Key Moments in Life: Childhood |
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Like many peoples around the world, most Africans think of the family as a unit that includes the living parents, children and grandparents. For many Africans, however, the family also includes the spirits of the ancestors and of infants not yet born. As a result, the ability to have children may be traced back to a primordial couple--the earliest ancestors and first humans to give birth. These may be semi-mythical characters who first established essential social values, or they may be very specific ancestors whose names are preserved in the oral histories of the lineage. This figure pair from the Dogon represents the primordial couple of a clan or lineage, and the linking of male and female to create new life--the man's arm over the womans shoulder is a clear expression of this bond. |
Primordial Couple |
Dogon people,
Mali |
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During the first years of life both boys and girls live with their mothers. Older children help with the care of younger siblings, and with daily chores. Although the amount of public education available varies greatly from one African country to another, generally schooling is mandatory at least through primary school. When boys are old enough to be weaned, and well before the onset of puberty, they move out of their mother's home and move in with their father. They begin to learn from their father and paternal uncles the skills they will need as adults. They go to the fields each morning to help with planting, cultivation and harvest, and accompany their elders on hunting trips into the wilderness in search of wild game to supplement the family diet. Small boys may make tiny weapons with which they practice hunting large insects and small rodents. |
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Doll, biiga |
Mossi people,
Burkina Faso |
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Like children everywhere, African children play with toys that help them visualize their roles as adults and teach them the skills of parenting, hunting, and farming. At the end of a day of trading and shopping a parent may stop at the blacksmith's stall in the market to buy a small carved doll for his daughter to play with. She may dress the doll in new clothes she has, made, may feed it and tuck it to bed under a tiny blanket in the corner of her room at night. The carved figure is called biiga, or "child" but it represents a mature women, with developed breasts, an elaborate hairstyle, and the scarification patterns that mark passages in life. The doll represents the child as she hopes one day to be. In the same way American girls play with dolls such as "Barbie" that represent an ideal or a stereotype to which the child hopes to conform |
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Child's Doll |
Mossi people,
Burkina Faso |
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Young boys in Africa are particularly skilled at manufacturing toys out of discarded materials. They fashion motorcycles from the colorful cans condensed milk is sold in, or make airplanes of millet stalks and trucks and cars of discarded wire and rubber inner tube strips. Children in Africa make toys that represent the trucks, morotcycles, and airplanes they see wealthy or important people using, and so these toys, like little girls dolls, represent hopes for satus and well-being in the future. Some of these "recycled" toys are so creative Europeans collect them, and boys earn good incomes selling them to tourists |
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Millet-stalk truck in this picture, shown with its maker, Hamisi Mbegwe, who was six years old when the photo was taken in 1985 |
Photo © by Diane Pelrine, The Indiana University Museum of Art |
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Children often make masks and other types of art objects in imitation of those used by their elders. They play under the supervision of older boys in preparation for the time when they will be separated from their families and undergo the period of training in the sacred knowledge of the lineage and group. This play serves to integrate them more smoothly into the next level of membership in the community and creates ideals of adult roles. Some of the same relationships between the members of age-grades that result from initiation have already begun to take form at this level. |
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Children's leaf masks in the village of Bagassi, Burkina Faso |
Photo © by Christopher D. Roy, The University of Iowa |
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At very serious performances of masks worn by initiated elders the young, uninitiated boys mimic with precision every dance step of the great plank masks in preparation for the day they will wear the masks themselves. Here the boys are watching intently as the great plank masks of their family perform. They twist in unison at the precise moment that the masks themselves twist from side to side |
Bwa, Gnoumou clan, children having a good time,1985, Burkina Faso |
Photo © by Christopher D. Roy, The University of Iowa |
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