company as line repairmen. Others had worked as clerks in the post office in Limuru. the land and freedom movement and land freedom army On the Gikuyu reserves, there were conflicting opinions about what should be done. (Indeed, the discussion has continued ever since in the form of intense debate as to what the experience of the 1950s meant, how it was experienced, whether its ideals and objectives have been abandoned or fulfilled, and whom it benefited and hurt; see Cohen, 1994, chapter 3). The Loyalists favored working to change the colonial government. There is evidence that these Gikuyu admired the European settlers’ farms and way of life at the same time as they suffered from their government’s policies. To the more militant Gikuyu, these Africans appeared to be black Europeans. As time went on and conditions worsened, the more militant groups won out. Enclaves of men began to take oaths committing themselves to fight for the rights of the Gikuyu. Known as the Land Freedom Army (Leo, 1984), they fought both the British settlers and the Gikuyu Loyalists who supported the colonial and British armies and joined the Home Guard. There were increasingly frequent incidents of violence, cattle maiming, arson, and assassinations. In October 1952 Senior Chief Waruhiu, one of the prominent moderate Christian leaders of an mbari in Githunguri, 15 miles north of Nairobi, was assassinated. The European settlers reacted to the death of this nonmilitant, Christian man as evidence of the growing danger of widespread violence and demanded that the government declare a state of emergency, which it did on October 20, 1952. Evelyn Baring, the newly appointed governor, ordered the arrest of 187 men who were thought to be leaders of the Land and Freedom Movement. Jomo Kenyatta was one of those arrested. He was accused by the government of being a leader of the committee organizing the oathing ritual. His trial in Kapenguria became a rallying place for militant groups who were no longer willing to wait for the government to correct Gikuyu grievances. When the uprising and time of the Emergency began in 1953, Ngecha

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The Historical Stage location included both Loyalists and rebels. As the struggle progressed, the colonial government widened the gap between the Loyalists and the Land and Freedom Movement by offering better land titles to the Loyalists. One of the bloodiest battles of the uprising took place in Lari, triggered by the Tigoni land dispute mentioned earlier. Ex-chief Luka, who had sided with the colonial government in the resolution of the dispute over the land in Tigoni and had moved onto the Lari land given in exchange but claimed by other Gikuyu, was brutally murdered by Land and Freedom Movement fighters and Gikuyu who were laborers on his farms. Members of his family and supporters were also murdered. A bloody punitive massacre by government forces followed. Violence and atrocities ensued, as the colonial settlers mobilized against the Land Freedom Army and enlisted the Gikuyu Home Guard and Loyalists. The accounts of historians and journalists are shocking. In 1954 and 1955, in an effort to end the struggle, emergency villages were set up, monitored by a Gikuyu police force loyal to the British and reinforced by the colonial militia. All of the inhabitants of such a village were confined within its fortifications unless assigned work outside, in which case members of the Home Guard monitored their activities. The villagers were mobilized during the day to work on roads or public works or in their gardens but were not allowed to leave the village at night. Individuals who were suspected of being freedom fighters or their supporters were rounded up and detained. In the camps the prisoners were subjected to severe beatings and other forms of violence that were justified as necessary for counteracting the oath they had taken to continue the struggle for land and freedom. This harsh treatment was called ‘‘rehabilitation’’ but was really a brutal form of attempted brainwashing. ngecha during and after the emergency Ngecha was designated as one of the emergency villages and fortified and monitored by a home police force reinforced by the Gikuyu Home Guard. The emergency village included families from the reserve and families of squatters brought in from the Rift Valley, many of whom had no prior claim to land on the Ngecha reserve. In 1960 the emer-

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The Historical Stage gency villages were dissolved, and the government made provisions for the new as well as the original residents. The new arrivals were given quarter-acre lots near the town center on which they could build. Acreage held in common and managed by the headman was set aside to be gardened by families who did not own sufficient land to raise their food. Some original residents of Ngecha were disenfranchised by this process, in particular a number of those persons who were absent from the village or who did not have relatives able to speak up for them at the time of land consolidation and the registration of land titles. It was clear by 1960 that no peace would ever be possible in Kenya under the British colonial administration. In 1963 independence was declared. In 1967, when we began research in the location, Kenya had been independent for four years, and the new government under the leadership of President Kenyatta was calling for Harambee, forgetting old antagonisms, and working together for a united Kenya. Still, there were clear signs that seeds of conflict within Ngecha were beginning to sprout. Many mbari members, especially freedom fighters, had been alienated from their land. They felt an uneasy antagonism toward those families who had reaped rewards by lying low during the emergency and supporting the colonial government. The Child Development Research Unit was committed by its agreement with the University of Nairobi to restrict our studies to nonpolitical areas of life. The families with whom we worked did not talk about the Land and Freedom Movement or old antagonisms. We did not discuss politics with them or inquire as to their experiences during the struggle for independence. Adults in our sample varied widely in age. Those who were adults during the Emergency abided by Kenyatta’s philosophy of Harambee and did not talk of the past. Nevertheless, for some of them, talking informally with Europeans was a novel and sometimes unsettling experience. In reviewing the job histories of the men in our sample who were adults in the 1950s, we found that many had been employed by European settler families or by agents of the British colonial government or both. Several were obvious former Loyalists who had continued working for European settlers during the uprising. Others went through the uprising holding good jobs with the East African Railroad or the

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The Historical Stage Post and Telegraph Company. In general, the experiences of many of these men led them to prefer a negotiated settlement with the colonial government to the violence and bloodshed of the war. Few men in the sample had been in detention during the Land and Freedom Movement. In the period immediately after independence, the government bought the farms of Europeans who had decided to leave Kenya. Families who had squatted on land outside the reserve were able to buy the acreage on which they had been living. Some European farmers gave land to their former laborers when they left Kenya. Those Kenyans who had attended school or who had worked for wages in Nairobi were in a better position than their peers to understand the capitalist sector and how to buy into the government land schemes. However, in Ngecha in 1968 many people were too poor to acquire land. These families were still living on the quarter-acre lots that they had acquired in 1960 at the end of the Emergency.

Schooling and Formal Education the founding of schools in thogoto and ngecha The Gikuyu early on saw the potential usefulness of formal education. They were convinced that the colonists had skills, material goods, and special powers that could only be acquired through school learning. Although Ngecha parents varied in the speed and thoroughness with which they thought it was wise to enroll their children in school, by 1973, even before the introduction of mandatory universal primary education in 1975, many sample families were enrolling their five-yearolds in nursery school, except for a few who lived at a distance from the school. These decisions led to major changes in family life. As later chapters of this book will show, some of these changes were those sought after, while others were equally far-reaching but unintended and unforeseen. For Ngecha families, the first opportunity to acquire formal schooling came around 1900. In 1905 the Church of Scotland Mission started a school in Thogoto, eight miles from Ngecha. The first students from Ngecha enrolled in 1910, to be followed between 1910 and 1913 by many

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The Historical Stage young men, some as young as 14 years old, who arrived often without the consent of their parents. Wild rumors circulated about the Thogoto school. It was claimed by some that the missionaries were cannibals and that the students drank from human skulls. For the students, becoming schooled meant accepting the Christian religion, taking a Christian name, having one’s earlobes stitched back to their natural shape, and accepting monogamy as the only moral form of marriage (Cox & Mberia, 1975). It is clear that the missions were not only teaching a new religion but also intentionally transmitting British culture to the students. The Scottish mission operating the school in Thogoto owned a large estate that included farms and simple medical facilities. The mission’s policy was to train students in trade skills such as iron smithing, carpentry, masonry, and tailoring, as well as to equip them with rudimentary literacy, in which the main emphasis was on reading and understanding the Bible. Students lived at the school and were given new tools, iron hoes, saws, and metal cooking pots. They helped to build houses with doors and windows. They learned to dress like Europeans and practice European hygiene, using soap. They were taught by missionaries that a man should take only one wife, live in the home with the children, share in caring for children, and reject ‘‘ceremonial debauches,’’ including initiation ceremonies (Oliver, 1952, p. 58). As Oliver summarizes, ‘‘No individual could become a Christian while remaining a full member of his tribal community.’’ Most of the students who attended the Thogoto school returned home after one or two years. Two Ngecha elders, Jackson Muriama and Johnathan Maara, in their eighties when interviewed, received their education at Thogoto and went on to teach and preach in Ngecha. These two elders could remember only seven from among the Ngecha group who had attended the Thogoto school for longer than two years. the founding of the ngecha school In 1911 a ‘‘bush school’’ was started in Ngecha, taught twice a week by student teachers from Thogoto. This school met under the trees. The curriculum included reading and writing, simple arithmetic, and studying the Bible. Some children attended this school without their

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The Historical Stage parents’ consent and were soundly beaten for their unsanctioned behavior. In 1920 the Church of Scotland Mission supported the construction of a special mud-and-wattle building for this school, and thus the precursor to what later was known as the Old Ngecha school was founded. In 1926 the original building was abandoned, and a larger one was built to serve as both a school and a church. While the Scottish mission was the first to establish a formal school for Ngecha children, other missions also introduced them to European customs. Ngecha was surrounded by a variety of missions that had established posts along the railroad. The Church Mission Society, Scottish Mission Society, Mission of the Holy Ghost Fathers, African Inland Mission, and Gospel Mission Society—all within 10 to 20 miles of Ngecha—had estates where students lived temporarily while being taught European ways of life. pressures for school improvement In the early years the colonial authorities favored training Africans to be good farm laborers and considered four or five years of schooling to be adequate. The missionaries accepted these imperialistic aims and adjusted their curricula and goals to the European settlers’ and the administration’s needs (Bogonko, 1992; Sheffield, 1973). When the colonials began to call for the help of more low-level clerks, minor officials, police, and interpreters, the government encouraged the missions to enrich and extend the curriculum. The mission schools began to prepare students for these new jobs and for teaching in primary school (Oliver, 1952). By the late 1920s educated Kenyans were actively demanding that their schools include the same types of curricula as the European schools. The government responded by opening a ‘‘native Industrial Training Depot’’ at Kabete, but this did not assuage Africans’ demands for a curriculum similar to that of the Asian and European schools. In 1920 the first professional school masters started arriving in Kenya. In 1925 the Local Native Council took over the running of the Ngecha Primary School. In 1910, when the colonial government proposed new policies to force the Kenyans to work for the colonial farmers, the missions began

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The Historical Stage to revise their policy of supporting the colonial administration. The missions began to take an active role in seeking to define the rights of Africans. For example, they protested the 1920 ordinance that required all African males above the age of 16 to register with their local district commissioner—a bitterly resented strategy of the colonial government for recruiting and controlling African labor. Indeed, by this time politically active groups of literate Africans were beginning to stir public opinion in Great Britain against harsh colonial labor policies and the alienation of land. This turn in British public opinion encouraged the missions to adopt policies that differed from those of the colonial government. The Protestant missions negotiated an alliance that included the Church Mission Society, Church of Scotland Mission, University Missions, London Mission Society, African Inland Mission, Gospel Mission Society, and United Methodist Missions (Oliver, 1952).This grouping favored further enrichment of the curriculum of the African schools. In 1925 they helped open the first secondary school for Africans in Gikuyuland, the famed Alliance School that was to train many of the leaders of independent Kenya. The school included teacher training and agricultural programs and eventually had six standards and was equipped to prepare students for university studies. Although some classes in industrial education were offered, the trend was toward general education (Bokongo, 1992). The headmaster and teachers were dedicated men and inspiring figures to the students who succeeded in meeting the standards of admission. According to Bidelman (1974), the school’s goals extended to transmitting British manners and mores as well as Christianity and literacy. During the same period, the Old Ngecha school was expanding its offerings. It was in the forefront of the general movement throughout Kenya initiated by educated Africans who were not content to limit their horizons to clerical jobs. By 1928 it had two divisions, a lower division with Standards 1 through 4 and an upper one with Standards 5 and 6. The lower division had about 400 students. The upper division, with about 150 pupils, was more selective. The curriculum included English, mathematics, agriculture, handicrafts, world history (mostly of Great Britain and its colonies), geography, and the Bible. Students

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The Historical Stage came from as far away as Nyanza and Nyeri to attend this school, finding lodging with friends and relatives in Ngecha. Five of the teachers were among those who had attended the school in Thogoto in 1910. Beginning around 1929 the close bond between education and religion, as taught by the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (pcea), was slowly severed. The pcea’s disapproval of polygyny and clitoridectomy helped motivate Ngecha families who supported traditional practices to withdraw from the pcea and to remove their children from mission-supported schools. These families joined the new independent churches and founded a local chapter of the Kikuyu Karing’a Education Association in 1929. Three years later they built an independent school for their children in Rironi, two miles west of Ngecha. Only the devout families of the pcea, about seven in number, continued to put their children in the Old Ngecha school. After this downturn, the enrollment of the Old Ngecha school did not rebound to its earlier level until around 1940. However, by 1956, as a result of Ngecha’s role as an emergency village, the school-age population in town had surged. The Old Ngecha school (still affiliated with the pcea) became seriously overcrowded. The community pressed for a new, nonsectarian school. In 1959 a new school (called New Ngecha during the time of our research) was built with government assistance on the opposite side of town from the Presbyterian church and its adjoining school (Old Ngecha). Gradually New Ngecha increased in size, and eventually Old Ngecha was phased out as a primary school. education for women In the early days education was not considered appropriate for women. Most fathers did not allow their daughters to attend school, reasoning that education would make a woman less tractable and thus would reduce the bride price that a potential husband would be willing to pay. A few young women, however, did strike out and attend school. About 10 young women in their late teens and early twenties are reported to have run away and attended the Thogoto school. In 1921 two girls were enrolled in the Old Ngecha school with their parents’ permission. Over the years the number of female students gradually increased. The support for their schooling was strongest among the Protestant groups,

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Table 3.1: Education of Men and Women in Ngecha from 1973 Census Data No schooling (%)

Some primary (%)

Males Before



–

–
–
–

 
 



   


— .






— .   

Females
–
–
–

  



 

 


—  

Year of birth

Completed primary (%)

Some secondary (%)

but their attitudes were gradually emulated by the members of the Gikuyu Orthodox Church. The burdensome cost of schooling was undoubtedly one of the reasons that girls received little education in the early years. Not until 1960 was education considered the unquestionable right of girls. By then the families of girls who had finished primary school and a year or two of additional training, and who thus had increased earnings potential, were receiving more bride price than the parents of girls with fewer years of schooling. increasing school attendance and costs to families In the early years few Ngecha youths, male or female, went on to secondary school. Of the early graduates of the Alliance School, only two came from Ngecha. Table 3.1 presents the level of education of Ngecha men and women by decades. It shows a slow but steady increase, first in primary education and then in secondary education. The table includes all of the adults in Ngecha who participated in the 1973 government census (see Table 2.1 for data on the families in the project study sample). Table 3.1 shows that some men born in the early decades

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The Historical Stage of the twentieth century received formal schooling, but most of those born in the 1940s completed primary school, and over 20% went on to secondary school. Education for women increased even more slowly, especially at the secondary level. As time passed, more students (both male and female) attended primary school, but many of them failed to pass the exams necessary for admission to secondary school, or they did not pass the exams with high enough grades to gain acceptance at one of the desirable government secondary schools. Paying school fees was surely a hardship for many Ngecha families. Until 1975, when education became free and universal, the fees for primary school (Standards 1–7) were 72 Kenya shillings and for secondary school (Forms 1–4) 450 shillings for boys and 300 shillings for girls. Furthermore, parents also had to pay fees for their children to sit for examinations. For example, at the end of Standard 7, students took the Kenya Primary Exam at a cost of 10 shillings. Students who passed with satisfactory marks could apply to the government secondary schools. Those failing to gain admission often applied to one of the Harambee schools that were scattered across Central Province and whose fees were twice those of the government schools. The students’ families often picked schools in locations where they could lodge their children with relatives, although some students rented small rooms where they cooked their meals and slept. In an attempt to ease the situation for Ngecha students, the Gichuru Harambee Secondary School was opened in 1968 in the building of the Old Ngecha school. This school, initially planned in the 1940s, was plagued by political and financial problems during the years of the research project. Teachers were in general poorly prepared and badly paid, and many were constantly on the lookout for better positions. Nevertheless, many local youth attended this school, along with young people from other locations who had family in Ngecha with whom they could live while attending school. Putting a large family of children through school required a considerable investment of cash. The fact that some of the very poorest families in Ngecha were able to educate their children through the primary level attests to their conviction of its value for later employment. Besides paying school fees and examination fees, parents had to buy

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The Historical Stage school uniforms and supplies. When overcrowding made it necessary to add rooms to the school building, they were confronted with mandatory building fees. Some families who found it difficult to pay primary school fees for all of their children sent some of them to the Ngecha Nursery School (see below), where fees were more reasonable. Children as old as 8 to 10 years of age were enrolled in the nursery school. additional educational opportunities In 1968, at the time the research project began, there were several other schools besides the ones previously described that Ngecha children could attend. One was on the Buxton farm near the Limuru railroad station. It had been founded by Sir Thomas Powell Buxton, a supporter of the Church Mission Society, as an outpost of the mission supervised by Rev. Leakey. Kabuku, a small clustered settlement adjacent to Ngecha, possessed both a nursery and a primary school. On the road to Tigoni, St. Paul’s College, a theological institution that trained Protestant ministers, also had a school that included children of several ethnic groups and offered instruction in the Swahili language. Gatimu, one of the districts of Ngecha sublocation, possessed yet another school. The more expensive Tigoni school accepted only European children before independence, but by 1973 some of the children of the wealthier families of Ngecha also attended, as did African and Asian pupils from surrounding districts. Farther away, in Kabete, were schools that a few Ngecha families utilized. The variety of choices open to families with financial means appeared to have led to a situation in which the more educated parents in the community did not work to raise the standards of the New Ngecha school. The status of a teacher in Ngecha may also have seemed less prestigious to individuals who were familiar with Nairobi and the money that could be made in the urban setting (Wanjiku Kagia and Violet Nyambura Kimani, personal communication). During our research, one father gave up teaching in favor of a government job and running a small store. Furthermore, some of the teachers who had worked for a long time at the Ngecha school may have been less than adequate, since they had not participated in teacher preparation programs since the early days. For whatever reasons, the New Ngecha school did not

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The Historical Stage have a good record of preparing students to pass the examination at the end of Standard 7. In 1973 there were few Ngecha students in the study sample who had received the Certificate of Primary Education. Of these, only a handful passed with high enough grades to gain admission to one of the government secondary schools. Besides school, there were other ways that men and women could learn to read and write Gikuyu, Swahili, and English. Adult education classes were held in Ngecha once a week. Some of the town mothers in our sample attended these classes. the ngecha nursery school The Ngecha Nursery School dated from the time of the Emergency (1952–1960), when it was founded by the International Red Cross. In 1962 and 1963 it was transformed into a full-scale Harambee school and custodial care institution. After 1963 enrollment grew steadily. In 1969 there were 232 children enrolled, each paying an annual fee of 30 Kenya shillings. Table 3.2 presents the enrollment at the Ngecha Nursery School in 1969 and 1973. In 1969 the median age of the children was seven years, with a range of five to eight years, and class size was 58 (Cohn, 1969). The average length of attendance was 1.7 years in 1969 (Herzog, 1975). Between 1968 and 1973 the New Ngecha school became severely overcrowded, which affected conditions at the nursery school. The primary school headmaster, in an attempt to hold the numbers down, began to favor those children who had attended the nursery school, even giving preference to those recommended by the nursery school teachers. Many children were refused admission to primary school until they had completed two years in nursery school. This policy, plus the growing realization that education was a key to financial success in the new nation, led to a rapid increase in the number of children sent to the Ngecha Nursery School. During 1973 the school population increased by 30%, and a new building was constructed. Three hundred children between the ages of 3 and 10 years were housed in the three large classrooms of the new building. The mean age of the students had dropped to age 6 years (Table 3.2). As discussed in later chapters, the time spent in school by these young children made the life of Ngecha

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Table 3.2: Description of Children Attending the Ngecha Nursery School in 1968 and 1973
 




Estimated total number of children in nursery school





Average number of children per classroom





Percentage of children under
 years of age


%

%

Median age of the children

 yrs.

yrs.

Range in age of the children

– yrs.

–
 yrs.

Average age of each child’s oldest sibling not yet attending school (i.e., still at home)

 yrs.

– yrs.

mothers more difficult by depriving them of the assistance the youngsters might have provided as the nurses and caregivers of their younger siblings. The Ngecha Nursery School convened at 8:00 a.m., with the children lining up outside the classrooms. Coming inside, they sang Christian prayers and hymns in unison (the only religious instruction in the schedule). They also received lessons in hygiene (for example, how to brush their teeth with a mint-scented stick) and good manners (for example, the right and wrong way to address a grandmother), with children questioned by the teacher and responding in unison. They had lessons in drawing, English and Gikuyu prayers, and counting, during which they repeated after the teacher. They were introduced to writing, with the teacher writing on the chalkboard and the students copying on their slates. They had occasional lessons in how to speak Gikuyu correctly, likely the only times in their school experience when the language was formally taught. Students also enjoyed storytelling, with the children volunteering to come to the front of the room to recite a story, often repeating the same one day after day (Cohn, 1969). They had organized playtime for 30 minutes in the morning and again in the afternoon, often including singing. They went home for lunch at noon and returned at 1:30, to remain until 3:00 p.m. For the children from homesteads who were

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The Historical Stage used to associating only with close relatives, nursery school offered the stimulation of new friends as well as novel activities. Older children, however, frequently lost interest in the repetitive curriculum and spent most of their time interacting with peers rather than paying attention to their lessons (Cohn, 1969). When 18 sample families were interviewed in 1969 (Herzog, 1969) as to why they had enrolled their children in nursery school, 20% stated that they did so because they thought it was compulsory for admission to Standard 1, and 56% stated that nursery school would help their children later and make them more successful in primary school. Several of the mothers and fathers interviewed actually disapproved of the nursery school and did not want to send their children there, even if they could afford the fees. These parents were critical of both the overcrowding and the age heterogeneity of the groups. Some mothers complained that the hours were too long and that the children came home exhausted. One mother noted that too much time was spent playing and that the children thus formed the wrong impression of school.

References Bidelman, T. O. (1974). Social theory and the study of Christian Mission. Africa, 44(3), 235–249. Bogonko, S. N. (1992). A history of modern education in Kenya (1895–1991). Nairobi: Evans Brothers (Kenya). Clough, M. S. (1998). Mau Mau memoirs: History, memory, and politics. Boulder co: Lynne Rienner. Cohen, D. W. (1994). The combing of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohn, A. (1969). Behavior observations of Kikuyu nursery school children. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University, Nairobi; also hraf, New Haven ct. Cox, F., with Mberia, N. (1977). Aging in a changing village society: A Kenyan experience. Washington dc: International Federation on Ageing. Cox, F., & Mberia, N. (1975). The influence of schooling on the status and maintenance of the Kikuyu aged in a periurban community. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University, Nairobi; also hraf, New Haven ct.

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The Historical Stage Curtis, A. (1975). Ngecha and others. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University, Nairobi; also hraf, New Haven ct. Dundas, C. (1924). Kilimanjaro and its people: A history of the Wachagga, their laws, customs, and legends, together with some account of the highest mountain in Africa. London: H. F. & G. Witherby. Edgerton, R. B. (1989). Mau Mau: An African crucible. New York: Free Press. Githuka, C. (1970). Some notes toward a history of Ngecha. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University, Nairobi; also hraf, New Haven ct. Herzog, J. (1969). A survey of the parents of nursery centre children in four communities in Kenya. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University, Nairobi; also hraf, New Haven ct. Herzog, J. (1970). Nursery schools in Kenya: An informal report to the Commission of Inquiry, Public Service Structure and Remuneration Commission, Government of Kenya. Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University, Nairobi. Herzog, J. (1973). Initiation and high school in the development of Kikuyu youths’ self-concept. Ethos, 1(4), 478–489. Herzog, J. (1975). Education in Ngecha. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University, Nairobi; also hraf, New Haven ct. Hobley, C. (1910). Ethnology of A-Kamba and other East African tribes. Cambridge: University Press. Hobley, C. (1922). Bantu beliefs and magic, with particular reference to the Kikuyu and Kamba tribes of Kenya colony. London: H. F. & G. Witherby. Hobley, C. (1970) (1929). Kenya, from chartered company to crown colony: Thirty years of exploration and administration in British East Africa. London: F. Cass. Kenyatta, J. (1962). (1938). Facing Mount Kenya: The tribal life of the Gikuyu. New York: Vintage. Konogo, T. (1987). Squatters and the roots of Mau Mau 1905–1963. London: Curry. Leakey, L. S. B. (1977). The Southern Kikuyu before 1903, 3 vols. New York: Academic Press. Leo, C. (1984). Land and class in Kenya. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Malia, J. A., & Mbito, M. N. (2002). Circumcision and the conferral of privileges and new responsibilities: Changing boys to men in sub-Sahara Africa as reported by Kikuyu men living in the United States. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the National Council on Family Relations, November 2002, Houston tx. Department of Child and Family Studies, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Mbito, M. N., & Malia, J. A. (2002). Transforming boys to men in sub-Sahara Africa:

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The Historical Stage Preparing for the circumcision ritual as reported by Kikuyu men living in the United States. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the National Council on Family Relations, November 2002, Houston tx. Department of Child and Family Studies, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. McIntosh, B. G. (1968). The Eastern Bantu peoples. In B. A. Ogot (Ed.), Zamani: A survey of East African history (pp. 198–215). Nairobi: Longman Kenya. Muriuki G, (1974). A history of the Kikuyu, 1500–1900. Nairobi: Oxford University Press. Ogot, B. A. (1968). Kenya under the British, 1895 to 1963. In B. A. Ogot (Ed.), Zamani: A survey of East African history (pp. 255–289). Nairobi: Longman Kenya. Ogot, B. A., & Ochieng’, W. R. (1995). Decolonization & independence in Kenya, 1940–93. Athens: Ohio University Press. Oliver, R. (1952). The missionary factor in East Africa. London: Longmans and Green. Posnanski, M. (1968). The prehistory of East Africa. In B. A. Ogot (Ed.), Zamani: A survey of East African history (pp. 49–68). Nairobi: Longman Kenya. Presley, C. A. (1992). Kikuyu women, the Mau Mau rebellion, and social change in Kenya. Boulder co: Westview Press. Rosberg, C. G., Jr., & Nottingham, J. (1966). The myth of Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Routledge, W. S., & Routledge, K. P. (1910). With a prehistoric people, the Akikuyu of British East Africa. London: E. Arnold. Sheffield, J. R. (1973). Education in Kenya: An historical study. New York: Teachers College Press. Sorrenson, M. P. K. (1967). Land reform in the Kikuyu country: A study in government policy. London: Oxford University Press. Sorrenson, M. P. K. (1968). Origins of European settlement in Kenya. Nairobi: Oxford University Press. Sutton, J. E. D. (1968). The settlement of East African History. In B. A. Ogot (Ed.), Zamani: A survey of East African history (pp. 69–99). Nairobi: Longman Kenya. Thomson, J. (1885). Through Masai land: A journey of exploration among the snowclad volcanic mountains and strange tribes of eastern equatorial Africa. London: S. Low, Marston & Company. Whiting, J. (1981). Aging and becoming an elder: A cross-cultural comparison. In J. G. March (Ed.), Aging (pp. 83–90). New York: Academic Press.

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let women be supported A woman’s work never fails iyiai uui! The one loved by her agemates Cierume, our girl We got initiated together We enjoyed our maidenhood together I have now come to answer her cries. The cries of cutting grass for a house The women of my age are always supported They are supported with gruel from millet The gruel is seconded by sour milk From a good big gourd ayiai uui! A woman with no cows in her shed And that without any goats They do not know how to support women Who goes to a lazy woman’s home? Who responds to the screams of a foolish wife? Iyiau uui! Women need support. The work which is already done Is not like the one which is waiting Iyiai uui! Let them be supported With gruel from millet and let it be followed by sour milk From a good big gourd ayiai uui! Let women be supported iyiai uui! With gruel from millet And sour milk from a good big gourd A woman is supported by her fellow women Let women be supported! Ciarunji Chesaina

4

Women as Agents of Social Change Beatrice Whiting

The Wage Economy and Technological Changes When societies undergo economic and technological change as rapidly as Kenya did in the years following independence, implications for daily life are tremendous. In another rural area of East Africa, Robbins and Kilbride (1987) investigated the impact of microtechnological innovations in Buganda. The arrival of new small-scale processes and material items such as radios, bicycles, flashlights, sewing machines, baby bottles, toothbrushes, timepieces, culinary practices, contraceptives, and cosmetic arts had tremendous effects. Although relatively inexpensive and small, items like bicycles and radios drastically changed the economy of the rural households and community by increasing production and distribution efficiency and people’s consumption desires. The new technologies also contributed to change in personal identities and modified individuals’ information level and sense of security. Ngecha during the years of our research, 1968–1973, experienced similar dramatic transformations in such areas as daily routines, family lifestyles, men’s employment, women’s household workloads, and the socialization of children. Changes in the ways that families procured water, fuel, and food reorganized the daily lives of men, women, and children. This chapter focuses on changes in the women’s lives, because women were such powerful agents of social change for their families (even if sometimes their influence was invisible to the outside world). In what ways were Ngecha women such active and effective forces for change? How did the changes in which they participated affect the pattern of daily life of adults and children? How did families ad-

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Women as Agents of Social Change just to the new cash economy? How did their husbands’ wage-earning jobs affect the division of labor and the women’s responsibilities? Ngecha was a place of changing lives, not just of an abstract ‘‘changing lifestyle.’’ Each individual’s and each household’s story was somewhat unique. Living side by side in the village were families influenced to differing degrees by their involvement in education and the modern sector. Age was certainly a factor, and our sample included husbands and wives in their sixties and seventies as well as married couples in their twenties and thirties. An additional variable was proximity to the centers of change. People had varying amounts of contact with European employers, city life and working conditions in Nairobi, educational institutions, and Christian churches. Religion played a role: people had joined different churches and chosen different customary practices and values. How did the women adjust to the new scene? Contrasts among the groups of families that we selected for study illustrate and highlight the variations in the stories of changing lifestyles. The residents of Mbari-ya-Thaara were the closest to the former European estates and closest to the road open year-round to Nairobi. The architecture of their homes suggested that they had adopted new lifestyles more quickly than had the families in Mbari-ya-Igi, living farther toward the southeast on a single-lane dirt road. The homes in Mbari-ya-Igi were more similar to the homesteads described by Kenyatta (1962) in his accounts of the culture of his childhood in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Mbari-ya-Igi, mud-andwattle round houses with thatched roofs were still seen in several of the homesteads. The changes were dynamic and interrelated. All of the changes in family lifestyle in progress during the five years that we observed were aspects of a total picture not easily broken into separate parts. The different domains of change interacted with each other, so that the total effect appeared like a kaleidoscope, each change reverberating and reflected in others. To simplify the picture so that I can tell the story, I will focus first on women’s workloads with respect to securing water and fuel, then on cash cropping and women’s increasing responsibility for farm management and entrepreneurial activities, and next on the effects of these on homestead and family life (includ-

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Women as Agents of Social Change ing changing sources of personal identity, increasing intimacy between husbands and wives, changing sexual behavior, and pressures on the extended family system). I conclude with a discussion of Ngecha women’s changing goals for what they considered a good life. women’s workloads Many of the technological changes taking root in Ngecha had a direct and observable effect on the daily work of women but not in a onedirectional way. Some changes lightened their workloads, while others increased their burdens. The Water Supply The introduction of a town well and pump was one source of great improvement in women’s lives. Traditionally, carrying water was the work of females. Before the town well was drilled, almost all women filled five-gallon metal drums (mutundi ), which they carried on their backs with tumplines attached to their foreheads. Girls who were big and strong enough helped their mothers, carrying water in the same way. Sometimes boys helped, too, though they never used the ‘‘female’’ tumplines and instead transported water drums in wheelbarrows or on their shoulders. In 1968 Ngecha women spent an average of 1.5 hours per day transporting water (with a range from 10 minutes to 3 hours). Town families, who formerly had to walk up to several miles to neighboring streams, were able to obtain water at the town well, paying a small charge to fill a five-gallon container. A few wealthy households that could afford the installation costs had water piped into their homesteads, and they in turn sold water to their neighbors. People living in country sections who had once depended on streams as their water supply were now buying water at the town water station, where it could be picked up and carried or rolled in large drums. The fortunate owners of lorries (trucks) loaded them up with water drums to supply both their homes and their animals. In 1973 money was allotted and initial work completed on a water system that would serve all of the houses in one country section of Ngecha, and piped water was promised for all of Ngecha. When we

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Opposite, top: A girl hauls empty water barrels using a tumpline. (Sayre Sheldon) Opposite, bottom: The boys’ style of carrying water never involved the tumpline. (Sayre Sheldon) Above: Women and children await their turn to buy water at the town well. (Sayre Sheldon)

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Women as Agents of Social Change visited in 1975, pipes had been installed in some sections, but the system was still not in running order. Although all the households in our sample benefited from the town pump, there were a number of families who could not easily pay the small charges required to fill a fivegallon container at the town tap and who sometimes had to choose how to spend their limited means. Water was a high priority for everyone, and since the charges were not exorbitant, women were usually able to earn the required fees by selling produce from their gardens in the town market. They did not have to try to get money for water from their husbands. Another important technological change that contributed to the water supply of a homestead was the introduction of large metal rain barrels (varying in size from 45 to 2,000 gallons) to catch the runoff water from metal roofs. To make the required investment, a family needed to collect a substantial amount of money from either wage employment or the sale of cash crops. To catch the rainwater, they needed a house with a metal roof and gutters, and such a house was expensive and required the approval of the household head. The family had to decide to move from the traditional round house with a thatched roof to a rectangular house with a metal roof. As described below, the required change in house plan from circular to rectangular had important repercussions on a family’s lifestyle. The Provision of Fuel In some families providing fuel for the household was a time-consuming task. In traditional times men had felled the trees and cleared the brush, and women had collected firewood. During the period of our research, men no longer cleared brush, but women still collected the firewood. On the land of the country section were stands of wattle, a tree imported by the British from Australia and introduced for its bark and as a fast-growing source of fuel. Women cut these trees on their property and carried wood home. Most households that did not have enough land to grow an adequate supply of wattle either had to buy wood or, if they could not afford the cash outlay, work for it on someone else’s land. They usually walked five miles to a large farm in Tigoni, where

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Women as Agents of Social Change they spent the better part of the day working, cutting brush, and carrying their load home. These trips occurred weekly or biweekly. Some people purchased their fuel. Women who were successful gardeners might earn enough money through selling surplus vegetables in the market to purchase wood without the help of their husbands. They could buy wood in the market for about 30 Kenya shillings a load in 1973. If they could afford the additional cost, they could get it delivered by lorry to their homestead. Or they could buy charcoal at 10 Kenya shillings a sack at the market or from neighboring retailers, and for a further charge it would be delivered. The few families that owned lorries used them to carry both wood and water. In sum, the introduction of a town water station, piped water, rain barrels, water drums, retailers of wood and charcoal, and lorries capable of hauling wood and water were innovations that changed the patterns of time allocation of the women in the households wealthy enough to purchase some or all of these items. If one estimates six to eight hours a week spent in cutting and carrying fuel, a water tap in the yard and wood delivered to the household could save a woman as much as two and a half hours a day. Introduction of Cash Crops The transformation of agricultural production was another catalyst that changed the work routines of families. Traditionally, the women had been the farmers. Besides providing water and fuel for the household, the women raised the vegetables that were the staple food supply —the daily diet of their children and husbands. The men and boys tended the household’s goats and cattle. Men were expected to clear the land of trees and brush, to help break the soil in preparation for planting, and to plant some men’s crops, such as yams. They sometimes helped with weeding and harvesting. The women planted maize, squash, beans, tomatoes, and green vegetables and did most of the weeding and harvesting. In Ngecha during our research, each woman gained a garden plot by assignment on her husband’s or father-in-law’s homestead. To work her garden (varying in size from 1/4 to 2 acres), she put in an average of 2 hours a day for six days a week during the rainy season and 2.6 hours

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Women as Agents of Social Change a day during the dry season. Women who had planted an acre plot and had no hired help often worked about 4 hours a day at least four or five days a week, leaving the house around 10 a.m. and not returning until 2 p.m. They also earned cash that they could control themselves from the sale of surplus vegetables. Cash cropping involved both the men and the women in Ngecha households. Whereas new technologies reduced the hours that women spent procuring wood and water, their workloads were increased by the introduction of cash crops. Why did families go into cash cropping? First, the Gikuyu’s early interest in cash was set into motion by the colonial government’s taxation policy. The hut tax for Africans was intended to motivate them to go to work on the European tea estates and dairy farms to get the required money. As the people became familiar with European money, they increasingly began to seek cash to meet other expenses, in particular to pay their children’s school fees, since they now recognized schooling to be the best route to a good job in the modern sector of the economy. Second, Ngecha women were very successful reproductively, and as the population increased, families needed new land to expand their vegetable gardens to feed their growing families. This need for more land first became urgent during the colonial period, when the tribal elders were disallowed from sending out scouts to colonize new land. The government tried to alleviate pressure by introducing new techniques of farming to increase the farmers’ yields. It hoped that the adoption of new technology and crops would make it possible for farmers to become self-sufficient by selling their produce. The colonial government stationed an agricultural agent in Ngecha to teach people new farming techniques and to introduce cash crops such as pyrethrum. The agent also played a role in establishing a cooperative where farmers could borrow money for fertilizer and seedling plants and also sell their harvests. Along with the cooperative, the colonial government encouraged local farmers to create dairies to sell milk. Most Ngecha men, who had traditionally cared for sheep and humped-back native cattle, were persuaded to trade them in for dairy cows. A dairy cooperative was formed to sell feed to the farmers to supplement their pasturage and to buy

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Women as Agents of Social Change their milk. All of the families from Ngecha purchased dairy cattle on loans, even when they had no adequate pastureland. Those who lived in town built stalls to keep their cows and fed them with grass gathered by the women along the sides of the roads. Women spent hours cutting and carrying grass to the animals and bringing them water. The cows were milked twice daily and the milk carried to the cooperative. The cooperatives were generally thought to be a success. Ngecha was considered a showplace during the late 1950s when the price of pyrethrum was high. The cooperatives, however, did not decrease the women’s workload. The men took formal charge of the cash-cropping operations. Their wives labored in the pyrethrum fields and helped with the weeding, picking, drying of the harvest, and transporting the crops to the cooperative, but the men collected the money and did not give the women any control over how it was spent. Besides pyrethrum, some families grew flowers for the Nairobi market. Others raised chickens, keeping as many as 100 brooding hens. The women found themselves feeding and watering the chickens and collecting, washing, and packing the eggs, a profitable source of cash. When the men were unavailable because of their wage-earning jobs and their sons were in school, inevitably the women had to take total responsibility for the farm work. Even if the family could hire a local man to help or bring in a group of women to weed and harvest the crops, the wife was still responsible for supervising the work. Further unexpected outcomes resulted from the surveying and registration of land that took place at the same time that the government introduced cash crops. Depending in part on the happenstance of where the members of their lineage happened to be when the registration of land was taking place, some households acquired much larger, more efficient farms than others. Another set of households received an advantage because they had supported the colonial government during the Land and Freedom Movement and so were favored in the land registration. Agricultural agents had pushed for individual ownership of land because they believed it would encourage ambitious, capitalistic striving among the Africans. They expected that landowners would want to reap profits for themselves rather than to share their income with all the members of a large polygynous extended homestead. Prop-

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Women as Agents of Social Change erty owners, however, continued to attempt to pass their wealth to their children. Headmen of large homesteads began to give land to some of their sons before they died, so that the sons could take individual ownership of their shares. The government, however, prohibited the division of land into lots smaller than four acres. ngecha women as willing entrepreneurs in the new economy There were many unforeseen consequences to the introduction of the new economy for the people of Ngecha, particularly for the women. Women lost access to land they needed to raise vegetables as the men took control of it for cash crops. In the worst situations, some women found they did not have enough land to plant vegetables to feed their children. In other cases, the resulting gardens were too small for them to grow a surplus of vegetables to barter at the local market for other products on which they had grown dependent, such as tea, sugar, cooking oil, and soap, as well as water and wood. They were forced to depend on their husbands for all cash. Thus, though the men had formal control of the profits resulting from cash cropping, much of the associated workload and hardships fell on their wives. As the women’s workloads became heavier and their men went off to wage-earning jobs or other activities, women increasingly needed the assistance of their children to help them with household and agricultural chores. However, the introduction of schooling rendered this source of help problematic. Traditionally, mothers would assign ever more complex chores to children as they became physically capable and responsible. As children went in larger numbers first to primary school and then to nursery school, they became less available to help with the daily workload. When the mothers of Ngecha were asked about their hopes for their daughters, many listed nursing and teaching as possible jobs. They assumed their daughters would be working women, and they hoped that they would have good jobs. Indeed, some of the Ngecha women were already themselves part of the labor market. Besides growing the family food and managing the cash crop operations, a number of them had gone beyond their homesteads in search of cash income. Some

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Women as Agents of Social Change took jobs as housemaids and farmworkers. Others worked in their husband’s duka (small shop). A few women with more schooling were nurses, secretaries, or nursery school teachers. There can be no doubt that the women of Ngecha were hardworking and willing to do what was required of them. They spent at least four hours per day engaged in farming and other activities that took them into the fields or to the market to barter goods or buy the products of the industrial world. They were particularly happy to get money that they could control themselves from selling the surplus from their gardens, and they were ready to seek any kind of new money-making opportunity whenever they were relieved of some old chores. Beginning in childhood, these women had acquired the intellectual and emotional skills they needed to work long hours, take initiative, and solve multifaceted problems. They had developed self-confidence as they succeeded in accomplishing the share of the work assigned to them by their own mothers. They had learned to take pleasure when they succeeded as members of the family work team. They had learned to cooperate with others and coordinate their actions to fit planned outcomes and to find enjoyment in seeing group goals accomplished. As they had grown up and become more responsible, they had learned how to organize their younger siblings and to manage the household in their mothers’ absence. They had become practiced in planning, leading, and giving orders to others younger than themselves. Thus when women married they readily accepted responsibility for raising the food for their family and never expected their husbands to furnish all the resources they needed. By selling extra produce, they expected to gain for themselves money they could control. They had a deep sense that they could do the activities related to buying and selling. They had grown up watching their mothers bartering in the open market, a place to learn bargaining skills. Ever since the days when caravans had began to trek across Kenya, women had been involved in transactions of goods, and their experiences rendered them prepared for the opportunities of the cash economy. The women of Ngecha were quick to catch the entrepreneurial spirit and to try new ventures. For example, women may have been the ones who first had the idea of starting to raise flowers to sell at the Nai-

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Women as Agents of Social Change robi marketplace. They began by raising flowers from seedlings when the Rockford farm where they were working set out new flower beds and allowed employees to take the cullings home. Another example of their experimentation was their forays into raising rabbits and pigs. They learned how to raise chickens in order to sell pullets and eggs. They made baskets for sale through a basket cooperative and invested in sweater-making machines. They followed closely the farm reports broadcast on the radio and were eager to gather useful information and hear of new opportunities. In sum, although the new technological changes lightened the women’s workloads, the need for cash and the introduction of cash crops served as a force in the opposite direction. The women used the time gained from easier access to water and fuel to spend more time on cash crops and other new projects. Their desire for cash increased as they sought to cover whatever school fees were not paid by their husbands (whose responsibility it was). They participated in work groups that hired out to weed or harvest crops. Some women worked for wages to supplement their income. effects on homestead and family life During the five years when we worked in the village, work patterns were not the only things changing. We also learned about profound changes in family lifestyles and the dynamics of interpersonal behavior. Previous authors writing about economic development have often assumed that industrialization, urbanization, and participation in the world economy lead inevitably to a particular chain of events: a decline in traditional polygynous marriage, a decline in extended families, an increase in isolated nuclear families, and the growth of heterogeneous, nonkin-based communities. In Ngecha, some of these predicted changes were seen to be taking place but not in any simple, unidirectional way. changing sources of personal identit One striking change was the increase in the number of nuclear family households, where husband, wife, and children were living elsewhere than the homestead of the husband’s father. Three factors fostered this

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Women as Agents of Social Change increase: the growth in population leading to the overcrowding of the homesteads; the introduction of cash crops; and the decision of families to send all their children to school. Thus the traditional social institutions were undergoing change. In his account of Gikuyu culture, Kenyatta (1962) listed the most important units of the social organization that served to provide individuals with a sense of identity: (1) the riika, the age grade that boys and girls entered when they were initiated in their teens, giving them an identity that lasted throughout their lives and peers to whom they could turn for cooperation and help; (2) the alternating ‘‘generations’’ of Mwangi and Maina, each of which ruled politically during alternate periods of about 35 years; (3) the mbari, the patrilineage of an individual’s father and grandfather; for women at marriage, the husband’s lineage became the most important mbari, the lineage affiliation of her children; (4) the mucii, the homestead where an individual was born and raised; and (5) the nyumba, the house of the wife who was the individual’s mother. The nuclear family was not included in Kenyatta’s description of traditional social structure. There was no term in the Gikuyu language for the nuclear family. Colonial policy undermined important aspects of this social structure, particularly the generation and age-grade system. These were dealt major blows when Pax Britannia deprived the warriors of their traditional functions. Furthermore, the colonial government, fearful of the violence that might erupt in large gatherings, virtually abolished the great initiation ceremonies, one of whose functions was to teach the initiates the duties, privileges, and appropriate behavior of their age grade. European medicine had another detrimental effect on the riika system because many boys were circumcised in the hospital when they completed Standard 7 of primary school and thus did not participate in the small local initiation ceremonies. The Christian churches influenced the system for girls by criticizing and prohibiting clitoridectomy, so that such operations came to be performed only secretly in Ngecha. In spite of all these forces weakening the riika system, individuals continued to identify themselves by the year that they were circumcised, but the group solidarity created by the traditional rituals of initiation had been undermined.

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Women as Agents of Social Change However, two other elements of the traditional social structure remained strong. The mbari and the mucii were still important functioning units of the social structure and a framework for defining the identity of all Gikuyu. As in traditional times, a young man preferred to bring a new wife to his father’s homestead, but new economic conditions could make the situation complicated. The husband built a house for the wife, and his father allocated to her a quarter-acre garden. The new couple became members of the mucii, contributing labor and a share of any wages earned by the husband to the entire group. In return, the couple received the protection of the head of the homestead. It was his responsibility to control the peace of the homestead and minimize any rivalries and jealousies created by the coming together of multiple wives and married sons, so that they did not disrupt daily life. However, the new cash economy increased conflicts between young couples and their extended families. Strained relationships sometimes resulted when the husband had a wage-earning job, because he would find himself torn between the desires of his wife for her children and the requirement of sharing with all the members of the homestead. increasing intimacy in living arrangements of husbands and wives A further sign of changing patterns was the increasing intimacy between husbands and wives. Evidence of this increasing intimacy could be seen in the new architectural styles coming to Ngecha. There were fewer separate men’s houses in Ngecha in 1973 compared to 1968. Instead, whenever new-style rectangular frame houses were built with tin roofs and rain barrels, the woman’s hut (nyumba) and the man’s hut (thingira) were joined under one roof. In the typical three-room house, husband and wife now slept together: husband, wife, and youngest children in one room and older children in another. Sleeping with his wife and youngest children, the father of necessity became involved in infant and child care. In the central room of the house was the public area, with a European-type table and stool and, in the more affluent houses, chairs and vinyl couch. The cooking fire was relegated to either a separate structure or an attached wing. Even though housing arrangements fostered increasing intimacy

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Women as Agents of Social Change between marriage partners, husbands and wives still spent considerable time apart. This was true even of the educated couples, because paid employment took the men outside the household. Most men with steady employment were seldom home during the daylight hours during the week. Some did not come home every night. Especially during the early days of men’s outside employment, it was extremely difficult for them to return home daily. The red clay (murram) roads were impassable during the rainy season. Men working for the East African Railroad, for Post and Telecommunications, or in the Rift Valley might have been gone for months at a time. By 1973, however, a paved Tarmac road enabled men to come home more frequently, and more men owned automobiles or lorries. In 1973, 29 of the 39 fathers on whom we had detailed information came home every evening (and 2 also sometimes stopped in during the day to check on household affairs). Of the 8 who came home less frequently, 2 came home two to three times a week, and 3 came home every weekend. Only 2 were gone for as long as a month at a time. Several divided their time between farms, sometimes separated by as much as 60 miles. Traditionally, the father was reported to have had little contact with his children until, in the case of boys, they moved out of the mother’s hut, often at the time of the second birth ceremony, which symbolically cut the umbilical cord connecting the child to the mother (Leakey, 1977, vol. 2, pp. 550–562). At this point, the boys went off to sleep with their father in his thingira or with older boys in shacks they constructed. The timing of this change in sleeping arrangements depended on the physical and social maturity of the growing boys but usually took place somewhere between ages five and seven. In 1968, however, when most fathers did not any longer have a separate house of their own, the older sons after initiation made arrangements to sleep away from the women, preferably in a little house they built for themselves. According to Leakey (1977) and Kenyatta (1962), at the end of the nineteenth century a father was not supposed to handle an infant, and he was not supposed to sleep with his wife during the period immediately after parturition and during the nursing period. By the time of our research, this avoidance had more or less completely broken down, as was evident from the 1968 census data on the spacing of births. Even

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Women as Agents of Social Change the most traditional, polygynously married mothers had an infant on an average of every two years. Fathers were clearly becoming more involved with babies. When interviewed about their husband’s contact with infants, all but 4 of the 42 mothers in the sample reported that their husbands sometimes held infants. Three of these four mothers were the older, polygynously married women in our sample. Only the youngest husbands reported that they went so far as to help dress infants, when the mother was away. Walking through the village, we observed that sometimes men went about carrying infants in their arms. One of the fathers who worked in a European household advised his wife about the proper diet for infants and children. Another husband who had lived in Great Britain for a few months of job training played with his two-year-old son and held his two-month-old baby in his lap. His wife reported that this man had never held babies before his trip overseas. The increase in husband and wife intimacy was also fostered by the decrease in polygyny. Men in 1968 were voicing the opinion that they could not afford a second wife. Numerous conditions were discouraging men from having more than one wife. With the registration of land and the breakup of the large farms, there was not enough land for a man to support two families unless he could buy extra land. It was expensive to build two rectangular frame houses. Only a few old men, original owners of the large farms registered in the 1950s, had acreage ample for two wives and their families. Lacking enough land, a man could purchase a share in a Rift Valley land cooperative and house one wife on the new farm while keeping the other back in Ngecha. We had a few men in our sample who had been wealthy enough to make this investment. They could rotate their wives and children between the farms depending on the schooling arrangements available for the children and the agricultural demands of the two gardens. Many young men in Ngecha followed a practice of living for a brief time on their father’s land after they first married, to cement their affiliation to the family mbari. Then they rented a house in town as well as land for gardens and pastures. This adjustment had some advantages but also many drawbacks for the women and highlighted the important functions of the extended family. The woman living in an

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Women as Agents of Social Change extended homestead had available other adult women, such as motherin-law, sisters-in-law, co-wives, and their mature daughters. She could call upon these women for help with the daily work and child care, to come in an emergency, or to provide company during brief interludes in the workday. The woman living in a rented house in town was isolated from the cooperative homestead groups and would miss the friendly sociability that was a part of the life of a well-run extended homestead. She might hire help, but this cost money. If her husband had a job and was gone during the daylight hours, her workload and child care responsibilities could make life difficult. However, the Ngecha couples also found benefits to setting up an independent household. If the couple continued living on the husband’s homestead, part of his wages would go to the homestead head. His wife might protest this arrangement and favor leaving the homestead, hoping to use her husband’s wages for school fees and other expenses needed for preparing her children for the new economy. She was less motivated than her husband to share with the members of his extended family. In the new intimacy of husband and wife, she could pressure her husband to set up an independent homestead. pressures on the extended family system There is evidence that both the colonial government and the Christian churches undermined the sanctity and the importance of the extended family. The agricultural agents introduced cash crops with the conscious awareness that the traditional practice of distributing earnings within the extended family would have the effect of penalizing the more ambitious members. The colonial government was a strong supporter of land demarcation and the division of the large homesteads among the sons of the homestead elders before their deaths. They also favored restricting the size of holdings to prevent farms smaller than four acres. The Christian churches favored the nuclear family. In the imagery of the church, the Holy Family was depicted as Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus, with no attention given to the extended family. The Gikuyu Orthodox Church was the only Christian church that did not refuse membership to polygynously married couples; all of the other churches em-

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Women as Agents of Social Change phasized the husband-wife relationship as sacred. This was in direct conflict with the moral teachings of traditional Gikuyu culture. In previous times, the young man at the warrior stage of life might be away from his homestead for extended periods, and he would leave his sons in the care of his brothers. Leakey (1977, vol. 2, p. 851) quoted one man who counseled his son as follows: ‘‘My son, take good care to be very obedient and dutiful to your other fathers [father’s brothers are a man’s classificatory fathers], for although I am your father, they are important to you. Even if you anger me greatly, I am never likely to refuse to help you, since you are the sons of my body, but if you anger your classificatory fathers, they may refuse to help you, and after I am dead they might disinherit you.’’ Leakey (1977, vol. 2, p. 852) summarized the statements of the Gikuyu elders he knew when he was growing up in the early decades of the twentieth century: ‘‘So deep rooted was the idea that a paternal uncle was more important than a person’s own father, that a father would usually ask one of his brothers to speak to his son for him if such a son showed signs of trying to break away from parental control, for though a man would sometimes disobey his father, only a very wayward man would disobey his paternal uncle, for fear of losing his help.’’ Ngecha still had extended homesteads in 1968, usually large farms owned by older men who had been around when land was registered in the 1950s. However, even these homesteads were already crowded, especially when the homestead head had several wives. The increase in people with rights to the land was creating enormous potential for conflict. It was evident that not all their grown sons would be able to move back and that their new wives would soon have numerous children. In the traditional system, all land was owned by men. The widow of a deceased son and her children stayed on the homestead of her former husband because all of the children belonged to the lineage. Although an adult son might leave his place of birth and set up his own homestead, he retained the privilege of bringing his wife back to live on his natal homestead. Furthermore, by right all sons would inherit land from their father when he died. In Ngecha during the time of our research, the landholdings of the large lineages were often broken up when individual men sold their

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Women as Agents of Social Change share of the lineage land that was registered in their names. However, lineage bonds were still strong, and the individual depended on members of his sublineage to come to his aid in settling quarrels and in defending him in legal battles over land or business deals. For the typical man, the other men of his mucii were the people with whom he had grown up and his first and most important supporters. They were the ones who would help him financially in raising the bride price for a wife and paying school fees for his children. A wife knew to respect these bonds. She might resent the fact that her husband’s emotional ties to his lineage were deeper than to her, but she would be ill-advised to undermine her children’s identification with their father’s lineage. If she decided to leave her husband and return home to her father’s homestead, she would very likely lose her children, especially her sons who would inherit land from their father. Her ties to her birth lineage remained strong, and she and her children might visit and spend time with her family, but the children’s strongest identification was with their father’s lineage. changing sexual behavior Sexual patterns were also changing. These changes had been set in motion by the decline of initiation ceremonies and by the teachings of the Christian churches, both of which led to many unforeseen consequences. In traditional times, young people had been taught about the regulation and purpose of sexuality and about proper courtship behavior during initiation. During this ceremony, but also all during their childhood, they learned about the importance of marriage and childbearing. They learned that marriage was the doorway to a good life (for the young woman aged 15 to 20 and for the man aged about 25). They learned that the purpose of the marital relationship was reproduction and that the status of both men and women depended in large part on the number, health, and strength of their offspring. They learned to desire many children, and this persisted even after times changed and the objective need for numerous progeny for agricultural work and the defense of the homestead declined. While the desire for marriage and children was still a prevalent value

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Women as Agents of Social Change in Ngecha during the period of our research, the method of finding an appropriate mate had changed. Young women no longer went to traditional dances and all-night parties where they could meet eligible men. They did not receive sexual instruction from the next older age group of young women who had recently gone through their initiation ceremony. Nor were they gradually introduced to sex through the old custom of ngweko (communal sleeping that allowed for physical contact between young couples but prohibited full intercourse), described by Kenyatta (1962) but unknown to the young people in 1968. They did not discuss sex with their mothers, as this was taboo. Parents had lost almost all control over their children’s choice of mates. The young people selected each other and then requested their parents to start the negotiations for the bride price, a payment most of the women still favored as insurance for the stability of marriage. Often the woman became pregnant even before marriage; in about half the marriages surveyed the woman was pregnant when negotiation for the bride price began. Usually the settlement of bride price was completed, but there were an increasing number of cases where the father of the man was unwilling to finalize the marriage negotiations and instead paid a fine for his son rather than cut short the man’s education. A woman’s parents then took over the raising of the newborn child. women’s goals for a good life In certain respects, the life of the adult female in Ngecha had not changed as radically as the life of the adult male, as her life still continued to revolve around her children and her homestead. Her central concern, as in the past, was the welfare of her children. What had changed was her vision of what a good life would be for herself and her children in the years to come and how to get there. Although a woman’s relationships to her husband, family of origin, and affines (in-laws) were secondary to her concern for her children, she realized that these individuals were important for ensuring her children’s future welfare. She knew it was wise to establish and maintain good working relationships with them. Her challenge was how to balance what would be good for her children with her obligations to her husband’s mucii and mbari. She had to figure out how to resolve the

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Women as Agents of Social Change conflicts of interest between getting the best for her children and at the same time sharing resources with her husband’s extended family. For example, she encountered such a conflict when her husband’s and her own wages and earnings from cash crops were divided to finance the education of all the school-age children of the homestead. In some families, young wives and their husbands tried to manage within the traditional framework of the extended homestead. In others, the couples had broken away and moved out to set up independent homesteads. By studying the different strategies of these families, we learned about the benefits and liabilities of each type. In the independent houses where we observed, the problems of a shrinking workforce were obvious. Lacking the help of school-age children, sisters-in-law, or co-wives, the women were overworked, with their husband gone all day and in some cases most of the week. Women who lived close to the husband’s compound fared better than those who lived farther away. Two of the mothers we studied in independent households were overworked and had symptoms of depression. They missed the social life of the homestead, where there were leisure moments to visit with other adult women. We also observed in the homes of several families who had moved to Nairobi. The women had taken with them interpersonal skills to create new support systems and build a social network, but they missed having adequate care for preschool children and gardens. These lacks were severe handicaps, especially if the women had become employed. Life in Nairobi obviously carried its own liabilities and highlighted the need for new supporting institutions. For all of the women, their unquestioned first priority was having children. The Kenya students who lived with us could not understand their American women colleagues, some of whom stated that they did not want children. They had an easier time sympathizing with American women who did not want to marry, although they themselves did want to marry a man with property that their sons might share at some future time. Because of their desire for children, Ngecha women had ambivalent attitudes toward family planning. The majority wished for four to six children. The women were quite aware of the rapid rate of population

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Women as Agents of Social Change growth in Kenya but did not consider this to be an issue that affected them either directly or indirectly. Instead, several factors, including traditional Gikuyu customs for naming babies, played a role in their desires for large families. According to the traditional naming practices, parents named their children, in turn, after each of the children’s four grandparents, then after the parents’ oldest or favorite siblings (Herzog, 1971). In 1972 Priscilla Kariuki interviewed 57 married and 3 unmarried Ngecha women between the ages of 22 and 49 about their attitudes toward family planning. She asked them whether they approved of it, what techniques they knew or had heard of, whether they used family planning, and, if they did not, whether they planned to use some technique in the future (Kariuki, 1973). Fifteen (25%) of the mothers were using family planning. Twenty-two (37%) reported that they were potential users, while the remaining 23 (38%) said that they did not and would not use planning. The mothers who were nonusers stressed the social value of children as helpers with chores and as a source of support in old age, but those who did use family planning were concerned about having children whom they did not have enough resources to feed or send to school. This distribution was related to women’s education, employment, and religion. Of the 35 women with some education (1–7 years), 11 used family planning and 17 were potential users, while among the 25 with no education, 4 were users and 5 were potential users (X 2(2) = 12.86, p < .01). The women’s responses were also related to their ages but not significantly. Of the 31 mothers aged 30–49 years, 24 (63%) used or planned to use some technique in contrast to 14 (48%) of the mothers aged 20–29 years. None of the 11 Catholic families used family planning, in contrast to 15 of the 49 non-Catholics. All 6 of the employed mothers were users or potential users, in contrast to only 31 of the 54 housewives. According to Kariuki (1973), many of the women in the sample reported that at one time or another a doctor had talked to them about the spacing of births, but many were unwilling to follow this advice because of fear that it would affect their body functioning and make it more difficult for them to work hard. The young women of Ngecha also desired a closer relationship with

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Women as Agents of Social Change their husbands than had formerly been typical. For these young women, the new frame houses fostered increased intimacy between husband and wife and may have been important in encouraging young couples to distance themselves from the extended family. In the frame houses, they found more opportunity to discuss life strategies and to influence their husbands to accord with their own ambitions. Women who lived near their mothers or married sisters visited them frequently and enjoyed working with them as well as passing time in knitting or weaving a basket, laughing, teasing, and conversing. As we observed the adjustment of Ngecha women who moved out of their extended homesteads into Nairobi, we noted that they transported their skills at cooperating with other women, readily forming new work groups and constructing new social networks. The women’s upbringing, first as child caretakers and mothers’ helpers, then as members of their age groups in social activities, had taught them how to work with others and provided them a source of security when they married and set up independent households. Whether they remained in Ngecha or moved to Nairobi, they could still live up to Gikuyu ideals of a good hostess and demonstrate how to welcome visitors, offering tea and a stool on which to sit, just as they had been taught as children. For Ngecha women, therefore, mastering the arts of sociability and the pleasures of spending time with other women was always a priority for successful living. They had many reasons to be keenly aware of the value of female solidarity, since their men often spent their leisure time among other men, socializing in the bars in town and, except for holidays and celebrations, rarely socializing with the women. Certainly, we found all of this surprising and enlightening, since we had grown up in the United States, where it was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that we realized how isolated and lonely it could be for women in the suburbs and how much any person needs a support group of same-sex peers. Besides proper expression of positive emotions related to sociability, hospitality, and generosity, Ngecha women were also trained to modulate and control the negative emotions of anger, jealousy, envy, and greed. The management of these negative emotions was essential to the traditional lifestyle because such emotions were disruptive and de-

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Women as Agents of Social Change structive to life in an extended family homestead. As young children, they were taught the importance of sharing resources such as food and the attention of family members. If they were jealous or rivalrous of their next-born sibling, they were not pampered. Instead, their jealousy may have been commented on, and they were instructed to tend to their younger sibling carefully. Any reluctance to share or any greed in taking more than one’s portion of food was treated as a serious offence. In their childhoods, these women received early and serious training in nurturant behavior and learned to be trustworthy child nurses and cooperative members of the extended household. Nevertheless, this training did not appear to squeeze all life and joy out of the women. Rather, we were impressed by their vitality. They did not fit any stereotype we may have learned about submissive females dominated by patriarchy—passive victims of male discrimination. Instead, the Ngecha women maintained a lifestyle separate from the men and derived a sense of importance from their roles as mothers, farmers, and entrepreneurs. We speculated that their early preparation as members of the family workforce had contributed to their self-assurance. Their success had been promoted by the thoughtful strategy of their child-rearers who had studied their individual development and then gradually assigned them new tasks when they were seen to be mature and capable enough to complete them—tasks performed by the nextolder age group or by the young women and mothers that they, the younger children, admired. The role of Ngecha women was different from that of the men, but they were equally important to the life of the community.

References Herzog, John D. (1971). Fertility and cultural values: Kikuyu naming customs and the preference for four or more children. Rural Africana, No. 14, spring, pp. 89–96. Kariuki, P. (1973). Research paper on attitudes toward ‘‘family planning’’ in Ngecha village, Kenya. Archived at University of Texas, Austin, and Library of Congress. Kenyatta, J. (1962). (1938) Facing Mount Kenya: The tribal life of the Gikyuyu. New York: Vintage.

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Women as Agents of Social Change Leakey, L. S. B. (1977). The Southern Kikuyu before 1903, 3 vols. New York: Academic Press. Robbins, M. C., & Kilbride, P. L. (1987). Microtechnology in rural Buganda. In H. R. Bernard & P. Pelto (Eds.), Technology and social change (2nd ed.) (pp. 244–267). Prospect Heights il: Waveland Press.

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5

Changing Concepts of the Good Child and Good Mothering Beatrice Whiting, with Ciarunji Chesaina, Grace Diru, Jonah Ichoya, Priscilla Kariuki, Violet Nyambura Kimani, Irene Kamau, Rose Maina, Wanjiku Munge-Kagia, Jane Mwangi, and, for the postscript, John Whiting, Thomas Landauer, and Lynn Streeter

Concepts of the Good Child and Good Mothering in a Changing Community Ngecha women were major protagonists in creating and sustaining social and economic change in their communities during the years following independence. Their experiences with schooling, technology, and new lifestyles caused them to reappraise their values as working mothers and their goals for themselves and their children. In their roles as mothers, they modified their concepts of what makes a child ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’ and their socialization practices. The women’s activity resonated with me because rights and proper roles for women were such a heated issue of contention in my own society, the United States, during the time of the research. Coming to Kenya, I wanted very much to get to know not only the women in the village of Ngecha but also the young women working on our project while attending the University of Nairobi and preparing for professional careers. Permission to embark on the research was granted with the understanding that we would take on apprentices and prepare them in the methods of social science research. All of the research conducted by the Child Development Research Unit was undertaken by teams consisting of American graduate or postgraduate students paired with University of Nairobi students. Dur-

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering ing the years of our research in Ngecha, the young women researchers lived in the house in Tigoni, five miles from the families who were the focus of study. These women were my eyes and ears in the homesteads. Every day they visited the families we selected to study, observing and recording the behavior of the mothers and children. They then returned to the research house, and we spent hours each day discussing the data they had collected. Through informal conversation they revealed the personal adjustments they were making as they entered the new professional world of Kenya. They had been raised in households very similar to those they were observing but were embarking on lives different from their mothers’. As time passed and they married and had children, they were creating new patterns consonant with living and working in the new capitalistic society. Learning about their personal quests reinforced the need to examine family life in Ngecha, to document and analyze the changes that were taking place in women’s roles as mothers. How were the changes from an agricultural economy to a wage-earning economy, and other changes that affected their daily life, influencing mothers’ goals for their children and their concepts of their own role as mothers (Bacon & Ashmore, 1986; Goodnow, 1984; LeVine, 1974)? This essay explores the relation between cultural concepts (of childhood and mothering) and the surrounding economic and social system. It theorizes that changes in a community’s economy and social structure that alter the lifestyle and the daily routine of families will be accompanied by changes in cultural belief systems (Harkness & Super, 1995). Mothers adjust their goals to new environments. Because mothers want to raise children to a viable adulthood, they revise their priorities for the characteristics they hope for in their children to make them consonant with the adult model. They adapt their styles of mothering to fit their new concepts of children. I was particularly interested in the effect of schooling on these concepts. As shown in chapter 3, the introduction of schools in Ngecha had been an important catalyst for changes in daily life. The daily routines of men were rapidly changing. Work on European farms; employment by the government to work on the railroad, for the power and light companies, or for the postal service; and entrepreneu-

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering rial enterprises such as trucking and store-keeping took many of the men away from their homesteads during the daylight hours. In some families women were left in charge of the management of the farm (see chapter 2). Women’s lives had not changed as radically and still revolved around their children and their homesteads. Their main concern, as in the past, was the welfare of their children, raising food for them, caring for them, and teaching them the skills they would need in adult life. Their image of a ‘‘good woman’’ did not seem to have changed appreciably from what Kenyatta (1962) and Leakey (1977) described. Ngecha women in 1968 stated that a good woman was hardworking, a good provider of food for her family, and a generous and good-humored hostess to all visitors to the homestead. She deferred to her husband and did not behave in a way that shamed herself or her family. The children’s routines had been revolutionized by the introduction of schools. Families were convinced that schooling was essential for employment, and they wanted both sons and daughters to attend school. Mothers expected their children to finish at least primary school. They hoped for their children to graduate from secondary school, and a few dreamed of them acquiring a university diploma. The basic goal was the acquisition of good wages. Mothers who had formerly taught farming, housekeeping, and child-care skills now wanted to help their children be successful in school. Mothers who had attended school themselves had clearer ideas of what this involved; they had more realistic concepts about what characteristics would be necessary in school and what they could do as mothers to help their children acquire these characteristics. In the study of family life and child development, we observed in 42 homesteads, talking to mothers, recording their patterns of interaction with their children, and administering some standardized questionnaires. We collected some basic demographic data that made it possible to identify differences in families along a traditional-modern dimension (Whiting & Edwards, 1978). The mothers varied in their years of schooling, and this seemed to correspond to mothering goals and values. It was not until 1940 that school was considered appropriate for girls in Ngecha; few of the

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering women born before the 1940s had been to school. Only 2 of the 13 mothers (15%) in their thirties had attended school, in contrast to 13 of the 16 mothers (81%) in their twenties. It was the younger group that put forward new concepts of the type of child they hoped to raise and new concepts of how they should behave as mothers.

Changing Concepts of the Good Child concepts of good and changeworthy behavior for children Valued traits are encoded in the language system of a culture. Terms of attribution that define behavior that is admired or disparaged are common in every language. In seeking to identify the characteristics that Ngecha mothers hoped for in their children, we asked one of our bilingual university students to list attributes that she considered praiseworthy in children. Table 5.1 presents the terms she listed as descriptors of a generally good person (mwendu mwega). In writing down the adjectives, the student clustered them on the basis of similarity and selected what she considered to be the nearest equivalent English description. Most of the terms appear in all the other lists we elicited from other students-apprentices and from a sample of mothers in the village. The first two clusters include qualities that were mentioned as important in Kenyatta’s (1962) description of a generally good person, one who treats others well: respectful, obedient, polite, kind, and generous. The third and fourth clusters describe admired individual traits: careful, composed, well organized, confident, clever, hardworking, brave, and bold. These are individualistic or ‘‘self traits,’’ distinguished from attributes that concern interpersonal behavior (Abbott & Arcury, 1977). Table 5.1 also presents a list of traits that the same student labeled as changeworthy, that is, bad traits that one would not like in one’s children. Again the list includes adjectives that appear in the other lists we collected: lazy, foolish, roguish, disobedient, jealous, selfish, selfcentered, noisy, and easily annoyed. To check whether the mothers in the village concurred with the student’s list, we asked four of our ap-

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Table 5.1: Good and Bad Characteristics for Children Good characteristics Cluster
ari-gitio mulaana mulugi mwinyihia muumaandu Cluster  muigua mwathiki muhoreri mutheru ngoro winyilite Cluster  mumenyereri ari kihariro wiigite wiiguite Cluster  muugi mutheru ari mituki wi kiyo mumiriru ari ucamba Bad characteristics muguta githayo kirimu mundu mumaramuru mundu mukora muremi ari uiru munegeni kurarira na ihenya mwiyendi

respectful generous (materially) generous humble, polite kind to people obedient, listens and obeys obedient gentle good-hearted, pure-hearted composed, well behaved careful with things not careless independent, well-organized confident (self-confident, some vanity) clever, sharp, sometimes cunning clean quick, fast in doing things hard-working, industrious bold, brave (long-suffering) bold, brave, courageous lazy, idle idle, lazy not clever, unintelligent, moronic a rogue rougish naughty, disobedient jealous talkative, noisy easily angered selfish

Note: Clusters were created by a Kenyan university research assistant.

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering prentices to visit mothers in the village and interview them concerning the behavior of children that they would consider as praiseworthy. In order to understand the meaning of these concepts, we discussed descriptive adjectives and phrases used to describe children with six of our university apprentices (four males and two females). We found that they could think of adjectives and adjectival phrases that described traits that were disliked more easily than those that were praiseworthy. We decided to collect lists of Gikuyu words for changeworthy behavior. The lists made by each of the six students varied in length from 28 to 60 items, averaging 47. Combining all the lists, we copied the 35 most frequent terms on slips of paper and gave a set to each student to sort into clusters that contained similar characteristics. We asked them to identify the adjective that seemed to be the best descriptor of the various categories. We then asked them to select an English adjective that seemed to be the closest equivalent to the Gikuyu adjective and to write in English examples of the type of behaviors that would be observed in a person with the characteristics described. The students then reviewed each other’s categories and discussed similarities and differences in their categories and in the behavioral definitions. We prepared a list of those descriptors that appeared most frequently. It is probable that the behaviors considered changeworthy were those that were encountered most frequently in their experiences with children. There was consensus among the students that disobedience, aggressiveness, roguishness, greed, selfishness, dishonesty, carelessness, laziness, irresponsibility, destructiveness, and lack of good manners were types of behavior disruptive to family and community life. Illustrations cited by the students gave contextual definitions and examples of relevant behavior. Disobedience included behavior such as refusing to perform the chores that parents assigned—not washing dishes or completing the weeding of a section of the garden, for example—or chores assigned to be performed while the parents were away. Refusing to go to school and playing hooky were mentioned. The most serious disobedience cited was failure to keep watch on smaller children to see that they did not hurt themselves. A child who was disobedient was said to have ‘‘lost his ears,’’ to lack memory of what one is told to do or not to do. Examples of aggressive behavior in-

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering cluded beating up younger children even though they grabbed an object from the older child, picking fights for no reason, or inciting others or egging them on to fight. Roguishness included leaving home without the parents’ knowledge, staying away from home and not helping the parents, and frequenting other people’s homes hoping to get some food. Greed, particularly where it concerned food, was a changeworthy behavior cited by all. Examples included refusing to share food with others, wanting to keep all the food for oneself, complaining to the mother that one has not received a proper share of the food she has been serving, eating too much or taking food away from others, and eating all the food in the house in the absence of others. Jealousy was included in this general category, including greed for the attention that was given to the sibling that replaced one at the mother’s breast. There was consensus that carelessness, laziness, and irresponsibility were bad traits. Clumsiness, impatience, and lack of planning were included in this category. An example of impatience and lack of planning was a child who was supposed to boil milk but took it off the fire before it boiled or was distracted by some trivial activity and let the milk boil over. One of the most serious offenses cited in this category was dropping a child or an infant on the ground or floor, often as a result of trying to tie the carrying-shawl without help instead of asking an adult or older child to tie the infant or child securely. Lack of initiative in performing work that should be done was exemplified by not taking any steps to prepare food for the very young siblings when the mother was late coming home and there was no food ready for supper. This was considered irresponsible. Not having cleanliness habits was also cited as being irresponsible. Destructive behavior included being wasteful of food, spoiling useful things, and destructive extravagance. Reviewing both Kenyatta’s (1962) and Leakey’s (1977) descriptions of the culture of the Southern Gikuyu, the behavior attributed to a good child by our informants in 1968 seemed similar to behavior valued in the late years of the nineteenth century. The only example that obviously belonged to the new era was truancy. A surprise is the failure of students to mention lack of respect for elders in their lists of changeworthy behavior. It is our impression that ari-gitio, respect for elders, is so deeply ingrained in Gikuyu children that it is taken for granted even

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering by modern Gikuyu college students. Since the daily routine of parents and children had changed radically with the introduction of schools, we were interested in whether parents had modified their concept of a good child. In particular, we wanted to explore the possible effect of exposure to Western-style schools on the hierarchy of maternal values. Had the hierarchy of values changed such that those that emphasized approved interpersonal styles of behavior had become less valued as the self-traits moved up in the hierarchy? the effects of schooling With these questions in mind, several months later we interviewed four mothers as to the traits they thought would make a child successful in school. Four traits were mentioned frequently: muugi, mumiriru, wiiguite, and mwendi kumenya tumaundu. A muugi child was clever, sharp, keen, and hard. A mumiriru child was brave, courageous, and bold—in context, one who dares to speak up in class. A wiiguite child was selfconfident, perhaps a little overconfident. Finally, a mwendi kumenya tumaundu child was inquisitive, asking what he or she did not know. Unlike the descriptors elicited by the concept of a good girl or boy and that described approved patterns of interaction with others, the descriptors that characterized children who were successful in school were self-oriented traits. With the exception of mumiriru, a trait that appeared in only one list of praiseworthy behavior, they were not attributes that were mentioned when we interviewed about traditional values. Inquisitiveness was not mentioned as a praiseworthy behavior. Traditionally, children who kept asking questions, particularly when adults were talking with each other, were considered bad mannered. Children were not supposed to address adults unless called upon; they were to speak only when spoken to. Clever and overconfident children might be boastful and seek attention by showing off. The school setting was very different from the home, where young children were surrounded by siblings and cousins and adults who were kin. Classmates were same-aged boys and girls from several different lineages. The rules for appropriate behavior differed for the two settings. In the homestead, a young child who sought attention from older

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering siblings or adults by showing off was apt to be met with sarcasm or was ignored. In the school setting, children were asked to perform before others. Andy Cohn, an American graduate student who observed in the nursery school in 1968, described a daily scene in which the teacher called on a volunteer to come to the front of the class and tell a story. Day after day, the same two boys volunteered. Finally, another child summoned the courage to take a turn (Cohn, 1969). Boggs (1972) reported similar behavior for Hawaiian children. LeVine (1980, pp. 78– 79) described a similar shift in childhood for the experience of the Yoruba girl in Nigeria: ‘‘Participation in the school classroom represents entry into a new world of values and becomes a form of assertiveness training, overcoming her reticence to speak as an adult, inducing her to display what she knows and thinks for public evaluation and encouraging her to view her assertions and attention-seeking tendencies as [a] positive aspect of her self rather than breaches of etiquette.’’ It must have taken time for the children to get used to new rules about the role of questions in discourse. Being questioned by an adult who knows the answer was a new experience. Questions in the home setting were for seeking information, not for testing knowledge. Adults questioned children frequently, but children seldom initiated conversations with adults. Asking questions of the teacher was considered rude. As Goody (1978) has pointed out, information is only obtained from high-status persons indirectly. People ask information questions most readily of those in similar status. In the classroom, however, it is permissible for a child to seek information from the teacher (Goody, 1978; Harkness & Super, 1982). Ngecha mothers rarely gave verbal recognition to their children’s performance; verbal praise was seldom recorded in the observations of mother-child interaction. The examples we have most often followed some accomplishment of a child that indicated progress in developing literacy or numeracy skills. In the classroom, in contrast, feedback from the teacher was necessary and frequent; for example, teachers told children when their answer to a question was correct. As noted earlier, all Ngecha mothers were concerned that their children do well in school. When interviewed about their aspirations for

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering their children, all of the mothers’ answers indicated that they believed that success in the new era was dependent on schooling, and they wanted to have their children do well in primary school so that they could continue into the government secondary schools that were tuition free. Failing to meet the entrance requirements, schooling could only be continued in Harambee secondary schools, whose entrance fees were high and academic standing not always comparable to the government schools. We wondered whether the belief that schooling was essential had influenced mothers to change the priority of their choice of the traits desired for their children. We expected that the mothers who had themselves spent time in school might have a different hierarchy of values than did unschooled mothers as to the traits they thought were important. If asked to rank order the valued traits, would the mothers with schooling have different priorities? If two values were simultaneously evoked, which one would take precedence? Were there indications that schooled mothers ranked the new assertive habits of their children higher than did unschooled mothers? In an attempt to identify variation within the village in commitment to a new ideology, we asked a sample of 24 mothers to state their preference for eight character traits: four that were traditionally considered praiseworthy character traits and four that were considered good for success in school (the first group chosen as examples of characteristics that stressed harmonious interaction, the second group as examples of self characteristics).We interpreted the frequency of a mother’s choices to be an index of her hierarchy of values. We composed a questionnaire pairing these traits. We selected respect for elders, obedience, generosity, and good-heartedness to characterize the traditional; we chose cleverness, inquisitiveness, boldness, and confidence to represent the more modern. Each mother was asked to respond to 16 forced choices, presented in random order, between two items, one from each category. For example, each mother was asked: Which is better, that your child be generous or clever? Bold or generous? Generous or inquisitive? Generous or confident? Clever or respectful? Respectful or bold? If a trait was chosen first in each comparison, it received a score of 4, if chosen three times a score of 3, and so on. We looked at the clustering

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering of the choices based on the number of times each mother chose each of the eight values. We next performed a multidimensional scaling of the eight values based on the 24 mothers’ choices. The results indicated that the values separated into two strong clusters, one consisting of the values good for school (clever, inquisitive, confident, brave), the other made up of the traditional values (respectful, obedient, generous, good-hearted). Thus there was consistency in the value-orientation of the mothers. Those mothers who chose any of the four self terms or any of the four traditional values tended to choose the other three. In a further attempt to validate our selection of the four traits considered good for school, we asked the 24 mothers to identify which of the eight traits were good for learning. There was a high degree of consensus on the four attributes we had picked. With one or two exceptions, clever and inquisitive were chosen by all the mothers as good for learning. Confident and brave tied for third place. All four traits were ranked more valuable for learning than were obedient, respectful, generous, and good-hearted. We reviewed the choices of the mothers as they related to their years of schooling. The frequency of choice of each of the traits considered good for schooling was positively related to the mothers’ years of schooling, and the frequency of choice of each of the traditional traits was negatively correlated (see Table 5.2), but few of the correlations approached acceptable levels of significance. Confident (r = .414, p < .05) and inquisitive (r = .399, p < .10) were the two traits most positively related, while obedience (r = −.462, p < .05) was the most negatively related. We wondered whether there were other experiences besides attending school that might predict a mother’s choice of traits considered good for learning. It appeared that the husband’s education had an influence. Mothers with no schooling who were married to men who had six or more years of education chose the traits good for school more frequently (see Table 5.3). The presence of a radio in the house in 1968, which was positively related to the years of schooling of the mother and father, was an even better predictor of value choices than the years of schooling of either the mother or the father.

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Table 5.2: Relationship of Mothers’ Education to Their Choice of Valued Traits Correlation with mothers’ education (years of schooling)

Mothers’ choice of valued traits Confident

.
 a

Inquisitive

.

Clever

.


Brave

.


Good-hearted

−.



Generous

−.

Respectful

−.


Obedient

−. 

Note: All correlations are Pearson product-moment correlations. Tests of significance are two-tailed, a p < .05.

demographic indicators of change We explored still other experiences that might effect change. It appeared that there was a cluster of demographic variables that could be identified as modern. We used members of the community to identify demographic variables. We asked them to identify the families they considered most modern and analyzed the demographic indices that were the correlates of their judgments. Since many of the demographic characteristics of a Ngecha family that were considered modern were highly correlated, we decided to develop a modernity factor score for each mother based on the demographic information (Whiting & Edwards, 1978). From our basic data we selected variables that we assumed would reflect the modernity of each family, including the number of years of schooling of each mother and father; the type of houses in the homesteads in 1968 (round mud-and-wattle with thatched roofs the more traditional, frame houses with metal roofs and glass windows and electricity the more modern), the church to which the mother belonged (the Gikuyu Orthodox Church the more traditional in that it

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Table 5.3: Relationship of Fathers’ Education to Modernization and Mothers’ Choice of Valued Traits for Children Mothers’ choice of valued traits

Fathers’ education (years of schooling)

Modernization (radio in home)

Confident

.

. a

Inquisitive

. 

. a

Clever

.

. a

Brave

.

.

Respectful

−.



−.

Good-hearted

−.


−.


Obedient

−. 

−. a

Generous

−. b

−.  a

Note: All correlations are Pearson product-moment correlations. Tests of significance are two-tailed, a p < .01, b p < .05.

accepted polygyny and traditional rituals of female circumcision, the Protestant churches of East Africa and the Catholic Church the more modern). We scaled the occupations of the mothers and father on the degree of their involvement with the modern sector. We noted whether the mother could speak Swahili or English or both and whether there was a radio in the house in 1968. We included the mother’s type of marriage (polygynous or monogamous) and the type of homestead (nuclear or extended). We included estimates of traditional-type wealth (land and cattle) and of wage income. We noted whether the mother had lived in communities other than Ngecha. Table 5.4 presents the items with the highest component loadings on Factor 1, which accounted for 43% of the variance. As can be seen, the number of years of schooling of the father had the highest loading. The mother’s years of schooling was second. The mother’s knowledge of Swahili or English or both and the presence of a radio in the house in 1968 also had high correlations. A mother’s modernity factor score proved to be a better predictor of

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Table 5.4: Indicators of Modernity in Ngecha Component Loadings on Factor 1 (‘‘Modernity’’) in Principal Components Factor Analysis Father’s years of schooling

.

Mother’s years of schooling

.

Mother’s language

.

Radio in home

.

House type in
 

.

Father’s occupation

.

Membership in church

.

Monogamous marriage

.


Mother’s occupation

.

her choice of values than the number of years of her schooling alone. Table 5.5 presents the correlation between the mothers’ modernity factor scores and the frequency with which they chose each of the eight character traits. It can be seen that a mother’s preference for confident and inquisitive children was significantly related to her modernity factor score (r = .473, p < .02; r = .414, p. < .05). Clever and brave were positively related but not significantly. The four traditional values were all negatively related to modernity, generous and obedient significantly (r = −.494, p < .02; r = −.484, p < .02). The analysis of the experiences associated with modernity indicates not only the importance of years of schooling but also the importance of the media in altering the hierarchy of values. Mothers who could understand Swahili, for example, could learn from broadcasts. We heard mothers discuss agricultural programs that they had heard. Gikuyu are used to auditory learning, attending to proverbs, folktales, and oral accounts of their history as well as the narratives of their elders. Unfortunately, we did not monitor the content of the broadcasts. The possible role of the church (see Table 5.4) on the transmission of values suggests the importance of studying the teachings of the vari-

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Table 5.5: Relationship of Mothers’ Choice of Valued Traits with Modernity Mothers’ choice of valued traits (frequency scores)

Correlation with mothers’ modernity factor scores

Confident

. a

Inquisitive

.
 a

Clever

.

Brave

.


Good-hearted

−.


Respectful

−.

Obedient

−. a

Generous

−. a

Note: All correlations are Pearson product-moment correlations. Tests of significance are two-tailed, a p < .02, b p < .05.

ous denominations. The mothers who were members of Protestant churches had higher scores on the values for success in school than the members of the Gikuyu Orthodox Church. In sum, the introduction of Western-type schooling and radios changed the hierarchy of the maternal values that defined the modern mothers’ concepts of a good child. The traits considered good for success in school, what we have identified as more individualistic (selforiented, egoistic), ranked higher in the hierarchy of values of women with schooling than those traits traditionally considered to be characteristics of a good child. Our findings did not indicate that goodheartedness, respect, obedience, and generosity were no longer valued, rather that they were lower in the hierarchy. As Kenyatta (1962, p. 118) pointed out, however, there was the potential for conflict between the values that stress social harmony and the new values. Kenyatta (1962, pp. 102–103) characterized the European system of education as stressing individuality in contrast to Gikuyu education, which is concerned with personal relations and with the laws of proper behavior:

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering Growing boys and girls learn they have one thing to learn which sums up all others, and that is manners and deportment, proper to their station in the community. They see that their happiness in the homestead . . . their present comforts and their future prospects depend on knowing their place, giving respect and obedience where it is due. Presumption, conceit and disobedience . . . are all grave offenses. . . . The selfish or selfregarding man has no name or reputation in the Gikuyu community. An individualist is looked upon with suspicion and is given the nickname mwebongia, one who works only for himself and is likely to end up as a wizard. He may lack assistance when he needs it.

The conflict between traditional and modern values was clear to the Kenya university students. In 1970 a group of University of Nairobi students who met to discuss moral dilemmas spoke eloquently of the conflict between one’s responsibility for one’s siblings and their children and the desire to establish oneself and one’s family in the new culture (Edwards, chapter 8 this volume, 1975, 1985, 1997). How could one refuse the request of a brother who had helped to pay for one’s education and now needed money for his son’s schooling when the funds were needed to meet the expenses of one’s own child? There were many changes in the lifestyle of families who were wage earners and city dwellers that were contributing to the acceptance of a new hierarchy of values. It was clear that to survive without guilt one had to change one’s value priorities. Sharing with one’s married brothers and lineage-mates, being generous, was difficult if one was working and living in an apartment in town. Young people who had jobs in Nairobi were hard put to house and feed siblings, half-siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews who arrived in the city to visit. As we have seen, schooling was not the only catalyst for change.

Changing Concepts of Good Mothering It seemed inevitable that the change in the goals of the new generation of mothers would be associated with changes in their conceptions of their roles as teachers. Traditionally and in 1968, Gikuyu mothers taught their young children, both boys and girls, rules of proper behavior and skills (Whiting, 1983). The mothers assumed that they could

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering teach children as young as age three or four how to perform simple household tasks.They taught children of four or five years of age how to take care of young children and how to garden. However, with schooling and the accompanying changes in goals for children, were mothers acquiring new conceptions of what a mother should or could teach? In 1968 we explored the mothers’ beliefs about their ability to influence the development of their children. We asked 17 mothers why they thought some children were smarter in school, harder workers, more obedient, more cheerful; why some children were taller, talked and walked earlier, had more mature habits. The mothers were not accustomed to formulating their theories and found it hard to answer the questions that required them to generalize about children. We found a framework developed by Janet Fjellman (1971) to be a good elicitor. The women were asked, ‘‘Some children are lazy, others work hard, why is that? Some children are smart in school, others are not, why is that?’’ and so on. The answers fell into five major categories. The first reflected the widespread belief in predetermination; nature rather than nurture was identified as the genesis of the majority of the traits. A majority of the mothers thought that a child is smarter and more cheerful and talks earlier because he or she is born that way, because God gave the child a quicker and lighter brain, one with more knowledge. If a child talks earlier, it is because the child is born with a lighter tongue. The cheerful child is born with a better heart. A child who runs fast has ‘‘light’’ organs that act quickly. The second category related to the child’s given name. Some women stated that certain traits were inherited from parents or from the person after whom the child was named. For example, a child is tall because the child takes after the parent who is tall or who has long bones. A child is cheerful because both parents are cheerful or because the grandparent after whom the child is named is cheerful. The third most common response of the mothers was that a child has a certain trait because of the child’s interest or desire (kwenda), reasoning that implies a concept of motivation. Thus a child can run faster than other children because he or she wants to win and practices running. A child has mature habits if he or she so desires. A child decides or chooses to be obedient. It was not clear just how this reasoning relates

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering to the nature-nurture dimension. One mother stated that God created the interest, but the statements of others were not so clear. The fourth category was health related. Some mothers mentioned the influence of diet and health on height and on the ability to run fast —‘‘an unhealthy child will be shorter and slower’’–but most mothers thought that they had little influence over these characteristics. Some mothers mentioned hunger as detrimental to competent schoolwork: ‘‘A child needs enough to eat to be good in school.’’ ‘‘A child can be disturbed by hunger.’’ ‘‘An unhealthy child will be shorter and slower.’’ One mother stated that a child learned to walk early if the mother’s milk was ‘‘quick’’ (iria iihiu). This type of milk would also make a child talk early. The fifth category had to do with socialization through work at home and school. The quality that mothers judged most susceptible to nurture was laziness. Six of the mothers reported that the amount of work assigned to a child was a good predictor of whether he or she would be lazy or a hard worker. A child given a lot of work would learn to do it. Some parents stated that obedience could also be taught: ‘‘Strict parents have obedient children.’’ ‘‘A child may be disobedient because he is influenced by a half-sibling who has bad habits.’’ Only three mothers commented on the possibility of parental influence on smartness in school; one attributed it to extra teaching at home, another to the way the child was brought up. A third noted that if parents were too strict, children did not do well in school. Following the findings of the early interviews about parental beliefs, in 1973 when we administered the forced-choice questionnaire on the attributes that mothers desired in the children, we asked them to judge whether the eight character traits were born into a child or acquired. Table 5.6 presents the responses. It can be seen that obedience, respectfulness, and curiosity were considered most open to influence; good-heartedness, boldness, and confidence the least. Seventy-one percent of the mothers thought that children were born clever. Of the traits judged to be good for learning, only curiosity was considered amenable to training by a substantial number (61%) of the mothers. Allowing children to ask questions and exposing them to new experiences were mentioned by the mothers as prerequisites for the

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Table 5.6: Mothers’ Judgments of the Origin of Children’s Character Traits Where does this trait come from? Born with (%) Good-hearted

Acquired (%)

Not sure or both (%)




Generous





Confident







Brave





Clever




Curious









Respectful









Obedient












development of this characteristic. Being brave, not being shy or not fearing to speak up in school, and being confident were judged by most mothers to be innate characteristics. Talking to mothers underscored the findings and their implications. Parents felt that they could train children to be successful farmers by teaching them to work hard. The mothers trained the children by working with them, demonstrating how to use a hoe, which plant was a weed, which was an edible crop. A mother demonstrated how to carry, hold, feed, and play with a baby (Whiting, 1983; Whiting & Edwards, 1988). Training was done in context, with observation of the model’s behavior probably more important than verbal instruction, a technique Rogoff (1990, 2003) labeled guided participation (also see Harkness & Super, 1982; Munroe, Munroe, & Shimmin, 1984; Weisner, 1979). Children also modeled the behavior of admired older siblings, whose age gave them the right to dominate. Children were important contributors to the household economy and understood that the tasks requested were necessary to the well-being of the family (Whiting & Edwards,

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering 1988). Since tasks were assigned according to the mother’s assessment of cognitive and physical skills, children were pleased to be assigned the chores their older siblings were performing. When mothers assigned important tasks, they took seriously the obedience of their children; they punished failure on the part of the child to carry out tasks that were important for the welfare of the family. If a mother was to trust a child to care for a younger sibling, she had to be confident that the child would obey the rules for appropriate behavior and be responsible in the mother’s absence. She was severe in punishing negligence. A mother who left a child to tend the fire under the pot of maize and beans while she went to the garden would chastise the child severely if he or she disobeyed and the food was not properly prepared for the family meal. One of our apprentices remembered having to eat a large bowl of boiled maize flour that, due to her negligence, had lumps in it. From as early as six years of age, children were expected to perform certain tasks in the absence of their mother or other adults, and this experience taught them self-reliance and responsibility as well as afforded them an opportunity to practice adult skills (Whiting, 1983; Whiting & Edwards, 1988). In spite of some of their statements, there was evidence that mothers did recognize the importance of their behavior in training their children in certain domains. When we interviewed mothers about gender differences in the behavior of their children, it became clear that even those mothers who had stated that a child was created obedient or disobedient believed that modeling maternal behavior and working along with the child played a role in determining how obedient a child would be. Nine of the 15 mothers we interviewed stated that girls were more obedient than boys (6 stated that there was no gender difference in the trait). Twelve of the 15 mothers said that girls were easier to train than boys. As the following statements reveal, mothers ascribed the gender difference to modeling and practicing the female role: ‘‘Girls are more obedient than boys because they are always around the mother.’’ ‘‘They go down to the river and draw water and must cook and sweep the house.’’ ‘‘Most of what the girl does is what the mother does.’’ ‘‘Boys’ interests are not similar to the kind of work the mother knows.’’ ‘‘Girls have an interest in what the mother teaches while most boys

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering don’t.’’ ‘‘Girls listen to their mothers; boys belittle their mothers.’’ As one mother stated, ‘‘Boys are more disobedient and disrespectful because they spend less time with the mother and understand her less, are less sympathetic.’’ It seemed clear that mothers acted as if they believed they could teach a child to be respectful. A mother started teaching a child from the youngest age how to interact with elders. She taught a child how to identify kin and to greet them and to behave courteously and dutifully in their presence. A respectful child who did not antagonize relatives was told that he or she would be able to count on them for help and support, for example, for help in paying school fees, in finding employment, or in the case of a male child, in securing funds to pay for a bride (Kenyatta, 1962). In sum, our findings indicated that mothers had less confidence that they could influence the characteristics that make a child do well in the school than they did in their ability to influence traditional characteristics. Overall, however, the more modern mothers ranked higher in their estimate of their ability to influence the development of their children than did the more traditional mothers. Reviewing the forcedchoice questions, two-thirds of the mothers who were above the mean in their judgment that the eight character traits were acquired rather than innate were also above the mean on the modernity factor score. In spite of the mothers’ reported fatalism, it was our impression that the majority of them were trying to help their children do well in school. Parents in some families tried to help with homework, or they encouraged older siblings to help younger ones. They tried to arrange the house so that there was an area where homework could be done. Fathers and older brothers especially spent time supervising evening study. However, parents with little education, living in crowded quarters, found it difficult to furnish this help. Except for reporting a belief that children should be allowed to ask more questions, there was little in the mothers’ reports that indicated changes in their behavior to their children to encourage the development of traits considered good for success in school. To explore the possibility that modern mothers had in fact changed, we turned to an analysis of our observations of their interaction with their children.

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering Mothers’ Behavior in Interaction with Their Children For our study of patterns of social interaction (Whiting, 1983; Whiting & Edwards, 1988), we had observed and recorded the social behavior of mothers and children as they interacted in the home setting. We looked at the data to see whether the more modern mothers had different styles of interacting with their children. What type of behavior might one expect would distinguish the behavior of these mothers who had more schooling and ranked higher on our modernity scale? The cross-cultural studies by LeVine and colleagues reported that mothers with more schooling were more responsive to the initiation of infants and toddlers, spoke more frequently with their children, and granted them a claim on their visual and verbal attention (Levine, 1980, 1987; LeVine et al. 1987). Snow et al. (1991) studied American children’s literacy and presented evidence that positive parental involvement with children in the home setting was related to the children’s performance on some of their tests of literacy skills. We began our analysis by exploring these paradigms, hypothesizing that mothers with a more modern orientation would spend more time interacting with their children. Based on our observational data, we computed the rate of interaction of the modern and traditional mothers with their children. We summed the frequency of nine types of behavior that accounted for over 90% of the social acts of mothers to children: (l) nurturant acts in which the mother offered help or material goods; (2) emotional nurturance in which the mother offered emotional support, attention, or praise; (3) commands or requests in which the mother assigned household, gardening, or animal-care chores; (4) commands or requests in which the mother assigned the care of an infant or younger sibling to the child; (5) commands or requests concerning appropriate cleanliness, manners, and other behavior considered proper; (6) reprimanding or scolding the child; (7) the giving or exchanging of information; (8) sociable initiations and responses; and (9) dominance in which the mother attempted to change the child’s behavior for egoistic reasons (for example, the mother wished not to be interrupted and told the children to go outside). (For more information on methodology, see Whiting & Edwards, 1988; Whiting, Edwards, & de Guzman, 2003).

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering For the present analysis, we selected the age group (four-to-five-yearolds) that had been observed to interact with mothers most frequently: our sample contained 12 girls and 12 boys. The girls had been observed interacting with their mothers for an average of 82 minutes and the boys an average of 87 minutes, but the range of individual variation was great because it was difficult for the observers to find some of the mothers who worked away from their homesteads. The range of interaction time for girls and mothers was from 30 to 180 minutes, for boys from 45 to 135 minutes. We computed the rate of interaction of girls and boys with mothers by dividing the total number of observed behaviors (all nine types) by the number of minutes that the mother and child were together in the same interactional space (the area in which the two people could hear and see each other). Mothers’ modernity factor scores were not correlated with these rates of interaction, suggesting that more and less modern mothers interacted with their children at similar levels, on average. In an earlier analysis of maternal behavior, we had found that an average of 49% of mothers’ interaction with four-to-five-year-old girls and 46% of their interaction with four-to-five-year-old boys were coded as training commands, including the assignment of chores, commands concerning etiquette, and reprimands (Whiting & Edwards, 1988, p. 123). As noted earlier, mothers began to train children at an early age to become members of the family workforce. Mothers reported that they began to assign chores when the children were as young as three to four years old, depending on their judgment of the child’s maturity. Because such a high percentage of the interaction between mothers and children was accounted for by these prosocial commands, we decided to test the hypothesis that mothers who were more modern would have a different pattern of interaction with their children than would traditional mothers. Our prediction that more modern mothers would spend comparatively less time assigning chores and more time interacting in other ways was upheld. Mothers’ modernity factor scores were negatively related to their rates of assigning housework and gardening chores for four-to-five-year-old girls and boys. The mothers who had lower modernity factor scores were observed to com-

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering mand their children to perform chores more frequently per minute of observation. The correlation was significant for the girls (r = .607, p < .05) but not significant for the boys (r = .329). Next we looked for an increase in the rate of other maternal behaviors that might indicate the type of interaction that has been reported in American studies of home background variables that predict achievement in school. We explored a measure of positive mother-child interaction suggested by Snow et al.’s (1991) finding of the effect of positive emotional atmosphere in the home setting. Early research by Baldwin (1949) had identified the positive relation of parental warmth and affection to children’s scores on intelligence tests in the preschool years. Studies using tests of achievement reported that parents who praised their children or communicated their positive feelings about a child’s success had more successful children (McClelland, 1961; Rosen & D’Andrade, 1959). We had a score that could be considered relevant to these variables. Of the two types of nurturance that we had coded, one included giving emotional support, attention, or praise. In addition to the studies in the United States cited previously, we had evidence from a cross-cultural study that suggested emotional nurturance might be related to measures of modernity. In a comparative study of maternal behavior in six cultures, mothers in the more complex societies reported and were observed using this type of behavior more frequently than mothers in the simpler societies (Minturn & Lambert, 1964; Whiting & Whiting, 1975), suggesting that more modern Ngecha mothers would also show higher rates of emotionally nurturant behavior. Exploring the paradigm suggested by these studies, we correlated mothers’ modernity factor scores with the proportion of their social acts coded as emotionally nurturant. The findings were in the predicted positive direction for the girls (r =.560, p = n.s.) but in the opposite direction for the boys (r = −.329, p = n.s.).Thus the more modern mothers were giving their daughters more emotional support and praising them more frequently than were the more traditional mothers. We looked at two measures in addition to emotional support and praise that might be considered indices of positive affect or friendliness in mother-child interaction: the behavior coded as the exchange of in-

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering formation between mother and child and the behavior coded as friendly sociability. Again the findings were different for girls versus boys. The more modern mothers exchanged information with their girls at a significantly greater rate than did the more traditional mothers (r =.645, p < .05), while the correlation was negative but not statistically significant for the boys. Furthermore, mothers’ modernity factor scores were negatively related to mothers’ sociability with the boys (at close to the p < .05 level) but, though positive, showed no relation for the girls. A summary score combining the three types of behavior (giving emotional support/praise, sociability, and exchanging information) was created and correlated with mothers’ modernity factor scores. The correlations were statistically significant at the p < .01 level for the girls, negative for the boys (r = −.224, p = n.s.). In sum, if we interpret this score as a measure of friendliness, the more modern mothers interacted with their daughters more positively than did the more traditional mothers, but there was no difference in the rate of friendly interaction of more versus less modern mothers with their sons. These findings suggest that the friendly interaction pattern of the Ngecha mothers may have been an asset in preparing girls for schooling. A further indication that the interaction of more modern mothers was less friendly with boys than with girls was suggested by the positive correlation between the mothers’ modernity factor scores and their rates of attempting to dominate their four-to-five-year-old sons (r = .632, p < .05). The findings seemed to corroborate the mothers’ statements reported earlier that boys were harder to train than girls. The mothers in 1968 as well as traditionally had more difficulty controlling their sons (Edwards & Whiting, 1980). Beginning around seven years of age, boys were not assigned as many chores considered to be women’s work and hence had more free time. At the time of our study, there were few tasks that boys could perform that were in the domain of men (Whiting & Edwards, 1988, pp. 125–128). The increased absence of the men that had resulted from their employment in the modern sector appeared to have decreased the mothers’ ability to control the behavior of their sons beginning as early as four to five years of age. The more modern mothers’ style of interacting with their sons was more authoritarian, a type of behavior that Baumrind (1971) finds to be negatively correlated with children’s measured intelligence.

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering Conclusion This study found Ngecha mothers to be changing their value priorities in raising their children. They still valued the traits describing positive character: obedience and respect for elders, generosity, and goodheartedness. However, the mothers who ranked higher on modernity (mothers who had been to school for more years, had husbands with more years of schooling, lived in houses that had radios in 1968, and had the linguistic skills necessary for listening to broadcasts) were more attuned to the new lifestyles developing in Kenya. They recognized that cleverness, confidence, inquisitiveness, and bravery or boldness were required for success in school and for earning the school certificates that were necessary for employment in the modern sector or for entrance into the university. In a forced-choice questionnaire, they gave these new characteristics a higher priority than they did the characteristics traditionally valued for children. These mothers were also changing their patterns of interaction with their children, allowing their children to initiate interaction with adults and ask questions. Such self-confidence, cleverness, and inquisitiveness were not part of the roster of traditional descriptions of a good child. It was the mothers with more years of schooling who most valued these selforiented traits, probably reflecting the behaviors that they had found helped them and were encouraged in the school setting. There was evidence, however, of ambivalence. Being clever was important for success in school, but the mothers noted that clever children were often too sharp for their own good; confident children could be overconfident. The meaning of being brave in the school setting could be interpreted as a willingness to try new things and learn new social and cognitive behaviors. It took courage on the part of both mothers and children to change traditional behaviors. Our Ngecha mothers distinguished between those character traits they thought could be acquired and those they thought were present at birth. Most mothers reported that they felt confident that they could teach children good work habits, industriousness, obedience, and respect for adults. In contrast, they thought that other qualities were innate in children: cleverness, bravery, generosity, and good-heartedness.

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering Our former apprentices, now colleagues and mothers with children, have read this report and made clear that the traditionally approved social traits were still on their list of priorities. Whether these women will be able to instill these values when they no longer live in lineage communities, however, remains to be seen. Kenyatta (1962) predicted the increase of selfishness with modernity; the university students recognized the dilemmas that economic change has created. Changes in lifestyle continue, and if the hypothesis presented in this essay is correct, we can expect further changes in the priority of values hoped for in children, in the behavior of mothers in their teaching roles with children, and in the mothers’ beliefs about their ability to influence the development of their children.

Editors’ Postscript In 1973 John Whiting, Thomas Landauer, and Lynn Streeter collected cognitive, physical, and demographic data on over 400 children aged four to eight years old in Ngecha. For most of the children, formally recorded birth dates were available from church, county, or clinic records or from parental evidence. Some of the children attended primary school, mostly Standards 1 and 2. The remaining children in the sample were divided between those who were attending nursery school and those who were not. The testers were five native-speaking Gikuyu females who had completed at least secondary school. Streeter, Landauer, and Whiting’s (1975) unpublished manuscript reports on a strong relationship between the children’s cognitive development scores, rapid school progress, and family modernization. The data shed important light on the issues discussed in this chapter because they suggest that the more modern mothers not only had different values and interacted differently with their children, but also they had children whose intellectual development and school attainment were surging ahead of children from the less modern families. To assess intellectual development, the researchers selected tests that were sensitive in the four-to-eight-year-old range, during which the ‘‘age five-to-seven shift’’ in cognitive skills occurs (Sameroff & Haith, 1996; White, 1965). In this age range, children develop cogni-

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering tively very rapidly. If there are antecedent variables affecting cognitive development, it should be possible to observe their effects comparatively easily during this period. The tests selected were either ones that had previously been shown to be highly sensitive within this age range or were tests we had reason to believe from pretest results would be discriminative in this age range. The researchers attempted to select subtests that had previously been used successfully in non-Western cultures, were easily administered, or had given sensible results. They constructed a cognitive test battery of 17 subtests. The test battery was administered in the Gikuyu language by female assistants who were undergraduate students at the University of Nairobi. The test battery had a highly unified structure and all the subtests were highly intercorrelated, so that a factor analysis yielded only one strong factor. An overall cognitive development index was then devised by relating the test scores to age. When this was done, 4 subtests were identified that, properly weighted, yielded a prediction of chronological age that was virtually as good as that of the complete battery, with an R square of .49. The four tests included, first, an animal-naming test, where the child was asked to name as many different animals as he or she could in one minute. All animals were scored as correct, that is, fish, birds, and insects were scored as animals. If the protocol included both a generic name and a species (for example, ‘‘bird’’ and ‘‘crow’’), both items were scored as correct. This task was highly linear with chronological age, and the average Ngecha child named 1.33 animals for every additional year of age. Second, the index included a body parts identification test.The tester told the child the name of a body part, and the child was required to point to that part of the child’s own body, for example, ‘‘brain’’ or ‘‘stomach.’’ From pretest results using 20 items, 10 body parts were selected: neck, armpit, forehead, fingers, shin, chest, shoulders, elbow, tongue, and nails. The score was the total number of recognized body parts. Third, the index included an auditory integration test, where common two- and three-syllable words were presented syllable by syllable with a delay of either one or three seconds between each syllable, for example, ‘‘ra-di-o.’’ The child’s task was to supply the word using a

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering typical speaking rate. Before the test trials, the tester used the child’s name as a practice item. If the child still did not appear to understand the task, other items were used. To achieve an accurate and constant presentation rate, syllables with the appropriate delay interval were recorded on a cassette tape recorder. Items were recorded by a native speaker, using a stopwatch to measure the delay between syllables. The child was familiarized with the tape recorder and told that the machine talked like a person but very slowly. The child was to listen carefully, so as to be able to tell the tester what word the machine had said. There were two sets of six words—two each with two, three, and four syllables. One set was used in the one-second delay condition and the other in the three-second delay condition. The one-second delay condition always preceded the three-second delay condition. All words were common concrete nouns in Gikuyu, such as ‘‘cow’’ and ‘‘potatoes,’’ or common verbs, such as ‘‘run.’’ Multisyllabic words were never compounds or other words in which the syllables themselves were words. There were two scores: the total number correct in each of the two delay conditions. Fourth, the index included part of the embedded figures test, which used a series of pictures, each of which depicted a coherent, meaningful scene or object. Within each picture was an embedded triangle. Embedded figures tap the child’s ability to distinguish figure from ground. The child had to find and point out the triangle. For example, one picture showed a boy wearing a triangular kerchief around his neck. The child was given a cardboard replica of the triangle and asked to find the hidden triangle and place the cardboard triangle over the triangle in the picture. One practice picture and 10 test pictures were used. The score was the number of triangles correctly located. The particular adaptation of the embedded figures test was taken from the one used by Klein et al. (1977) in Guatemala. All four tasks were quite linear with age for the Ngecha sample. From scores on the subtests and weights derived from a step-wise multiple regression, an age-adjusted cognitive development quotient (dq) was calculated for each child. The dq had measurement properties similar to intelligence quotient (iq) scores, that is, an age independent mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Its validity criterion was its corre-

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering lation with chronological age, but note that it reflected advancing intellectual development relative to normal development in Ngecha (not another standard population elsewhere), and thus it had cultural validity. Next, the dq’s were related to a number of modernization variables for children on whom different kinds of data were available. The independent variables can be divided into three categories: those estimating education of the family, family wealth, and family structure. Education measures included: child’s schooling (none, nursery school, primary school); mother’s education (years of schooling); and father’s education (years of schooling). Wealth measures included the following: a categorization of father’s occupation; a house modernization score based on house shape (round or rectangular), roof (tile or mudand-wattle), and house floor (cement or dirt); a mass media score (radio, books, magazines, and so forth); and income from cash crops. Family structure variables included: age of father (in decades); age of mother (in decades); number of wives in the household; father present or absent; number of siblings; and number of younger siblings. First, the modernization-education variables showed their influence. The child’s own education correlated r = .20 with dq, p < .001 (n = 294). Mother’s education correlated r = .17, p < .001 (n = 342). Father’s education correlated r = .15, p < .01 (n = 335). Next, the modernizationwealth variables showed their influence. Mass media was correlated r = .248 with dq, p < .001 (n = 182), as was cash crop income r =.162, p < .05 (n = 187). Finally, modernization-family structure was also relevant. The number of father’s wives correlated r = −.099, p < .05 (n = 376). Streeter et al. (1975) concluded that Ngecha families with more education, more exposure to outside information, and more cash income were found in 1973 to have children with higher levels of intellectual development.

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering and D. M. Brodzinsky (Eds.), Thinking about the family: Views of parents and children (pp. 3–34). Hillside nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Baldwin, A. L. (1949). The effect of home environment on nursery school behavior. Child Development, 20, 49–62. Baumrind, D. (1971). Current patterns of parental authority. Developmental Psychology Monographs, 4(1), 1–103. Boggs, B. S. (1972). The meaning of questions and narratives to Hawaiian Children. In C. Cazden et al. (Eds.), Functions of language in the classroom. Anthropology and Education Series (pp. 299–327). New York: Teachers College Press. Cohn, A. (1969). The behavior of children in nursery school. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University, Nairobi; also hraf, New Haven ct. Edwards, C. P. (1975). Societal complexity and moral development: A Kenyan study. Ethos, 3(4), 505–527. Edwards, C. P. (1985). Rationality, culture, and the construction of ‘‘ethical discourse’’: A comparative perspective. Ethos, 13(4), 318–339. Edwards, C. P. (1997). Morality and change: Family unity and paternal authority among Kipsigis and Abaluyia elders and students. In T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, & P. L. Kilbride (Eds.), African families and the crisis of social change (pp. 45–85). Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Edwards, C. P., & Whiting, B. B. (1980). Differential socialization of girls and boys in light of cross-cultural research. In C. Super and S. Harkness (Eds.), Anthropological perspectives on child development (pp. 44–58). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Fjellman, J. (1971). The myth of primitive mentality: A study of semantic acquisition and modes of categorization in Akamba children of South Central Kenya. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University. Goodnow, J. J. (1984). Parents’ ideas about parenting and development. In A. L. Brown & B. Rogoff (Eds.), Advances in developmental psychology, 3 (pp. 193–242). Hillsdale nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Goody, E. (1978). Toward a theory of questions. In E. Goody (Ed), Questions and politeness. Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, 8, 17–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harkness, S., & Super, C. M. (1982). Why African children are so hard to test. In L. L. Adler (Ed.), Cross-cultural research at issue (pp. 145–152). New York: Academic Press. Harkness, S., & Super, C. M. (1995). Culture and parenting. In M. Bornstein

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Concepts of Good Child and Good Mothering (Ed.), Handbook of parenting, vol. 2, Biology and ecology of parenting (pp. 211– 234). Mahwah nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kenyatta, J. (1962) (1938). Facing Mount Kenya: The tribal life of the Gikyuyu. New York: Vintage. Klein, R., Irwin, M., Engle, P., & Yarbrough, C. (1977). Malnutrition and mental development in rural Guatemala. In N. Warren (Ed.), Studies in crosscultural psychology (pp. 91–119). New York: Academic Press. Leakey, L. S. B. (1977). The Southern Kikuyu before 1903. 3 vols. London: Academic Press. LeVine, R. A. (1974). Parental goals: A cross-cultural view. Teachers College Record, 76(2), 226–239. LeVine, R. A. (1980) Influences of women’s schooling on maternal behavior in the Third World. Comparative Educational Review, June, pp. 78–105. LeVine, R. A. (1987). Women’s schooling: Patterns of fertility and child survival. Educational Researcher, December, pp. 21–27. LeVine, R. A. (1988). Human parental care: Universal goals, cultural strategies, individual behavior. In R. A. Levine, P. M. Miller, & M. M. West (Eds.), Parental behavior in diverse societies (pp. 3–11). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. LeVine, R. A., LeVine, S., Richman, A., & Sunderland Correa, C. (1987). Schooling and maternal behavior in a Mexican city: The effect on fertility and child survival. Population Council, No. 16, pp. 1–9. McClelland, D. C. (1961). The achieving society. New York: Van Nostrand. Minturn, L., & Lambert, W. W. (1964). Mothers of six cultures: Antecedents of child rearing. New York: John Wiley. Munroe, R. H., Munroe, R. L., & Shimmin, H. S. (1984). Children’s work in four cultures: Determinants and consequences. American Anthropologist, 86, 369–379. Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosen, B. C., & D’Andrade, R. (1959). The psychosocial origins of achievement motivation. Sociometry, 22, 185–218. Sameroff, A. J., & Haith, M. M. (Eds.) (1996). The five to seven year shift: The age of reason and responsibility. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Snow, C. E., Barnes, W. S., Chandler, J., Goodmand, I. F., & Hemphill, L. (1991). Unfulfilled expectations: Home and school influences on literacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Streeter, L., Landauer, T., & Whiting, J. W. M. (1975). Factors related to cogni-

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6

The Teaching of Values Old and New Ciarunji Chesaina

Editors’ Note: Chapter 5 showed how maternal concepts about praiseworthy attributes of ‘‘good’’ children were under pressure in Ngecha. Parents were coming to realize that the qualities needed for success in school and the market economy were different from those desirable for traditional homestead life. This chapter is by Ciarunji Chesaina, now a professor of literature at the University of Nairobi and once a field observer for the project as a secondary student. In 1969–1970 she collected 22 folktales from children aged 6–12 years old. The essay was written while she was a postgraduate student at Harvard University and had studied with David McClelland, who was researching the use of folktales and children’s texts as sources of information about cultural levels of achievement motivation. The scholarly value of this chapter is enhanced by the fact that Chesaina drew from her extensive, multiyear experience as a household child observer for the Child Development Research Unit in Ngecha to guide her selection of elements of folklore to discuss. She has chosen to highlight those proverbs and folktales that adults used with children because they were most easily understandable. Thus she provides a scholar’s and cultural insider’s selection and interpretation of a segment of the huge corpus of Gikuyu folklore, and she focuses on the meaning of the stories and proverbs from the point of view of parental intent. In revising this chapter, we added cross-references to other folklore texts to allow readers to learn about different versions of the stories and proverbs. We also added references to Chesaina’s later works and, where appropriate, references to recent scholarship on folklore that underscore points made by Chesaina in this chapter.

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The Teaching of Values Old and New Introduction One main purpose of education for children anywhere, at any point in time, is to prepare them to cope with the society in which they live. In modern Kenya, when people talk about education, they seem always to be referring to formal education, the Western type of schooling introduced into Kenya by Europeans. An older person who has not gone through such schooling but is well versed in traditional culture is regarded nowadays as ‘‘uneducated.’’ These condescending attitudes toward traditional education arise from ignorance about its special value. People often forget the richness of the traditional socialization practices, which, before and even after the coming of Europeans, served the African people for generations. As in many other African societies, Gikuyu parents educated their children first informally at home, where they taught basic values and respect, and then formally during the initiation ceremonies, where they imparted to adolescents what society expected of them as mature adults (Spindler, 1987). The point of this chapter is not to make comparative value judgments about the older versus newer styles of moral education but instead to emphasize their respective strengths and suggest that greater continuity between old and new could have been fostered, without the new methods and messages simply supplanting the old ones as appeared to be the implicit curriculum of the school. Traditional Gikuyu stories and proverbs should have and could have continued to play a prominent role in the education of young people even after schooling became a major force in their lives. Instead, the processes of cultural transmission to which the Ngecha children were being exposed in 1968–1973 involved a high degree of discontinuity between home and school that likely was producing conflict and dislocation along with potentially positive outcomes.

Teaching in the Traditional Style Literature is an art and it is distinguished from other art forms (for example, sculpture) by the fact that it utilizes language as a medium for artistic and imaginative expression. Like written literature, oral literature depends on artistic or imaginative use of language. However, by

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The Teaching of Values Old and New virtue of its verbal expression in its authentic form, oral literature has certain stylistic aspects which are peculiar to it. Each genre of oral literature has its own special characteristics just as each piece will have aspects which it does not share with other material of the same genre. (Chesaina, 1991, p. 8)

The traditional pattern of education depended heavily on the use of songs, proverbs, and stories. Kabira and Mutahi (1988) have claimed that Gikuyu folklore has five main genres: ng’ano (narratives), nyimbo (songs/dances), marabeta (poetry), thimo (proverbs), and ndai (riddles). Songs were sung for many purposes, sometimes to recount and preserve memory of a historical event, sometimes to provide rhythm for work, and sometimes as the background for dance and recreation. There were special songs for particular age and gender groups from childhood through old age sung at ceremonials or performances such as dances, marriage ceremonies, and reception of newborns (Kabira & Mutahi, 1988). Proverbs are sayings or metaphorical statements that have a point or lesson. They were used to warn, advise, inform, and clarify. They also had many contexts for use and could be heard in conversations between adults, during the proceedings of legal cases, and in discussions with children. It was not unusual for an adult to use a proverb when reprimanding or addressing a child. Since interpreting a proverb required some mature understanding, proverbs were mostly used with children older than about 10 years of age. Stories include all sorts of oral narratives, including those referred to as myths and legends as well as folktales and fables (Finnegan, 1970; Lindfors, 1977; Okpewho, 1992). The Gikuyu had a very rich tradition of folklore (Kabira & Mutahi, 1988; Gecau, 1970; Mwangi, 1997). Stories were told in the evenings after work while waiting for the evening meal or afterward before going to bed (Gecau, 1970). Stories for young children might be shorter and have more straightforward plots than stories intended for adults and adolescents. Both adults and children participated in storytelling sessions, but often children were the majority in the audience. They would gather in the hut of their mother, grandmother, or neighbor. An adult would lead the session, but everyone was free to take turns in the actual recounting of stories. Although lessons were imparted through the stories, their main purpose was

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The Teaching of Values Old and New recreational, not educational. In fact, people described the storytelling sessions as kunyihia hwai (literally, to make the evening shorter, that is, to pass time in the evening). Then, outside the storytelling, adults would reinforce the educational aspect and underlying messages. They might reprimand greedy and selfish children by comparing them to the hyena, using the technique of shaming that was a common strategy of Gikuyu socialization. For example, a mother might say, ‘‘Come everyone! Come and see that hyena we talked about.’’ Only proverbs and stories will be analyzed in detail here, as they were the major types of folklore used in the transmission of values, and the focus will be on the teaching of children aged about 9 to 14 years old (Standards 4–6 of primary school).

Proverbs Proverbs can be distinguished from ordinary forms of speech by their great use of poetic language. They serve as a metaphorical ‘‘clothes hangers’’ on which to hang concepts (Schwartz & Power, 2000); they embody the wisdom as well as the values of a society, which they convey in succinct, memorable form. Proverbs have been called the ‘‘quintessence of Kikuyu eloquence’’ conveying the essence of the moral code behind the tribal law (Barra, 1960, preface). ‘‘In a very clear way, these proverbs pointed to basic philosophy—to metaphysics, to epistemology and to the ethics of the Gikuyu people, as well as to applied philosophies such as that of education, of religion, of society, and to political philosophy’’ (Wanjohi, 1997, preface). Gikuyu proverbs are endless in number and a living art, hence never static. They have been collected by a number of scholars. Barra’s (1969) collection contains 1,000 Gikuyu proverbs originally collected by the Italian Fathers of the Consolata Society at the Catholic mission in Limuru and by teachers there through a school competition launched by the mission’s monthly magazine. The volume by Kabira and Mutahi (1988) considers proverbs from the perspective of oral literature. Wanjohi’s (1997) collection describes how they reflect elements of philosophy. This discussion focuses on their educational function. Many of the Gikuyu proverbs used by adults in their conversations

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The Teaching of Values Old and New were not very easily understood by children, so only those that children were expected to interpret will be discussed in this chapter. Developmental and psycholinguistic theory and research suggest that most children by the age of nine years can understand and use proverbial language (Nippold, Martin, & Erskinne, 1988; Schwartz & Power, 2000). In this essay, proverbs have been selected based on customary practice and parental intent: proverbs and stories commonly used with children to teach moral values. The proverbs used most often with children conveyed messages about certain kinds of behavior that were expected and valued in traditional society and which parents believed required adult socialization support to develop well, namely respect, helpfulness, sharing, proper reserve, responsibility, hard work, carefulness, and caution (confer Opoku, 1975). Many proverbs reinforced the value of respect for elders. The Gikuyu regarded elders as the guardians of the people’s wisdom, and children were taught from very early in life to respect and revere them. Young people who showed disrespect were severely punished. Elders, whether male or female, had the right to reprimand or advise any young person in the community, and they used proverbs to back up their authority. For example, they might ask a child who was not their own to perform an errand by saying, ‘‘Mukuru niatumagwo no kurumwo atarumagwo’’ (You can send an elder, but you cannot abuse him). In using this seeming contradiction (calling the child an ‘‘elder’’), the older person was flattering or charming the child into doing the task. However, they were also using the proverb so that they could teach the child the general lesson that one should respect one’s elders. Another proverb used when asking children to perform errands was kahiga kanini niko gaikagio mwere-ini (it is the small stone that we use for scaring birds from the millet). The proverb implies a comparison between big stones (adults) and small ones (children). Small stones can be better for scaring birds because they are swift (they reach the birds quickly) and light (they don’t destroy the millet). This proverb was another way of charming a child into being helpful, but it further pointed out a lesson about the importance of being useful to others. The Gikuyu lived in close, face-to-face communities, and therefore it was important to teach children what was expected of them as group

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The Teaching of Values Old and New members. Any adult, even one who was a stranger, could ask a child to give him or her a piece of something the child was eating. The child who responded with reluctance or selfishness but who was old enough to understand a proverb might then be told, ‘‘Muria wiki akuaga o wiki’’ (Whoever eats alone also dies alone).1 This proverb depended on another common moral emotion, fear (of death). Like shaming, fear was used very frequently in child rearing among the Gikuyu. The fear of death imparted by this proverb warned children against selfishness. Although the society encouraged sharing and the sense of belonging with the wider Gikuyu community, some special feelings were reserved for smaller social units, the lineage (mbari ), and the family. The proverb kaguti ka mucii gatihakagwo ageni (the oilskin of the home is not for rubbing into the skin of strangers) was a complex proverb, too complex for the ages dealt with here. The proverb is saying, in essence, that although one might extend hospitality or social intercourse to outsiders, there are secrets and even property that should be reserved specifically for the relevant social unit, whether the ethnic group as a whole, the clan, the mbari, or just the household. A simpler proverb with a similar meaning but more understandable to children was cia mucii ti como (home affairs are not for the public).2 This might be used, for example, when a son has gone around telling others that his father gave his mother a beating. The Gikuyu did not believe in using praise in socializing their children. When children showed high levels of responsibility, obedience, and hard work, other parents would comment enviously about their good qualities. But their own parents would never say to them, ‘‘Good boy!’’ or ‘‘Good girl!’’ the way people do today. Instead, the parents would show them indirectly how pleased they were. This approach to child rearing was encapsulated in the proverb kuganwo ni kuura (praise leads to ruin).3 This proverb may not have been told to the children, but they felt its effects and learned it as they grew older. Instead of praising children, the Gikuyu encouraged them. Two encouraging proverbs children were told were kunoga nokuo kunogoka (fatigue leads to rest) and mageria nomo mahoti (trials lead to success).4 For example, when children had just completed a very strenuous chore and complained to their mothers that they were very tired, their mothers

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The Teaching of Values Old and New might reply, ‘‘And fatigue leads to rest.’’ The Gikuyu felt that this was a more effective way of teaching children perseverance rather than directly acknowledging the fatigue or praising them for the work accomplished. Similarly, when children wanted to give up on a task, they were enjoined to continue trying harder, because ‘‘trials lead to success.’’ In addition to encouragement, the Gikuyu provided children with corrective criticism and advice. The proverb kaba ndaya ikinyia (it is better to take a long but sure road) was used to reprimand children whose hasty actions had led to failure.5 An even more common saying was ihenya inene rriunaga gikwa ihatha (too much haste breaks the yam tuber).6 This proverb, slightly more complex than the one about the road, depends on knowledge about yams, an important droughtresistant source of food. Yam tubers are delicate and require great care when dug out; otherwise they will break, leaving big pieces to rot in the ground. Therefore the proverb suggests that reaping good results requires great care, however slow the process. Adults also used proverbs to teach children about consequences that might arise from thoughtlessness. Murio niwiriagira (sweetness eats for itself ) provided counsel about enjoying oneself without considering the consequences.7 This proverb might be used to reprimand children when they hurt themselves playing with dangerous objects that they had been warned against. Parents might tell them to stop crying and comment sarcastically that the pain the children were experiencing was ‘‘sweetness eating for itself.’’ The saying implied that the children had gotten their enjoyment, or sweetness, from the object that had hurt them, and now it was the object’s turn to have its share. The entire Gikuyu society valued qualities of obedience—obedience of children to their elders and wives to their husbands. One common proverb that conveyed the general attitude about disobedience was murega agiathwo ndaregaga agikunjwo (whoever refuses to be ordered can never resist [survive] when being forced).8 Using this proverb was a way of sneering at those who refused orders or advice, reminding them that they were mortal just like everybody else. The proverb carried the implication that people might try to resist obeying, but they could not resist the fatal consequences of their disobedience, when it was too late anyway. People should be obedient and open to other people’s suggestions and advice if they wanted to avoid bad or fatal consequences.

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The Teaching of Values Old and New Finally, adults warned children to guard against bad influences within the community. Although the Gikuyu were members of a wider society, everyone had opinions about others and tended to regard certain clans, mbari, families, or individuals as bad elements who could lead their own children in the wrong direction. Parents warned children against families rumored to contain witches or thieves, or they might steer their children away from other children in the neighborhood thought to be hardcore. Muceere na Mukundu (whoever associates himself with a bad person becomes bad just like him) was the proverb used to teach children about associating with bad influences.9 Its literal meaning had to do with a certain tree that grows in damp places and near rivers, and it conveyed the idea that when a person spends too much time around something (or someone) with peculiar habits, he or she might start becoming like that, too.

Stories Stories were another important source of moral messages to Gikuyu children. Most stories were not as pointed in their instructional purpose as were proverbs. Rather, they conveyed ideas in a way that required listeners to do their own thinking and construction of reality. While some stories had a moral lesson stated at the end, the meaning of most stories was left open to the listener’s interpretation. Most of the tales had two or more morals, and the narrator could emphasize a particular one by his or her manner of telling the story (Gecau, 1970, p. 9). For older children, however, the morals were not too difficult to discern, if they used two guiding principles for interpretation. The first principle was to attend to the fate of the central character(s) in the story, and the second was to attend to the types of characters who played particular roles. Storytelling was a performance art and often took place in the evening between women and children in the quiet of the homesteads; presumably, much of the moral message lay in the teller’s gestures, voice, and word choice. Like proverbs, Gikuyu stories were a part of living folklore and thus existed in multiple versions at the same time as people passed them around and introduced creative variation. Two collections are by Gecau (1970) and Kabira and Mutahi (1988).

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This boy, like others in Ngecha, helps care for his family’s livestock. Children’s familiarity with domestic and wild animals helped them appreciate the personalities of the animal characters in Gikuyu folktales. (Frances Cox)

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The Teaching of Values Old and New What fate befell characters was clearly an important matter. If a character engaged in behavior that led him or her into meeting a bad end, then obviously the point of the story was that listeners should not follow that kind of behavior. As an example, consider the fate of the louse in this old traditional tale, ‘‘The Wasp and the Louse’’: One day, the wasp and the louse decided to attend a dance together. So they started preparing themselves, smearing oil on their bodies and putting on their best garments and ornaments. As usual with friends dressing together, these two checked each other’s smartness and told each other where they needed to adjust their garments or ornaments. Said the louse to the wasp, ‘‘My friend, tighten your belt a little.’’ The wasp looked funny with his belt so tight. The louse started laughing. Then he told his friend, ‘‘Now tighten it just a little more.’’ The wasp tightened it and looked even more funny. The louse laughed more each time the wasp tightened his belt. When the wasp was about to break his waist with his belt, the louse laughed so much that he broke his nose.

The louse in this story meets the fate of all those who enjoy themselves at the expense of others. Families who taught their children this story could use it to back up their moral socialization. When their children laughed at others, the children could be asked whether they wanted to break their nose like the louse. Most Gikuyu stories had animal characters, but the audience was expected to understand that these characters represented typical patterns of human behavior. The most common figures in the Gikuyu stories were Wamahiti (the hyena), Warubuku (the hare), and Irimu (the ogre, an enormous half-man, half-animal creature), but other animals figured in also. The hyena represented the greedy, selfish, but stupid one who was often tricked by the clever. The hare represented the clever trickster, the one embodying the Gikuyu proverb ‘‘wisdom surpasses strength.’’ The hare was often seen tricking animals bigger than itself and getting its own way, primarily through its wit.The ogre represented the dangerous character who could capture and hurt the unsuspecting. The ogre was found in stories teaching caution in dealings with others and often disguised itself as a handsome man who captured his human prey through his disguise. Njogu (the elephant) was one of the big ani-

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The Teaching of Values Old and New mals that, in spite of their muscles, were defeated by the little hare in arguments or feuds because they could not use their brains. The lion (and sometimes the elephant) acted as chief of the animal kingdom. The dove (and sometimes birds in general) represented the benevolent, often helping people thwart some danger by taking messages to those concerned. Wamathia (the deer) played a maternal role in stories. Some stories did have human characters, and as with the animals, there were certain recurring roles that listeners were expected to recognize. One typical character was the small boy with remarkable intelligence. Another was the despised person who miraculously triumphed in the end. This might be as a child who had been disabled or had lost his or her parents or possessed certain qualities that others maliciously envied, or it might be a despised woman whose husband preferred his co-wives for no good reason. Children were told all types of stories but particularly those with humor or characters with whom they could identify. They heard stories from the Gikuyu oral tradition that had many different kinds of themes, some of which were related to moral socialization. The character traits that children learned about through storytelling were good sense, spirit for work, caution, confidence, courage, perseverance, forbearance toward others, and leadership. One surprising missing personality trait in the traditional stories was obedience, emphasized in so many other dimensions of childhood socialization, including proverbs. The importance of having good sense (uugi) was definitely featured in stories told to children. Gikuyu people often called stupid people a derogatory nickname intended to disincline others from copying their behavior. They also used a well-known saying, kirimu no ta mwatu, comparing a stupid person to a beehive. They told stories that contrasted positive rewards for good sense or wisdom with the negative consequences of stupidity, as is this animal tale: Long, long ago, all the animals decided to bore a well. They agreed that any animals who did not share in the work would not be allowed to drink the water. The hare refused to work, but he said he would drink the water all the same. When the well was completed, the hyena had the first opportunity to stand guard over it. The hare came bringing with him some sweetened

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The Teaching of Values Old and New water for the hyena to sip. The hyena drank it and asked for more. The hare told him that he would give him another sip of water if he would agree to be tied up. The hyena had enjoyed the water so much that he could not refuse to be tied up. So he brought a lot of fiber and asked the hare to tie him up. After tying the hyena up, the hare not only refused to give him the promised sip of sweet water, but he also helped himself to the water at the well. Afterwards, the hare made several more trips to the well, but he was eventually caught. The animals decided to kill him, but the hare advised them that the best way to punish a big offender like himself was to have him swung and thrown away with great force by the strongest animal until he died. The animals took his advice and chose the elephant to do the job. The latter swung him until he broke his tail, whereupon the hare ran away. On his way, he found a woman making a basket. The hare told her, ‘‘You, woman making a basket, save yourself by removing all your clothes and running away.’’ The woman did as she was told, and the hare put on her clothes and started weaving the basket. The elephant came along and, mistaking the hare for the woman, asked him if he had seen a hare without a tail. The hare said, ‘‘Do you see that naked woman running? She is chasing that very hare.’’ When the elephant caught up with the woman, she told him where the hare was, but by then, the hare had run into the bush and told all the other hares to have their tails cut to avoid being killed by the elephant. In this way the hare managed to save himself. And this is why hares do not have tails.

This story taught that wisdom is more important than size for surviving in the world. Of course, children could easily identify with the hare because of its small size, and they admired the way the little hare saved itself from the powerful elephant and all the other animals. Another story illustrating the value of good sense involved a girl named Wanjiru who ended up losing all her body parts except her hair. Each time while her mother was away, the ogre came up and asked her to reveal where she was. The girl would reply, ‘‘I am here, where my mother hid me.’’ And the ogre would come and cut off part of her body. Wanjiru’s mother, coming home each evening, would lament and warn the girl not to reveal her new hiding place the next time. Wanjiru would

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The Teaching of Values Old and New promise, but when the ogre came she again revealed herself without hesitation. The moral of the story was that danger lurked in the world and could only be avoided through practical intelligence.10 The story about Wanjiru also illustrates another important theme of Gikuyu oral tradition, the value of being cautious about outward appearances. Children learned that in the world lurked not only problems but also people who might deceive them. These could be strangers pretending to be good in order to fool others or seeming friends who really had sinister ulterior motives. One popular story illustrating the dangerous stranger concerned a beautiful young woman who followed an ogre, whom she mistook for a handsome young man.11 Her friends who had earlier followed the ogre warned her that she could recognize him by an extra mouth they had seen in his hair, but she obstinately refused to pay attention and go back. Eventually she was rescued from the ogre, but not before she had married him and lived for years in great horror amid surroundings of human skulls—a sure sign that one day she, too, would become the meal of the ogre. A story illustrating caution about misleading friends was called ‘‘The Good One and the Bad One,’’ which taught that even friends, if they are intrinsically bad people, can bring trouble. In this story about a journey undertaken by two friends, the good one ended up losing both eyes to the bad one in return for a very small portion of food. Another set of stories taught children to show confidence, courage, and perseverance. These stories often featured a protagonist who began with inferior resources but ended up winning a great prize, surpassing others with superior resources. In one story, a very poor and ugly man married a beautiful young woman by passing a series of ordeals that other richer and more handsome suitors had failed to overcome. As with the stories about wisdom, this tale emphasized that good character rather than outward appearance mattered most in coping with the environment. Stories concerning how to get along with others taught children that they could avoid trouble with other people by thoughtful treatment. For example, one story involved a pregnant woman who broke a bird’s eggs for no reason whatsoever.12 The mother bird waited until the woman had delivered her own baby. Then, while the woman was away, the bird

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The Teaching of Values Old and New flew down and killed the baby. The mourning woman learned her lesson when the bird told her not to cry; the baby was of no more value than the eggs she had broken. The lesson here was sharpened by the choice of a baby as the object lost through the woman’s thoughtless and unkind action. Procreation was very important in the Gikuyu society, and the loss of a baby was deeply felt. Other stories warned children not to despise others, whether out of jealousy or for any other reason. Supernatural powers could avenge or reward the despised. One popular story of this type concerned a woman named Wacu who was much despised by her husband even though she worked hard, toiling in the fields while her husband gave a big feast for his other wives. A raven flew to the place where the meat was being roasted and grabbed a big chunk to take to Wacu. In this story, the raven represented the supernatural powers that look after the despised. The proverb ciakorire Wacu mugunda (they—the meat—found Wacu in the garden) derived from this story and was a reminder of how fortune can visit someone unexpectedly. Myths and legends constitute a final category of special stories. These were told especially to adolescent boys by their fathers and grandfathers. Although girls were not necessarily barred from hearing these stories, boys were regarded as the appropriate audience because, in a patrilineal society, they were the future leaders of the people and held the political leadership of the community in their hands. For instance, war stories were told to encourage boys about being warriors by giving them examples of heroes with whom they could identify. Origin myths, such as the story of Gikuyu and Mumbi (father and mother of the Gikuyu people), were aimed at maintaining solidarity and organization among the people.

The Teaching of Values in the School Setting Whereas in traditional times children learned lessons about behavior in the hut and the garden, during the time of the research project in Ngecha, teaching about values had moved into the school classroom (Bogonko, 1992; Sheffield, 1973). Once children started school, their time with their parents was minimized because most of their day was

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The Teaching of Values Old and New spent at school (Swadener with Kabiru & Njenga, 2000). On weekends they did chores at home or in the garden, and in the evenings they did chores and homework. The traditional storytelling sessions had lost their place and significance. The family and neighborhood ties that had promoted these gatherings were now very weakened, and the parents had come to accept schooling as the pivot point for their children’s future and a substitute for values teaching that had once been the responsibility of the adults in the community. They saw storytelling as a thing of the past with no relevance to the present era. When we asked one mother why she could not remember traditional stories, she replied that she now thought only of the future and not of the past. Most mothers said that they preferred seeing their children reading in the evenings rather than recounting and listening to stories. Therefore, given the importance of the school as the new forum for socialization, we continued this study of the teaching of values to Ngecha children by examining the content of the songs and textbooks used by schoolchildren. What were the children being taught about good behavior in a changing society? Certainly achievement was the central theme of the school literature all through primary school. This theme began in nursery school. The youngest children in Ngecha were not yet reading, but they did engage in singing. As described in chapter 3, children in the area were required to attend at least one year of nursery school before being accepted into Standard 1. There they mainly played, but they also learned a few simple English words and skills such as holding a pencil. They also sang songs that might help socialize or prepare them about the importance of working hard in school. Their parents had fully accepted education as the center of their children’s future and hope for getting a good job. The children in the nursery school sang songs intended to encourage their spirit for schooling. Here is an example, sung in Gikuyu, which was almost like propaganda in contrasting the rosy future of the schoolchild with the bleakness awaiting the unschooled: Maina! Uui Mwangi, Maina! Uui Mwangi, Gitiri kindu ndinakio, Na karamu ndi nako,

Maina! Yes, Mwangi, Maina! Yes, Mwangi, I have nothing Except a pencil

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The Teaching of Values Old and New Na ibuku ria kwandika, Riria ndi githomo-ini Ndaniuka ngathomage Ndaniuka ngathomage

And an exercise book When I am at school And when I go home I learn When I go home I learn

Muritu [in another verse ‘‘mwanake’’] Uyu wathi ku Wihumbite gacuka Nokehumba gatrarwa? Niugatuika mdungata, Ya aria mari thukuyu, Ya aria mari thukuyu!

Young girl [in another verse ‘‘boy’’], Where are you going Wearing only a sheet And an animal skin? You will become the servant Of those who are at school Oh, yes! Of those who are at school!

From the nursery school, the children moved into Standard 1, where they were introduced to formal education. Standards 1–3 were used as stepping stones for the upper grades, and children learned how to read and write in their first language. In Standards 4–7, English became the main medium of instruction. In Standards 1–3 children still received some exposure to traditional Gikuyu moral instruction. During their reading classes, entitled ‘‘Mother Tongue,’’ traditional literature found some place. The vernacular readers used for these classes, Wirute Guthoma (Learn How to Read) and Nitugathome (Let Us Go and Read), contained some stories and proverbs (see Kago, 1953, 1974). By the end of Standard 3, children were expected to have mastered the Gikuyu language completely, and they went on to use readers in English that did not feature traditional Gikuyu literature. They did very little oral storytelling in school, perhaps once a week at most. The main texts for Standards 4–7 were part of a series entitled Safari (Kenyan Ministry of Education, 1970), which were used during English lessons. These texts were produced by the Curriculum Development and Research Centre, formed in 1966 to reform the Kenyan primary school curriculum and ‘‘introduce a syllabus suitably related to the land and people of Kenya as an essential tool in fostering a sense of nationhood’’ (Bogonko, 1992, p. 118). We examined the Safari Books 1–3, used in Standards 4–6. They contained stories to read and exercises intended to promote vocabulary and sentence construction. At times the children were given a set of incomplete sentences, either in the form of a

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The Teaching of Values Old and New short composition or as separate sentences, and were required to fill in the blanks. At other times they were required to fill in the blank areas with pictures. Some poems also appeared in the readers, as extra aids for learning vocabulary. We undertook a content analysis of these readers to see how the themes of the stories departed from traditional Gikuyu oral literature. These textbooks were at an early stage of development at the time of our research, since the country was still newly independent. However, the books had a clear emphasis. Their goal was to convey information to children and reinforce achievement values rather than to foster other aspects of personality development, such as the traditional Gikuyu values of respect, obedience, cooperation, and so on found in the proverbs and stories children heard in the past. The books oriented children to what they could learn in the school setting rather than the home. For example, Book 3 contained 29 stories, one of which had an explicitly moral title, ‘‘Never Give Up’’ (Book 3, pp. 203–206). Perseverance was a traditional Gikuyu value, but here it was transported to the school setting. In the story, a boy with musical talent went to a concert where he was inspired to acquire a musical instrument to accompany his singing. Not having enough money, he decided to make one. First he tried to make a whistle using hollow stalks but had to give up. Finally, the adult who saved the day was not a family member but the boy’s teacher. The teacher challenged the boy to make a string instrument, leading him to make a guitar and form a school band. The moral of the story was straightforward: determination leads to eventual success. Book 3 contained one other story with a kind of moral message, but the purpose of the story seemed to be more entertainment than instruction, and the lesson was not at all straightforward. In this story, a factory worker had a huge interest in football (soccer). He thought about it all the time, even while he was working. His absentmindedness even caused him to buy a bad tire and so miss a football match! The story was told in a light-hearted manner that seemed to downplay any moral lesson from the story. At the end, the factory worker told his friend, ‘‘And that’s why I’m trying to stop thinking about football on work days . . . but I don’t know how long it will last’’ (p. 255).

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The Teaching of Values Old and New In all three Safari readers, school figured as the most important place in children’s lives and the stepping stone to their future. Indeed, they contained very few stories in which school was not mentioned. In this light, the title Nitugathome (Let Us Go and Read) suggested more than its literal meaning and seemed to call on the children to leave aside everything to devote themselves to education. In one story, a boy met an engine driver whose train had derailed. The boy was interested in learning how the railway engines work but postponed his questions until after school. In another story, ‘‘Amir and the Magic Maize Seeds’’ (Book 1), a boy longed to go to school but could not because his family was too poor to afford the fees. Eventually a giant gave him some magic maize seeds, a great moment enabling Amir to fulfill his wishes. ‘‘Soon they had a lot of money, and Amir went to school every day’’ (p. 156). In the books, the teacher and headmaster were portrayed as allknowing persons. In one story, the village teacher (who usually read to the villagers and gave them advice) went away, during which time the poor villagers were fooled. This awed regard for teachers reflected the attitudes of Ngecha people. Since we researchers were so educated, we were often asked by Ngecha villagers, ‘‘Why are you asking us all these questions? Isn’t all knowledge written in your books? You should be teaching us.’’ What knowledge could be gained from school, according to these readers? The books provided lessons on three main themes. The first was the environment and how to adjust to it. The second was the nation advancing through technology. The third was how to answer the all-important question, ‘‘After school, what next?’’ The first theme, the environment, actually included stories of several types. There were a number of stories focused on agriculture and tourism, not surprising since these were the two most important industries in Kenya. These stories were so explicit that they sometimes seemed more like advertisements or propaganda than literature. The stories about agriculture taught the importance of adopting modern farming methods. The stories on tourism provided children (who may have heard about game parks and other tourist attractions but surely never visited them) with a basic introduction to tourism. For example, in the story ‘‘Alina’s Birthday Present’’ (Book 2, pp. 82–84), a child

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The Teaching of Values Old and New was given a birthday trip to Lake Nakuru. It was her first time to visit the lake, and she was so enchanted by the beautiful pink flamingoes that she wanted to take one back home. Her father told her, ‘‘This is a bird sanctuary and you’re not allowed to catch birds here to take them home with you. People come here from all over the world to see the flamingoes in Kenya. We must be proud of them and look at them, but we mustn’t take them away’’ (p. 84). Other stories dealt with general aspects of the environment and assumed that readers were rural children who needed to be educated about the city and modern life. For example, a story entitled ‘‘Lost’’ (Book 3, pp. 126–129) taught about the complexity of getting around the town. The writer may have assumed (falsely) that rural life was so simple that anyone could understand it without instruction. Furthermore, the books were explicit that education is for modernization and technological development. Rural life was seen as a thing of the past, and villagers should learn about urban life, not vice versa. The second main theme of the stories was advancement through technology. ‘‘The Surprise’’ (Book 1, pp. 61–63) recounted how two schoolchildren were thrilled to ride in the trailer of a tractor that their farmer friend and the other farmers in the district had borrowed. Book 2 involved a series of exercises contrasting how life used to be with how it was now. Below the pictures were parts of sentences, which the children had to fit together to describe the pictures. For example, ‘‘Mr. Makanga (the farmer) used to dig with a jembe (hoe), but now he has a tractor’’ (Book 2, p. 34). Looking at the picture and how much work each farmer had completed, the child could have deduced that the tractor enabled the farmer to work three times faster. Indeed, many of the pictures in the Safari readers were almost like advertisements enticing the children toward modernization and sometimes oversimplifying the advantages of modern life while disparaging tradition. For instance, in a set of two pictures bearing the caption ‘‘better life through modernization,’’ a character named ‘‘Mother’’ was seen fetching water. The first picture showed a tired, poorly dressed mother carrying a clay pot and walking to a river. The second picture showed a cheerful, well-dressed mother filling a debe (four-gallon container made of tin) at a water tap. Certainly no one would want to dis-

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The Teaching of Values Old and New pute the convenience and health advantages of getting water from a nearby tap rather than a more distant river. Nonetheless, the pictorial comparison also seemed to imply the superiority of the debe to the water pot, when in fact the clay pot could better keep water cool. Of course, exaggeration is an ancient rhetorical device used in oral as well as written literature and can serve legitimate communication purposes. However, here the aim seemed to go beyond encouraging children toward modernization to convey condescending attitudes toward traditional ways. For example, in ‘‘Ranching’’ (Book 3, pp. 243–246), the child reader learns (through the eyes of a Masai ‘‘narrator’’) that the traditional Masai cattle used to be ‘‘bony and thin’’ (p. 244) because people used to buy more and more cattle, forgetting that the amount of grass remained the same. ‘‘They forgot all about taking care of the land. So the cows got thinner and the milk got poorer’’ (p. 244). We judged that the factual basis of this story—that the Masai owed their present improved existence to modern methods of ranching—was incorrect and therefore not truly informative. The Masai in the past knew perfectly well that more cattle required more grass, but they could maintain huge herds because there was ample land for grazing. When the pasture in one district was exhausted, they left it to recover while they moved to another grazing place.When they began to replace their traditional native cattle with hybrid cattle, they were able to obtain increased yield from each animal. Still, for the story to suggest that those who followed the traditional methods of herding knew little about cattle breeding was to make the children look down on the past. Because the story was told through the eyes of the Masai narrator, it increased the impression of being firsthand information, not a criticism by outsiders. The third and most thoroughly covered theme of the three Safari books concerned what the future might hold for the children after they completed school. The textbooks were clearly intended to help prepare children for their future livelihoods and to provide them information about job possibilities. In ‘‘The Goat That Liked Books’’ (Book 1, pp. 162–165), a girl exclaimed, ‘‘I’d like to be a nurse . . . but I can’t be a nurse unless I learn how to look after sick people. Perhaps this book will help me.’’ Children were educated about job opportunities

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The Teaching of Values Old and New and encouraged to aspire to these jobs. In ‘‘Salome Visits a Hospital’’ (Book 2, pp. 100–103), a schoolgirl interested in nursing was taken on a hospital tour to get acquainted with the job. Another story, ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Visit’’ (Book 1, pp. 49–51), introduced children to the job of game warden and tried to make them interested in wildlife preservation. In other stories, someone in authority explicitly encouraged them to aspire toward a certain job, for example, when the president of Kenya opened a self-help dispensary, which the children had helped build, by saying, ‘‘I hope some of you will be bricklayers and carpenters when you grow up. . . . Our country needs people who can make things and mend things’’ (Book 1, p. 207). Mechanical jobs and the new technical vocational schools were presented favorably. In ‘‘A Talk with the Engine Driver’’ (Book 2, pp. 11–13), some schoolchildren got a chance to find out from an engine driver what was involved in his job, and the story ended with one boy aspiring to be an engine driver someday and never have an accident like the one in the story. The literature introduced technical schools, which were new to Kenya and which many people regarded as inferior to ordinary high schools. In ‘‘Too Busy Talking’’ (Book 3, pp. 87–88), children heard about what goes on in technical schools: ‘‘My father . . . [is] quite pleased I am here now,’’ says one boy at the school. ‘‘He liked the screwdriver we made last week’’ (pp. 89– 90). The stories presented children with a range of job possibilities but maintained sex roles that put men above women—even where this was not really necessary. In all three readers, the girl characters aspired to be nurses but never medical assistants or doctors, in spite of the fact that these professions were sought after by Kenyan women. One slightly remarkable feature of the way the books approached this third theme, the future, was the realism shown. The books did not suggest that everybody would have an easy time finding a job after the completion of their studies. They presented an ideal for the children to pass their primary school examinations and obtain their Certificate of Primary Education (cpe), and then go on to further schooling and eventually train for some job. However, they also touched on the bitter truth that some children would not be able to go beyond the primary school level and that getting employment after school would not be simple or automatic. In ‘‘Starting a Fortune’’ (Book 3, pp. 79–82), a boy

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The Teaching of Values Old and New passed his examinations but could not go further owing to the limitations of places in the secondary schools. After failing to get a job, he became very disappointed, and his parents even more so because it now seemed they had wasted their labor to send their son to school. Then he talked to his friend the shopkeeper, who helped steer him how to get on in life through self-employment. The story ended on an optimistic note, when the boy decided to become a poultry farmer (realistic, since this does not require a large amount of land). His father would help him with money to get started, and the boy now predicted it would take him about four years to start making a real fortune.

Conclusion Folklore is a ‘‘living reservoir’’ of a people’s culture (Chesaina, 1991, p. 20) and a means of creative expression by which people in a community communicate their hopes, values, beliefs, and emotions. The thematic content of folklore reflects a worldview, conveys a cultural aesthetic, and responds to people’s needs to express beauty (Chesaina, 1997, p. ix). Throughout Africa, folklore is a performance art and one of the most vibrant and dynamic aspects of culture, continually stimulated by new influences. By taking in elements from what is new, folk culture helps both younger and older generations to maintain a sense of direction in the face of change and helps the community adapt to changing conditions (Chesaina, 1997, p. 40). Before the advent of schooling, the Gikuyu educated their children informally at home. Children heard proverbs that conveyed messages about the behaviors that adults felt were most ‘‘praiseworthy’’ and that parents believed they could directly shape and influence, such as respect for elders, helpfulness, sharing, proper reserve, responsibility, hard work, carefulness, and caution. Similarly, through storytelling, adults provoked children to attend to the virtues of good sense, spirit for work, caution, confidence, courage, perseverance, forbearance toward others, and leadership. The introduction of schooling in Ngecha would not necessarily have disrupted this traditional process. Continuity of old and new values could have been maintained if folklore had been incorporated into the

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The Teaching of Values Old and New content of children’s textbooks and school lessons. However, this was not the case in the period 1968–1973. Kenyan leaders called for the Africanizing of the primary school curriculum by teaching African culture and history, languages and literature, and other aspects of African life (Bogonko, 1992). Yet traditional Gikuyu stories and proverbs, which should have and could have continued to play a prominent role in their education, were set aside. The wisdom articulated in the oral literature could have gone a long way in helping to create a cultural synthesis between traditional African values and Western-oriented ones and in building a healthy culture for contemporary Africa (Chesaina, 1991, preface). Instead, Ngecha children read textbooks that emphasized themes of the importance of school achievement for personal success, the general importance of schooling for national modernization, the all-knowing qualities of teachers and headmasters, and tantalizing topics of technology, environment, and jobs that children could learn about in schools. Thus the processes of cultural transmission to which the Ngecha children were being exposed in 1968–1973 involved a high degree of discontinuity between home and school that tended toward value conflict and dislocation along with some potentially positive outcomes, such as adaptation to the market economy and formal education.

Editors’ Postscript Today, thirty years later, the issues raised by Ciarunji Chesaina about teaching values to Kenyan children are still important and timely. Kenyan oral literature traditions remain vital and alive, as witnessed by the fact that grandmothers in some parts of Kenya (such a Samburu and Masai) where more traditional care persists still act to pass on values, language, stories, and traditions of the culture (Swadener with Kabiru & Njenga, 2000, p. 272). Furthermore, there are still many who would like to keep a place for folklore in formal education; for example, preschool teachers in many districts of Kenya (Narok, Embu, Kericho, and Kiambu) say that they still include traditional songs and stories in their first language as part of the curriculum (Swadener with Kabiru & Njenga, 2000, pp. 64, 128, 188). What has changed most since the time of the Ngecha project is that even as the divide between tra-

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The Teaching of Values Old and New ditional and new ways of teaching values to children grows wider, the resources to bridge the divide also become clearer and more accessible. Kenyan teachers today can find many publications to support their use of oral literature with children and adolescents (for example, see Masinjila & Okomobo, 1994; Mbarwa, 1996; Miruka, 1994; Nadwa and Bukenya, 1983; Nkata, 2001; Okinda, 1994; Sunkuli & Miruka, 1990; Wario, 1989), and African scholars continue to build the knowledge base about the irrepressible popular cultures in their countries.

Notes 1. Confer Barra (1960) proverb 532 (p. 65), Muria wiki akuaga wiki (he who eats alone dies alone). 2. Confer Barra (1960) proverb 20 (p. 4), cia mucii itiumaga ndira (home affairs must not go into the open). 3. Confer Barra (1960) proverb 299 (p. 38), kuganwo ni kura (being praised leads to ruin). 4. Confer Barra (1960) proverb 355 (p. 45), mageria nomo mahota (trials mean successes, or where there is a will there is a way). 5. Confer Barra (1960) proverb 425 (p. 53), mucingu munene unaga hiti kuguru (the strong smell [of roasting meat] causes the hyena to break its leg or hasty climbers have sudden falls). 6. Confer Barra (1960) proverb 189 (p. 25), ihenya inene riunaga gikwa ihatha (great haste breaks the yam tuber [instead of taking it out whole] or haste trips up its own heels). 7. Confer Barra (1960) proverb 540 (p. 66), murio ni wiriagira (sweetness eats up itself ); Kabira & Mutahi (1988) proverb 14 p. 136, murio ni wiriagira (sweetness takes its toll). 8. Confer Barra (1960) proverb 525 (p. 64), muregi akirwo ndaregaga akihetwo (he who refuses [to do something] when asked, does not refuse when forced). 9. Confer Barra (1960) proverb 417 (p. 52), muceera na mukundu akundukaga taguo (he who walks with a mangy man becomes mangy). 10. Confer Gecau (1970, pp. 108–109) for another tale about Wanjiru and the ogre, but this time her relatives are duped by the ogre’s false appearance. 11. Confer Kabira & Mutahi (1988), ‘‘The Girl and the Ogre,’’ by Njoroge Kabugi, pp. 81–82, for another version of this story. 12. Confer Kabira & Mutahi (1988), ‘‘The Woman and the Bird,’’ by Wambui

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The Teaching of Values Old and New wa Wambugu, pp. 10–13, and ‘‘The Woman and the Bird,’’ by Wambui wa Wambugu, pp. 78–80, for other versions of this story. Confer Gecau (1970, pp. 44–45), story of Muthoni, for another version.

References Barra, G. (1960). (1939). 1,000 Kikuyu proverbs. London: Macmillan. Bogonko, S. N. (1992). A history of modern education in Kenya (1895–1991). Nairobi: Evans Brothers (Kenya). Chesaina, C. (1991). Oral literature of the Kalenjin. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya. Chesaina, C. (1997). Oral literature of the Embu and Mbeere. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Chesaina Swinimer, C. (1994). Perspectives on women in African literature. Nairobi: Impact Associates. Finnegan, R. (1970). Oral literature in Africa. London: Clarendon. Gecau, R. (1970). Kikuyu folktales. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau. (Later edition, 1982, author Rose Mwangi). Kabira, W. M., & Mutahi, K. (1988). Gikuyu oral literature. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya. Kago, F. K. (1953). Wirute Guthoma (Learn How to Read). London: Nelson. Kago, F. K. (1974). Nitugathome (Let Us Go and Read). Nairobi: Longman. Kenyan Ministry of Education (1970). Safari (Books 1–3). Nairobi: Afropress. Lindfors, B. (Ed.) (1977). Forms of folklore in Africa: Narrative, poetic, gnomic, dramatic. Austin: University of Texas Press. Masinjila, M., & Okombo O. (1994). Teaching oral literature. Nairobi: Kenya Oral Literature Association. Mbarwa, H. R. (1996). Your oral literature. Nairobi: Eagle H. Publishers. Miruka, O. (1994). Encounter with oral literature. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Mwangi, R. (1997). A girl who could not keep quiet. Kenya: East African Educational Publishers (Junior Readers Series). Nkata, D. (2001). Continuity and change in storytelling: Children’s stories in Uganda’s past and present. Paper delivered at the 15th irscl Biennial Conference, ‘‘Change and Renewal in Children’s Literature.’’ Warmbaths, South Africa, August 2001. Available online at www.unisa.ac.za/dept/clru/acl/artnkatha.html. Nandwa, J., & Bukenya, A. (1983). African oral literature for schools. Nairobi: Longman Kenya. Nippold, M. A., Martin, S. A., & Erskinne, B. J. (1988). Proverb comprehension

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The Teaching of Values Old and New in context: A developmental study with children and adolescents. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 31, 19–28. Okinda, E. (1994). A simplified introduction to oral literature and poetry. Nairobi: World Press. Okpewho, I. (1992). African oral literature: Backgrounds, character, and continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Opoku, K. A. (1975). Speak to the winds: Proverbs from Africa. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard. Schwartz, A. J., & Power, F. C. (2000). Maxims to live by: The art and science of teaching wise sayings. In W. S. Brown (Ed.), Understanding wisdom: Sources, science, and society (pp. 393–412). Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press. Sheffield, J. R. (1973). Education in Kenya: An historical study. New York: Teachers College. Spindler, G. D. (1987). The transmission of culture. In G. D. Spindler (Ed.), Education and cultural process: Anthropological approaches (2nd ed.) (pp. 303– 336). Prospect Heights il: Waveland Press. Sunkuli, L. O., & Miruka, S. O. (1990). A dictionary of oral literature. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya Ltd. Swadener, B. B., with Kabiru, M., & Njenga, A. (2000). Does the village still raise the child?: A collaborative study of changing child-rearing and early education in Kenya. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wanjohi, G. J. (1997). The wisdom and philosophy of the Gikuyu proverbs: The Kihooto world-view. Nairobi: Paulines Publications. Wario, L. H. (1989). Ways of teaching primary English. Nairobi: Macmillan.

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7

Aging and Elderhood Frances Cox, with Ndung’u Mberia

Editors’ Note: This chapter by Cox in collaboration with Mberia describes the daily life and experience of men and women growing old in Ngecha. The chapter notes the effects of land pressure and the resulting decrease in the number of extended homesteads and polygynous marriages—two types of social institutions reported as favorable to the care of the older generation. The people interviewed for this study lived in the village and were self-supported or supported by their own kin. In Kenya in the 1960s and 1970s, organized services for the aged were few and were provided only by voluntary agencies such as churches. There was the Home for the Aged Destitute eight miles from Ngecha founded by the Presbyterian Church in 1967, where Cox and Mberia did some additional interviewing (Cox with Mberia, 1977). Finding services available to be inadequate to the needs, Cox and Mberia could only offer to communicate what they heard of people’s anxieties, satisfactions, and wishes in the hopes that others might listen. In the words of their participants: ‘‘We are your teachers. We will teach you what it is to grow old today. You must then go out and tell others. Perhaps someday the world will find answers’’ (Cox with Mberia, 1977, p. 22).

Introduction The goal of our work was to find out what it was like to grow old in Ngecha. What satisfactions, regrets, anxieties, and hopes for yet another day come to those who had reached the final stages of life in a society transformed within their lifetime? Had the institutions and values that integrated and maintained the elderly and the old in the past been destroyed, reshaped into a new configuration, or maintained in their full integrity? What were the long-term outcomes of decisions made

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Aging and Elderhood early in life to pursue or not pursue formal schooling? What were the influences of economic, technological, and social changes on the quality of life for the older segments of the Ngecha population? We have based our discussion upon 12 months’ fieldwork in Ngecha. As a first step to our work, we performed a survey to find out the age distribution of people in Ngecha (Cox with Mberia, 1975). We talked to a random sample of 1,175 individuals in Ngecha and found 49.5% of them to be 18 years old or younger, 35.2% between 19 and 40, 10.2% between 41 and 60, and 5.1% over 60 years of age. We then interviewed a focal sample of 88 men and women between the ages of 60 and 94. The designation of 60 years was not based on community definitions, which, as we shall show, tended to be functional and individualistic rather than chronological. Sixty years was chosen for cross-cultural comparative purposes and as the approximate age by which an aging individual was and is expected to have earned a position of respect and thus security in approaching old age. terminology Terminology used within the social sciences in referring to older individuals is vague and inconsistent. In this chapter, we use three terms to define segments within the sample population. First, the term ‘‘elder’’ refers to individuals who occupied a role through which they exerted active and recognized influence within the community structure by virtue of seniority. Second, the term ‘‘elderly’’ refers to individuals who, although not necessarily exerting recognized community influence, still continued to function as productive adults (with a modicum of physical and mental competency and independence). Finally, the term ‘‘old’’ refers to individuals who were dependent or felt the need to be dependent on others for the basic necessities of life, exhibited overt signs of physical and/or mental decline, and were no longer capable of functioning as fully productive family and community members. Gikuyu terminology assigned to older adults in Ngecha reflected their position within their social structure. The term ‘‘muthuri,’’ traditionally reserved for a male elder, was now available to the newly married man. The fact that there was no specific term for male or female elders suggested the recent precariousness of the role. Muthee sug-

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Aging and Elderhood gested an elderly male, while elderly females were most often referred to as nyina wa, mother of so and so. Both elderly and old females were often called cucu, grandmother. Mukuru, old person, was applied to either the male or female recognized as old. The very old woman was sometimes referred to as kiheti but rarely in her presence, for the term was seen to carry derogatory connotations of senility, laziness, and decrepitude. A grandfather was called guka, and a great-grandparent, either male or female, was called uchuku. The Gikuyu appeared always to have differentiated the elderly, who may or may not have occupied the role of elder, from the old. influences of schooling The focus of our research was not on education, but we did conduct a study of men aged 60 and over who were interviewed at length to examine the role of schooling in their lives. A brief statistical description of the schooled versus unschooled groups is presented as background for the more detailed qualitative description that follows focusing on life and experiences of the three groups of aging men and women (elders, elderly, and aged). The subsample of 42 men aged 60 to 94 years contained 18 men who had attended school (Cox with Mberia, 1975). The length of attendance was from 2 to 10 years, with an average of 5 years. The first person from Ngecha to attend school had entered school in 1910 at age 14. All but two of the schooled sample went to mission schools—most to Thogoto (see chapter 3) and, among the younger men of the sample, the mission school in Ngecha. Comparing their later employment, 78% of the 18 schooled men had been employed (as independent businessmen, chief, skilled mason, medical assistant, clerks, ministers, teachers, and headmasters). Many were quite mobile, moving from one area to another, making contacts that proved useful to them later. None worked full time into their sixties but instead chose to return earlier to Ngecha as they saw greater financial rewards in farming. Of the 24 unschooled men in the sample, 71% had been employed (as messengers, watchmen, farm employees, and railroad laborers). One of the schooled individuals entered the

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Aging and Elderhood armed forces during the First World War in contrast to four of the unschooled. With regard to religion, 33% of the unschooled had either not formed any religious ties or had severed them, while 11% of the schooled were affiliated with a church at the time of the study. The Gikuyu Orthodox Church was the most strongly attended by the elderly men of both groups (47% of the schooled and 52% of the unschooled). The Presbyterian Church of East Africa (pcea) claimed 39% of the schooled and 4% of the unschooled. During the struggle for national independence, 33% of the schooled had chosen to stand with and actively join the Loyalists versus 8% of the unschooled. However, individuals of both groups were also active nationalists: 39% of the schooled and 46% of the unschooled were actively committed to the armed struggle for land and freedom. The marriages of the schooled group were 67% monogamous versus 75% polygynous for the unschooled. Monogamy among the schooled individuals was a deliberate choice based upon both religious and economic considerations. The first couple to marry in a church in Ngecha, in 1922, consisted of a member of the schooled group and a schooled woman. Marriage was still largely patrilocal, and 59% of the schooled versus 56% of the unschooled were part of three-generation extended households. The monogamous men, not surprisingly, had fewer children than the polygynous ones. Yet 43% of the schooled men had over 11 children. Men among both groups, but especially among the schooled, spoke to us of family planning and their regret that it had come too late for them. They realized that they had invested much income and energy in their large households, some of which could have been used to improve their own current living situations. Accumulation of land through inheritance and purchase was an important measure of status and affluence in Ngecha, and the schooled had accumulated larger parcels of land. Of the schooled group, 29% had holdings of 1/4 to 5 acres, 29% had 6 to 10 acres, 12% had 11 to 20 acres, 12% had 21 to 30 acres, and 18% had more than 30 acres. In contrast, 16% of the unschooled had under 1/4 acre, 44% had 1/4 to 5 acres, 12% had 6 to 10 acres, 16% had 11 to 20 acres, and 12% had 21 to 30 acres.

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Top: Ngecha contained many old men who had attended mission school starting around 1910. (Frances Cox)

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Top: Older women expected to stay actively involved with their grandchildren as long as their health permitted. (Frances Cox) Below: Many marriages of elderly people evidenced a warm, equitable companionship. (Frances Cox) Opposite: An elderly man. (Frances Cox)

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Aging and Elderhood It was difficult to make a judgment as to the difference in degree of affluence of the two groups in relation to the standards of the community. However, using such guidelines as land size, cash income, house type, and other indicators of affluence such as clothing, house furnishings, piped water on the land, vehicles, and the hiring of employees, it appeared to us and to others in the community who were questioned that 41% of the schooled group could be termed affluent in relation to community standards versus 20% of the unschooled group. Nevertheless, a surprisingly high percentage of both groups declared financial independence: 89% of the schooled and 81% of the unschooled group. They claimed to pay their children’s school fees and to provide for their own daily necessities. (Fifty-six percent of the schooled and 58% of the unschooled still had children in school at the time of the study.) In sum, the differentiation between the schooled and unschooled was not so strong that their existence in Ngecha was radically distinct. Schooling alone did not determine a man’s status or comfort, even though it did correlate with differences in employment, marriage, religion, land ownership, and apparent affluence. an ethnography of aging in ngecha The following discussion is descriptive, an ‘‘ethnography of adult life’’ (Clark, 1973, p. 86). The purpose was to understand the effects of economic, technological, and social changes on the older segments of the Ngecha population who had not previously received focused attention. We wanted to give the senior people an opportunity to speak for themselves about their past and present situations. Although the research was not intended either to prove or disprove existing social science theories of aging, nevertheless we kept in mind a suggestion by Cowgill (1972) that the relative status of the aged tends to be higher in traditional than in modern societies. In Ngecha, the elders, the elderly, and the old were presented with a spectrum of alternatives never before available to their ancestors. It was among this population, although by no means homogenous, that we found the pioneers of modernization. We encountered those who had been the rebellious, curious youth who ran away from home to sit under a tree learning to manipulate new symbols (as described in

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Aging and Elderhood chapter 3). The symbols communicated not only words but a vision and access to a life in which the expectations and constraints of the only existence they had known could be refashioned and in which a personal relationship was possible with a god who embraced both the Gikuyu and the Europeans. We found those who had once boarded trains at Muguga bound for the nascent city of Nairobi, leaving behind young wives to assume broadened responsibilities. We found those who had sought employment from neighboring Europeans and those who had joined the armed forces and were caught up in a World War. Many of their contemporaries had remained in Ngecha, conforming to traditional patterns but becoming aware of changes taking place around them. Even when they had been young, the older persons in the community had also been encouraged to support new ideas and innovations disseminated by the churches, schools, and government. However, it was the young who most noticeably stepped out of the traditional stream of life, either by choice or by circumstance, having barely entered it. They spent their lives participating in and initiating change, so it never surprised them even when it veered off in unexpected directions and picked up unexpected momentum.

The Elders Gikuyu culture once had a highly developed age-set, age-grade system (Whiting, 1981; Worthman & Whiting, 1987). In the past the payment of a series of goats or sheep or both to the kiama, the men’s council of elders, finalized upon the initiation of a first child, allowed a father to enter the ranks of the elders as a junior member. A woman’s entrance to elderhood also took place upon the initiation of her first child, at which time her head was shaved in a prescribed style and she prepared a porridge of maize and millet, serving half to the younger women whose sphere she was leaving and half to the older women to identify herself as a junior member of the women’s council (nyakinyua). These councils of elders controlled the social and ritual precepts of Gikuyu society, and individuals progressed through life in conformity with their standards and dictates. Membership in the institutions was not only open

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Aging and Elderhood to all individuals who had married and raised children to recognized adulthood, it was obligatory; not to belong was not to exist. Most men and women had access to the role of junior elder by age 40. It was then incumbent upon individuals to prove themselves responsible members of the mbari (localized lineage) to extend their interests and efforts and offer their experiences beyond their immediate homesteads, to reflect on their actions and assume full responsibility for them, and to prove themselves worthy to enter the inner circle of council elders, where secrets were shared and judgments agreed upon. Once signs of senility were displayed (for example, loss of memory, lack of attention, inability to walk to the site of gatherings unaided, inflexibility) the individual was defined as ‘‘old’’ and gently eased beyond the circle of control. It was then time for the individual to return to the homestead, to live surrounded by sheep and goats, sons, and grandchildren, to wait for the dependency of childhood in which all needs were met, for life was seen as a cyclical process: the individual was expected to enter and depart life as a child. female elders Few women in Ngecha were recognized as elders at the time of our study, and the women’s council had ceased to function. In the past a woman became a member of the council at the end of her childbearing years. A female elder who gave birth was frowned upon; reproduction became the duty of younger co-wives. The elder woman began to share responsibility for the actions of women within the mbari and for proper conformance in ritual activities. In particular, she played a critical role in activities surrounding female circumcision, marriage, birth, and death. She directed the preparation of food and entertainment for mbari guests. In return, she could look forward to respectful gifts of porridge, black-and-white beans (njahi), and castor oil with which to rub her body. She could call on those younger women to labor on behalf of the mbari. Once she proved herself reasonable, she could recommend fines in the form of food for indiscreet or disrespectful behavior of the younger women. Punishment for more serious offenses took the form of ostracism. She could be called upon to elicit information from a daughter whose mother suspected a breach of good behav-

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Aging and Elderhood ior. Her control was confined to the younger females of her husband’s mbari, but she might attempt to influence a man through his wife. Old women whom we interviewed claimed that elderhood was a good period in their lives; they were like girls again. They ate well, enjoyed close female companionship, and were relieved from much physical labor. Their bodies had time to recuperate from childbearing. They had strength, independence, and traces of their beauty left. They were no longer young and not yet old. They became recognized as old at the point when they were no longer efficient or dependable in performing nyakinyua duties and when their age became a matter of attention and discussion at gatherings. Then, like the old men, they were expected to follow the life cycle back to childhood. At the time of the research, female elders were sometimes still called upon to advise a wayward young woman, but they had lost the power to fine or ostracize. Punishment was seen to be in the hands of God. They were sometimes called to the deathbed of an elderly or old woman to beg her to withdraw curses from the family. They were in attendance at night-long wakes, leading hymns and collecting money to pay burial expenses. At weddings, they were likely to speak on behalf of the bride’s mother and the mbari women, advising the bride on behavior now expected of her. Female elders were often among the first to visit a newborn member of the mbari. They were called upon to give relevant information during a dispute but conceded that dispute settlement was the business of men. Although they represented the women of their mbari, they had become religious representatives as well, exerting their strongest influence through the churches. They were known for their organizing abilities and for their concern and fund-raising skills on behalf of the poor both within and outside of Ngecha. They oversaw the physical appearance of the churches and entertained church guests. Recognized female elders were physically active and thought of as relatively affluent, although several were widows. Naomi Muthoni, described in chapter 2, was the driving force behind a successful women’s land cooperative in the nearby Rift Valley. She encouraged her Ngecha followers, many of whom were widows, to ward off dependency by banding together to achieve economic power. Many of the elders were

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Aging and Elderhood politically active and made their loyalties known during the Emergency. They recognized their own leadership abilities and wondered what they might have achieved had they had access to broader educational opportunities. They valued education and urged the young who go beyond Ngecha to return and share the benefits. Many of these women had been rebels. They broke out of the traditional life patterns, availing themselves of education, employment, and agricultural innovations. Many were early Christian converts and monogamous, whereas the majority of women their age had co-wives. While their male counterparts were known for their quiet wisdom and humility, the women elders were sometimes accused of flaunting their independence, of being overbearing and proud. male elders Defining a Ngecha man as an elder at the time of the research study depended on the characteristics of both the speaker and the elder. A Ngecha man in his late eighties, the last remaining mbari patron within the community, was looked upon as a respected elder by members of his mbari, for his memories were still critical when disputes arose; to those outside his mbari, he was most often defined as old. A recognized elder had to have firmly established roots in Ngecha. A man in his eighties who arrived in Ngecha soon after the First World War with no local lineage connections was not considered an elder; he remained an outsider. An elder also had to be in relatively good health. A Ngecha man nearing his sixties, weighed down by poverty and poor health, could not expect to be seen as an elder, for he lacked the energy to sustain the expectations of the role. He accepted that he would soon be defined as old and would welcome it, for he would be weary. Wealth, past achievements, and present achievements of sons were criteria for membership to elderhood. A man in his sixties seen not only to have wasted his own life but that of his sons was regarded as an old man, useless to himself, his family, and the community. Most elders were economically productive and independent. They tended to be thought of as relatively affluent, indicating to the community that they had made sensible decisions throughout their lives, had

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Aging and Elderhood not antagonized those who held the land before them, and had invested their energies well. Inflation, changing criteria of affluence, and economic competition, however, were threatening the ability of the elders to ‘‘keep up to standard.’’ In the past the elders as a body, the kiama, exercised power in legal, religious, ritual, and education spheres. In Ngecha at the time of our research, their legal powers and control of the schools had been taken over by the national government. Although the elders still played a role in adjudicating disputes, their authority was not necessarily binding if challenged. The schools, once affiliated with the church, were now administered by trained personnel responsive to the parents of the schoolchildren and regulated by the Ministry of Education. Even the importance of the elders in the religious sphere was being challenged. Young men and women with an increased interest in church affairs were voicing their opinions, and men trained in national and international religious centers were taking over both the ritual leadership and the administration of the church. The community insisted that the power of the kiama was dead. Goats and sheep were rarely presented to the elders in exchange for services and permission to progress through life. An elder sometimes may have said to a young man, ‘‘Come on, it is time for you to pay . . . can’t you see I am hungry for meat?’’ but he said it largely in jest. Kiama membership was no longer obligatory, and decisions were no longer binding. The elders could not agree as to when the kiama began to lose its authority. Undoubtedly the first inroads into its power came with the appointment by the colonial government of chiefs, subchiefs, and other administrators. There was some evidence that Sir Percy Girouard changed his attitude toward the council around 1910, perhaps recognizing that traditionally this body had administrative and judicial powers and that leadership had never been delegated to one man.The elders did remember, however, that there had been periods when the kiama became inactive, which they attributed to periods of famine and an unwillingness to slaughter or give away goats in periods of hunger. As one elder stated, ‘‘Without animals, there is no kiama.’’ During these periods, those eligible had postponed paying their entire fees, and those seeking service had put off requests for adjudication.

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Aging and Elderhood Kiama meetings in Ngecha were attended by the chief, or headman, representing the government, and perhaps by others considered outsiders according to the traditional standards. Oaths could no longer be employed to elicit the truth from those accused of deviating from customary behavior, and physical punishment could no longer be inflicted. While most elders regretted that they had ‘‘lost the whip,’’ some recognized the need for reform, noting the misuse of past prerogatives, the indiscretions of the kiama, and the greed of elders who became rich off the weaknesses of others. However, although the elders had lost much of their power, their knowledge was still sought in disputes over the ownership and boundaries of land and in marital disagreements that touched upon bride wealth. Although deeds had been registered at the time of land consolidation, there were still conflicts that dated back to the curse of a dying father, which must be honored, as well as to land transactions of the original settlers with the Dorobo. When such issues arose, the elders who knew the relevant history and had a reputation for wisdom and reasonableness, as well as friendship and possible loyalty, were called on by the disputants. Although not binding, the elders’ opinions were often accepted. The case could also be taken to the district court, which might in turn ask the kiama’s decision, or the court might refer a case directly to the elders. But the number of these locally settled land disputes was declining rapidly with the national regulations about land division and the registration of deeds. Although the elders were called most commonly to adjudicate conflicts that required knowledge of past events, they were still concerned with maintaining community standards and planning for the future. They were forward looking, urging parents to send their children to school and to church; youngsters to study hard, push ahead in life; young men and women to enter marriage with care and deliberation; adults to save for the future and care for the old; the old to leave behind blessings rather than curses. They feared the drinking habits, the breakdown of marriages, and the new sexual license and regretted they had no power to control these problems. They complained that the young valued education but had lost respect for physical labor. They noted that the new generation judged the worth of an educated man to be 10 times that of an unschooled man but that the educated man

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Aging and Elderhood was afraid to soil his hands. Although there was intergenerational conflict in values, the elders strove to keep in step, to keep their doors and minds open to the young.They, too, valued education. A respected elder in his late sixties explained his long association with the young. ‘‘I have never been afraid of the young. I have watched them change and grow, make mistakes and become wise. Education has always been my greatest interest and hope. Above all, I enjoy teaching and counseling the young. Even today I work with the church as a teacher. I am proud that my students are now more progressive than I am.’’ Although the elders appeared conservative, as youths many had been rebels. They left Ngecha seeking education and employment. They returned bringing new ideas. They refused to be left behind by the young and continued to exert pressure through quiet persuasion. Their most frequent censure was of the youths’ challenge to authority and questioning of the competence of national leaders. Some warned that the son who attempted to overthrow the father would himself be destroyed. Others were more tolerant, taking the attitude of an elder in his late eighties who explained, ‘‘It is natural for the young of today to question those in power. It is part of becoming educated and of growing up. I did it myself when I ran away to school and then questioned my own customs, weighing them against those of the white man. I understand because I was a radical, a rebel.’’ Although the elders shared many values and opinions and participated together as a decision-making body, they were neither a united nor a homogenous group. They had had different experiences and belonged to different mbari. They stood on different sides during the Emergency. But they valued forgetting old accusations and controversies, as dwelling on them would only ‘‘feed the hyena twice.’’

The Elderly Not all elderly individuals in traditional times had been able to secure a reputation as trusted and respected elders. Although they retained membership in the kiama or nyakinyua and might have been called upon to serve, they were unable to penetrate the inner circle of control. They commanded little influence outside their homesteads. At the time

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Aging and Elderhood of the research, the vast majority of the active elderly were not recognized as community elders. They strove to exert their influence within the homestead, to accumulate obligations owed them against their inevitable upcoming period of dependency. Elderly men or women were not yet considered old if they were able to participate in physical labor to their own or the homestead’s benefit or to direct the labor of others, or if they were still consulted in homestead decisions. They were still productive and independent. Although the elderly took great pride in remaining so, they suspected they may never have the opportunity to relax and hand responsibilities and physical labor to others. They felt their bodies rebelling but asked, ‘‘Who will pick up the load if I put it down?’’ Some feared they would be forced to work until they died. Others insisted that was what they wanted. They prayed death would claim them before they became a burden upon those already overburdened. Some suspected that their bodies and minds would rapidly collapse once they were no longer strained. They saw the ascendancy of the young over the elderly and the old as a worldwide phenomenon. One elderly man commented, ‘‘The world is changing too rapidly. Unless God puts a stop to it, the young will soon shut their eyes to catch some sleep and upon waking will find a strange new world in which they too will be unable to cope.’’ elderly women The elderly female in Ngecha was seldom idle. She tended to her own needs and those of her husband if he was still living: carrying water, gathering firewood, and cooking. She farmed her own piece of land, which may have decreased in size over the years as the population of the homestead increased, and may even have helped her daughters-inlaw farm theirs. If she had no land available to her, she tried to rent a small piece. Some widows held the deed to their former husband’s property, with the responsibility to divide it among their sons, but this was rare. The fortunate woman had her own cow, some chickens, and perhaps a few sheep. When attending local and surrounding markets, she bargained shrewdly while considering purchases and selling her surplus products. If she had no surplus of her own, she may have bought

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Aging and Elderhood produce from others to sell in the markets, earning herself a small profit. She guarded her money carefully, keeping the amount a secret, yet spent it more often on others than on herself, possibly contributing to school fees within the homestead, to the church offering, and to burial costs of a neighbor. It was a matter of pride to her to be able to buy an occasional piece of clothing for a grandchild and sugar to serve with her guests’ tea. She sometimes pooled a portion of her money with that of female friends to be used when financial crisis faced each of them in turn. She sometimes deprived herself in order to save money toward the purchase of another cow, more chickens, or new seeds for her garden. She may also have attempted to accumulate and hide money for her approaching old age. It was a foolish woman, she warned, who told any man of her financial affairs. Sons and husbands complained, with a touch of pride, ‘‘She cries for the poor but is the richest of us all.’’ Her sons were looked to expectantly for the luxury of a new headscarf or a dress. It was a surprised guest who left the house of an elderly woman unfed, for elderly women liked to be thought of as generous by other women. The women exchanged mutual gifts of produce but kept careful track of any generosity or favor paid them, returning it at the first opportunity. To not return a gift was to put oneself in debt to another, even the gift of a cup of tea. As Ngecha husbands usually shared the house of a wife, most often choosing that of the eldest wife if polygamous, there was added opportunity for interaction between the elderly couple. This sometimes led to a warm companionship, in which memories were shared and plans discussed, or sometimes to virtual silence. One most often felt mutual satisfaction and respect in their presence. A woman in her late sixties, the mother of 12 children, explained her marital relationship as follows: We had a big job and were poor. We were young and frightened, but I told my husband, ‘‘Our home is a seed bed. We must plant children, take on the job of watering, feeding and shading them.’’ And this we did with all our energies. The time came when the seeds flourished and were strong enough to stand alone. We invested ourselves in our children, and soon we will be able to rest. It is all coming back to us like a pension. With

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Aging and Elderhood the bride wealth we received for our daughters, my husband was able to take a second wife. He is still grateful for my encouragement.

Most polygamous senior wives claimed that they urged their husbands to take a second and younger wife. They felt somewhat ashamed to have given birth after the initiation of an eldest child and certainly after initial grandparenthood. Female companionship and the sharing of family responsibilities and chores were welcomed. Some wives were treated cruelly, and it was hoped another wife might soften the husband or at least deflect some of his cruelty. Additional wives and children added to the prestige of a homestead and promised the eldest wife care in old age. However, some elderly wives had come to feel resentment that their husbands still had to labor to pay school fees for young children when they should have been accumulating resources for their old age. None of the polygamous wives would any longer advise a daughter or granddaughter to enter a polygamous marriage. This attitude was said not to be an indictment against their husbands but rather indicated scorn of the young men of today, who were thought of as weak, and the realization of the economic pressures that would swamp a polygamous family. Nor did they advise a young woman to marry an elderly man, asking, ‘‘What would be the sense in that? Who would educate her children? She could do nothing but take up a jembe (hoe) and do it herself. And later she would have to care for an old man. What young woman wants that?’’ While they did not usually express criticism of co-wives, many elderly women were critical of their young daughters-in-law. They felt powerless over them, fearing the young women were turning their sons against them and demanding more from the sons than they could comfortably provide. To prove the bond between herself and her son, a mother sometimes joked with him in the wife’s presence. However, in daily relations with her sons she was likely to have the reputation of behaving in a ‘‘hard and all-knowing’’ manner, of being critical and offering unsolicited advice. As the mother and her daughters-in-law grew older together over the years, they had either come to respect each other or to avoid each other. Elderly widows were numerous in Ngecha. The traditional practice of levirate, the marriage of a widow to the deceased husband’s brother,

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Aging and Elderhood had begun to die out shortly before the Emergency. The chaos that resulted from the nationalistic struggle had made men no longer able or willing to take on added responsibility for their brother’s widow. Widowed women tended to band together for mutual aid and companionship, often visiting each other in the evenings to help ‘‘kill the night.’’ Having no husbands to protect them from the disturbances of children, they were noticeably busy grandmothers. When young mothers within the homesteads went to the fields, to market, to employment, or to training unencumbered, the grandmothers often performed their tasks with a child on their backs. When children were thought ready to learn to talk, they were placed among the rough and tumble of older children. A boy or girl was assigned to carry the child when necessary, to answer the child’s cries, and to intercede in squabbles on the child’s behalf. The grandmothers then became overseers of the older child, teaching him or her to properly care for those younger. Widowed grandmothers usually cooked more than they expected to eat, for they rarely ate without the company of children. Schoolchildren within the crowded village often ate lunch with their grandmothers, whose homes may have served as safe bases for neighboring children as well. In return, the elderly women hoped to receive occasional small gifts from parents or chores performed by the children. Young students sometimes found their grandmother’s house the only quiet place within the homestead to study. Children slept in their widowed grandmother’s house either to relieve overcrowding within their parents’ house or simply because they enjoyed the company of one who rarely criticized or rejected them. Of course, not all grandmothers were noted for their kindness. Some were accused of exhibiting favoritism and others of being harsh in their relationships with the young, including their grandchildren. Because of the patrilocal character of homesteads, grandmothers typically spent more time with their sons’ children than with their daughters’. However, if they lived independent of a multigenerational homestead, they sometimes invited a daughter’s child to live with them in order to perform chores and to provide company. A daughter’s child may also have been sent to stay with her grandmother if the daughter and her husband lived too far from a school for the child to attend or

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Aging and Elderhood if they were unable to support the child. Elderly grandmothers living with husbands performed much the same services as widowed grandmothers but with less freedom. Although grandmothers occasionally complained that the care of children tired them, they took pride in having many grandchildren. Most rejected family planning, saying, ‘‘Only God can plan a family.’’ Longings for food no longer profitable to grow or raise on small, cash-oriented farms occupied an important niche in the memories of the elderly women. They spoke of meat, honey beer, millet and sorghum porridge, a wide variety of beans, bananas, sweet potatoes, arrowroot, fat, root soups, and sugarcane. They not only missed the obvious variety and nutrition of the past diet but the occasions upon which symbolic significance was expressed through the preparation, distribution, and eating of food. Although often nostalgic, the women refused to live in the past. They accepted education as a necessary safeguard against the uncertainties of a changing society but also feared the distance it could put between them and their children and grandchildren. They may have felt particularly isolated and suspicious when English and Swahili were spoken for any length of time in their presence. The elderly women formed a slightly more homogenous population than the elderly males. They had less opportunity to choose from alternatives over the years, and the differences found among them in lifestyles most often reflected their husbands’ choice. Although the structure of the nyakinyua no longer existed, the elderly women remained bound by common life experiences and formed the backbone of community support in times of crisis. Friendship and the formation of groups among elderly women, defined traditionally by mbari affiliation, usually depended on church affiliation and affluence. In many ways a woman’s security in old age, although not assured, was greater than a man’s. The explicit debt between mother and son was more honored than that between father and son; however, the elderly woman was aware that her future security was not assured. In any case, she was dependent on her son’s ability to compete for scarce resources within and beyond the community and on his willingness to

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Aging and Elderhood honor the debt between generations, which he would soon be called upon to pay. elderly males The majority of elderly males lived in multigenerational homesteads. As nuclear families strove for autonomy within the homestead, it was at first glance difficult to judge who acted as head of the homestead. However, when any question of land ownership arose, it became clear the household head was the man who held the deed. The elderly landed fathers tenaciously retained their deeds. It was not unusual to find sons in their thirties and older expressing anxiety over the share of land they might be allotted in the future or frustration that they were not free to make land utilization decisions independent of their fathers. Such frustration in the past would have encouraged the ambitious son to move onto adjacent land and initiate his own mbari. In Ngecha at the time of the research, the son had to buy his own land, and plots for sale in Ngecha were high priced, as were the former European farms in the White Highlands. Settlement schemes and cooperatives in the Rift Valley were more reasonable alternatives. The fathers kept their sons in suspense quite deliberately, intending to announce their decision on their deathbeds. They explained that the son who showed the greatest interest in both the father and the land would be given all or the largest portion of land. ‘‘He who feeds my stomach when I am hungry will get my land’’ was a commonly quoted aphorism. It was no longer the eldest son who necessarily inherited the largest portion. Disgruntled and disappointed fathers threatened to give land to loyal daughters, relatives, or friends and even threatened to sell the land. A man sometimes wanted to divide his land equally among his sons, but the law prohibited deeding plots of less than four acres. Fathers wishing to make an even distribution or who owned too little land to hold their sons’ interest sometimes attempted to purchase additional land in the Rift Valley. A frequent justification for deed retention was the fear that sons would be unable to resist the temptation of inflated and rising land

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Aging and Elderhood prices and sell the property. ‘‘And then,’’ asked an elderly man, ‘‘what would become of me when I am old and what would become of my grandchildren?’’ Sons admitted to this temptation and accepted the father’s right to hold land in trust for them until the father’s death, at which time the land was expected to be even more valuable. Thus the combination of land shortage and land inheritance as practiced encouraged tensions between elderly fathers and sons, between brothers, and between co-wives and husbands. Lest the impression be given that the most prevalent characteristic of the elderly men was divisiveness, it should be made clear that most played a critical supportive role in the homestead. They could, if they were able, contribute to school fees for their grandchildren. It was not unusual to find an elderly man supporting an unmarried, deceased, or divorced daughter’s children. The elderly man could also be lending partial or total support to an even older person than himself, to a sister or surviving mother. Although his sons may have housed their families on his land, they could be working outside of Ngecha only to return home as visitors, leaving the father added responsibilities. The majority of the elderly men had lost the privacy that a separate house offered them traditionally. Instead, they shared a wife’s house. If polygamous, they sometimes moved between wives; however, they usually chose to reside with the eldest wife, enjoying the quiet and order possible only in a childless house. His young children and grandchildren visited him, but they did so quietly and at the first sign of impatience scattered outside. The crying child was quickly removed from his presence. The elderly man spent his days busily. There were family matters to attend to, sometimes taking him to Limuru, Nairobi, or farther. He may have transported flowers or other goods to markets. Part of his day was spent working in his fields or directing the work of others. He ordered feed and fertilizer and attended cooperative meetings. If a church member, he may have gone to church functions. Troubled or ill friends were visited, and he was sometimes called upon to attend a dispute. Evenings were spent entertaining, visiting, conferring with his sons, keeping his financial accounts in order, and planning strategy. He tried to keep a small amount of money set aside for himself, for

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Aging and Elderhood trips to the beer house where he would be free from the ears of women and the cries of children, for a cup of soup or piece of roasted meat at the butchery, for contributions he might be asked to give, or for a pair of shoes or a warm neckscarf. He attempted to keep his financial affairs secret but sometimes had to call upon an educated son or friend to decipher the intricacies of a cash economy. Most were finding the maintenance of economic independence more and more difficult. To compete agriculturally, they needed cash, livestock, and often hired labor. Jobs were no longer available to them, and they could no longer depend on receiving bride price for their daughters, who could choose or be forced to marry poor men or could even reject the need of bride price. The elderly father expected gifts and occasional loans from his sons and sometimes from his daughters. He resisted becoming dependent on them, either because the sons had no inclination to support their father’s expectations or because he was not yet ready to relinquish his active role for the passive role of the old man. Within homesteads in which all were poor, the elderly fathers felt anxiety over their own welfare and that of their sons. Some claimed their present poverty stemmed from adherence to traditional standards, particularly polygamy and the fathering of many children. They regretted that family planning had come too late for them and felt impatience with sons who continued to produce many children. Polygamy was seen as a mixed blessing. It produced too many children and demands upon the husband, but the labor and company of a younger wife were appreciated. An affluent man in his sixties expressed conflict over the dictates of his church and his feelings of need for a young wife when he said, ‘‘I suffer from loneliness, a sense of lost manhood. My wife is shrinking with age. Women do not suffer this loneliness, for sons feel much more sympathy towards mothers than towards fathers. I wish I could be like my grandfather who had eight wives, or my father who had four. But I have only one, and I am lonely.’’ Respect and admiration were no longer readily given to the elderly man who managed to marry a young wife. They had lost the choice of women to the young, the community suspected children born of such a union were not fathered by the elderly man, and the children were pitied as being unlikely to receive a proper education. The elderly

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Aging and Elderhood fathers claimed to be as good as or better fathers than younger men. An 87-year-old father whose youngest child was 10 years old explained, ‘‘When a man is young, his energy scatters things away. As he grows old he gathers things around him. I am a better father now than when I was young. Children are a blessing, and I receive great happiness in having them around me.’’ The greatest problem facing the elderly father was the education of his children. Over half of both the polygamous and monogamous elderly males had children of school age or younger. It was seen as the duty of every father to educate both his sons and daughters, and it was no longer enough for a child to learn to read and write. Many elderly fathers found that, although they had provided several years of primary education for their eldest sons and had paid large bride wealth on their behalf, they were now accused of having failed them by not educating them to the standards of today. They saw these sons left behind, unable to compete. They dared not fail their young children, for education was seen as the most dependable investment the fathers could make toward the future security of their children and thus toward their own dependent years. The education of sons could relieve the father of the obligation to pay bride wealth, most often demanded in cash and paid by sons, but it forced them to prolong their economically productive lives. Although they made sacrifices to educate their children, sometimes to the point of selling animals and land, not all claimed to understand the aims of education other than to secure a job. They pointed with alarm to fathers who had educated their children well only to be left poor and hungry in their old age with the debt unpaid. Most elderly men did not dwell on the past. They said, ‘‘He who lives in the past lives alone,’’ but at moments longings for it were revealed. A particularly fine moonlit night prompted one elderly man to throw his arms wide to the sky and call out, ‘‘A perfect night for dancing and it is all, all gone. What a waste, a night like this.’’ Yet recovered from his impetuousness, he later explained that he had wasted himself in dancing, putting off the serious business of life to be admired by the girls; that today a schoolboy of 10 was pushing ahead farther than he had done at 20. ‘‘And this,’’ he said with a sweep of his arm, indicating the relative poverty of his surroundings, ‘‘is what I have to show for it.’’

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Aging and Elderhood Elderly men who gathered around the fire for warmth and companionship, when slipping back in time, often reminisced about the kirugu, the meat feast. A feast might have gone on for three months, during which time they had slaughtered and eaten goats and sheep, drunk soup and beer, danced, and enjoyed the secrets and company of men united by friendship and the ability to contribute animals rather than by age or kinship. All of the elderly men remembered attending such feasts, some as recently as the beginning of the Emergency, and attributed their present vigor to meat they had eaten in the past. The elderly men of Ngecha hoped to command obligation and respect by holding their deeds, educating their children, and responding to needs within their homesteads. They knew they must rely on their own ability to accumulate security and on the ability and willingness of their offspring to gain and share theirs. They walked a precarious and seemingly endless road toward old age.

The Old Ideally, old age in Ngecha was seen as a period of reward for a life lived in which one had met the expectations of society. The old had faced the impossibilities in life, and they no longer needed to struggle against them. In this ideal vision, they had earned comfort and company, a warm fire to sit by, food to fill their stomachs, a blanket to cover their bodies, and time to sit in the sun. The problems and chores of the homestead and of the community no longer taxed them, although their wisdom was still sought and children still searched for their roots through their memories. They were protected and also protected themselves against anxiety, anger, and grief, for ‘‘deep thoughts’’ were said to destroy the mind, to kill the old. No matter how frail the old became or how far back into childhood they slipped, they were to be sustained until the final life in them quietly left to join the spirits of the ancestors hovering above, no longer in frailty but with renewed vigor. In most discussions of old age in Ngecha, this ideal was rarely reflected. Instead, most people regarded old age with fear and dread. They saw old age as a time of helplessness, insecure dependency, discomfort, humiliation, and hunger. Schoolchildren spoke of old people

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Aging and Elderhood as being poor, dirty, and potentially threatening. Young adults described the typical old person as out of step with the times. Older adults saw the very old as burdensome. The elderly spoke of them as defeated. The old described themselves as a group as forgotten and hungry. However, neither the ideal vision nor the pessimistic fears fully captured the attitude of most Ngecha residents toward particular old persons or accurately described the quality of their lives. A young man of 20, in concluding a description of his relationship with his grandmother, said with deep emotion, ‘‘Oh, I hate old age. It took my grandmother from me.’’ the old women The old women realized that old age was upon them when they could no longer carry the lightest load, when their hands became unsteady while cooking, and when they looked into the faces of their last born and no longer found youth. They felt their energies oozing from seemingly punctured bodies, shrinking them in stature and drying their bones and joints. They found they could not easily distinguish weeds from young plants and were shooed from the gardens by younger women. They then had to admit that it was a foolish woman who denied old age too long. The quality of an old woman’s life was most strongly dependent on the relationship she had built up over time with her sons and on her sons’ ability to meet her needs. Her security lay within the multigenerational homestead. The majority of old women lived in such homesteads. The wise old woman was said to be careful not to demand too much of her sons and other homestead members but instead to sit patiently and wait for her needs to be seen. However, some were apt to complain to female visitors of hunger, showing the belt they wore to keep them feeling full and upright; of not having enough firewood to allow it to dry out properly; and of being ashamed of their clothing. The complaints were remembered and may have been repeated upon their death. Discontented and complaining old women left behind rumors of neglect. Contented old women were said to die of old age, leaving blessings upon those around them. The greatest comfort to an old woman was the presence of children.

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Aging and Elderhood In discussing her enjoyment of children, one woman said, ‘‘When they are not with me, I feel dizzy and confused. I only want to sleep.’’ Children brought the old women firewood and water, removed chiggers from their feet, washed their clothes and utensils, and tidied their houses. They kept the women company, sometimes using the blackened plank walls of a woman’s house as a blackboard. Schoolchildren were sometimes sent to the old women by their primary school teachers to learn traditional riddles, songs, and stories. Most women welcomed the opportunity to share their pasts; however, some were reluctant. Some saw talk of the past as an affront against the church. One woman feared that neighbors would think her mad if they heard her singing traditional songs. Another woman did not wish to frighten the children with memories of famine, disease, and the pain of circumcision and beautification. The old women were anxious for their young offspring to be bright, to stand out among others, for they would be identified together even after the old died. The women encouraged the education of granddaughters and great-granddaughters, although they realized that the expense of educating all children within the homestead would deprive them of occasional meat or new clothing. Education of young girls would allow these girls to join the young men in earning money and gaining independence. It would place the young wife on a more equal footing with her husband; although if she were wise, she would still appear submissive, for it would still be the wife’s responsibility to maintain peace within the family. Education would enable daughters to join their brothers in the support of aged parents. Most daughters residing near a mother grown old were a considerable support and comfort. A daughter would often share water, firewood, and food with her mother if she found her in need. She sometimes surprised her with a colorful headscarf or a kilo of sugar and offered to bathe her and shave her head. A mother left alone was sometimes invited to live with her daughter. The old women admitted to missing elements of the past now gone. They missed the occasions upon which a woman could drink beer and eat meat, the beauty of their youth, and the dances. They spoke of the time when young men desired them and paid the elders the goat that allowed them to touch the firm breasts of the young girls. The spirit

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Aging and Elderhood of Gikuyu womanhood was seen by them as missing in contemporary young women: cohesion, physical strength, and obedience to unquestioned obligations.The old women missed having rights of control over the produce of a small garden, cultivated by a younger woman, as was the practice in the past. They regretted being unable to give gifts and having lost control over the variety of their diets. The security of the past was gone; however, in retrospect, some said the basis of much of the past security was painful. Some remembered fathers’ love for their daughters as based upon the number of animals she was thought able to bring into the homestead upon marriage, of beautiful daughters being given to wealthy ‘‘hyenas,’’ men who had the reputation of being cruel to their wives. One old woman spoke of the sadness she still felt over having been denied the right to marry the man she had once loved and desired. Sons feared and obeyed their fathers, but fear had sometimes turned to hatred, poisoning the homestead. Innocent individuals had suffered from misused and stray curses. The vast majority of old women were widows. The fact that they had outlived their husbands surprised them. Men in the past were said to have lived longer than women for they were ‘‘pampered.’’ Men now felt torn apart from others, being killed by worry, hard work, and an endless search for money. The women questioned why they had lived so long. Years of bearing children and of seeing death had stolen their strength and peace of mind, yet they lived while the young and strong continued to die. The old women were disturbed by others’ attitudes toward illness, claiming that in the past people had taken time and paid attention to illness. Individuals with special knowledge of medicinal roots and surgical skills had been consulted. A mundu mugo, one who sees, was sometimes sought by the family to diagnose the cause and treatment of an illness. An animal was often prepared and slaughtered for the ancestors. Today, they complained, people did not deal seriously with illness. They simply went to a hospital or clinic where they were seen by busy strangers. The women may have patiently submitted to a hospital examination, but they had little confidence in the interest of modern medical practitioners in keeping the old alive and comfortable. They

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Aging and Elderhood felt equally disturbed when they admitted to feelings of illness and pain only to be told they were not ill but simply old. Days appeared long to the old women, and they attempted to fill them. They left their doors open for visitors and welcomed them cheerfully. They attempted to prepare a meal or a pot of tea. They moved slowly about the homestead gathering news. If strong enough, they walked beyond the homestead to the homes of neighbors and to church services if they were Christians. Church affiliation reassured the women that their burial would be attended and paid for and promised reunion with loved ones after death. The solitary old woman, left alone without sons or daughters, had to depend on her own abilities to maintain herself, on the kindness of neighbors, on the concern of the churches, and on relatives’ feelings of obligation or shame. Although the people of Ngecha accused each other of refusing to look at the problems of those beyond their own fences, the solitary old woman was not allowed to starve. Her survival became a matter of pride to those around her. the old men The men of Ngecha knew they were finally old when their bodies no longer responded to their wishes. The simplest chore caused their bones and joints to ache, and they noticed a loss of appetite and fading of sight. They were called fewer times to disputes and then eventually not called at all. People sometimes corrected them in conversation, suggesting they were confused. It was a gradual process. One man explained, ‘‘The goats and sheep are no longer paid, so it is hard to know where you are in life. For the past months I have done nothing but sit in the sun. All my needs are met. My sons tell me I am 92. I guess I must be old.’’ The old men most often lived within their homesteads with one or more sons. They may still have held the property deed, but by now the relationship between father and sons was likely to have settled into a pattern with each holding relatively realistic expectations of the other. The presence of a well-maintained old man—warm, well fed, and housed—was a matter of pride for the entire homestead. Members entertained his guests, swept his house, washed his clothes, and kept

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Aging and Elderhood him company. Yet for all the comfort they may have been offered, the well-maintained old men still suffered sadness similar to those of their less fortunate peers. One man said, ‘‘I feel my mind being eaten away by so much death. I am the last of my age grade; so many friends gone. I feel depressed by the behavior of people. Perhaps I have lived too long.’’ As he looked back over his life he remarked, ‘‘If the people of my youth came back today, they would not know where they were. Everything is changed, the land, the people, the traditions—everything.’’ The days of the old men were usually spent enjoying the warmth of the sun or of the fire and tending to such chores as fence mending and the tidying of the surroundings. They were seen at harvest time removing the kernels of corn from the cobs, preparing the corn for storage and sale. If strong enough, they sometimes walked to the shops or to the houses of friends to enjoy a period of conversation. They strolled about their property, looking at the crops, watching activities, encouraging a child to strike deeply into the ground with a jembe. The old men moved through the day quietly, with patience and care, trying to conserve their energies. They took frequent short naps and attributed their remaining strength to a life of hard work and traditional foods eaten in the past. Evenings were often spent in the house of a son, listening to conversation, dozing, and eating. The old men valued the possession of one or more sheep, remembering days when the old were expected to own countless sheep. They sometimes fattened a sheep for a time when their hunger for meat could no longer be denied. They sometimes kept a sheep to ensure payment for a sudden illness or other emergency. One man kept several sheep in his house for company, as a replacement for children. It was important to have children about to fetch a packet of snuff, to sit quietly listening to exploits of the past, to be taught to herd animals, to help fill an old man’s day. Old men who were poor said there was nothing good about being old when one lives with poverty, for life is bleak for those who must content themselves with what is left over from those already poor. The cold disturbed their sleep as they had only shreds of a blanket to tuck around themselves. The mahiga (fireplace) was cold from lack of firewood. Their stomachs and minds rebelled against a constant diet of

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Aging and Elderhood plain, stiff porridge. They welcomed aid through government agencies and local organizations; a refuge within the village where they could go when hungry, ill, or lonely; visits from young people who might be willing to perform simple chores beyond the strength of the old man; a reliable source of firewood, water, and food; warm clothing. They wanted to live and to die in their own homes. There was a deep-seated fear of dying in a hospital among strangers. Although the churches attempted to help the old, the task was beyond their resources. Further aid was seen as a hypothetical issue; it was not expected. The old men realistically saw their position within the priorities of both the community and the nation. Those living with only an aging wife to depend upon watched fearfully for signs of old age in her. They attempted to help her but found their efforts often fruitless. They suspected that a man with a helpless wife or with no wife at all, who had no younger woman to cook for him, could starve. An old couple living alone told of their constant hunger. Although both were frail, they made the effort to pay calls upon neighbors in the hope that they would be offered cups of tea, rich with sugar and fresh milk. Feeling the approach of death, an old man sometimes called to himself his wife or wives, if still living, and an elderly male friend to announce his final decision regarding land he might hold. If his relationship with those of the homestead had been good, his pronouncement was predictable. If tensions and resentments had been allowed to simmer unresolved, his announcement could come as a shock, perhaps evoking future land disputes and family bitterness. Upon his deathbed an old man could be moved to direct a curse or a blessing toward members of his family, particularly his sons. In casting a curse, a man might say, ‘‘Even if I die you will get nothing from me, not even a piece of my finger,’’ indicating land, or, ‘‘You will be having children who will not stay,’’ suggesting death. Although most Ngecha adults insisted that they did not believe in the power of the curse to bring misfortune, they admitted that it was a terrible thing to see the results of conflict and disappointment in the form of a curse. The curse was not an empty threat, for the manifestation of failure to establish and maintain a critical relationship hung heavily over the cursed. A middle-aged man told

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Aging and Elderhood of his efforts to avert the curse: ‘‘I heard my father was close to death and rushed to his side, pushing all others aside so it would be me who cared for all his last needs. I washed him and fed him. I was with him when he died. We had been enemies and I was afraid of him. I feared his curse and how it would affect me. I knew people would talk about it. He did not curse me, but things have gone badly for me ever since.’’ An old man sometimes feared to utter a curse because curses were apt to go astray and hurt those most loved. Devout Christians rejected the curse and turned to blessings to leave behind, saying, ‘‘May you always cultivate only that land which is productive,’’ or, ‘‘I have no bitterness against anybody. May it be done to you as it has been done to me.’’ Old men who had been well cared for were said to die of old age. Those who had suffered were said to die of worries and conflict with others. Although sons were sometimes blamed for the poverty and abandonment of an old man, the old themselves were also blamed. Past incidents of cruelty and selfishness involving the old man and his sons were cited. He could be accused of having failed to provide well for his children when they were young or for his own parents when they were old. The old man may have been seen as having wasted his youth and his money, of not planning well, of living by emotion rather than by his wits and hard labor. The consequences of a man’s entire life were believed to confront him when old. They were seen by all and could not be ignored or denied.

Conclusion There existed in Ngecha the widespread belief that in past days many more older people had gone on to live to great old age. People attributed this to contemporary risks from automobile accidents, an increase in the frequency and variety of disease, repeated emotional and mental stress, and a less nutritious and plentiful diet. While the threats to survival they mentioned were certainly present in Ngecha, their beliefs may also have reflected two other factors. The first was the position in the community held by older persons within the demographic pyramid. While it was possible that the absolute number of individuals 60 years and older had remained constant or even grown over the years,

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Aging and Elderhood the relative percentage of older people within the total population had very likely diminished due to the increased number of young people at the base of the pyramid. The second reason was the visibility of older people in the community. The aged in past days had probably been more visible because their active participation had been required at all gatherings within the mbari. People had gathered at their invitation. The definition of old age in Ngecha remained functional, based not on chronological age but on the individual’s social and physical wellbeing. However, it was likely that the elderly of the past had been free to cease functioning as physically productive homestead members at an earlier age. They had lived within homesteads better able to maintain dependent members; they had faced fewer chores because of the greater abundance of household labor, available land to expand upon, and economic homogeneity. The new economic pursuits coming into Ngecha had certainly increased the work of the homestead group. Cash cropping demanded frequent harvests and crop rotation, intensive cultivation, and periodic applications of chemical fertilizers and insecticides. Grade milk cows, purchased at a high price and representing a source of steady income, required commercial feed to encourage high milk yield and chemical dipping to prevent disease. Land congestion necessitated extensive and expensive fencing. As noted in earlier chapters, many young men were employed outside the village, delegating all agricultural work to the women who had less help from their children, most of whom were now in school. Parents were reluctant to take them from their studies to perform tasks, for exams needed to be passed in the highly competitive educational system. Out of school, young men no longer saw their future in relation to the care of animals and sought paid employment. Those hoping to be farmers needed first to accumulate capital. All these factors affected the niche occupied by the elderly and the old within a homestead, determining to a large extent their judgment as to when they could expect to assume a dependent role. They most often chose to prolong productivity until it could no longer be sustained, to postpone dependency. They were willing to do so because they perceived the conditions that denied them earlier disengagement. They were able to follow the thread of economic change.

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Aging and Elderhood The elderly and the old seldom characterized their current stage of life as their most satisfying. Some had expected aging would be pleasant but had been disappointed. Both males and females most often identified the years immediately preceding marriage through the birth of a third child as their best. Those who had lived in adherence to relatively traditional expectations felt self-satisfaction in proving themselves as adults and felt desired, valued, and fruitful. Those who had reached out beyond Ngecha toward a broadened world felt that this had offered them a variety of opportunities to better their lives. By the time they become parents of many children, however, their responsibilities had become heavy, the community was more admiring and encouraging of those younger than themselves, and some opportunities had proved deceptive. In conclusion, this research uncovered some important sources of concern about the welfare of the aged in Ngecha as the community became more involved in the market economy. None of the past institutions that had once tended to integrate the elderly had been maintained in integrity. The kiama had been weakened and reshaped, and the nyakinyua had been all but destroyed. Although the ideal of maintenance of the old had remained relatively constant, in practice it had become more and more difficult. The cost of maintaining one old person was said to be a minimum of 100 Kenya shillings ($14) per month, a large sum to those who had to divide a small income in many directions. Mobility of homestead members, caused largely by education, employment opportunities, and land shortages, also had contributed to the failure to uphold the ideal of maintenance. It was understood that unless the needs of the old were attended to daily, the old would be forgotten. An occasional gift, no matter how generous, could not compensate for day-to-day hunger. A bright new headscarf could surprise and delight an old woman, but it could not warm her on a cold night if she had no blanket or firewood. Although respect for the elderly was still the ideal (Edwards, 1997), such deference was no longer always granted. (Perhaps this was true in the past as well.) It was still paid to trusted elders who were recognized as powerful. However, for those without such status, overt gestures of respect sometimes could not hide underlying ridicule, disgust,

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Aging and Elderhood or hatred. Yet one 78-year-old man suggested that respect has never come naturally to the young, now or in past times. He explained, ‘‘In those days when I was a boy, if an old man stumbled and fell, my friends and I would laugh. We made such fun of the weak, never realizing that one day we too would be old and helpless. The young have always been cruel.’’ In many ways, the elders of Ngecha were like the elders described in three reports on older people in Western Kenya (Cattell, 1997; Kilbride & Kilbride, 1997; Sangree, 1997). Like the others, the elders of Ngecha felt considerable ambivalence about their positions and situations and expressed some of the same themes. Their implicit assumption was that respect and care for elders are important and that the ‘‘intergenerational contract’’ requires exchange of resources between parents and children over a lifetime. Aging individuals in Ngecha, like those in Samia, sometimes engaged in ‘‘discourses of neglect and suffering’’ (Cattell, 1997). Like those in Tiriki, they often complained that they were too busy and too poor (Sangree, 1997). Nevertheless, seniority, even though it had lost much of its traditional religious significance, remained (and still remains) an important status-ascribing principle (as described in chapter 8). Elderhood had certainly lost some of its former meaning and special dignity. The activities of elders had become restricted. While in the past the elders had been responsible to and for the community, they had now become responsible chiefly to their families. In the past they had broad consultant obligations; now their obligations were largely oriented to continued labor for themselves and their homesteads within a cash economy. The men were looking more and more to their ability to work into old age. The women still looked to their sons, who, unbeknownst to their fathers, sometimes secretly supported their mothers out of affection. Yet even as something was being lost, the older people of Ngecha still lived in the same world as the young and were looking with them to the future. They refused to be seen as mere remnants of a traditional past. Those struggling with poverty saw one another as fellows. Just as these people had once been pioneers in their youth, so they were pioneers

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Aging and Elderhood still, for they were creating new patterns and models of aging. Expectations of self and others were as yet unclear, and they were helping to create them.

References Cattell, M. G. (1997). The discourse of neglect: Family support for the elderly in Samia. In T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, & P. L. Kilbride (Eds.), African families and the crisis of social change (pp. 157–183). Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Clark, M. (1973). Contributions of cultural anthropology to the study of the aged. In L. Nader & T. W. Maretzki (Eds.), Cultural illness and health: Essays in human adaptation (pp. 78–88). Washington dc: American Anthropological Association. Cowgill, D .O. (1972). A theory of aging in cross-cultural perspective. In D. O. Cowgill & Holmes, L. D. (Eds.), Aging and modernization (pp. 1–14). New York: Meredity. Cox, F., in collaboration with Mberia, N. (1977). Aging in a changing village society: A Kenyan experience. Washington dc: International Federation on Ageing. Cox, F., & Mberia, N. (1975). The influence of schooling on the status and maintenance of the Kikuyu aged in a periurban community. Unpublished paper, Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University, Nairobi; also hraf, New Haven ct. Edwards, C. P. (1997). Morality and change: Family unity and paternal authority among Kipsigis and Abaluyia elders and students. In T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, & P. L. Kilbride (Eds.), African families and the crisis of social change (pp. 45–85). Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Kilbride, P. L., & Kilbride, J. C. (1997). Stigma, role overload, and delocalization among contemporary Kenyan women. In T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, & P. L. Kilbride (Eds.), African families and the crisis of social change (pp. 208– 226). Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Sangree, W. H. (1997). Pronatalism and the elderly in Tiriki, Kenya. In T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, & P. L. Kilbride (Eds.), African families and the crisis of social change (pp. 184–207). Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Whiting, J. (1981). Aging and becoming an elder: A cross-cultural comparison. In J. G. March (Ed.), Aging (pp. 83–90). New York: Academic Press. Worthman, C. M., & Whiting, J. W. M. (1987). Social change in adolescent sexual behavior, mate selection, and premarital pregnancy rates in a Kikuyu community. Ethos, 15(2), 145–165.

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8

The University as Gateway to a Complex World Carolyn Edwards, with E. G. Runo and Ezra arap Maritim

Introduction In the years following national independence, all age groups in Kenya were energized by a sense of possibility about transforming their society and their own lives. This book has presented a portrait of how individuals and families in Ngecha leveraged their human and economic resources on behalf of their own and their children’s futures. As shown in chapters 4 and 5, mothers were rethinking their values and goals for caregiving as they experienced the changeover to a wage economy and accepted the importance of schooling for the future. The everyday settings, activities, and companions and the values that children were learning in school and at home were changing in interconnected ways in Ngecha, as revealed by the discussion of old and new styles of teaching values in chapter 6. Likewise, the contexts of support for the elderly were in flux. Chapter 7 made clear how technological and economic changes were putting pressure on the contexts of care that people of Ngecha could and thought they should provide for vulnerable aging kin. Elderhood was not the privileged status it once had been, but still individuals retained their resilience and capacities to adapt. Yet we have not heard reflections on these processes of social change by Ngecha’s young adults on the verge of maturity. What did this age group think should be the proper relationships between husbands and wives and between parents and children in the new nation of Kenya? Were they explicitly aware, for example, of whether and how the rapid

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University as Gateway to a Complex World social and economic changes going on around them had affected their familial and parenting values? Were they attempting to preserve traditional Gikuyu or Kenyan customs and, if so, which ones? When making decisions that had an ethical component, did they consciously think in terms of what was right and wrong? What identity or reference group did they use as a source of value knowledge: locale, language group, religious denomination, nation, or other more universal group? How were different individuals responding to the alternative values they were exposed to in the university context? This chapter communicates some of the ethical reasoning concerning family roles and obligations in the face of changing times by a group of 19 Gikuyu-speaking students who were attending the University of Nairobi in 1972–1973. These students were not from Ngecha but rather from other Gikuyu communities, and their educational level was much higher than that of the Ngecha adults described in other chapters of this book. Yet these students derived from homes generally similar in composition and parental education and occupation from those discussed earlier, and their very achievement of university standing was the ideal of many Ngecha parents for their children. Thus findings from these articulate and self-reflective students are directly relevant for this book. As we shall see, many of the students did clearly understand their family obligations in relation to the Gikuyu community as well as to the nation of Kenya. They did not consider that they were speaking for anyone but their own individual selves, but their interviews reveal much about how thoughtful and educated Gikuyu individuals in the 1970s made sense of the rapid social and normative changes taking place in their home areas. Throughout the interviews, the students spoke about many of the same themes addressed in this book: women’s workloads and control of their own money; the autonomy of the nuclear family and weakening extended family ties; the new money economy and importance of education; conflict between the self ’s aspirations and demands of parents; respect for parents combined with some disillusionment with them as out-of-date; fear of being cursed by an angry, dying, neglected parent; special affection for aged mothers and grandmothers; the changing structure of Kenyan life; and the tensions between European and African familial and religious values. One

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University as Gateway to a Complex World student made the apt summary comment, ‘‘African life being far too complex.’’ They clearly acknowledged the intricacies and difficulties of their choices and dilemmas. The University of Nairobi students were interviewed as part of a larger study of experiential influences on the development and maturity of ethical judgment and reasoning of Kenyan secondary and university students and community leaders (reported and discussed in Edwards, 1974, 1975, 1978, 1985, 1994, 1997; Harkness, Edwards, & Super, 1981). The students were interviewed individually using a series of hypothetical story dilemmas, requiring them not only to make ethical choices but also to justify why they thought one or another decision to be right. The stories were constructed so that choosing to go with either side of the dilemma could be justified as ‘‘right’’ or ‘‘good.’’ All of the dilemmas concerned story characters said to be related by kinship; in answering the probing questions, the students provided extensive insight into their ideas about changing parent-child and husband-wife roles and obligations in the Gikuyu community. Reviewing this material in the light of the issues raised by the present volume, it is striking to see how active the students were in interpreting the changing nature of Kenyan and Gikuyu society and values, as well as how individualized and personalized were their responses. The students’ drew upon a common pool of words and phrases in discussing the dilemmas and their own personal observations and experiences, but they constructed a wide range of different arguments and conclusions. This chapter describes how the students—both female and male—framed their evaluations concerning parent-child and husband-wife relations within explicit theories about their changing communities and society. The descriptions will stay close to the interviews and include many quotations to convey as exactly as possible the content and variation of the students’ viewpoints.

The Research Process In 1972–1973, 52 University of Nairobi students were interviewed, including first-to-fourth-year males and females of African and Asian heritage in all degree programs, recruited through classes and word

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Sex & Age

F,  F, 
F,  F,  F,  M, 
M, 

M,  M,  M,  M,  M, 
M,  M,  M,  M,  M,  M,  M, 


No.


   

  














rd year, sociology nd year, zoology rd year, sociology rd year, medicine rd year, gov. & hist.
st year, arts & educ. nd year, arts & educ. nd year, educ. nd year, law nd year, commerce nd year, commerce
st year, arts & educ. nd year, gov. & soc.
st year, educ.
st year, educ. nd year, commerce
st year, educ. nd year, commerce nd year, arts & educ.

University Status (Year, Studies) Kiambu Nairobi Fort Hall Fort Hall Nyeri Meru Nyeri Nyeri Murang’a Murang’a Kiambu Murang’a Murang’a Nyeri Nyeri Nyeri Embu Fort Hall Nyeri

Where From Form  Form  Form
No info College Form
None None None Std.  None None None Std.

Std.

None Std.  Std.  Std. 

Father Std.  Std.  Std.  Form  Form
Std.

None None None Std.  Std.  None None Std.  Std.  None Std.  None Std. 

Mother

Parents’ Schooling

Farmer Businessman Clerical officer No info., deceased Education officer Chief Farmer Farmer Farmer Farmer Farmer Farmer Railway worker Subchief & farmer Farmer Farmer Tailor Primary teacher Primary teacher

Father’s Occupation Monogamous Monogamous Monogamous Monogamous Monogamous Polygynous Polygynous Monogamous Polygynous Monogamous Monogamous Polygynous Polygynous Monogamous Monogamous Monogamous Polygynous Monogamous Monogamous

Parents’ Marriage   





 

  


  

Sibling Order

Table 8.1: Description of the 19 University Students (listed in order of mention)





     


 


 



 

Number of Siblings

pcea pcea Catholic Anglican pcea Anglican pcea Anglican Anglican Catholic Catholic Anglican Catholic pcea Catholic pcea Catholic Catholic pcea

Religion

University as Gateway to a Complex World of mouth. Of these, 19 students (14 men, 5 women) identified themselves as belonging to the Gikuyu (or related Meru and Embu) language group—the largest single language subgroup in the sample. The students were working toward various degrees in the arts, sciences, education, commerce, medicine, and law (see Table 8.1). Seventeen of the 19 students grew up in the Central Province; they reported their home places as Nyeri (7), Murang’a (4), Fort Hall (3), Kiambu (2), and Nairobi (1). The other two were from Meru and Embu. They ranged in age from 20 to 31 years, with a mean age of 23.They were about equally divided between those who had two schooled parents and those with only one or no schooled parent. Their fathers’ occupations were identified as predominately farmers, but also teachers, chief or subchief, education officer, businessman, tailor, clerical officer, and railway worker. Most of the students grew up with many brothers and sisters (mean of 5.4); five were first-borns. In religion, they identified with several Christian denominations: Roman Catholic, Presbyterian Church of East Africa (pcea), and Anglican, and their parents had been both monogamously and polygynously married. Interviews between the first author and the participating students were conducted in the office of the Bureau of Educational Research at the University of Nairobi. Each interview, conducted in the English language, was tape-recorded and lasted about two hours. Students were told that the purpose of the research was to understand their ideas of right and wrong by having them discuss some hypothetical story dilemmas with no right or wrong answers. They were presented with four hypothetical dilemmas and associated probing questions and then a standard set of open-ended questions about how their own values and attitudes had been affected by experiences in secondary school and the university. Three of the hypothetical story dilemmas were drawn directly from the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, developmental psychologist and educator recognized for his constructivist theory of moral judgment development (Kohlberg, 1981, 1984; Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983). These dilemmas were adapted in detail to suit the Kenyan setting and have been used in numerous other cross-cultural studies (confer reviews in Edwards, 1979, 1982, 1985, 1995; Snarey, 1985).

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Top: The University of Nairobi in 1970. (Carolyn Edwards) Bottom: Many of the University of Nairobi students had attended quiet, selective boarding schools in rural areas of the country. (Carolyn Edwards)

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University as Gateway to a Complex World The fourth dilemma, based on the same format but entirely new and especially tailored to Kenyan context and value systems, grew out of intensive discussion in a seminar conducted at the university in 1972 to train those students who were preparing to serve as the research assistants for this project. E. G. Runo, Ezra arap Maritim, and Salma Gulamali were especially important in transcribing the interviews and discussing their interpretation. Hypothetical story dilemmas, the heart of Kohlberg’s method, represent an elaboration of the clinical method of questioning invented by Jean Piaget (1948) to uncover the structure underlying children’s moral and logical reasoning; they worked well in Kenya, too, to elicit rich samples of individuals’ reflections. Of the four dilemmas, the one called ‘‘Daniel and the School Fees’’ (developed in the training seminar) called forth the richest and most extensive thinking about familial relationships and obligations—both parent-child and husband-wife. It is presented in Table 8.2 along with the probing questions. The interview also contained two other story dilemmas that elicited some answers about the rights, duties, authority, and role obligations between parents and children. A dilemma about James and the Nairobi Show focused on a 14-year-old boy whose father promised him he could go to the agricultural fair if he earned all of the money himself; then his father demanded the money from James in order to go drinking with friends. Probing questions concerned whether James should refuse his father, who has the right to the money, and whose conduct was unfair. There were also several questions about a father’s authority and a son’s obedience and questions about promise keeping and breaking. In addition, a second story about Daniel involved a situation in which his aged mother was dying in great pain and wanting to take an expensive medicine that would prolong her life one year but not ease her suffering. Questions concerned whether Daniel, a poor man, should buy the medicine, whether he should obey his mother’s stated wish to be allowed to die, and the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, infanticide, and suicide. Thus all three dilemmas concerned sons, not daughters, but provided information about many moral aspects of the parent-child relationship.

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Table 8.2: Interview Dilemma and Probing Questions: Daniel and the School Fees A man, Daniel, managed to complete his secondary school education (Form 4) on the basis of school fees given him by his brother. Afterward he married and took his wife to live with his parents in the rural area, while he got a job in the city. Eight years later, when his first son was ready to go to primary school, his mother and father came to him and said, ‘‘Your brother who educated you has been in an accident and cannot work, so you must begin to pay for the education of your brother’s child.’’ This child was the same age as his own son. The man, Daniel, did not have enough money to pay school fees for both his own son and his brother’s child. His wife said he must put his own son first. 1. What should Daniel do in this situation? Should he put his son or his brother’s child first? Why? 2. What obligation does he have to his brother who educated him? 3. What does he owe his son? 4. Should he obey his parents in this case? Do you think a son has to obey all of his parents’ wishes? Why, or why not? 5. What should a grown son do for his parents? 6. Is it more important to maintain harmonious relations with his wife or with his brother and parents? Why? 7. Would you condemn Daniel if he just moved his wife and children to the city and did not pay for the education of his nephew? Why? 8. Would you yourself expect your eldest children to help their younger brothers and sisters with school fees? Why, or why not?

Besides ‘‘Daniel and the School Fees,’’ the interview contained another story dilemma that elicited ideas concerning the husband-wife relationship. This was an adaptation of Kohlberg’s famous Heinz dilemma (we called him ‘‘Joseph’’) about a man whose wife is dying of cancer. If there is only one drug that might possibly save her, the druggist is charging an exorbitant price, and no one will lend Joseph the money, should he steal the drug? Probing questions asked whether a ‘‘good husband’’ would steal and whether his decision should be affected by how much he cares about or feels affection for his wife. In addition, some of the university students were asked a short set of ques-

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University as Gateway to a Complex World tions about the husband-wife relationship: what is his rightful authority; should a couple socialize jointly or separately; what is the desirable arrangement for the evening meal?

The Women’s Points of View All five female students had schooled mothers and fathers (Table 8.1). Thus their parents were slightly more educated than for the sample as a whole. Their mothers’ educations ranged from Standard 3 to Form 3. Furthermore, for the four women for whom there was information, their fathers had attended some secondary school. Not surprisingly, these female students had a great deal to say about the husband-wife relationship. None took a stance in favor of traditional role relations. In considering Daniel’s problem of being tugged between wife and parents, most took the perspective of the wife. However, they varied in their stance toward the traditional closeness of the extended family, founded on values of respect, harmony, and understanding. Three distanced themselves from this ideal, while two favored it. One of the most articulate students was a third-year student in sociology from Kiambu. She described herself as a ‘‘born capitalist,’’ though at the same time she expressed pride in being African and believed Kenyan children should be taught ‘‘not to copy the Whites.’’ When asked what is the rightful authority of a husband over a wife, she answered: More or less they should be equal . . . but of course you know that the husband is always the head of the family, so you wouldn’t be replacing him.

Thus her ideal was a partnership marriage, with joint decision making but not necessarily completely equal power. She wanted ‘‘understanding,’’ by which she meant discussion, analysis, and compromise, and then there would be no difficulties. But disagreements are actually common, she went on, because of conflicts over money. Here she described her own observations about why conflicts are common:

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University as Gateway to a Complex World Each person tends to go his own way and that is the problem. Especially nowadays when everybody is working: the wife is working, the husband is working. The wife will tend to do what she thinks she can do with her money, and the husband will do the same. So there won’t be any bringing together of anything, and that will raise a problem. . . . In my mother’s time, I don’t think there used to be any problems about money because my father used to be the overall one and my mother used to be the housewife and always stayed at home, so that there used to be no conflict. If my father says there is no money for salt or anything, my mother understood there was no money. [Things worked] because the husband knew his duties. But nowadays they tend to neglect their duties, especially the modern Africans, they tend to neglect the men’s duties. . . . So the more we get educated and the more we want to get privileges, I think the more problems will come.

She went on to describe how women today have a double workload. In the morning, while the husband is still dressing and combing his hair, the wife must wake and dress the children and feed everyone breakfast. After work, while he takes off his tie and reads the newspaper, the wife goes straight to the kitchen. Therefore, she declared, she herself would rather be a housewife than a career woman, but with joint decision making about the use of the husband’s income. When asked what should happen if the parents of the husband come along and tell them they are doing things wrong, she was vehement, arguing for the autonomy of the married couple: Especially in the African system, we have got this problem, of mother-inlaws interfering with the life of the married couple. I think this is one of the things we should try and stop, especially because people are grown up and now they are married. I think they should be left alone. I don’t see why another woman should come to your own house and try rearranging it. I think they should be left alone. If the mother-in-law wants more money, I think they should just explain, this much money and no more, because of the family background. But I don’t think she should come and interfere; I think it is very dangerous because sometimes the mother of the boy, of the husband, sometimes can complain and in fact, add more—you know, we say in Gikuyu—salt, so that the wife is beaten for nothing. So in any case I think they should try and live very far from the mother-in-law.

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University as Gateway to a Complex World Similarly, a second-year student in zoology from Nairobi argued that a grown son should only obey his parents up to a point. She agreed that the nuclear family of husband-wife-children is a separate living unit. Concerning Daniel and the school fees, she said that when a man is caught in a conflict between his wife and parents, harmony with the wife should prevail: Once you get married, you sort of separate completely from your parents. You can just, say, go live somewhere else with your husband. This means you don’t really have contact with the parents. That doesn’t mean you don’t think of them, just that after you are married, your parents come second.

Another student who spoke forcefully on the interfering quality of in-laws was a third-year student in sociology from Fort Hall. When asked whether Daniel should obey his parents when they tell him to pay school fees for his nephew, she said: I think parents should be obeyed but not in this case. . . . You know, there are some things where parents should be out. They should just give advice and the person should decide what to accept and what to leave out. . . . Because I think parents can at times be very selfish. You know they love their children, but they are unable—just like other human beings— there are times when they want their child to do what they think is right and not what is necessarily right. For example, there are cases when parents will say, ‘‘Marry so and so,’’ and that will just be because what they see in the marriage future is well-being in money matters. And even in a case like this [Daniel], I don’t know what they could have in mind to tell him, ‘Educate your nephew first instead of your own child,’ but I don’t see any reason behind it. . . . It seems to me that parents can be very selfish and they will have motives which are not very good for the child at times, and when I am an adult I think I should be able to reason out some of the things. I need [my parents’] advice all right, but I know if they themselves had listened to advice from their own parents, they would probably have done things which were not very good for our family. For example, parents will always require to be given most of the things, because in our country right now most of our parents are poor, and they will feel that their child should give them most of what they have.’’

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University as Gateway to a Complex World When asked whether it is more important to maintain harmony with wife or parents, however, this student did not side unequivocally with the wife. Instead, she said that the husband should side with whomever is right in the situation. He should be ‘‘fair.’’ Wives, too, can be selfish and misguided. In contrast to these three students, two other female students felt much more sympathetic to the ties between the grown son and his parents vis-à-vis the wife. One of these was a third-year student in medicine from Fort Hall. She spoke eloquently on the value of harmonious living. A son should take care of his aged parents so as not to disappoint them and also not to disappoint himself. I mean, there won’t be this feeling, you know, his parents feeling that their son respects and loves them. He will not feel that he—you know, he’s fulfilling his duty of loving his parents. And even for the people who are looking on, and if this happens here and here and here in this society, then you won’t have harmony, you know. I don’t know how to put it, but it won’t be happy here and there.

At the same time, she felt strongly about the husband-wife bond. She said (about Joseph whose wife was dying with cancer): In the first place when people are married, when they commit themselves to one another, they promise that they will take care of each other. . . . I think it’s understood that a husband and a wife take care of each other, you know it’s not just an ordinary relationship, like any man and any woman. It’s understood that they should take care of each other. And they understand too, that they should take care of each other.

Yet when asked whether it is more important to have harmony with the wife or with the parents, she was more moderate than the others and said he should try and get along with all three as much as possible. Only if agreement is not possible should he give primacy to the wife, and that is because of the potential effects on children: I think it’s much more important for the man to get along with the wife, because they are bringing up a family sometimes and if he doesn’t get along with the wife, the possibility is that this family might break up. Then the children will suffer in one way or other. . . . His life really is

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University as Gateway to a Complex World centered at his wife with his wife. I think his parents, once he’s left their home, are sort of in the periphery. I mean, they might be more important than anybody else in the society, but they are more in the periphery.

The final female student, a third-year student in history and government from Nyeri, also took the position that the husband, Daniel, has to maintain a good relationship with both wife and parents and should try to bring the parties together. Indeed, of all the women, she made the strongest statement on behalf of the traditional African extended family: I think that by helping one person [in the family] you are not only helping that particular individual but the family as a whole. Because after all, I myself being an African and believing in the African extended family idea, I feel that one member of the family is just as important as the other one, and so everybody should help everybody else when necessary and when possible.

In contrast to all of the other women, moreover, she felt that it would be more natural for Daniel to side with his parents than with his wife, although ideally he should give primacy to the wife. I think there is a stronger bond between a mother and her son and his children . . . than between a husband and his wife. I think it’s because it is a blood relationship, while I think ideally it should be the other way around, [with a] better relationship between husband and wife. Because after all, they are living together, and it’s a life-time relationship and companionship. But you see, I am just talking from experience of what I see—no matter what conflicts may arise between parents and children, it’s always much easier to patch them up, than between husband and wife.

At the same time, however, she recognized that rapidly changing values can lead to disagreements between generations. In that case, young people are entitled to make their own decisions: Parents might be very, very traditionally oriented in their thinking and their views, and the son may belong to a young generation. The views of the child may not necessarily coincide with the views of the parents, and there may be a conflict. . . . I think a grown-up person should use their

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University as Gateway to a Complex World own discretion as to whether to obey their parents or not. After all, the decisions are theirs and they are living their own lives.

In sum, all five of the female students felt the husband-wife relationship ideally should come first, but they varied in their views about its autonomy from the extended family network, particularly the husband’s parents. Only one of the five explicitly declared herself committed to the traditional African extended family.

The Male Students’ Points of View The male students, perhaps more than the female, seemed torn between different value systems and old versus new modes of relating between the generations. Many of them framed their answers in terms of what they believed to be traditional values and explicitly named a reference group, such as ‘‘we Gikuyus,’’ ‘‘our society,’’ or ‘‘our community.’’ Only two of the male students displayed a seemingly easy acceptance of weakening extended family ties in contemporary Kenya; five displayed strong commitment to their version of Gikuyu values; and seven seemed torn two ways. students with least traditional orientations One student who expressed little or no pull toward traditional Gikuyu values was a first-year student in arts and education from Meru. This student said it would be ‘‘almost inhuman’’ for Daniel to neglect his son’s education. He argued that an adult son needs to obey his parents only as long as they ‘‘do not hinder his progress in life.’’ Even a young son does not need to obey when a father oversteps the bounds of his rightful authority. The authority of a father over a son, so far as I’m concerned, should only cover those areas which are building up a man out of a son, and not things which might injure his manhood or his pride or which might frustrate his own aspirations or even initiative. . . . Let’s say, if a son were in school, and when he went [home] on holiday, he had to become a sort of laborer in his father’s home, instead of reading his books or preparing for a final examination. I think the son would be justified in disobeying the father so that he may do the correct thing for his own future.

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University as Gateway to a Complex World Another student who took that same tack was a second-year student in arts and education from Nyeri. He felt Daniel had some obligation to his nephew but that ignoring his own son would be like letting oneself drown while trying to save someone else, in other words, an absurd self-sacrifice. When asked whether a grown son should obey everything his parents tell him, he replied: These days we can’t actually obey everything, because some of the things are out-of-date . . . the way they used to think—has actually changed quite a bit.

Even James, the young son, was right to disobey his father; he had the right to the money since he had earned it, and his father’s authority is limited: I think the authority should be [only] as long as he is going to help the son to attain his goal or just to grow up or help or something of the sort.

Neither of these students defined the right or good in terms of Gikuyu or African values; neither spoke of a moral reference group, such as ‘‘our community’’ or ‘‘our society.’’ students in the middle Seven students (four of them from Murang’a) felt more ambivalent about the proper authority relation between the generations and were torn between traditional Gikuyu and European lifestyles. In many cases they approved of Daniel’s independence from his old-fashioned parents but in some other way recognized the traditional respect and authority patterns. For example, a second-year student in education from Nyeri was definite that Daniel should pay school fees for his son rather than nephew. I would prefer to side with my wife . . . [my parents] are aged in a way and I have a lot of life with my wife. . . . [Y]ou are tending to your own family members, rather than being so much concerned with the extended family nowadays. . . . Nowadays we are not so much concerned with our parents, but in a way we seem to be drifted away from the relatives.

At the same time, when it came to the issue of the father’s authority over his young son (James and the Nairobi Show), he indicated indeci-

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University as Gateway to a Complex World sion and made frequent reference to how it used to be in ‘‘our society,’’ meaning among the Gikuyu. When asked about the authority of the father, he said: Well, it depends on the society. Because in our own society, the father has got full right [to the money], full authority on the son. . . . So being his son, then respecting the customs in our own society, then I would allow him to give the father the money.

A similar student was a second-year law student from Murang’a. When asked about Daniel and the school fees, what would be the ‘‘most correct thing’’ to do, he changed his mind as he spoke: Pay for his brother’s [son], because that is more or less according to traditional society. . . . But let’s say when you have lived away from the traditional society, you are a University man or something, you obviously pay for your son, because sometimes some of the ties are broken.

He went on to describe the ‘‘clash of views’’ a young man may have with his father if his father tries to control when or whom he marries or if his parents don’t approve of his wife. These days people have run away from home when they can’t agree with their parents’ views on his own wife. . . . [T]here isn’t much a person can do except, let’s say, to try and show his parents to try and put up with any kind of inconveniences that they may have, or if they don’t like the manners of the wife or something like that.

Yet this student, too, felt ambivalence about disobedience or disloyalty to the older generation. This came out in his back-and-forth answers about whether Daniel should buy the medicine for his aged mother. One of the reasons he thought it might be best to purchase the medicine comes from the power of the mother to curse the son: When old people died [in the past], usually the children wanted to be on terms with them. Otherwise they may leave a curse. People feared the curse. They fear it even today. You don’t like your parent to say something bad about you when he is dying, so you sort of tend to be tender to him. . . . It all depends whether you are an educated man or a traditional man.

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University as Gateway to a Complex World Another student in the middle was a second-year student in commerce from Murang’a. He seemed intensely attentive to the value changes going on around him and answered questions in abstract terms of what he has seen others do rather than in terms of what he felt for himself. For example, when asked whether Daniel should be closer to his wife or parents, he said: Oh well, especially these days—due to the influx of these new ideologies, and due to the need to please yourself and your family—now it has become more of deciding among you and your wife these days more than the whole family. You know, people are beginning to be not as loyal to the family as before. And people are starting to have self-realization in such a way that they want to upraise themselves even within the family. So that you find that these days, people might choose even against their mother. . . . (Should a grown son obey everything his parents tell him?) I think especially in these days it is very difficult . . . because the structure of life is changing, and let us say, most of them [parents] tend to be living in the past, while you are living in this time.

Similarly, when asked whether it is more important to have harmony with wife or parents, he spoke about how difficult a matter this is these days, especially if you find your educated wife is bad to your parents: that you have gotten married to somebody who might even be abusing your father—especially these educated girls and such! So you find that in fact, there is a lot of conflict. . . . You find that most of the people [husbands] prefer to remove them from living together.

While this student realized values were changing, he seemed to feel a strong pull toward traditional values. He believed in the power of the aged mother to curse her son who did not buy medicine, as well as in the traditional obligations to help one’s siblings pay their school fees: The structure of life is changing, and you find that people . . . just want to feel that they are themselves and they don’t want to help the others. That is tending to be the order of the day today. But traditionally, I should feel that I am obligated to them and I should help them.

Another student in the middle, seeking to straddle traditional Gikuyu and modern values, was a second-year student in commerce from

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University as Gateway to a Complex World Kiambu. He thought the question about Daniel and the school fees was very difficult. He acknowledged that Daniel was obligated to his brother but noted that the brother had helped Daniel to fulfill his own duty (not to be repaid). His preference for his own son was conditioned by his strong sense of changing times and the current importance of education for later life success. Education is so important now. At the moment it is the only thing that you have in order to earn a living. Before, people didn’t use to go to school, but then there were big pieces of land. You grew up in your father’s shamba. He gave you a piece of land when you grew up, and cattle and everything and the wife to settle. Now you have to get education.

He felt a grown son need not always obey his out-of-date parents; he is closer to his wife: [Parents] are a bit late, you know. They don’t think in terms of today. Although even then, you know, you shouldn’t be putting them down like that; but there are situations when you have to ignore them. . . . If I had to take sides, I think I would side with my wife . . . she is the one who has lived with me. In a way, the wife replaces one’s parents.

Yet this student was opposed to weak ties between the generations and between a man and his close kin. He was motivated not by fear of a curse but by how bad he would feel if he had to see others in his family suffering from his lack of generosity. He felt older brothers have an obligation to help educate their younger siblings; he himself intended to help his own eight younger siblings: There are eight children behind me, so I have go to struggle to get them educated—most of them, at least. . . . I wish now I had a small family, or I wish my father had a lot of money, so that when I leave the College, I am also ready to get a wife, get started. But now I can’t [if I want to] go and stay with my parents. I feel it as a duty to help them. (Why? After all, you are not the father?) I am not the father, really, but I wouldn’t want them to suffer. Because if they suffer, I also suffer. They can’t move away from home. They can’t—we are not like people in Europe where a person can move from New York to California and leave them; we can’t do that. You go home sometimes. If you stay in town, after some years you go back. You can’t stay in harmony if your brother is poor. He will say, ‘‘This

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University as Gateway to a Complex World man had money and he wouldn’t educate. He refused.’’ He will always be quarreling [with me]. If he also feels that you are obliged to help him, that is part of it.

Another student who spoke distinctly on the paramount necessity of gaining an education was a first-year student in arts and education from Murang’a. As he put it: ‘‘the education being a kind of stepping stone to jobs or to a happy future.’’ This student seemed pulled between traditional and modern values and motivated by a desire to reduce conflict between people and minimize everyone’s feelings of hurt or suffering. In addition, he was one of the few students who described how ‘‘keeping good relations with the community’’ and fear of community ostracism are motives for moral behavior. When asked, ‘‘Can you imagine a case in which the conventions of your society would require you to do something that seems very wrong to you to do?’’ he gave a very vivid example about female circumcision, still commonly done in his home place in Murang’a. He made clear that he still felt connected to that place and its people: For instance, you take this question of female circumcision. The educated women think it is risky biologically, but then the society requires that they should do it. Today it is not very widespread, but in the place that I come form, it is emphasized. That is Murang’a, in the Central Province, just nine miles from the border, you’ll get all the women circumcised. Those who are not, their parents are sort of outcasts, and those girls are looked at with contempt. So I think, then, that that conflicts with somebody’s feelings, because one is sure that it is a good thing to remain uncircumcised, but society thinks otherwise. (What is the function of punishment?) One can’t live happily alone, so if you are made an outcaste by your neighborhood, you will feel out of place, and you’ll never feel free. You go to another place, you still talk of your place, but you can’t fit in.

Another student in the middle was a second-year student in government and sociology from Murang’a. He was pragmatic rather than moral in thinking about Daniel and the school fees dilemma. He initially argued that Daniel should help his own son first to avoid criticism from his wife; then he changed his mind, thinking how the par-

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University as Gateway to a Complex World ents might get angry and leave Daniel or chase him out, sell his land, and give the money to the nephew. When asked whether a grown son should obey everything his parents tell him, he said no, because they might ‘‘tell me to do things that are getting out-of-date.’’ Yet when asked whether it is more important to maintain harmony with wife or parents, he drew a traditional picture of the marriage relationship: I think I will have to stay with my parents according to the way of life of my tribe. (Why?) Because the wife can go away any time she sees that she wants to go away, but my parents can never go away from me. You know, if my wife goes away, I will be left with my parents.

This student was among the minority of university students who said James should give his father the money he himself had earned for the Nairobi Show. He was sure of his answer because he felt both Gikuyu custom and Christian religion (the Ten Commandments) expect this. [H]is father expects him to be obedient because he has to show him that he respects him . . . he had the right to give the father [the money] because he is expected both by religion and the tribal custom to obey his parents.

The final student strongly pulled by the call of both Gikuyu and European values was a first-year student in education from Nyeri. He argued that Daniel should educate his own son first because ‘‘[i]t is an obligation for a father to educate the son.’’ He accepted that a grown son should try to please his parents by obeying them and being responsible for their needs; at the same time, he felt a husband is closer emotionally to his wife. Asked about whether husbands and wives should share their social lives, he gave a long, considerate answer, as if he had been thinking about these issues on his own: In any case, in answering such a question, you know, I am torn between two answers. Because there is this modern way, I mean, I would say the White way of doing things, and then there is the African way. I would base my arguments on the two sides. I would say on the African way, men are expected to be dominating, and what they do usually is share their evenings with other men, let’s say, his age-mates. They discuss things, they go to visit places, or else they sit in their homes and discuss things

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University as Gateway to a Complex World until they feel tired, and then the night is over and they go to bed. That was the way it was previously, and some people persist in it even today. But then, the trend that is there now, among the present Africans who are educated, is that they feel obliged to share their good times with their wives. Maybe they go for pictures and films or to dances, and for that matter, after working, they can even sit in the house and watch the television. They share such common things as the Whites do. So, on the social side of it, I would say, there’s not much to learn from the wife anyway, I would admit, because the only things that you discuss are only things that you have been discussing for quite a long time. You can’t discuss these papers, the news of the day. Not much you can learn from the wife. So, there is always the need for a change, to go and see some people outside and learn, from a man anyway. As an African I would say that. Yeah, you need a change and go and see people outside and learn. So, on the social side of it, it’s not—it is not sufficient to just share with the wife all of the time. (How about eating dinner?) I like the idea of eating with the wife and children. For sure, we are one thing, in any case, in a family. We are expected to share all things equally. I mean, if not equally, we are expected to be together for most of the time, as long as we can afford the time. And eating is ordinarily one of the times that we should be together most.

students with most traditional orientations Five male students (three from Nyeri) were definite spokesmen for traditional Gikuyu or African values, as they understood them. Each had a distinct perspective and way of conceptualizing issues, demonstrating that there is no fixed and final set of arguments constituting Gikuyu thinking but instead an open collection of basic terms, concepts, and favored lines of reasoning that allow people to understand and argue with one another and to use in constructing a personal system of moral meanings. A first-year student in education from Nyeri related almost all of his answers to Gikuyu custom. For example, he said Daniel should take his own son first because ‘‘[t]his being his son—there is so much regard in our culture for one’s son.’’ He said a grown son should obey all of his parents’ wishes because ‘‘[o]ur society demands this, that one obey his parents.’’ Rather than calling the older generation out-of-date, he said

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University as Gateway to a Complex World it is good for young people to respect older ones because ‘‘[w]e have got a lot to learn from them about our society and about our culture.’’ This student saw the value changes going on around him as mostly bad, leading to a deterioration of social life. For example, when speaking about the story of Joseph and the medicine for his wife, he blamed the druggist’s greed on the new money economy in Kenya: I think it is just because of getting into the money economy or something, just because money was introduced to this country not a long time ago. So everybody feels he should have the most money—more money than the next person—this is very common.

When asked what he would think about an older brother who was not willing to pay school fees for his younger siblings, he said: I would really blame him, and everybody would blame him—not me alone. This [irresponsibility] takes place because there are some young men who take drinking so much, drinking beer and city life, such that they disregard their other brothers and sisters at home, and the society is not very happy with them.

Similarly, he contended it is more important to have harmony with one’s parents than with one’s wife. A wife should definitely be under the husband, in the traditional way, or trouble will ensue. Only in terms of wanting a closer father-child relationship than he himself had experienced did he express some reservation about the older patterns of family life: This is very common these days, that sometimes one’s wife is disagreeing with his parents. . . . First they’ve given you a piece of land, they’ve laid your foundation at least. And . . . let’s say you have been educated or something, then you marry an educated girl, and then when she comes to the family, she can’t cope . . . when your wife comes to your home, where the standard is not very high,—probably she comes from a richer family and at her family the standard is higher. . . . Sometimes women tend to disregard the husband’s parents. This is where the trouble comes from. And according to my view, and if I was caught in such a situation, I would definitely side with my parents. (How about sharing social life with your wife?) Our custom does not agree to this. . . . [A]ccording to Gikuyu society, a wife is somewhere

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University as Gateway to a Complex World lower than a man. She’s got to agree to what a man decides. If your wife is disobedient or something, the blame is laid on the man. So our customs do not agree that a woman indulges in social life. This is a man’s business. A man drinks beer, goes to parties, or something like that. The wife is expected to stay in the kitchen. This has been the custom for a long time. (And you agree with that custom yourself ?) I think it is a very good one. Because if men and women are on an equal footing, if husband and wife are on an equal footing, then I rather think there will be disagreement in the family or something, because one of them definitely has got to be a leader, you see. One of them has got to lead the other. One has got to be in a position to make jural decisions, and if they are both on the same footing, then it is going to be difficult as to who is going to make the decisions. This is where the problem comes in these days. They are the cause of chaos in most families, where women want to be liberated and they want equality or something. But Gikuyu society doesn’t agree with this. (What about eating dinner all together?) It is a bit—it gives one a bit of pleasure when you are together sharing a meal or something. You talk about the day, sort of speak to your children, let them understand you a little. Because most of us did not understand our fathers completely, because the father was such a high person that you had very little in common with him. Sometimes he used to come very late at night drunk. . . . He was very tough and he was cruel or something. So we used to agree with our mother’s point of view.

A second-year student in commerce from Nyeri was also very committed to the extended family. He felt a proper analysis of its organization shows why Daniel must help his own son first: Before you help the other person, you have to help yourself. . . . You know, if you go in a sort of organizational chart, you find that, first, there is yourself, of course, and there are your sons, your brothers, and then the others. So your son will come first before your brother’s son, even in the extended family system. . . . I think we are somehow different from the Europeans. Because my understanding of what they do is, once you are married and you have got your children, you don’t care about your brothers and so on. Here it is quite different.

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University as Gateway to a Complex World When asked what a grown son should do for his parents, he replied in terms of his ethnic reference group and gave one of the most extensive and detailed answers: You see, in the first place, I would rather talk about my tribe. People in my tribe are interested in something like business, they want farms, good clothing, etc. So you would either start a small business for your father— if he is interested, of course. If your farm is small, and it is possible that your father sold a small farm when he was educating you, you would buy him another piece of land, and clothing, if he doesn’t have any.

He indicated reverential respect for the mother figure, too, when asked whether Daniel should buy the medicine for his aged mother: I think Daniel should go on and buy the medicine, because the life of his mother matters a lot. (To whom does it matter?) To the whole family, you know. After all, that family came from that old woman, if I can put it that way, and so they should, you know—the African families I am talking of—they want their mothers or their grandmothers to live longer. And I think they would be willing to forego this amount of money in order to have their senior lady to live for another year.

This student respected the elders for their wisdom and knowledge about Gikuyu customs and history: From the society’s point of view, old people are good: they give advice. They tell stories of some days back—say, in our society, before we have got education brought by the White man. Old people were like the novels we read today.

The only way time this student indicated disapproval of traditional Gikuyu values was when he was asked about infanticide of a baby who was deformed. He declared himself, as a Christian, opposed: The Gikuyus used to do the same, long ago, before the Whites came, I think. The second of twins was killed. I don’t think it is good, in my opinion. But it all depends where you are standing. Are you a Christian? Are you educated? Because this will determine your values. I don’t think it [infanticide] is a good thing, because that is God’s creation. I don’t see why one should kill a human being.

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University as Gateway to a Complex World A first-year student in education from Embu was really very undecided about whom Daniel should educate. He felt it would be best to listen to and respect the advice of those around him: It all depends on what people will say about it, mostly. . . . So usually it will depend on what other people around, especially the close, elder relatives, think about it. So if you are pressed by the opinion of very many elders, sometimes one should comply.

Asked whether it is more important to maintain harmony with wife or parents, he selected the parents—but with an attempt to be a bit balanced and fair to the wife: Well, in the traditional setting, you should listen first to the elders, that is, his fathers, his mothers, his uncles, and the rest, and he should listen less to his wife. Actually, when someone does exactly what his wife tells him, they usually have a song for him, that he is sat on by his wife, or something of that nature. But, you see, things are changing, and people listen to both these days. I mean, if you want to be a bit balanced, you won’t listen completely to your wife and forget about your fathers. That would be doing an injustice. So people try to listen to both these days. But usually, more emphasis was put on the father than on the mother, and even the wife would not have said something which was completely against the father’s and mother’s wishes.

His strong commitment to Gikuyu customs was embodied in his answer to a question about the age at which a father’s authority begins to diminish over a young son: Actually, the breakup—I will quote from my indigenous community— the breakup is usually as soon as the son is circumcised, that is, he goes through the ritual of being converted to an adult. Yes, that is the boundary, about age seventeen.

A second-year student in commerce from Fort Hall was another who frequently referred to ‘‘our society’’ as his moral reference group. He thought Daniel should put his own son first, but Daniel nevertheless has an obligation to the brother who educated him because of ‘‘our customary law, the way we have been brought up in our society.’’ When asked whether it is better for Daniel to maintain harmony with wife or

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University as Gateway to a Complex World parents, this student told a long anecdote involving his own brother; his thoughtful conclusions demonstrate his capacities to be flexible in order to remain true to the higher, traditional goal of harmony within the extended family. I think in such a situation you should maintain with your wife. Because I remember of a case, we had also a case like that, with my brother who lives in the urban [area while his wife stays in the rural area]. He had a conflict with the wife—this one somehow was completely dissatisfied— and you know, in our society when they [in-laws] are living together, you must share some interests, some sort of things. But the wife didn’t like this, because she used to say, ‘‘What is my husband? He’s mine, not yours.’’ So there was some sort of conflict, and they couldn’t continue to stay together. You have seen most of our houses; they used to share a different house but the same roof. So she wanted to have her own home; there was a conflict, and the wife went back to her own home. So according to the custom, the code of laws or something like that, they say to regain our family we should not go and tell the wife to come back. She should come on her own. There’s a saying, ‘‘We don’t run after women.’’ That’s what they say, what we are usually told—although life’s changing. . . . But my brother took a different thing, and I think it was the right thing. When [he and his wife] did discuss the matter, he said he was going to build a house for her. And the house was built, and now she is happy and lives about four miles from my home. And she feels now she can do anything, and the exchange of food and other things now can continue.

He revealed the depth of his commitment to family values in his answer to a question about whether he would condemn Daniel if he just moved his wife and children to the city and forgot about his nephew. There is this feeling called extended family system, in which you are not only responsible for your sons. Especially in that moment, because he was given a lot of help—his brother helped him, out of the feeling that he had some sort of obligation. And so [Daniel] is expected to do the same thing. Because oftentimes those from our area—I don’t know if it’s true of the other areas—most of the time when we get educated, we go to live in town and forget our parents. And this is very bad, because the par-

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University as Gateway to a Complex World ents, who have sacrificed most of their time, saving one thing or another, [now] they see it is no use in educating one of their sons. Because they are trying to invest in him, but actually as soon as he gets some income or enough education, he fails to recognize there was somebody who made that possible.

Moreover, this student did not interpret the customary obligation as burdensome or even as a rigid duty. He felt it as something a brother does out of his own heart, not because he is required to do so. As far as possible, if I am able, it is my [the father’s] duty to educate my children; and I should not go impose [on] all the older brothers to help all the younger ones. But by my behavior and the way I have brought them up, they will feel it is their duty—it is not a duty, but they will feel it is a social obligation to lend us something or to give us something. It’s within themselves: it should come from within themselves, not from what we say, by word or behavior, that they should. They should offer willingly.

The final student who explicitly placed his decisions within the framework of what he called ‘‘African’’ values was a second-year student in arts and education from Nyeri. He felt Daniel must educate his own son first or else face the righteous anger of that son when he grows up and realizes his father favored another over him. And even the two might meet one day—my nephew and my son—and even a quarrel might arise. [My son] will say, ‘‘Oh, so this is why you’re given priority to be educated by my father. That’s why he neglected to educate me first, and being the right son.’’ You see, all these things are liable to arise, particularly within an African context.

When asked whether he would condemn Daniel if he just moved to the city and forgot about his nephew, this student gave a long description of his own situation. He explained how his own brothers watch out for the welfare of his wife and children while he is at the university. He concluded with a firm affirmation of the value of helping within the extended family. Yes, I would, I would. Well, here is the case of the African life being far too complex, because in my own [case] . . . now I’m here in the University, and I’m not being sponsored by anybody, and my children,

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University as Gateway to a Complex World my children, some of my children are in school now, and my wife also, my wife is just working around. Well, they may not be having sufficient money to keep them going. And, therefore, it is a responsibility of my brothers, who are, in fact, in employment. If there is something which goes wrong, they could at least assist and encourage them when I’m here, well, having so much work here, I almost forget what is going on up there. I would almost condemn them, if they are not looking after my family when I’m away. . . . In this case there are good relationships, between me and them, because we all live together. They see my family as their own family. They look at them as their own family. And this is the situation of this man [Daniel]. If once he decides to leave the family, his parents, up there, and comes to the town with all his family, it means that there’s no relationship. He doesn’t care what is going to happen to them, whether they starve, whether there are some children who need education who are younger, all that. Therefore, I would condemn this man.

Rather than having been influenced by exposure to European ideas to give up his Gikuyu ones, instead he incorporated those newer concepts into the dominant framework of the older one. This was illustrated by his answers to the dilemma about Daniel buying medicine for his aged mother. He argued that Daniel, ‘‘according to the traditions,’’ shouldn’t listen to his mother’s refusals; otherwise, in the last moments of her life, she may change her mind and say, ‘‘Well, I’m dying now, nobody is caring for me,’’ and curse Daniel. When the student was asked how that cursing happens, he offered a psychological interpretation, that the curse operates through the person’s guilty conscience. Thus he adhered to the customary belief and integrated European science into that framework. He concluded: It is terrible [if he doesn’t buy the medicine], not in the sense of the modern law, but I think the tradition—within the tradition of the tribe. According to those people, it is a terrible crime, because it would mean there was negligence.

Conclusion We have seen how the University of Nairobi students, in their responses to story dilemmas involving conflicts of familial values and duties, ar-

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University as Gateway to a Complex World ticulated many observations about the ongoing changes in Kenyan society, as well as their interpretations of how these changes had affected their own and others’ choices and perspectives. In the context of their observations, a few of the students, both male and female, expressed a ready embrace of a more European-style family life, including spatial separation and decision-making autonomy of the husband-wife unit from the authority of older relatives and more intimacy and equality between husband and wife. Most others, however, revealed misgivings or regrets about what they saw as gradually eroding ties of respect and obligation between parents and grown children. These students recognized that old parents can sometimes be old-fashioned or out of bounds in their recommendations and demands, but nevertheless they felt strong obligations to share resources, ‘‘listen,’’ ‘‘understand,’’ and ‘‘seek harmony’’ with their close relatives and still recognized the power of elders to advise and bestow curses or blessings upon the younger generation. The most morally conservative students, all male, expressed desires to retain older patterns of hierarchical relationship between husband and wife and father and son, as well as strong identification and satisfaction with their reference group as a source of values.

References Edwards, C. P. (1974). The effects of experience on moral judgment: Results from Kenya. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Edwards, C. P. (1975). Societal complexity and moral development: A Kenya study. Ethos, 3(4), 505–527. Edwards, C. P. (1978). Social experience and moral judgment in East African young adults. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 133, 19–29. Edwards, C. P. (1979). The comparative study of the development of moral judgment and reasoning. In R. H. Munroe, R. L. Munroe, & B. B. Whiting (Eds.), Handbook of Cross-Cultural Human Development (pp. 501–527). New York: Garland. Edwards, C. P. (1982). Moral development in comparative cultural perspective. In D. Wagener & H. W. Stevenson (Eds.), Cultural Perspectives on Child Development (pp. 248–279). San Francisco: Freeman.

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University as Gateway to a Complex World Edwards, C. P. (1985). Rationality, culture, and the construction of ‘‘ethical discourse’’: A comparative perspective. Ethos, 13(4), 318–339. Edwards, C. P. (1994). Cross-cultural research on Kohlberg’s stages: The basis for consensus. In Bill Puka (Ed.), New Research in Moral Development (pp. 373– 394). New York: Garland. Edwards, C. P. (1997). Morality and change: Family unity and paternal authority among Kipsigis and Abaluyia elders and students. In T. S. Weisner, C. Bradley, & P. L. Kilbride (Eds.), African families and the crisis of social change (pp. 45–85). Westport ct: Bergin and Garvey. Harkness, S., Edwards, C. P., & Super, C. (1981). Social roles and moral reasoning: A case study in a rural African community. Developmental Psychology, 17, 595–603. Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development. Vol. 1. The philosophy of moral development. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg, L. (1984). Essays on moral development. Vol. 2. The psychology of moral development. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg, L., Levine, C., & Hewer, A. (1983). Moral stages: A current reformulation and a response to critics. New York: Karger. Piaget, J. (1948) (1932). The moral judgment of the child. Glencoe il: Free Press. Snarey, J. R. (1985). Cross-cultural universality of social-moral development: A critical review of Kohlbergian research. Psychological Bulletin, 97(2), 202– 232.

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9

Ngecha Today Violet Nyambura Kimani

The village of Ngecha—its people, environment, and general outlook —has undergone tremendous changes since the period during which the information used in this book was collected. This chapter will describe some of those changes from the point of view of a community health researcher who has maintained continuous contact with the community and its people. Administratively, Ngecha is part of the Limuru division, Kiambu district of Central Province, with its distinctive physical geography. Four locations—Ngecha, Tigoni, Limuru, and Ndeiya—make up Limuru division, positioned on the southwestern part of Kiambu district. The ecology of the general area is strongly influenced by physical features, in particular the Kikuyu escarpment to the north (approximately 7,800 feet above sea level), isolated hills such as Kendong Hills (6,237 feet), the Gicheru Ranges (6,890 feet), and the relatively flat areas at the center and to the south. The flat zones contribute to the formation of Nyakumu and Ewaso Kendong swamps in the southern and western parts, respectively. Two rivers, Ewaso Kendong and Rui Ruaka (literally river of women), drain the Limuru division. These streams flow through the northern locations, Limuru and Tigoni. Nevertheless, the area endures perennial water shortages due to reduced stream flows and environmental pollution. The southern area covering Ngecha and Ndeiya locations faces acute water scarcity throughout the year because there are hardly any surface streams, and the people depend solely on underground aquifers accessed through boreholes and hand-dug wells. Escalating deforestation over the last decade makes the situation worse.

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Ngecha Today Climatic and weather conditions also vary with relief features. Although a large section of the southern and western parts experience semiarid conditions, the northern and eastern parts undergo wide climatic variations ranging from tropical savanna to high-altitude, almost temperate zones that prove an ideal environment growing a wide range of crops. In these higher areas are found the large farms that cover over 148,000 acres (60,000 hectares) of high-potential agricultural land in Kiambu district. These large farms in Limuru and Tigoni locations are privately owned, are highly mechanized, and engage over 75% of the active labor force from Ngecha and adjoining villages. The name Ngecha refers to both the administrative unit (location) and the community (ituura in the local dialect). In this chapter, the name Ngecha refers usually to the community (village) rather than to the administrative location. Ngecha is among the most highly populated areas in the Kiambu district. According to the 1999 Kiambu District Development Plan, Ngecha location has 61,101 inhabitants, of whom 10% are considered urban residents. The average total fertility rate is 5.2 children per woman, the mean annual population growth rate is about 3.1%, and population densities exceed 2.1 persons per acre (520 persons per square kilometer) in the high-potential agricultural lands. This chapter is based on information gathered recently through a household community diagnosis study using structured questionnaires supplemented by key informant interviews, focus-group discussions, and participatory observations. The community diagnosis exercise was conducted with the aim of obtaining updated information about demography, maternal and child health services, water and environmental sanitation, nutritional status, morbidity patterns (including health seeking), and the social and economic status of Ngecha today. As part of this exercise, a structured household questionnaire was conducted in approximately 300 households, retracing the village clusters in the earlier Ngecha research project, namely, Mbari-ya-Igi, Mbari-ya-Thaara, and the township (which local people refer to as Gichagi). However, prior to this, several focus-group discussions were held among selected women leaders who had participated as young mothers in the original Ngecha project. In addition, in-depth inter-

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Ngecha Today views were conducted with selected key informants, including schoolteachers, youth, and the elderly. It was quite thrilling for the 10 women and me to reflect on those earlier times and to compare Ngecha then and now. They recalled how, as part of the Ngecha project, babies born to them and other women prior to midnight 1969 were followed consistently for one year, with careful tracking of their mental, physical, and social development. Those babies are now adults over 30 years old, the majority of them married with several school-going children of their own. Additional information was provided by public health data gathered by the Centre for Health and Behaviour Studies of the University of Nairobi, a multidisciplinary arm of the university dedicated to promoting multidisciplinary research and information dissemination. As part of its mandate, the center has been working in collaboration with the Tigoni Subdistrict Hospital to establish a cervical cancer screening and treatment program. (Within the national health system, a subdistrict hospital has the capacity to provide most but not all services that are provided by a district hospital. However, a district hospital is the official referral facility for its surrounding district.) A five-day outpatient clinic was held at Tigoni Subdistrict Hospital in December 1999 for diagnosis and treatment of cervical cancer. The women who volunteered to participate demonstrated an overwhelming response and commitment to their own health. Initially, we had been apprehensive that turnout would be low, but worries were quickly dispelled when women were effectively recruited through the local communication networks, particularly local churches and women’s groups. A group of volunteer doctors from Loma Linda University in California participated in the 1999 cancer screening exercise and then came again in 2000. Since they are volunteers using their own resources to pay for the trip to Kenya, they can only afford an occasional visit. A team of doctors and social scientists from the University of Nairobi has continued to provide ongoing consultation to the clinic in collaboration with the Tigoni Subdistrict Hospital staff. So far, a total of 600 women have been screened and advised. Finally, additional data were collected through participatory qualitative methods. Trying to discover community perceptions about the

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Ngecha Today causes of cervical cancer, we found out that the community particularly blames oral contraceptive pills and use of the cervical coils. People explained that the pills accumulate in the body and eventually create wounds that revert to cancer. Likewise, they feel that the coil and other devices erode the surrounding parts of the body and cause cancer.

Demography and Maternal and Child Health Services Household data were collected by trained research assistants who interviewed each head of the household or the spouse. (The household unit was defined as all the people who had lived and eaten from a common pot continuously for the past three months, including individuals who were nonrelative employees or long-term visitors.) The findings corroborated information gathered earlier through in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions. The number of people in a household was found to range between three to eight persons usually living in a two-to-three-room house. There was a high rate of ruralurban migration, with some people commuting daily to the city to work or sell agricultural produce and eggs. A woman in her early thirties narrated being on the road every week using long-distance buses to supply eggs to the wholesale market in Mombasa, on the coast of the Indian Ocean. The following kinds of comments heard in the focus groups convey common concerns about the negative long-term results of birth control on family preservation: We grew up in large families, where an average mother had as many as 8 children. Family planning campaigns started in 1965, and people were initially very reluctant to use the birth control methods. Over the years, people have come to realize the difficulties of rearing large families, and today some women prefer to have only one child. The child is pampered like a precious jewel, thus growing into an individual difficult to control. Should such a child die, the parents become so devastated that some get heart problems. It becomes even more depressing when such a mother has already been sterilized. Our sons and daughters are reluctant to bear many children to ensure family continuity. It is disheartening to imagine our spouses and ourselves might not have grandchildren taking after our

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Ngecha Today names to avoid being forgotten when we die. We would like to strongly appeal to women today to give birth to at least 4 children, 2 boys and 2 girls to name after the four grandparents. I cannot understand why they do not want children. They say that the economy is not doing well, but we believe that God provides for everyone. Even the woman with 10 children would never really get to a point of starvation. Taking into account that the calamity of hiv/aids is wiping out young people by the thousands every year, the necessity to bear more children has never been more urgent, at least to avoid a situation where families are completely eliminated.

One elder informed us that some of the younger families had moved out of Ngecha in search of better fortunes, suggesting further themes about the negative effects of change on family preservation and continuity: ‘‘Some of our children have moved out of Ngecha and bought or leased land elsewhere. A number have migrated to America in search of employment. However, land is still very precious. When a person without land dies they are buried in a public cemetery. In contrast, people who own land are interred in there with the ancestors.’’ Household data confirmed that all the women who had been pregnant during the preceding 12 months had sought prenatal services at least three times during the pregnancy and that 100% of the same women delivered under institutional care. About 50% of the women had visited government facilities, 39% had used church-sponsored facilities, and the remaining 11% had attended private clinics and maternity homes (most private maternal health facilities within about half a mile [1 kilometer] of Ngecha). Women resumed using family-planning methods about six weeks postdelivery, and their reliance on the most popular birth control services helped them attain the number of children they could support and fend for. However, older women in the focus groups commented disapprovingly upon institutional delivery: ‘‘The majority of modern mothers choose to deliver at health institution, and some even opt for Cesarean sections to avoid labor pains! (Laughter). It is incredible that a woman can fear childbirth that much. In our days, an expectant woman worked until the last minute when labor pains set in. She delivered at home assisted by other women, and if complications arose she was rushed to the hospital in a hired taxi. In

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Ngecha Today contrast, a pregnant woman today keeps her bag packed in readiness to rush to the maternity institution at the first indication of labor.’’ Maternity institutions, especially private ones, have capitalized on the current trend and charge high fees for even normal, spontaneous vaginal deliveries. Children in Ngecha are fully immunized within the first year of life. Immunization programs have involved house-to-house campaigns as part of the international effort to eradicate polio worldwide. Recently, the focus of the local immunization campaign has turned to measles. In the early 1970s a mobile clinic that was regularly established at the camp of the location chief provided immunization services and treated minor ailments. With the declining economy, marital relationships are becoming more fluid and short-lived. People say that the majority of women get married at around 24 years of age, while the men marry at a relatively older age of 27 years and above. Because so many of the men are unemployed themselves, they look to marry educated women who have the potential of securing some form of future employment. Marriage partners are generally from the vicinity, but a few have married in from outside groups. Young people no longer consult their parents about the choice of partners but rather just inform them once they have completed their plans. Some real situations and scenarios were elaborated in the focus-group discussions. For instance, one woman reported that one young man had announced to his parents that he was living with a German woman whom he intended to wed in church the following week. ‘‘This is my fiancée,’’ he proclaimed. ‘‘She is expecting my baby, and our wedding is set for Saturday.’’ The woman went on in this way: ‘‘As a mother, now tell me what would you do or say? But just give them your blessings? We have seen many cases of separation and divorce. We accept anybody they choose. We do not say anything even when a girl has had a premarital child, we still accept her.’’

Water, Sanitation, and Housing Because there is almost no surface water in Ngecha, the community relies on a borehole situated at the center of the village just outside

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Ngecha Today Gichuru High School. The people have to pay for the water, and sometimes long lines form as people wait to be served. In general, women and children are responsible for fetching water. Some years back a project was completed to pipe water to the houses, but this was discontinued when it was found that families often not only wasted the water but also failed to pay their water bills. Today, households can pay donkey-cart owners to fetch water. Young boys enjoy donkey-cart rides as they gallop to fetch water. As I was collecting data for this research, I found that retracing the footpaths in Ngecha village prompted contradictory feelings, nostalgic joyful emotions as well as some gloom. The joy came when I relived those youthful days in the early 1970s when we, young project researchers, used to walk briskly through the thick dust or the slippery mud, depending on the weather. The gloom arose when I reflected on the deteriorating social and physical environment around me today. Certainly, I found that the dust that covered our shoes to be as fine nowadays as it ever was. On one occasion I was walking toward Igi with two medical students near the crossroads to Nyathuna-Wangigi, Gichagi shopping center, and Ruthui. A matatu pulled onto the road heading toward the shops in a cloud of dust that sank deep into our lungs. (A matatu is a form of transport common in Kenya. It is usually a minibus or a pickup truck with a covered bed offering cheap transportation.) One of the students coughed and blew his nose in disgust. I started to tell some of my long-ago experiences to the students, and they exchanged glances of disbelief at those ‘‘prehistoric days.’’ Suddenly I stopped and gazed as we arrived at that formidable intersection, and my blood chilled in my veins as I reflected on a certain morning in 1970 when two young men had lost control of the large water drum that they were rolling to a family in Mbari-ya-Igi. The heavy drum hurtled down the slope with reverberating booms and a trail of dust. Just then a little girl from Mbariya-Igi was hurrying up the slope on her way to the Ngecha Nursery School. Apprehending the rolling projectile coming toward her, the girl had dived into the ditch for shelter, but unfortunately the drum had crashed on both her upper legs, causing deep cuts. People rushed to the scene as the young men took to their heels for fear of mob repri-

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Ngecha Today sal. The child was taken to the hospital in the Ngecha project vehicle. A few days later the village chief had presided over the case and helped the families who were concerned settle on appropriate compensation. I wondered now what had become of the girl. A local woman, Florence, who was our guide back in 1970, informed me that the family had since moved from Ngecha to Marigi in Komothai location, but she believed the girl must by now be married with several children. When I heard this, I sighed with relief. People appear to observe rules of hygiene more carefully today than in the past, yet ironically, communicable diseases are on the increase. An elder informed us that there is more community awareness regarding preventable diseases, but diseases have become more complicated to fight: ‘‘Roads are now much better than before, and there are more cars today. We wash hands always before eating, but why are people still dying from diarrhea and tuberculosis? Forests have given way to farming. Gardens are even smaller. We need to rethink where we went wrong!’’ In a focus-group discussion with women who participated in the earlier study, Florence elaborated on the obvious changes observable in housing units throughout Ngecha: We used to live in houses made of mud. Today most houses are made of stones, concrete, timber, and iron sheets. Grass-thatched houses are no longer constructed. Houses used to be roofed with tin sheets called debes. One such sheet was valued at barely one shilling fifty, and over a hundred of them were required to roof a small room the size of a kitchen. School authorities at the time required the family of each child enrolled to provide one sheet of debe, in order to gather enough sheets to roof the classrooms. Iron sheets are now available, albeit quite expensive, and have replaced the debes. Quite a number of people around here have built stone houses with tiled roofs.

For housing, 86% of the family households live in semipermanent houses with iron sheet roofing and walls of either iron sheeting or timber. The other 14% live in permanent houses with stone walls and tile roofing. About 30% of the households live in rented houses with two or three rooms. For cooking fuel, 17.6% of households use electricity, 23.5% paraffin, 47% charcoal and firewood, and 11.9% other sources,

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Top: Tigoni House, formerly the headquarters of the Ngecha research project, is now the home of the Centre for Health and Behaviour Studies of the University of Nairobi. ( Violet Nyambura Kimani) Bottom: Some of the women who were part of the original study in 1968–1973 participated in a focus-group discussion led by Violet Nyambura Kimani (far right). ( Violet Nyambura Kimani)

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Opposite, top: Since Ngecha does not have access to much running water, boreholes (wells) still provide a common source of water. Today, households often pay donkeycart owners to fetch water. ( Violet Nyambura Kimani) Opposite, bottom: Most people live in homes built with iron sheet roofing and timber walls. In the background stands one of the rarer and more expensive homes built of stone walls and tile roofing. ( Violet Nyambura Kimani) Above: Families keep cows to produce milk for sale. They usually do not have enough land to pasture them and so raise them with zero-grazing. ( Violet Nyambura Kimani)

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Ngecha Today mainly gas and sawdust. Microwave ovens were seen in several houses in the township.

Nutritional Status The major subsistence crops grown today include maize, beans, potatoes, and a variety of vegetables and fruits such as pears and avocados. Maize, prepared in a number of ways and mixed with beans and other pulses, potatoes, and vegetables, remains the staple diet for both adults and children. About twice or so every week, some families can afford to add meat to their diet. Other people (especially men) consume plenty of roasted meat while drinking at the local bars. Milk is seen as an essential commodity, and every family consumes some amount of milk each day. Those who raise chickens can afford to eat eggs, but many mothers reported that the young ones show reactions to eggs. Young children eat the same food as the rest of the family, except that it is prepared separately and mashed with milk and such additions as margarine or butter. Infants are weaned on bananas and potatoes mixed with green vegetables and then mashed with a little butter and cow milk. In between meals, young children are fed with porridge made from various types of millet with a little milk added when available. These days, refined foods like rice, ugali (a stiff porridge made from cornmeal), and commercial instant infant foods are the most common baby foods, usually sweetened. Fruits such as papaws and ripe bananas may be mashed and added to the child’s food or else given as a snack between meals. On special occasions, such as weddings, gatherings of the extended family, and entertainment events, everyone feasts on delicacies such as rice, chapatis (East Indian bread), beef stew, and sodas and bottled juices. One major variation between child practices then and now is the predominance today of hired help (maids) who care for babies all day while mothers work away from the house. Furthermore, as farming land available to each household diminishes, most families have come to rely more heavily on food bought in shops and outdoor markets. Small kiosks that sell flour and sugar repackaged in small, affordable amounts (half a kilogram) have mushroomed to supply people’s daily needs. Some feeding programs for the needy are provided through

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Ngecha Today the churches and nongovernmental organizations (ngos), primarily to serve orphans, sick widows, and poor elderly members of the community.

Morbidity Patterns and Health-Seeking Behavior Before the missionaries arrived in Kenya, our people used traditional medicines for treating diseases and other health needs. Herbal specialists gathered the precise parts of plant materials they wanted and then through drying and grinding or boiling extracted the medicines required to treat the problems presented to them. The missionaries introduced modern medicine and discouraged their Christian believers from using any traditional healing practices by calling them evil and primitive. The people were eventually enticed to turn to modern medicine as we know it today. These days, people are accustomed to buying medicines from shops for most sicknesses; when symptoms persist, they seek institutional care at a clinic or hospital. Several health facilities, clinics, and dispensaries, either privately or government sponsored, are found within the Ngecha township area. Religious organizations under the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (pcea) and Orthodox churches have set up their own health services. Other private services are sponsored by ngos, such as Plan International. Private practitioners abound at the shopping areas, and those who can afford the fees seek health services from the private sector. The remainder of the population tends to go to the government-run facilities, such as the Nyathuna dispensary and Wangige Health Center for minor ailments and the Tigoni Subdistrict Hospital for further attention. Disease patterns have shown immense diversity over the years. Chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, and kidney and liver problems, are so common that people all talked about them with a clear understanding of their various symptoms, possible causes, and required management. In the focus-group discussions, for example, many of the participants reported themselves to be undergoing medications for one chronic condition or other, and they stated the various dietary proscriptions and prescriptions they have to observe. They

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Ngecha Today said: ‘‘There are many new diseases in Ngecha these days. Our children are getting wiped off the face of the earth by mukingo [the local nomenclature for hiv/aids].’’ ‘‘The elderly are suffering from diseases we never heard of before, such as cancers, hypertension, diabetes, and many others. Even people in their late twenties and thirties have heart problems.’’ The information is corroborated by the data from household questionnaires. For instance, households were asked about perceived childhood diseases in order to determine how the top 10 diseases in the area were ranked. Pneumonia, coughs, colds, flues, and fevers came out at the top of the list of childhood diseases from 67% of the respondents. Others included measles, diarrhea, malnutrition, skin conditions, and malaria, in that order, as reported by 33% of the respondents. The most common diseases affecting the youth were complications of hiv/aids at the top of the list at 45%, followed by malaria at 29%, and then diabetes and high blood pressure at 13% each. Among the adult population, diabetes was ranked at the top, followed by depression and heart problems. Colds and flues came in fourth for adults, while kidney problems, liver problems, and ulcers came in fifth, sixth, and seventh, respectively. People blamed dusty conditions and allergic reactions for most of the respiratory conditions among children. They pointed to poverty as the cause of malnutrition and said malaria resulted from malariacausing mosquitoes present in the cow enclosures near residences. They felt that youth illnesses were largely the result of behavior related to the use of alcohol, other drug addiction, promiscuity, and accidents. Finally, they believed that the rudimentary causative factors accounting for most of the adults’ morbidity involved the natural process of aging, alcohol, modernized lifestyles, poverty, and misfortune. Misfortune included bereavement and loss of able-bodied offspring and their spouses from the scourge of hiv/aids, which was compelling aging parents to take over guardianship of orphaned grandchildren. Examples were elaborated in the focus-group discussions and in key in-depth interviews. The whole of Kenya is now suffering from the overwhelming problem of aids orphans. Requiring national and global support, this prob-

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Ngecha Today lem deeply affects household and kinship relationships and can no longer be contained at the family and kinship levels. Kenya is one of the African countries with high prevalence rates and devastating socioeconomic impacts. Gains previously won in children’s health are being lost. For example, the most recent Kenya Department of Health Survey (1998) revealed that mortality in the under-five age group has risen from about 90 deaths per 1,000 births to 112 deaths per 1,000 births in the past few years. Likewise, maternal morbidity and mortality have increased, along with the number of orphaned children. The unprecedented and rapid spread of hiv/aids is now one of the direct and indirect leading causes of morbidity and mortality, making this disease the most plausible source of changes in the overall health situation. Indeed, by the year 2005 the health sector costs for treatment, care, and support for those with hiv/aids are predicted to account for more than half of all government health spending in Kenya. Families affected by hiv/aids suffer losses to basic necessities such as food, shelter, health care, education, and emotional support. They often become socially isolated, rendering orphaned children vulnerable and exposed to the risk of contracting hiv/aids themselves. Household resources are strained by the expenses of caring for the infected and by funeral expenses. Families are sometimes forced to sell their land, leaving nothing to address the needs of orphans. Surviving grandparents are often too weak and sickly to manage the heavy responsibility of guardianship for several young children. Community initiatives through churches and other ngos provide some assistance, but they require government intervention and support if they are to be sustainable. This national scenario is applicable to Ngecha, and people showed full awareness of the problem. In the household survey, 100% of families demonstrated clear knowledge of hiv transmission and the fact that there is no known cure or vaccine against it. Some have heard about antiretroviral treatment (arv), and they recommended this highly for pregnant women who have tested positive for the virus.When asked about their response to illness episodes, Ngecha people said they sought institutional care (50%), treated themselves with shop medicines and other means like home remedies and dietary modification (38%), or took no immediate action (12%). Quality of care was said to

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Ngecha Today be equivalent to the ability to pay. In other words, the private sector was rated highest (75%) in quality, albeit the least affordable to the majority. Government health facilities were said to be perpetually faced with shortages of drugs and committed personnel, yet those who cannot afford the private sector have no other option.

Social and Economic Conditions The economic trend in Ngecha is in decline and almost back to preindependence levels of the 1950s and early 1960s when poverty was prevalent. In that era, poverty was attributable to illiteracy, high levels of ignorance, and colonial domination. Today many well-educated individuals, even university graduates, are unable to secure jobs. This means that parents can spend all of their resources on their children’s education only to see them loitering around without any means to improve the household economic status. While some people in Ngecha have apparently achieved substantial wealth (as evidenced by their grand stone houses with electricity, telephones, and running water from individual boreholes), most of the population is living almost below the poverty line. Some youth have turned in frustration to violent crime such as stealing and robbery, making it no longer safe to move around the village after dark for fear of muggers and rapists. Poverty aside, both adults and children are also becoming apathetic toward education, according to key informants. A male school teacher explained: ‘‘I have worked here as a teacher for many years now, and I have come to conclude that many children here do not like education. It is not a priority. Children are coerced to go to school. There are also parents who discourage their children from attending school, saying it is expensive. There are, however, no obvious gender differences in enrollment, performance, and retention in schools. As a matter of fact, we often find girls doing much better than boys.’’ Children drop out of school as a result of orphanhood, general truancy, and lack of school fees, among other reasons. This has led even young children to be working for wages, a situation that could be regarded as child labor. The problem is not uncommon in Ngecha, and concerted intervention is urgent.

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Ngecha Today On a positive note, the Young Men’s Christian Association (ymca) has set up an active club for the youth in Ngecha village. A membership fee allows members to enjoy many sports, entertainments, and opportunities to travel and even participate in income-generating activities. The club assists with marketing products, and their sculptors and painters are known regionally and abroad. Indeed, there is an internally famous collective of artists, the Ngecha Artists Association, that was founded in 1995 by local self-taught artists to develop indigenous and nontraditional art forms and cooperate with other international visual arts organizations (Ngecha Artists Association, May 1999, June 2001; Ernst-Luseno, 2002). Their work is often displayed at the gallery in the Ngecha ymca Centre and at the Gallery Watatu and Unik Gallery in Nairobi. Land pressure continues to be a severe problem in Ngecha. Initially, families tilled whatever pieces they could find anywhere within the land owned by their clan. In the mid-1950s land was demarcated (see chapter 2) such that each family head obtained a title deed. Some of the land was also sectioned at that time into quarter-acre plots for future commercial development. As the population grew rapidly in ensuing years, the original family-owned plots were further subdivided into smaller portions to allow married sons to found their own households and build their own dwellings. Through this process, some of the land has become virtually uneconomical for agriculture. A number of families have sold their plots and migrated to the Rift Valley, Naivasha, and Ngong areas in search of better opportunities, but the majority of families still own land in Ngecha as a treasure held dear. In the past subsistence farming prevailed and cattle grazed in the fields of Ngecha, but today the typical practice with cattle involves zero-grazing. Families used to keep a cow to produce milk for home consumption, but today farming is so commercialized that the dairy cow is reared to produce milk for sale. This cow is made to reproduce every year without a break. So much milk is being produced that marketing it is a problem, and some people have to hawk milk in the city of Nairobi. Since simply farming their own lands will not support many families, some of the more fortunate people work in the formal sector of the

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Ngecha Today economy, such as schoolteachers, clerks, civil servants, and accountants. They may work at local schools or commute to the city of Nairobi. People also work in the informal sector of the economy as casual laborers in the dairy industry or on the tea and flower plantations in Limuru and Tigoni locations. Women also engage in casual labor in the farming industry, while others manage small businesses such as hawking eggs, vegetables, and milk. Farm laborers in Ngecha used to be paid in cash or kind, while today transactions are in cash only. The division of labor seems out of balance in Ngecha today, putting too much responsibility on women and not enough on men. There is not enough work defined as masculine that men can find to do or are willing to do given prevailing gender-role definitions and opportunities. We observed with disappointment that women seemed to toil for about 18 hours every day to meet their domestic needs and generate a little extra income. Instead, men whiled away their time leaning against shop walls, sitting and drinking on high stools in the bar, and playing makeshift chess games. The young men were open in praising their mothers for making sure that they had completed their high school education, but they could not find adequate employment for themselves.The older Ngecha women do want better lives for their daughters than they had themselves back when women were valued as a kind of investment and source of prospective bride wealth to their natal family. They reported how they have worked single-handedly to guarantee that their daughters would get educated so they can make their own way with better prospects. Habits of hard work and responsibility have created in Ngecha women a sense of enterprise and a capacity to make sacrifices for the future not always evident in the men. For example, a few years ago some Ngecha women joined others from the Limuru division in a business project to purchase passenger buses, an initiative spearheaded by the local member of Parliament. The drivers, accounts officers, and other office support staff were all men. After the first dividend was handed out, the men deserted the project and it collapsed, causing the women to lose all of their contributions. Such an experience can erode women’s trust in men for income-generating projects. I hope

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Ngecha Today that things change so that men and women can pull together effectively to bring continued progress in Ngecha.

Conclusion The changes that have taken place in Ngecha over the years have resulted in immense diversity of economic and social conditions. Evidence of development abounds. The number of permanent stone houses continues to increase. More families can be found crowded onto quarter-acre plots as new generations are born to the original households. Each family household may keep thousands of laying chickens, zero-grazed dairy cows, and sometimes donkeys used to pull carts to fetch animal fodder and water—all together on the same plot of land. Crowded environments do not offer the best place for rearing young children. Mothers reported to us that children have many allergic reactions to the dust from the chicken houses and itch when they are fed eggs. New developments in the central shopping area primarily provide entertainment in the form of bars where people can drink or buy roasted meat. Increasing numbers of commercial matatus zoom through the dusty village roads competing for passengers. Indeed, matatus have taken over the transport industry, and there are no commuter buses in Ngecha anymore. Donkey carts for hire carry animal fodder and other goods around the village. Heavy commercial vehicles (lorries) supply merchandise to the traders within the district as well as across the country. People learn about the outside world through the mass media, including radio, television, and telephone and other telecommunications. Ordinary mail is handled through the post office or is hand delivered, and even electronic mail is available. People also send verbal messages through announcements in churches, schools, and chief ’s barazas (public meetings). Development has to be understood in the contexts of ecosystem and human health. Although many of the developments described above produce commerce and income, they also expose families to all kinds of pollutants and influences that affect them physically and behaviorally. Many youth start drinking early, and some get into crime, develop

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Ngecha Today drug problems, and acquire sexually transmitted infections, including hiv/aids. So far, these broader ramifications have been ignored in Ngecha. Unless something is done, the health of the community will continue to deteriorate. The burden of disease and ill health cannot be separated from nutritional, economic, and social development and consequent environmental degradation. The links between poverty, vulnerability, ill health, and psychosocial conditions such as depression, crime, and violence must be recognized and addressed. What happens in Ngecha in future years will not be an exception to what is happening in the rest of Kenya.

References Ernst-Luseno, H. (2002). Contemporary Kenyan art. [Online] http://prometheus .cc.emory.edu/PS/Spring1999/Ernst-Luseno/web pages/about project.html. Ngecha Artists Association. (1999, 2001). Articles in Caravan: Newsletter of the Alliance for a Responsible and United World, No. 3, May 1999; No. 8, June 2001. [Online] www.alliance21.org/caravan.

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hope on the horizon Look, look, look What do you see There on the horizon? I see women talking I see women walking There on the horizon Look, look, look again What do you see now There on the horizon? I see women struggling I see women running There on the horizon Look, look, look again What do you see now There on the horizon? I see women holding hands I see women dancing I see hope there on the horizon Ciarunji Chesaina

contributors ciarunji chesaina is professor of literature at the University of Nairobi. She was Beatrice Whiting’s first project apprentice in the Child Development Research Unit while still a secondary school student at Alliance High School. She continued to work on the project during vacations from Makere University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1971. She subsequently earned a Carnegie Fellowship to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she earned her master of education degree in 1972. She received a doctorate in literature from Leeds University, United Kingdom (1988), and an mba from the United States International University (1998). She has taught literature at various levels for many years, including at Kenyatta University from 1972 to 1991, when she moved to the University of Nairobi. She is the author of Oral Literature of the Kalenjin (1991), Oral Literature of the Embu and Mbeere (1997), Hope on the Horizon: Essays on the Status and Liberation of African Women (1994), Perspectives on Women in African Literature (1994), Pokot (1994), and Ninani yu majaribuni katika Mzalendo Kimathi (1982). frances cox (now deceased) carried out fieldwork on the Gikuyu aged in Ngecha under the auspices of the Bureau of Educational Research, University of Nairobi, in 1974 and 1975 as part of her graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. A skilled photographer, she took many photographs in Ngecha. She is author of Aging in a Changing Village Society: A Kenyan Experience (1977) and ‘‘The Influence of Schooling on the Status and Maintenance of the Kikuyu Aged in a Peri-Urban Community’’ (Report to the Bureau of Educational Research, 1975). carolyn pope edwards is professor of psychology and family and consumer sciences at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She received her Ed.D. in human development from Harvard University and was a research associate at the Child Development Research Unit in 1972–1973. She has been an invited fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo, was visiting professor at the National Research Council in Rome, and has also taught at the University of Massachusetts (1977–1990) and University of Kentucky (1990– 1996). She is an author or editor of Promoting the Social and Moral Development of Young Children: Creative Ideas for the Classroom (1986), Children of Different Worlds:

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Contributors The Formation of Social Behavior (1988), The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education (1993; 2nd ed., 1998), Bambini: The Italian Approach to Infant-Toddler Care (2001), and Moral Development: The 51st Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (in press). She has also written many journals articles and chapters on early childhood education, moral development and prosocial behavior, and cultural/comparative child development. john herzog is professor of education, emeritus, at Northeastern University (Boston). After participating as a staff member and graduate student at the Laboratory of Human Development at Harvard and doing doctoral fieldwork in Barbados, he received his Ph.D. in education, specializing in psychological and educational anthropology. He was field director (1968–1969) and research associate (1969–1970) of the Child Development Research Unit, working mainly in Ngecha. At Northeastern, he chaired the Department of Foundations of Education. He has published articles in the Harvard Educational Review, Rural Africana, Human Organization, and the Anthropology of Education Quarterly, among others. In 1975–1976 he was president of the Council on Anthropology and Education. Since 1995 he and his wife, Dorothy S. Herzog, have been studying a French apprenticeship and education program called compagnonnage, of which certain features bear interesting similarities to Gikuyu male initiation. violet nyambura kimani (nee ‘Gaturu) is associate professor of community health and chair, Department of Community Health at the University of Nairobi, where she has taught for more than twenty-five years. She is a founder and coordinator of the Interfaculty Collaboration Program, currently Centre for Health and Behaviour Studies, based at Tigoni House. She leads the center in multidisciplinary research, grass-roots community service, and information dissemination efforts. Once a research apprentice with the Child Development Research Unit, she went on to receive her bachelor’s degree at Makerere University (1973) and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Nairobi. She holds a certificate in medical anthropology and health behavior from Harvard Medical School, where she held fellowships in 1990–1991 and 1999. She has over 60 publications, including journal articles, chapters, monographs, working papers, training manuals, conference and workshop papers, and consultancy reports. She is actively involved in research among various Kenyan communities on their beliefs and behavior related to health factors such as health resource use and the place of culture in hiv transmission.

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Contributors beatrice blyth whiting (now deceased) was professor emeritus of anthropology and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was research associate at the Laboratory of Human Development from 1952 to 1963, lecturer in social anthropology from 1963 to 1969, lecturer in education from 1969 to 1974, and professor of anthropology and education from 1974 to 1980. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University in 1942 and was associate director of the Child Development Research Unit from 1969 to 1974. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1978–1979) and Distinguished Scholar at the Henry A. Murray Center for the Study of Lives (1980–1985). She is author or editor of many articles and books, including Piute Sorcery (1950), Six Cultures: Studies of Child Rearing (1963), Children of Six Cultures: A Psychocultural Analysis (1975), and Children of Different Worlds: The Formation of Social Behavior (1988). john w. m. whiting (now deceased) was professor of social anthropology and social relations at Harvard University from 1963 to 1978 and author of many influential articles and books, including Becoming a Kwoma (1941), Child Training and Personality (1953), Field Guide to a Study of Socialization (1963), and Children of Six Cultures: A Psychocultural Analysis (1975). He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University and was a founding member and president of the Society for Cross Cultural Research. He was director of the Child Development Research Unit from 1966 to 1973.

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index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. achievement tests, 142 adolescents, 12; sexual behavior of, 69, 112 affluence, education and, 186 African Inland Mission, 80 age-set system, 15, 54, 60–61, 62, 105 aging, 12–13, 179–80; ethnography of, 186–88; patterns of, 213–14 agriculture, 54, 56, 66, 201, 211, 246, 262; cash crops and, 99–102; European colonial, 71–72 aids, 258–59, 264 ‘‘Alina’s Birthday Present,’’ 170–71 ‘‘Amir and the Magic Maize Seeds,’’ 170 Anglican Church, 27, 68 animals, as story characters, 162–64, 165–66 Arab slave traders, 67 archaeology, 54–55 artist collective, 261 assertiveness training, 127 Athi, 57

British, 3, 59; generational changeover and, 61–62; settlement by, 67–68 British East Africa Company, 59, 67 Buganda, 93 Bureau of Educational Research, 6 burials, 207 buses, passenger, 262 Bushmanoid people, 54 Buxton, Thomas Powell, 68, 85 Buxton farm, 69, 85

Bantu-speakers, 54; land tenure of, 55–56; migration of, 8, 15 Baptist Church, 27 Baring, Evelyn, 75 Baringo, Lake, 54 Bata Shoe Factory, 4 behavior: changeworthy, 122–25; children’s, 126–27, 138–39; education and, 133–34 birth ceremonies, 107 birth control, families and, 248–49 birth spacing, 107–8, 114 boys, 39, 161; and mothers, 138–39, 141, 142, 143

Caine, G. W. L., 68 Carnegie Corporation of New York, 6 cash: access to, 100; women’s access to, 102–4 cash crops, 12, 13, 113; impacts of, 94, 99, 101, 104 Catholic Church, 114, 131 Catholic mission (at Limuru), 68, 156 cattle, 43, 172; dairy, 100–101, 211, 255 Caucasoid people, 54 cdru. See Child Development Research Unit Central Highlands, 15, 55 Central Province, 3, 4, 5, 55, 245 Certificate of Primary Education (cpe), 86, 173 cervical cancer: screening and treatment, 247–48 changeover system, 61–62 character traits: of children, 122–24, 137, 144–45; development of, 135–38 chicken raising, 104, 256 chiefs, 70, 73 Child Development Research Unit (cdru), 4, 6, 15, 34, 77, 119–20 children, 14; behavior of, 11–12; change-

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Index children (cont’d.) worthy behavior of, 122–25; character development of, 135–38; daily play of, 46–48; daily work of, 96– 97, 102; encouragement of, 158– 59; family planning and, 113–14; fathers and, 107–8; health of, 248– 49; holiday routines of, 50–51; and interaction with mothers, 140–43, 144–45; old women and, 204–5; respect for elders among, 125–26; school day routine, 44–45, 48–49, 86–88; social impacts of schooling on, 126–30; socialization of, 6–7, 119, 134–39, 157–58; welfare of, 112–13 choice, children’s, 135–36 chores, household, 45–46, 50, 135, 141–42 Christianity, 22, 27, 33, 239; family structure and, 109–10; old age and, 207, 210; schools and, 68–69, 79 churches: affiliations with, 27, 51, 207; participation in, 33–34; Protestant, 22, 69; social change and, 130–31; social values and, 132–33 Church Mission Society, 68, 80, 81, 85 Church of Scotland. See Presbyterian Church of East Africa Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Committee (Presbyterian), 68, 79 Church of Scotland Mission, 81; school, 41, 80 circumcision: female, 41; initiation rites and, 60, 105; male, 60, 62 civil rights: after independence, 66–67 clans: Gikuyu, 55–56, 60; land tenure and, 70–71 clitoridectomy, 41, 60, 69, 105 cognitive development: measuring, 147–48 colonial era, 3, 105; agriculture, 71– 72; British settlement during, 67–68; education, 80–82; generational

changeovers and, 61–62; labor policy, 69–70; land ownership, 70–71 competition, in play, 48 conflict, 67, 77; Masai-Gikuyu, 59, 61 cooperatives, 189; dairy industry, 100– 101 corrective criticism, 159 corruption, government, 14 co-wives, 41, 42, 196 cpe. See Certificate of Primary Education culture: traditional, 130–31, 238–39; transmission of, 154, 174–75 curiosity, 136–37 curriculum, primary school, 168–69 Curriculum Development and Research Centre, 168 Cushitic speakers, 54, 55 Dagoretti, 59, 67 dairy industry, 73, 211, 255; cooperatives, 100–101 dances, 69, 155 ‘‘Daniel and the School Fees’’ dilemma: university student response to, 221– 42 daughters, and aging mothers, 205 death, old age and, 209–10 deeds, land, 199–200, 207–8 deer (Wamathia), 163 deforestation, 245 demographics: and health services, 248–50; of old age, 210–11; of social change, 130–34; and university students, 217–19 dependency, of elders, 188 detention camps, socialization process in, 41–42 diet, 136, 198, 256 disease, 59; patterns of, 257–60 disobedience, 230; children’s, 124–25, 159 District Commission, 70 District Council, 43

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Index division of labor: male-female, 64, 262 divorce, 67 Dorobo, 56–57, 192; Gikuyu intermarriage with, 63–64; in Ngecha, 57–58 East African Post and Telegraph Company, 30, 75, 78, 107 East African Protectorate, 67 East African Railroad, 30, 77, 107 East African Scottish Industrial Mission, 68 economic agreements: Gikuyu-Dorobo, 58 economic changes, 4, 6, 9; family impacts of, 104–6 economic development, 263–64 economics, 211, 260; women and, 9–10, 194–95 economies, 78; family, 29–31; household, 137–38; market and wage, 12–14, 15 education, 30, 65, 113, 129, 186, 202, 205, 260; colonial, 80–82; formal, 78–88; in households surveyed, 27, 29; of mothers, 121–22; mothers’ role in, 138–39; with proverbs, 156–60; secondary, 83–85; social change and, 94, 232–33; social values and, 242– 43; and status, 192–93; traditional, 154–56; traditional vs. European, 61, 133–34; in values, 166–74; women’s, 82–83, 190 elders, 13, 110, 213; councils of, 187– 88; female, 188–90; leadership and, 42–43; male, 190–93; respect for, 125–26, 157; terms for, 180–81; women and, 64, 66. See also old age elderly, 193–94; men, 199–203; respect for, 235–36; schooling levels of, 181–82; women, 194–99 elephant (Njogu), 162–63 elite (Gikuyu), 62 Elmenteita, 41

Elmenteita, Lake, 54 Embu, 55 emergency. See State of Emergency emotional nurturance, 142–43 employment, 51, 260; formal sector, 261–62; men’s, 107, 120–21, 187; schooling and, 173–74; of survey participants, 29–31, 77–78 encouragement, proverbs of, 158–59 English, knowledge of, 131 entrepreneurship, 94; women’s, 42, 102–4, 262–63 estates, 3, 4 ethics, through proverbs, 156 Ethiopia, 54 Ewaso Kendong River, 245 Ewaso Kendong swamp, 245 families, 10, 14, 40, 56, 58, 158; birth control and, 248–49; changes in, 12–13; children’s economic role in, 137–38; Christian influence on, 69, 109–10; economies of, 29–30; extended, 134, 232–34, 236–37; family planning and, 113–14; hiv/aids and, 258–59; nuclear vs. extended, 12, 104–6, 108–9, 115; social change and, 221–42; surveys of, 23–24 family planning, 113–14, 249 famine, 59, 68 farming, 29, 31, 55, 58; cash crops, 12, 13, 73 farms, 23, 31, 108, 246; European, 71– 72; management of, 32, 94, 99–102 fathers, 40; children and, 107–8; employment of, 29–30 feasts, elderly and, 203 feeding programs, 256–57 fertility, 14 fieldwork: on health, 246–47; participants in, 24–32; survey, 23–24 fighting, among children, 47 flower raising, 262; as cash source, 103–4

273

Index folklore, 153, 174–75. See also proverbs; stories food, 198; family-raised, 102, 103; female preparation of, 188, 197; nutrition and, 256–57. See meal preparation forts (Gikuyu), 57 Fort Smith, 59, 67 freedom fighters, 41 fuelwood, 98–99 future, stories about, 172–74 gada system, 15, 54 Gallery Watatu, 261 gardens: surplus from, 102, 103; women’s work in, 99–100, 106 Gathundu, 43 gender, 10, 47; and behavior, 138–39; division of labor, 64, 262; marital relationships, 236–37 genealogies, 28, 60 generations, 61–62, 105 Gichamu, 59 Gicheru Range, 245 Gichuru Harambee High (Secondary) School, 23, 65, 84, 128 gifts, 188, 195 Gikuyu, 3, 55, 59, 67, 69, 74, 75, 79, 82; colonial labor, 71–72; migration, 8, 15, 56; in Ngecha, 57–58; political power of, 61–62; reserves, 72–73; socialization, 6–7; social structure of, 70–71; traditional culture and, 221–42; women’s status in, 62–64 Gikuyu (place), 68 Gikuyu Home Guard and Loyalists, 76 Gikuyu (Kikuyu) Karing’a Educational Association, 69, 82 Gikuyu Orthodox Church, 27, 83, 109, 130–31, 133, 182 girls, 38, 39; and mothers, 138–39, 141, 142, 143 Girouard, Percy, 70 ‘‘The Goat That Liked Books,’’ 172

‘‘The Good One and the Bad One,’’ 165 good sense, 163 Gospel Mission Society, 80 grandparents, 196, 197–98, 200 grave sites, 54–55 Great Britain: and colonial policies, 81 greed, 125 Greek Orthodox Church, 69 guerrilla warfare, women and, 66 Harambee, 34, 77, 84, 86, 128 hare (Warubuku), in stories, 162, 163– 64 harmony: importance of, 226, 236, 239–40 health, 136, 190; development and, 263–64; disease patterns, 257–60; maternal and child, 248–50; nutrition and, 256–57; survey of, 246–48 hiv, 258–59, 264 Hobley, Charles W., 64 holidays, routines of, 50–51 Holy Ghost Fathers, 68, 80 Home Guard, 75, 76 Home for the Aged Destitute, 179 homesteads, 3, 36, 56, 94, 113, 201; and family organization, 105, 106; old men in, 207–8; patrilineages and, 59–60; polygamous, 41, 42; and registration, 101–2; surveys of, 23–32; taxes on, 69–70 honey gatherers, 57 hospitality, 158 households, 263; amenities of, 252, 256; children’s economic role in, 137–38; children’s work in, 113, 141– 42; daily routines in, 44–50; health surveys of, 246–47; hiv/aids and, 258–59; holiday routines in, 50–51; increased intimacy in, 106–7; land registration and, 101–2; and social change studies, 23–24; sociability in extended, 115–16; survey participants, 24–32

274

Index hunger, 136 hunter-gatherers, 54; Dorobo, 56–57 hut tax, 70, 100 hyena (Wamahiti), in stories, 162, 164 hygiene, 252 Igi patrilineage. See Mbari-ya-Igi income: cash, 100, 102–3, 113; sources of, 29–30, 37 identity, personal, 95 illness, old age and, 206–7 independence, struggle for, 22, 66, 75–77, 78 Industrial Training Depot, 80 infanticide, 238 infants, fathers and, 107–8 inheritance, 44; of generational groups, 61–62; land, 182, 186, 199–200; women and, 66–67 initiation ceremonies, 7, 60–61, 69, 105 intellectual development testing, 145– 48 intimacy: between husbands and wives, 95, 106–9; women and, 114–15 Irimu, 162 Italian Fathers of the Consolata Society, 68, 156 job histories, 30, 77–78 jobs, 107; stories about, 172–73; women’s, 102–3 Kabete, 41, 57, 67, 80, 85 Kabuku, 73, 85 Kagunda, 58 Kahuria, Pharis, 41 Kamba, 58 Kangau, 70 Kangethe, 22 kanu. See Kenya African National Union Kapenguria, 75 kau. See Kenya African Union kcu. See Kikuyu Central Association

Kendong Hills, 245 Kenya African National Union (kanu), 22, 42, 74 Kenya African Union (kau), 74 Kenya, Mount (Mount Kirinyaga), 3, 4, 55 Kenya Land Commission, 71, 74 Kenya Primary Exam, 84 Kenyatta, Jomo, 15, 43, 75 Kenyatta University, 6 kiama, 187–88, 212; governance system and, 70, 191, 192 Kiambu, 42, 43, 55, 56, 58, 59 Kiambu District, 245, 246 Kiambu District Development Plan, 246 Kibororo, 57–58 Kibuku, 3 Kikuyu. See Gikuyu Kikuyu Central Association (kcu), 74 Kikuyu Independent School Association, 69 Kikuyu (Gikuyu) Karing’a Education Association, 69, 82 Kikuyu Orthodox Church, 69 Kilome, 10 kinship, 48; hiv/aids and, 258–59 Kirinyaga, Mount (Mount Kenya), 4, 56 kirugu, 203 labor, 70, 80; agricultural, 71–72; educated men and, 192–93 labor policy: colonial, 69–70, 81 land, 13, 31, 76, 100, 108; alienation of, 70–71; of Bantu-speaking groups, 55–56; British colonialism and, 67– 68, 72; changes in, 110–11; Dorobo and Gikuyu, 57–58; inheritance of, 66–67, 199–200; lineages and, 24–27; ownership of, 32, 33, 77, 191, 261; patrilineages and, 59–60; railroads and, 67–68; registration of, 101–2; Rift Valley, 73–74; social status and, 182, 186 Land and Freedom Movement, 22, 41,

275

Index Land and Freedom Movement (cont’d.) 42, 71, 74, 75; participation in, 34, 66, 76, 77, 78 Land Freedom Army, 75, 76 language, and level of modernity, 131 Lari, 74, 76 leadership, 66; elders and, 42–43, 188–93; Naomi Muthoni’s, 42–44 Leakey, Harry: and mission schools, 68–69, 85 Leakey, Louis S. B., 15, 63, 68 legislation: and inheritance reform, 43–44 levirate, 196–97 lifestyle change, 16 Limuru, 4, 21–22, 31, 67, 68, 74, 75, 245, 246, 262; schools at, 69, 85 Limuru division, 245 lineages, 57, 58, 158; Gikuyu, 3, 15, 56; land tenure and, 24–27, 110–11. See also patrilineages literature, oral, 154–55 livestock, 100–101, 191, 208, 255, 263; Gikuyu, 58, 61; in stories, 161, 172 Local Native Council, 80 locust plagues, 59 Lower Kabete, 68 Loyalists, 75, 76, 77, 101, 182 Luka, 76 Mahinga Emergency Village, 42 Maina, 61, 105 maize, 55 malaria, 258 Malayans, 55 malnutrition, 258 marital relationships, 13; changes in, 111–12 marketing, 49, 51 markets, 15, 31; women entrepreneurs in, 102, 103–4 marriage, 103, 131, 182; elderly and, 195–96, 201–2; gender and, 236–37; Gikuyu-Dorobo, 63–64; husband-

wife relationships in, 226–28, 234–35; intimacy in, 106–9; social changes and, 111–12, 223–24, 226–28. See also polygamy Masai, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 66, 67 Matheri family, 58 Mau Mau rebellion. See Land and Freedom Movement; State of Emergency mbari. See patrilineages Mbari-ya-Igi, 23, 58, 60, 71, 94, 246; survey participants in, 24, 25 table 2.1, 27 Mbari-ya-Ngecha, 58 Mbari-ya-Thaara, 22, 23, 32, 58, 60, 73, 94, 246; survey participants in, 24, 25 table 2.1, 27 Mbeere Plain, 4 meal preparation, 40; by elderly women, 188, 197; school day, 45, 48–50 men, 100, 101; education levels of, 27, 83–84; as elders, 187, 190–93; elderly, 181–82, 183–84, 185, 199–203; employment of, 29–30, 120–21; old, 207–10; students, 228–42 Meru, 55 migration, 14, 15, 54, 262; Gikuyu, 3, 8, 56–57, 71; and intermarriage, 63–64 military: British, 59 milk production, 49, 51, 256 Ministry of Education, 191 missionaries, 257; colonial government and, 80–81; and schools, 3, 68–69, 78–79, 85 Mission of the Holy Ghost Fathers, 80 modernity, 141, 142; character development and, 144–45; levels of, 130–33 modernization: 16, 23–24, 94, 100, 130–31; and social change, 145–48 Mombasa, 55 morality: parent-child relationships and, 221–42 moral messages: proverbs as, 157–60;

276

Index ngweko, 69, 112 Nitugathome (Let Us Go and Read), 168, 170 Njogu, 162–63 nursery schools, socialization in, 167– 68 nutrition, 256–57 nyakinyua, 66, 193 Nyakumu swamp, 245 Nyandarua Range (Aberdares), 4, 55, 56, 74 Nyanza, 82 Nyeri, 55, 64, 82 nyumba, 105

in readers, 169–70; stories as, 160, 162–66 morbidity: levels of, 258, 259 mothers, 6, 63, 105, 205; behavior of, 11–12, 16, 134–38; and children’s schooling, 127–28; education of, 121–22; health of, 248–50; and interaction with children, 140–43, 144–45; modernity level of, 131–33; as teachers, 138–39 mothers-in-law, 31 ‘‘Mother Tongue,’’ 168 motivation, 135 mucii, 105, 106, 112 Muguga, 23, 59, 67 Muguru, Eunice, 32–34 Mumbi, 55, 56 Murang’a, 55, 60 Muthoni, Naomi, 34, 37, 41; leadership of, 42–44, 189 Mwangi, 61, 105 Nairobi, 3, 67 Nairobi–Rift Valley road, 23 Nakuru, 41 narratives, 155 Ndeiya, 245 New Ngecha. See Ngecha Primary School Ngai, 55 Ngecha, 31, 35–36, 68, 69, 73, 245, 246; description of, 22–23; as emergency village, 76–77; fieldwork in, 23–24; Gikuyu settlement in, 57–58; health in, 257–60; location of, 3–4, 56; nutrition in, 256–57; as reserve, 74– 75; schools in, 78, 79–80; settlement of, 56–57; socioeconomics of, 260– 63; survey participants in, 24, 25 table 2.1; water availability in, 250–52 Ngecha Artists Association, 261 Ngecha Nursery School, 22, 37, 65, 86–88. See also nursery schools Ngecha Primary School, 22, 23, 31, 80, 85–86. See also Old Ngecha school

obedience, 159 ogre (Irimu): in stories, 162, 164–65 old age, 190; attitudes toward, 203–4; demographics of, 210–11; and illness, 206–7; and men, 207–10; and women, 204–7 Old Ngecha school, 22–23, 72, 73, 80, 81, 82, 84. See also Ngecha Primary School Olduvai Gorge, 53 parent-child relationships: moral aspects of, 221–42 parenting, 10–11 parents, 12, 112 pastoralism, 54, 56 pastureland: access to, 101 patrilineages (mbari), 22, 56, 105, 106, 112, 188; Gikuyu, 3, 56; and homesteads, 59–60; land tenure and, 70–71, 108–9, 199 pcea. See Presbyterian Church of East Africa Peace Corps, 43 peer groups, 7. See also age-set system personality traits: of children, 122–25; schooling and, 128–29 play, 39, 46–48 poetry, 155

277

Index pole tax, 70 political power: of elders, 190, 191; changeovers in, 61–62; women, 66 polygamy, 27, 33, 63, 108, 131, 182, 200; Christian opposition to, 69, 109–10; elderly women and, 195–96; family organization of, 31, 41, 56 population growth, 105 pork processing plant, 4 Porter, Arthur, 6 Portuguese, 55 poverty, 208–9, 258 praise, parental, 142–43 pregnancy, 249–50 Presbyterian Church of East Africa (pcea), 27, 33, 82, 131, 179, 182, 257 preschools, 175. See also nursery school primary sampling unit (psu): defined, 24 primary schools: curriculum, 168–69 Protestants, 22, 69, 81, 131, 133; women’s schooling and, 82–83. See also various sects proverbs, 155, 162; teaching with, 156–60 psu. See primary sampling unit public meetings (baraza), 34 punishment, 138; by female elders, 188–89 pyrethrum industry, 30, 73, 100, 101 radios, 129, 131, 132, 133 raiding, 59, 61 railroad: and British settlement, 67–68; trans-Kenya railroad, 3, 4, 67 rain barrels, 98 ranching, 43, 172 raven, 166 readers: messages contained in, 169–72 reading classes, 168–69 rebellion: and independence fight, 75, 76 reciprocity, 14 regiments. See riika

religion, 13, 94, 182, 219; and holidays, 50–51 reproduction, 10, 188. See also birth control; family planning reserves, 3; Gikuyu, 72–73; Ngecha, 74–75 residence, 31; of grandparents, 197–98 resources: access to, 99 respect, 157; for elderly, 235–36; for tradition, 238–39 responsibility, 138 riddles, 155 Rift Valley, 3, 4, 22, 43, 54, 58, 71, 72, 107; land tenure in, 33, 73–74, 108, 189, 199; work in, 41, 42 riika system, 60–61, 105 Rironi, 73, 82 roads, 23, 94 Rockford Flower Company, 4 roguishness, 125 Routledge, Katherine, 64 Routledge, William, 64 Rui Ruaka, 245 Safari, 168; future as theme in, 172–74; modern themes in, 170–72; moral messages in, 169–70 ‘‘Salome Visits a Hospital,’’ 173 school days: household routines on, 44–46; nursery, 86–88 school fees, 84–85, 100, 104, 128, 186, 200; extended families and, 233–34 schooling, 7, 12, 13, 73, 74, 102, 136, 143; of elderly, 181–82; mothers’ role in, 139, 144; social impacts of, 126–30, 133; teaching values in, 166– 74, 175–76; traditional values and, 174–75; women’s, 82–83 schools, 69, 173, 191, 220; colonial policies and, 80–82; mission, 3, 68–69, 78–79; in Ngecha, 72, 79–80, 85– 88; secondary, 83–85; in Thogoto, 78–79, 82 Scottish Mission Society, 80

278

Index scouting expeditions (Gikuyu), 57, 71 self-reliance, 64, 66, 138 sexual behavior, 10; of adolescents, 69, 112; social change and, 95, 111–12 sharing, 134 sheep, 100 slave trade, 67 smallpox epidemics, 59, 68 sociability, women’s, 115–16 social behavior, 7; women as teachers of, 134–35 social change, 4, 7–8, 9, 12, 14–15, 105; demographics of, 130–34; economic changes and, 102–4; and extended families, 109–11; and households, 23–24, 106–9; modernization and, 145–48; and schooling, 126–30; sexual behavior and, 111–12; technological change and, 93–94; university students’ response to, 221–43; women’s work and, 95–102; and young adults, 215–17 social development, children and, 6–7 socialization, 154; of children, 119, 136–39, 157–58; detention camp, 41–42; as group members, 157–58; mothers’, 6, 134–35; and play, 47–48; through school, 167–74 social organization, 10, 105 social status, of women, 63–64, 66 songs, 155; nursery school, 167–68 squatters: Gikuyu, 72; Rift Valley, 73–74 standards (grade levels), 168–69 ‘‘Starting a Fortune,’’ 173–74 State of Emergency, 22, 42, 75, 190; men during, 193, 203; Ngecha during, 76–77 status: gender and, 236–37; land ownership and, 182, 186 stores, ownership of, 30 stories: moral messages of, 160, 162– 66; in readers, 168–72 storytelling, 155–56, 167 students: interviews of, 217–19; re-

sponse to hypothetical dilemmas by, 221–43; and social change, 16–17, 216–17 sublineages (mbari), 59 ‘‘The Surprise,’’ 171 Swahili, 43; knowledge of, 131, 132 ‘‘A Talk with the Engine Driver,’’ 173 taxation, 69–70, 100 teachers, status of, 85 teaching. See education tea estates, 4, 68, 100, 262 technical schools, 173 technological change, 4, 104; and social change, 93–94; stories of, 171–72 Thaara, Jeremiah, 33 Thaara patrilineage. See Mbari-yaThaara Thomson, Joseph, 66 thoughtlessness, 159; stories about, 165–66 Tigoni, 4, 22, 23, 72, 74, 120, 245, 246, 253, 262; fuelwood from, 98–99 Tigoni Subdistrict Hospital, 247 time allocation: resource access and, 99 ‘‘Too Busy Talking,’’ 173 tourism, 170–71 trade, women and, 66 tradition, respect for, 238–39 translators, women as, 66 tribal polarization, 13 Turkana, Lake, 54 Uganda Railroad, 67, 70 uncles: paternal, 110 ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Visit,’’ 173 Unik Gallery, 261 United Methodist Missions, 81 University College, Nairobi, 6, 8 University Mission Society, 81 University of Nairobi, 6, 77, 220; students from, 216–19 Upland Pork Factory, 74 urban centers, 12, 15

279

Index values, 13, 16; education and, 242–43; modernity level and, 130–33, 145; schooling and, 128–29, 166–74; traditional v. modern, 133–34, 174–76, 223–42 villages, 57; emergency, 76–77 Von Hohnel, Ludwick, 59, 66 voting rights, women’s, 66 wages, and schooling, 13 Wamahiti, 162 Wamathia, 163 Wangigi, 31 Wanjiru, 164–65 warfare (Masai-Gikuyu), 59 warriors, 105 Warubuku, 162 Waruhiu, Chief, 75 water: access to, 250–52, 254; obtaining, 95–98 wattle, 98–99 well, town, 97, 250–51, 254 White Highlands, 68, 71, 74, 199 wildlife preservation, 173 widows, 189, 196–97, 206 Wirute Guthoma (Learn How to Read), 168

women, 31, 113, 121, 253; daily routine of, 45–46, 48–50, 51; economic activities of, 9–10; education levels of, 27, 29, 83, 84; elderly, 184, 194–99; as elders, 187, 188–90; as entrepreneurs, 102–4, 262–63; intimacy and, 114–15; marriage and, 201–2; old, 204–7; and schooling, 82–83; sociability of, 115– 16; and social change, 8, 12, 93–94; social status of, 62–64, 66; students, 223–28; work performed by, 31–32, 37, 38, 40, 91, 95–102 women’s council (nyakinyua), 66, 193 wood, access to, 98–99 work, 109, 114, 125, 262; in Rift Valley, 41, 42; women’s daily, 31–32, 37, 38, 40, 45–46, 64, 91, 95–102, 113, 224 yams, 159 young adults. See youth Young Men’s Christian Association (ymca), 261 youth, 7, 261; social change, 215–16 Zanzibar, 67

280