A large part of the workers' time off the job is spent at home. This chapter is concerned with family relationships: the development of the nuclear family through marriage and the birth of children, household composition as reflecting limitations in family size and structure expected of urban-dwellers and contacts with the extended family through visits and the exchange of gifts, especially the sending of regular remittances to parents.

MARRIAGE

Because of the wide variety of forms of marriage acceptable in Ghana, all more or less permanent relationships defined as marriage by the workers were recorded as such. Table 7.1 shows that only a third of the workers under the age of twenty-five were married, compared to three-quarters of those between twenty-five and thirty-nine and nearly all of those over forty. Some of the older men who were not currently married were widowers or divorced. Data from the 1960 Census (Special Report E) shows that 39% of the urban African population over the age of fifteen and 41 % of the adult male African population in the country as a whole were not currently married. Our figure of 33 % is lower because the sample was concentrated in the years in which both spouses tend to be living and included few men under twenty, who are seldom married.

Workers in Tema and Takoradi were more likely to be living with women without benefit of ceremony (mutual consent marriages) than were workers elsewhere.