unitex@rubbs.fidonet.org (unitex) (09/12/89)
A day in the life of Catherine Bana
(Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 20, 1721 words, DATELINE:
BALKOUI)
Catherine Bana is a farmer's wife in Balkoui, a village in
Burkina-Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world (it comes
136th in the rankings, just ahead of Ethiopia).
Expressed in terms of gross domestic product per capita, her
"wealth" is a bare @100 a year, or 100 times less than that of
an average inhabitant of an industrialised nation. But no such
sum ever actually passes through her hands. In her case, as for
millions of other Africans who still do not enjoy such basic
services as water, health care and education, statistics tell
only half the story.
I visited Balkoui, one of Burkina-Faso's 7,500 villages, one
stormy day in June. To find out what life was like there, I
picked out Catherine Bana at random from a group of women who
were pounding red millet. She lives, like most of her
compatriots, light-years away from such concepts as the affluent
society and the welfare state. Burkina-Faso is a destitute,
landlocked nation in the Sahel. Its eight million peasants
scrape a meagre living from agriculture, livestock rearing and
crafts, and are helped to some degree by foreign aid.
Balkoui, which is located on an arid plain near Burkina-Faso's
modest capital, Ouagadougou, consists of a group of
"concessions" (clusters of round huts surrounded by a wall),
each of which is occupied by an extended family. It is a Mossi
village (centuries ago, the Mossi founded a number of powerful
kingdoms in the region). Its 69-year-old traditional chief,
Johnson Sibiri Tapsoba, an amiable retired civil servant, holds
audience under a thatched roof.
In Balkoui, where a minority of Christians live side by side with
a population that is mainly animist and polygamous, it is the
women and children who are most in evidence. This is hardly
surprising: chief Tapsoba has six wives and 21 children, and
regards four wives as a fair average for any man who believes in
traditional values. There is a shortage of labour on the farms,
and, as he puts it, "the more women and children you have, the
bigger the field gets."
Tapsoba remembers the village always being poor. Like the rest
of Burkina-Faso, it subsists on small mixed farming, a few
livestock, bartering and crafts. Famine as such is rare, but
during the rainy season, when the grain runs out, malnutrition
is widespread. In Balkoui as in the rest of the country, "once
the October harvest is over, the menfolk have nothing to do for
six months," says chief Tapsoba. Nothing, that is, except
indulge in their favourite tipple,dolo, which is made from
fermented millet, and produce children. Fortunately for them,
they have their wives to help out.
At the age of 27, Catherine Bana looks already worn out by hard
work and a succession of pregnancies. She has one husband, six
children and a life expectancy of 45 years. Her latest-born
clings to a breast that has been withered by years of voracious
feeding. "God willing," she says, she will have even more
children.
Like her animist neighbours, Catherine, who is a Christian, uses
no contraceptive methods. Under the twin pressures of the
labour shortage and infant mortality, even men with only one
wife have lots of children. As Tapsoba puts it, "to end up with
six children you need to produce at least ten."
Catherine and her family share a concession with two other
peasant families, as well as a few chickens, sheep and dogs.
Their huts, utensils, furniture and standards of hygiene are all
pretty rudimentary. They are poor, but not destitute. There is
a tradition of helping one another. The womenfolk share the
cooking, the household chores and the carrying of loads.
For Catherine Bana, an ordinary day begins at about 4 a.m.,
when, according to an unchanging ritual, she embarks on the
first of a long succession of Sisyphean tasks. After doing the
housework and feeding the children, chickens and animals, she
fetches water and wood, and washes clothes. Then she has to
prepare the household's staple food (a kind of porridge) and red
millet for making dolo. She must also remember to grind some
grain by hand or else take some to the mill.
The moring has already got very hot by the time Catherine begins
her second work fatigue of the day -- in the fields. Setting
off with her youngest child strapped to her back, a daba (a kind
of hoe) in one hand, a bowl of to in the other, a jug of water
on her head and nothing to protect her feet from the hot ground,
she is the archetype of the African woman.
Whether it is sunny or raining, she spends the whole afternoon in
the fields tending the crops (millet, sorghum or ground-nut,
depending on the time of year), walking considerable distances
to fetch water and tirelessly scratching the parched soil. She
stops only briefly to rest or eat a little food. Catherine
returns home well before nightfall to do various odd jobs. Later
she makes dinner, washes, tidies up, puts the children to bed
and prepares the next day's meals. Then at last she can go to
sleep, except when she is required to satisfy her husband's
sexual appetite or sit up looking after a sick child. She works
* Origin: UNITEX --> Toward a United Species (1:107/501)
---
Patt Haring | UNITEX : United Nations
patth@sci.ccny.cuny.edu | Information
patth@ccnysci.BITNET | Transfer Exchange
-=- Every child smiles in the same language. -=-