Africa’s Population Boom and Children Trapped in Poverty

This culture was not fashioned out of naivety as any foreign writer on the topic would be quick to conclude but was imbibed as a result of the contribution of a bigger population to the economy.

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 laborers 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 neighborhood are mostly his wives and children.

Source: Africa World News