say, Kenya, is strapped with cloths to his mother’s back, accompanying her while she tills the fields, gathers firewood and collects water. The child is coddled and fed on demand, not on a schedule, and it is very rare indeed to hear an African infant cry.
By the time the child is four or five he has assumed the responsibility of tending the herd or caring for younger brothers and sisters. He is seldom balky and never disrespectful to his parents. His freedom is great and largely undirected. He may cut off the top of a banana tree and use it like a rubber tire to float in a stream. He may entwine palm leaves to make a soccer ball or build a little cart with wooden wheels, greasing the “bearings” with fresh cow dung. But almost certainly he has never had a store-bought toy, and if he lives in a small rural village, he may never have seen an electric light, a telephone, a flush toilet or a comic book.
“In the first year the physical development of children in rural Africa is precocious compared to Western norms,” says Nina Darnton, an American child psychologist who spent three years working in Africa.
“There is tremendous stimulation and love between mother and child. Then, by the second year, the mother usually has had another baby and the first child is taken off her back and left pretty much alone, unstimulated. It’s like a sudden fall from grace.
“The precocity levels out then with Western norms. By the third year it has declined. This is when, in the Western world, mothers are giving their children toys and sitting down to explain the way things work. But a mother in Africa doesn’t have time for that.
“The children are left to their own devices. You have the feeling they’re crying out for stimulation and direction. They have all this wonderful energy, a lot of it very creative, and nowhere to direct it.”
If African parents share a single dream today, it is that their children get an education, the end result of which is a government job and the security that goes with it. This is the African equivalent of asocial security system, because Africa’s sons and daughters care for their aged parents as they would their own children. Education is pursued as an end to itself; the quest for knowledge is decidedly secondary.
The Njumbi primary school, not far from the town of Karai in Kenya, is typical of what rural Africa offers. You leave the paved highway and bounce along a rutted dirt road for fifteen or twenty minutes, through parched hills and past mud-walled, straw-roofed homes until you come to a cluster of low, weather-darkened buildings built with cement blocks during the colonial era. The headmaster, Michael Mathini, an energetic and amiable man of thirty who rides a bicycle to work, greeted us at the door. He led us into his office and pointed with great pride to a wall graph showing that his students scored above the national average in the annual state-administered examination.
The school had 620 students, four outdoor latrine pits, one dictionary, a few broken windows Mathini hoped to fix when he had some money to buy glass with, and seventeen teachers who earned from $80 to $135 a month. There were no amenities such as a library or classrooms with heat and electricity. The frayed books the children used were printed in London and contained illustrations of white children and Western-world fairy tales such as
Jack and the Beanstalk
and
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. Hardly the type of exercise that would reinforce the identity of a black child who came to school barefoot.
I asked the headmaster who the children’s heroes were, “Heroes?” Mathini repeated. “That is a Western idea. We don’t have heroes or idols in Africa.” Then, speaking of Kenya’s first two presidents, he added, “But we do tell the children that we want another Kenyatta or Moi. We tell them, ‘These people were born poor and naked like you, so you can advance without coming from a rich
By the time the child is four or five he has assumed the responsibility of tending the herd or caring for younger brothers and sisters. He is seldom balky and never disrespectful to his parents. His freedom is great and largely undirected. He may cut off the top of a banana tree and use it like a rubber tire to float in a stream. He may entwine palm leaves to make a soccer ball or build a little cart with wooden wheels, greasing the “bearings” with fresh cow dung. But almost certainly he has never had a store-bought toy, and if he lives in a small rural village, he may never have seen an electric light, a telephone, a flush toilet or a comic book.
“In the first year the physical development of children in rural Africa is precocious compared to Western norms,” says Nina Darnton, an American child psychologist who spent three years working in Africa.
“There is tremendous stimulation and love between mother and child. Then, by the second year, the mother usually has had another baby and the first child is taken off her back and left pretty much alone, unstimulated. It’s like a sudden fall from grace.
“The precocity levels out then with Western norms. By the third year it has declined. This is when, in the Western world, mothers are giving their children toys and sitting down to explain the way things work. But a mother in Africa doesn’t have time for that.
“The children are left to their own devices. You have the feeling they’re crying out for stimulation and direction. They have all this wonderful energy, a lot of it very creative, and nowhere to direct it.”
If African parents share a single dream today, it is that their children get an education, the end result of which is a government job and the security that goes with it. This is the African equivalent of asocial security system, because Africa’s sons and daughters care for their aged parents as they would their own children. Education is pursued as an end to itself; the quest for knowledge is decidedly secondary.
The Njumbi primary school, not far from the town of Karai in Kenya, is typical of what rural Africa offers. You leave the paved highway and bounce along a rutted dirt road for fifteen or twenty minutes, through parched hills and past mud-walled, straw-roofed homes until you come to a cluster of low, weather-darkened buildings built with cement blocks during the colonial era. The headmaster, Michael Mathini, an energetic and amiable man of thirty who rides a bicycle to work, greeted us at the door. He led us into his office and pointed with great pride to a wall graph showing that his students scored above the national average in the annual state-administered examination.
The school had 620 students, four outdoor latrine pits, one dictionary, a few broken windows Mathini hoped to fix when he had some money to buy glass with, and seventeen teachers who earned from $80 to $135 a month. There were no amenities such as a library or classrooms with heat and electricity. The frayed books the children used were printed in London and contained illustrations of white children and Western-world fairy tales such as
Jack and the Beanstalk
and
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. Hardly the type of exercise that would reinforce the identity of a black child who came to school barefoot.
I asked the headmaster who the children’s heroes were, “Heroes?” Mathini repeated. “That is a Western idea. We don’t have heroes or idols in Africa.” Then, speaking of Kenya’s first two presidents, he added, “But we do tell the children that we want another Kenyatta or Moi. We tell them, ‘These people were born poor and naked like you, so you can advance without coming from a rich
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