Pop­u­la­tion growth in Africa seems to be a big topic today. This morn­ing we had a cou­ple of sto­ries about how pop­u­la­tion booms can make resources even more scarce. Another story that we linked to talked about how US pol­icy may have con­tributed to the pop­u­la­tion boom.

What is hard for us west­ern­ers to under­stand is why big fam­i­lies are so desired by the men in Africa, espe­cially with all effort it takes to feed all the chil­dren. Often big fam­i­lies are not a series of mis­takes but is what the par­ents want and soci­ety pres­sures for the same.

From All Africa, we have found a pretty good expla­na­tion on some African peo­ple want a lot of chil­dren. Writer Paul Ohia links the desire of a big fam­ily to the big fam­ily farms.

In rural agri­cul­ture and ani­mal rear­ing, the fam­ily that has the high­est num­ber of off-spring fare bet­ter dur­ing the farm­ing period because the num­ber of work­ers increases. It should be noted here that it was not tra­di­tional to employ per­ma­nent hands by fam­i­lies to do the cul­ti­va­tion an herds keep­ing. Though a fam­ily can hire paid labour­ers from time to time, the usual per­ma­nent work­ers are the mem­bers of the family.

Polygamy in Africa can best be under­stood in this light because men being the nat­ural inher­i­tors of fam­ily farms and herds tend to marry as many wives as their resources can allow them in order to have many work­ers. They are not slaves in any way because they ben­e­fit from the pro­ceeds of their works as their daily nour­ish­ments come thereof.

In a nut­shell, major­ity of the cat­tle herds­men that tra­versed your local­ity with their herds were not employed work­ers but chil­dren or own­ers of the cat­tle though the sit­u­a­tion are chang­ing nowa­days. The work­ers you saw in the large acres of farm­land owned by a man in your neigh­bour­hood are mostly his wives and children.

Times have changed and many Africans have become edu­cated enough to leave rural farm­ing to embrace white col­lar jobs but the allure of hav­ing as many chil­dren as pos­si­ble remains in their sub­con­scious. Of course, an aver­age African would be hav­ing quar­rels with his or her mother in-law if the per­son announces that she/he wants to have only one child or just two children.

This tra­di­tion led to pop­u­la­tion boom and in a soci­ety where social secu­rity does not exist, most of the chil­dren who were not lucky enough to be born by afflu­ent par­ents suf­fer lots of set­backs. In sev­eral cases when one or two of the par­ents becomes deceased then they are left at the mercy of rel­a­tives. Very unlucky ones do not find rel­a­tives to take care of them and that is the birth of African street children.

Study reveals that the con­ti­nent is pro­duc­ing a child every sec­ond, and by 2050 its pop­u­la­tion will reach 2 bil­lion. Due to the afore­men­tioned social pres­sure, African women bear 5.3 chil­dren each on aver­age, com­pared with 2.1 in the United States, says the Pop­u­la­tion Ref­er­ence Bureau, a demo­graphic research cen­tre in Washington.

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