The conditions under which infants are raised in sub-Saharan Africa have been explored by anthropologists, demographers, and developmental psychologists. Despite the large size of the continent and the diversity of its inhabitants, the sub-Saharan agricultural peoples are connected by history as well as geography and constitute a distinct cultural region in comparison with other regions of the world. Many Gusii customs are shared with other peoples in the region. This chapter sets the stage for our consideration of the Gusii case by describing similarities and variations in African practices of infant care, beginning with the goal of survival and proceeding to the organizational and relational contexts of caregiving, its characteristic activities and interactions, and patterns of early development.

SURVIVAL AS A GOAL OF INFANT CARE

African customs of infant care have been described in the anthropological literature since at least the beginning of the 20th century. The earliest observers were Protestant missionaries who worked among Bantu peoples in southern Africa before 1920. Their published accounts are not focused on childhood but include descriptions of customs in which babies are breast-fed for 2 or 3 years, carried on their mothers' backs, and often taken care of by young girls – whose photographs with babies bound to their backs appear in some of the books. The great frequency of infant death is mentioned, often as an aside. Birth rituals, naming ceremonies, and vernacular terms for the early stages of childhood are described, usually with no interpretation.

For Gusii infants and their parents, high fertility is a pervasive condition of family life and child development. Like parents elsewhere in Africa, the Gusii fervently desire the maximum number of surviving offspring, but they have been exceptionally successful in achieving this goal: Their fertility ranks near the top among human populations. The population of Kisii District, that is, Gusiiland, grew from under 300,000 in 1948 to well over a million in 1979, with the highest population growth rate in Kenya (which has the highest national growth rate in the world) and it also became, as of the 1979 census, the most densely populated district in the country. Thus fertility, though highly valued by the Gusii, had resulted in a serious ecological problem by the last quarter of the 20th century.

This situation was evident in Morongo, where the 1956 population density of 450 per square mile had risen to about 1,000 by 1976. Robert LeVine, who lived at Morongo in the 1950s, was unable to recognize the Nyansongo locality in 1974 because of the number of houses filling up the cow pastures, which had been its most visible internal boundaries. Homesteads, and houses within homesteads, were closer together than they had been – too close for comfort, by Gusii standards.

Ombese, a 60-year-old father in our sample, exemplifies the consequences of population growth for family life. His father, one of the original settlers of Morongo, had owned a large hillside of 75 acres, and Ombese, as one of three sons, had inherited about 20 acres.

The Gusii people, now numbering over a million, inhabit the southwestern corner of the Kenya highlands, elevated above the hot coast of Lake Victoria farther to the west (Figure 3.1). They have occupied this territory – with its cool climate, rich soil, and abundant rainfall – for perhaps two centuries, maintaining a distinctive Bantu language and ethnic identity amidst the Nilotic speaking peoples who surround them. Geographically isolated in 20th-century Kenya, the Gusii nevertheless have become known throughout the country since World War II, first for their productive agriculture, and more recently for their exceptionally high fertility and population growth.

The Gusii were precipitously introduced to Western culture in the first decade of the 20th century when they came under British rule and the first Christian missionaries arrived. Their lives have never been the same, and the pace of social change has increased with each successive decade up to the present. Yet their contemporary survival strategies, family life, and patterns of child care can only be understood in terms of traditions inherited from their ancestors. Here we present an overview of Gusii culture and institutions in precolonial times and how they changed between 1907 and 1974, of the Gusii life course as experienced by adults and learned by children, and of the community in which we studied Gusii young children and their parents from 1974 to 1976.

This chapter concerns how Gusii mothers define infant care – their shared assumptions about the tasks and standards involved – and examines the infant's interpersonal environment over the first 30 months of life. Age trends in the infant's social ecology are analyzed in relation to family characteristics and to developmental patterns measured by the Bayley Infant Scales.

THE CULTURAL MODEL OF INFANT CARE

Despite their socioeconomic and religious differences, our sample families in Morongo varied little in how they defined the maternal role and its primary responsibilities. Their model of infant care largely replicated that of the preceding generation, whose norms and practices were recorded in the 1950s. The practices of mothers had been affected by new scarcities as well as new resources. The new resources included blankets, which made it unnecessary to keep the cooking fire going all night, thus reducing the risks of burns; more clothing, keeping children warmer during the rainy season; bottles with nipples, making it unnecessary for child caregivers to force-feed babies from a calabash when the mother was absent; and the use of water from wells instead of streams. In other words, greater access to cash, imported consumer goods, and household improvements had brought a higher level of material welfare that reduced some of the risks to infants observable in the earlier study. Novel scarcities included firewood, still used for cooking but more difficult to obtain in densely inhabited settlements, and children to look after babies, now attending school during the years they formerly spent at home.

In this book we have focused on the ordinary devoted mother of Kisii District, Kenya, and her provision of a facilitating environment for the maturational processes of her infants during the years 1974–1976. Using these terms coined by the British pediatrician-psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott implies a general similarity between Gusii mothers and the English mothers Winnicott observed: Both are committed to help their infants grow and thrive. It does not mean, however, that the care they provide is the same. On the contrary, the evidence presented in the foregoing chapters indicates that Gusii mothers' understanding of what is best for their babies, the goals of care to which they are devoted, the specific processes they seek to facilitate, their methods of facilitation, and the kind of caregiving environment in which the methods are embedded, differ from those of London or the suburban United States. In this chapter we analyze these similarities and differences comparatively as cultural models with developmental consequences, taking first the perspective of the parent and then that of the developing child. Moving beyond the cultural relativity of these divergent models, we assess the costs and benefits of their associated practices during infancy and in subsequent development. Finally, we explore the implications of this analysis for theories of child development and the acquisition of culture.

INFANT CARE AMONG THE GUSII AND THE AMERICAN WHITE MIDDLE CLASS

In comparing these two populations, we cross the major socioeconomic and demographic divisions between a rural African people and the affluent, urbanized people of a Western industrial country.