Thirty years ago, Erik Erikson wrote that "the fashionable insistence on dramatizing the dependence of children on adults often blinds us to the dependence of the older generation on the younger one." As a psychoanalyst, Erikson was referring mainly to the emotional bonds between parents and children, but his observation is a reminder that in many parts of the world, adults depend on children in quite concrete ways. In northern Nigeria, children with trays balanced on their heads, carrying and selling a variety of goods for their mothers or themselves, are a common sight in villages and towns. Among the Muslim Hausa, aside from being a useful educational experience, this children's trade, as well as children's performance at household chores and errands, complements the activity of adults and is socially and economically significant.

Mud-brick walls surround every house or compound.

Children's services are especially important to married Hausa women, who, in accordance with Islamic practices, live in purdah, or seclusion. In Nigeria, purdah is represented not so much by the wearing of the veil but by the mud-brick walls surrounding every house or compound and by the absence of women in the markets and the streets. Women could not carry out their domestic responsibilities, not to mention their many income-earning enterprises, without the help of children, who are free from the rigid sexual segregation that so restricts adults. Except for elderly women, only children can move in and out of their own and other people's houses without violating the rules of purdah. Even children under three years of age are sent on short errands, for example, to buy things for their mothers.
Hausa-speaking people are found throughout West Africa and constitute the largest ethnic group in northern Nigeria, where they number over eighteen million. Their adherence to Islam is a legacy of the centuries during which Arabs came from the north to trade goods of North African and European manufacture. The majority of the Hausa are farmers, but markets and large commercial cities have existed in northern Nigeria since long before the period of British colonial rule. The city of Kano, for example, which was a major emporium for the trans-Saharan caravan trade, dates back to the eighth century. Today it has a population of about one million.

Two girls carrying bowls of cooked food.

Binta is an eleven-year-old girt who lives in Kano, in a mud-brick house that has piped water, but no electricity. The household includes her father and mother, her three brothers, her father's second wife and her three children, and a foster child, who is the daughter of one of Binta's cousins. By Kano standards, it is a middle-income family. Binta's father sells shoes, and her mother cooks and sells bean cakes and tuwo, the stiff porridge made of guinea corn (Sorghum vulgare), which is the Hausa staple. Binta described for me one day's round of activities, which began very early when she arose to start trading.

"After I woke up, I said my prayers and ate breakfast. Then I went outside the house to sell the bean cakes my mother makes every morning. Soon my mother called me in and asked me to take more bean cakes around town to sell; she spoke to me about making an effort to sell as much as I usually do. I sold forty-eight bean cakes at one kobo each [one kobo is worth one and a half cents]. After I returned home, some people came to buy more cakes from me. Then I went out for a second round of trading before setting out for Arabic school. I study the Koran there every morning from eight to nine. "When school was over, I washed and prepared to sell tuwo. First my mother sent me to another neighborhood to gather the customers' empty bowls. I also collected the money from our regular customers. My mother put the tuwo in the bowls and told me the amount of money to collect for each. Then I delivered them to the customers.
"On my way home, a man in the street, whom I know, sent me on an errand to buy him fifteen kobo worth of food; he gave me a reward of one kobo. I then sold some more tuwo outside our house by standing there and shouting for customers. When the tuwo was finished, I was sent to another house to buy some guinea corn, and one of the women there asked me to bring her one of my mother's big pots. The pot was too heavy for me to carry, but finally one of my brothers helped me take it to her.
"When I returned, my mother was busy pounding some grain, and she sent me out to have some locust bean seeds pounded. She then sent me to pick up three bowls of pounded guinea corn, and she gave me money to take to the woman who had pounded it. The woman told me to remind my mother that she still owed money from the day before.
When I came home I was sent out to trade again, this time with salt, bouillon cubes, and laundry detergent in small packets. Afterward I prepared some pancakes using ingredients I bought myself ten kobo worth of flour, one kobo worth of salt, five kobo worth of palm oil, and ten kobo worth of firewood. I took this food outside to sell it to children.
"My mother then gave me a calabash of guinea corn to take for grinding; my younger sister also gave me two calabashes of corn to take. The man who ran the grinding machine advised me that I should not carry such a large load, so I made two trips on the way back. He gave me and my younger brothers, who accompanied me, one kobo each.
"I was then told to take a bath, which I did. After that I was sent to visit a sick relative who was in the hospital. On the way I met a friend, and we took the bus together. I also bought some cheese at the market for five kobo. I met another friend on the way home, and she bought some fish near the market for ten kobo and gave me some. I played on the way to the hospital. When I got home, I found the women of the house preparing a meal. One of them was already eating, and I was invited to eat with her.
"After nightfall, I was sent to take some spices for pounding, and I wasted a lot of time there. The other children and I went to a place where some fruits and vegetables are sold along the street. We bought vegetables for soup for fifty kobo, as my mother had asked me to do. By the time I got home it was late, so I went to sleep."

Binta's many responsibilities are typical for a girt her age. Like many women, Binta's mother relies upon her children in carrying out an occupation at home. Although purdah implies that a woman will be supported by her husband and need not work, most Hausa women do work, keeping their incomes distinct from the household budget. Women usually cook one main meal a day and purchase their other meals from other women. In this way they are able to use their time earning a living instead of performing only unpaid domestic labor.

Among the Hausa, men and women spend relatively little time together, eating separately and, except in certain ritual contexts, rarely doing the same things. Differences in gender are not as important among children, however. In fact, it is precisely because children's activities are not rigidly defined by sex that they are able to move between the world of women, centered in the inner courtyard of the house, and the world of men, whose activities take place mainly outside the home. Children of both sexes care for younger children, go to the market, and help their mothers cook.

Two girls arrange kola nuts for resale according to size and quality.

Both boys and girls do trading, although it is more common for girls. From the age of about five until marriage, which is very often at about age twelve for girls, many children like Binta spend part of every day selling such things as fruits, vegetables, and nuts; bouillon cubes, bread, and small packages of detergent, sugar, or salt; and bowls of steaming rice or tuwo. If a woman embroiders, children buy the thread and later take the finished product to the client or to an agent who sells it.

Women in purdah frequently change their occupations depending on the availability of child helpers. In Kano, women often trade in commodities that can be sold in small quantities, such as various kinds of cooked food. Sewing, embroidery, mat weaving, and other craft activities (including, until recently, spinning) are less remunerative occupations, and women pursue them when they have fewer children around to help. Unlike the situation common in the United States, where children tend to hamper a woman's ability to earn money, the Hausa woman finds it difficult to earn income without children's help. Often, if a woman has no children of her own, a relative's child will come to live with her.

A woman with her infant.	Young children imitate the way women carry babies.	A boy demonstrates how to write in English.

Childcare is another service children perform that benefits women. It enables mothers to devote themselves to their young infants, whom they carry on their backs until the age of weaning, between one and two. Even though women are always at home, they specifically delegate the care of young children to older ones. The toddler moves from the mother's back into a group of older children, who take the responsibility very seriously. Until they are old enough, children do not pick up infants or very young children, but by the age of nine, both boys and girls bathe young children, play with them, and take them on errands. The older children do a great deal of direct and indirect teaching of younger ones. As soon as they can walk, younger children accompany their older siblings to Arabic school. There the children sit with their age mates, and the teacher gives them lessons according to their ability.

Much of a child's activity is directed toward helping his or her parents, but other relatives-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and stepmothers and adults living in the same house as servants or tenants may call on a child for limited tasks without asking permission of the parents. Like other Muslims, Hausa men may have up to four wives, and these women freely call on each other's children to perform household chores. Even strangers in the street sometimes ask a child to do an errand, such as delivering a message, particularly if the chore requires entering a house to which the adult does not have access. The child will be rewarded with a small amount of money or food.

Adults other than parents also reprimand children, who are taught very early to obey the orders of grownups. Without ever directly refusing to obey a command, however, children do devise numerous strategies of noncompliance, such as claiming that another adult has already co-opted their time or simply leaving the scene and ignoring the command. Given children's greater mobility, there is little an adult can do to enforce compliance.

Boys make toy cars, trucks and airplanes from tin cans, bottle tops, and plastic box tops for sale.

Besides working on behalf of adults, children also participate in a "children's economy." Children have their own money from school allowances given to them daily for the purchase of snacks, from gifts, from work they may have done, and even from their own investments. For example, boys make toys for sale, and they rent out valued property, such as slide viewers or bicycles. Just as women distinguish their own enterprises from the labor they do as wives, children regard the work they do for themselves differently from the work they do on behalf of their mothers. When Binta cooks food for sale, using materials she has purchased with her own money, the profits are entirely her own, although she may hand the money over to her mother for safekeeping.

Many girls begin to practice cooking by the age of ten. They do not actually prepare the family meals, for this heavy and tedious work is primarily the wives' responsibility. But they do carry out related chores, such as taking vegetables out for grinding, sifting flour, and washing bowls. Many also cook food for sale on their own. With initial help from their mothers or other adult female relatives, who may give them a cooking pot, charcoal, or a small stove, children purchase small amounts of ingredients and prepare various snacks. Since they sell their products for less than the adult women do, and since the quantities are very small, their customers are mainly children. Child entrepreneurs even extend credit to other children.

Aisha is a ten-year-old girl who was notoriously unsuccessful as a trader. She disliked trading and regularly lost her mother's investment. Disgusted, her mother finally gave her a bit of charcoal, some flour and oil, and a small pot. Aisha set up a little stove outside her house and began making small pancakes, which she sold to very young children. In three months she managed to make enough to buy a new dress, and in a year she bought a pair of shoes. She had clearly chosen her occupation after some unhappy trials at street trading.

In the poorest families, as in Aisha's, the profit from children's work goes toward living expenses. This may occur in households that are headed by divorced or widowed women. It is also true for the almajirai, or Arabic students, who often live with their teachers. The proceeds of most children's economic activity, however, go to the expenses of marriage. The income contributes to a girl's dowry and to a boy's bridewealth, both of which are considerable investments. The girl's dowry includes many brightly painted enamel, brass, and glass bowls, collected years before marriage. These utensils are known as kayan daki, or "things of the room." After the wedding they are stacked in a large cupboard beside the girl's bed. Very few of them are used, but they are always proudly displayed, except during the mourning period if the husband dies. Kayan daki are not simply for conspicuous display, however. They remain the property of the woman unless she sells them or gives them away. In the case of divorce or financial need, they can provide her most important and immediate source of economic security. Kayan daki traditionally consisted of brass bowls and beautifully carved calabashes. Today the most common form is painted enamel bowls manufactured in Nigeria or abroad. The styles and designs change frequently, and the cost is continually rising. Among the wealthier urban women and the Western-educated women, other forms of modern household equipment, including electric appliances and china tea sets, are becoming part of the dowry.

A woman, weaves a mat for sale.	Girls carry goods for sale.

The money a young girl earns on her own, as well as the profits she brings home through her trading, are invested by her mother or guardian in kayan daki in anticipation of her marriage. Most women put the major part of their income into their daughters' kayan daki, as well as helping their sons with marriage expenses. When a woman has many children, the burden can be considerable. For girls, marriage, which ideally coincides with puberty, marks the transition to adult status. If a girl marries as early as age ten, she does not cook for her husband or have sexual relations with him for some time, but she enters purdah and loses the freedom of childhood. Most girls are married by age fifteen, and for many the transition is a difficult one.

Boys usually do not marry until they are over twenty and are able to support a family. They also need to have raised most of the money to cover the cost of getting married. Between the ages of eight and ten, however, they gradually begin to move away from the confines of the house and to regard it as a female domain. They begin taking their food outside and eating it with friends, and they roam much farther than girls in their play activities. By the onset of puberty, boys have begun to observe the rules of purdah by refraining from entering the houses of all but their closest relatives. In general, especially if they have sisters, older boys spend less time than girls doing chores and errands and more time playing and, in recent years, going to school. Traditionally, many boys left home to live and study with an Arabic teacher. Today many also pursue Western education, sometimes in boarding school. Although the transition to adulthood is less abrupt for boys, childhood for both sexes ends by age twelve to fourteen.

As each generation assumes the responsibilities of adulthood and the restrictions of sexual separation, it must rely on the younger members of society who can work around the purdah system. Recently, however, the introduction of Western education has begun to threaten this traditional arrangement, in part just by altering the pattern of children's lives.

The Nigerian government is now engaged in a massive program to provide Western education to all school age children. This program has been undertaken for sound economic and political reasons. During the colonial period, which ended in the early 1960s, the British had a "hands-off" policy regarding education in northern Nigeria. They ruled through the Islamic political and judicial hierarchy and supported the many Arabic schools, where the Koran and Islamic law, history, and religion were taught. The British discouraged the introduction of Christian mission schools in the north and spent little on government schools.

The pattern in the rest of Nigeria was very different. In the non-Muslim areas of the country, mission and government schools grew rapidly during the colonial period. The result of this differential policy was the development of vast regional imbalances in the extent and level of Western education in the country. This affected the types of occupational choices open to Nigerians from different regions. Despite a longer tradition of literacy in Arabic in the north, few northerners were eligible for those civil service jobs that required literacy in English, the language of government business. This was one of many issues in the tragic civil war that tore Nigeria apart in the 1960s. The current goal of enrolling all northern children in public schools, which offer training in English and secular subjects, has, therefore, a strong and valid political rationale.

Western education has met a mixed reception in northern Nigeria. While it has been increasingly accepted for boys-as an addition to, not a substitute for, Islamic education-many parents are reluctant to enroll their daughters in primary school. Nevertheless, there are already many more children waiting to get into school than there are classrooms and teachers to accommodate them. If the trend continues, it will almost certainly have important, if unintended, consequences for purdah and the system of child enterprise that supports it. Children who attend Western school continue to attend Arabic school, and thus are removed from the household for much of the day. For many women this causes considerable difficulty in doing daily housework. It means increased isolation and a curtailment of income-producing activity. It creates a new concern about where to obtain the income for children's marriages. As a result of these practical pressures, the institution of purdah will inevitably be challenged. Also, the schoolgirl of today may develop new skills and new expectations of her role as a woman that conflict with the traditional ways. As Western education takes hold, today's young traders may witness a dramatic change in Hausa family life-for themselves as adults and for their children.

More Related Photographs

Additional Reading
2002	"Age and Gender in Hausa Society: Socio-Economic Roles of Children in Urban Kano. Republished as "Recommended Readings." Childhood: A global Journal of Child Research. Vol. 9, Number 3. Pp. 342 368.
2002	"Equity for Children Around the World" in Caring for Children: A Global Perspective. Proceedings of a symposium. Georgetown University Child Development Center. pps. 11-16.
1992	Having a Healthy Baby: Teenage mothers in Northern Nigeria. Faces, March 1992: 34-37.
1988	Changing Childhood. Faces, Feb. 1988: 18-23.
1988	Nigeria: Getting Married. Faces, Feb. 1988: 30-33.
1988	Hajiya Husaina: Notes on the Life History of a Hausa Woman. In Life Histories of African Women, ed. P. Romero. New York: Ashfield Press, pp. 78-98.
1987	Foreword, photographs, and captions. In Muslim Hausa Women in Nigeria, by Barbara Callaway. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
1987	Introduction. The Golden Stool, Studies of the Asante Center and Periphery. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 65, no. 1, ed. E. Schildkrout, pp. 7-13.
1986	Widows in Hausa Society: Ritual Phase or Social Status. In Widows in African Societies, Choices and Constraints. ed. Betty Potash. Stanford University Press, pp. 131-152.
1986	Law, Education and Social Change: Implications for Hausa Muslim Women in Nigeria. In Women in the World, 1975-1985.The Women's Decade. 2nd edition, with Barbara Callaway, eds. L. Iglitzin and R. Ross. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio Press, pp. 181-206.
1986	Entrepreneurial Activities of Women and Children among Islamic Hausa of northern Nigeria. In Entrepreneurship and Social Change. Monographs in Economic Anthropology, No. 2, eds. S. M. Greenfield and A. Strickon, Lanham: University Press of America and the Society for Economic Anthropology, pp. 195-223.
1984	Schooling or Seclusion: Choices for Northern Nigerian Women. Cultural Survival Quarterly 8(2), 46-48.
1983	Dependence and Autonomy: The Economic Activities of Secluded Hausa Women in Kano. In Female and Male in West Africa, eds. C. Oppong et. al. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., pp. 107-127. (Expanded version of Bay, ed., 1982).
1982	Dependence and Autonomy: The Economic Activities of Secluded Hausa Women in Kano, Nigeria. In Women and Work in Africa, ed E. Bay. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 55-83.
1981	The Employment of Children in Kano. In Child Work, Poverty and Underdevelopment, eds. G. Rodgers and G. Standing. Geneva: International Labour Office, pp. 81-112.
1980	Children's Work Reconsidered: Conceptual Issues and Concrete Examples, with Special Reference to Northern Nigeria. International Social Science Journal, XXXII (3): 479-489. In English, French and Spanish.
1979	Women's Work and Children's Work: Variations among Moslems in Kano. In Social Anthropology of Work. A.S.A. Monograph 19, ed. S. Wallmann. London: Academic Press, pp. 69-85.
1978	Age and Gender in Hausa Society: Socio-Economic Roles of Children in Urban Kano. In Sex and Age as Principles of Social Differentiation. A.S.A Monograph 17, ed. J.S. La Fontaine. London: Academic Press, pp. 109-137.

This article was first published in Natural History Magazine, June 1981: 44-53.