THE "PRONATALIST" CULTURE OF TROPICAL AFRICA: FERTILITY AND TRADITIONAL FARMING*

Tropical Africa currently lags far behind the rest of the developing world in terms of demographic transition. The article attempts to identify the most significant factors that caused this lag. It is shown that the African "pronatalist" culture has the closest connections with the peculiarities of the traditional economic system and social relations. The relationship between hoe farming, the prevalence of extended families and polygyny, and other socio-economic norms and practices with a slow transition of the birth rate from traditional to modern reproduction is revealed.

Keywords: Sub-Saharan Africa, Tropical Africa, birth rate, demographic transition, hoe farming, polygyny, women's employment, extended families.

To date, almost all regions of the world, with the exception of Tropical Africa, have completed the second phase of the demographic transition or are close to it. According to the World Bank's 2012 data, a high birth rate of more than 5 children per woman is currently maintained in 20 countries in the developing world, 19 of which are located in Tropical Africa (the only country outside of Tropical Africa with a birth rate of more than 5 children per woman is Afghanistan). [World Bank, 2014]. At the same time, 9 countries - Niger, Mali, Somalia, Chad, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Angola, and Uganda - had a birth rate above 6 children per woman in 2012. The countries with the highest birth rates in the world have been stable for quite some time: Niger and Mali - 7.6 and 6.9 children per woman in 2012, respectively. Another 11 countries in terms of total fertility rate (TFR) are in the range of 5 to 6 children per woman-Gambia, Zambia, Burkina Faso, Malawi, East Timor, Tanzania, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Guinea. However, even in those African countries where the birth rate has fallen below the level of 5 children per woman, it remains very high by world standards. Thus, TFR in the range of 4.5-5.0 children per woman in 2012 was observed in 15 countries, such as Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Equatorial Guinea, Benin, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Cameroon, Eritrea, Comoros, Sierra Leone, Mauritania, Togo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Madagascar [World Bank, 2014].

* The study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project N 13 - 06 - 00336).

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Figure 1. Total fertility rate in various regions of the developing world, 1960-2012

Such a noticeable lag behind Tropical Africa in making the birth rate transition has attracted the attention of many researchers - not only demographers, but also specialists in various fields of development research, especially given the fact that in many demographic and socio-economic development indicators, the countries of Tropical Africa in the middle of the XX century were at a comparable "starting level" with others developing countries and regions that have successfully entered the fertility transition and have now completed or are completing it (see Figure 1). The contrast between the dynamics of the fertility transition in sub-Saharan Africa is particularly striking compared to the Middle East and North Africa region, where the "starting" birth rate was even slightly higher, but by now it has reached the lowest level. Due to rapid declines in the second half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the rate of growth in sub-Saharan Africa was almost twice that of sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 2).

The demographic literature has repeatedly attempted to identify the reasons for such a strong difference in the demographic dynamics of Tropical Africa from other regions of the developing world, as well as to establish whether the experience of fertility transition, its factors and mechanisms identified for other regions, is applicable to the realities of Tropical Africa. One of the most recent works on this topic, performed by outstanding experts in the field of demographic processes and birth rate transition in the developing world, J. R. R. Tolkien. Bongaarts and J. Casterline, convincingly shows that " dark declines in the birth rate in recent years in Africa are slower than the rates observed in Asia... in the 1970s, "while" in the 1970s, Asia and Latin America were at roughly the same transition stage as Africa is now " (Bongaarts and Casterline, 2012, p. 155).

Another, earlier study by J. R. R. Tolkien Bongaartsa's study showed that in 1992-1998, birth rates in Asia, North Africa, and Latin America declined by an average of 0.08 children per woman per year, and in Tropical Africa - by 0.07 children. However, in 1998-2004. the annual rate of decline in sub-Saharan fertility has declined significantly, falling to 0.02 children per woman on average for the region, while

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Figure 2. Total fertility rate in sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, 1960-2012

As in other regions of the developing world, the birth rate continued to decline at the same rate without slowing down (Bongaarts, 2008).

In their study, which showed a lower rate of decline in fertility in Tropical Africa than in other regions of the developing world, when they were going through a similar stage of fertility transition, J. Bongaarts and J. Casterline identifies two factors that they believe are most responsible for the slow rate of decline in fertility in Africa and are very likely to continue to hinder the acceleration of fertility decline in the future: 1) the intervals between births in Africa are noticeably longer than in Asia, and therefore there is almost no potential for their increase to reduce the birth rate; 2) the ideal family size and the desired number of children are extremely large in Tropical Africa compared to those in Asia, even taking into account the early transition stage [Bongaarts, Casterline, 2012, p. 166].

Both of these factors were repeatedly mentioned in the classic works of J. Bongaarts, J. Caldwell, R. Lestag and other researchers who considered the demographic situation in Tropical Africa as the reasons for maintaining a high birth rate in the region [Caldwell and Caldwell, 1987; Lesthaeghe, 1980; Bongaarts, Frank, Lesthaeghe, 1984]. These factors were often considered essential attributes of" pronatalist " African culture.

Although the phenomenon of the "pronatalist" culture of Tropical Africa is mentioned quite often, so far in the demographic literature there has not been a complete systematic explanation of the mechanisms of the emergence of "pronatalist" attitudes and factors that caused their high stability, a single scheme of causal relationships between individual components of the "pronatalist" culture (values, social norms, customs and traditions behavioral patterns in marriage and fertility) and the reasons why Tropical Africa is so different from other regions of the developing world. This article will attempt to present a cognitive framework for such a systematic explanation, which requires using data from demographic, anthropological, and cross-cultural studies.

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ELEMENTS OF "PRONATALIST" CULTURE IN TROPICAL AFRICA

Already in 1983, R. Levin and S. Scrimshaw in their essay "The influence of culture on fertility" presented an overview of the areas of anthropological research devoted to various aspects of fertility, and noted that anthropological and ethnographic knowledge allows us to determine the sociocultural attitudes and norms common in society (the basic goal of which is to maximize the reproductive success of a given society - to maximize its chances reproduction in the next generations), which largely determine the behavior of the population in matters of marriage, fertility, sexual relations, etc. [Levine and Scrimshaw, 1983]. Later, M. Lockwood presented a fundamental work on anthropological approaches to the study of sexual relations, marriage, fertility and control over it, as well as reproduction in general (Lockwood, 1995).

I will briefly mention some of the works that explore those social norms, practices, and values and their causal relationships that are most closely related to fertility in Tropical Africa. In particular, we are particularly interested in the practice of tabooing sexual contact for women for a long time after the birth of a child and thus ensuring long intervals between births; polygyny; the prevalence of extended families and the system of social ties based on kinship; and the level of women's participation in productive work.

Taboo sexual contact after childbirth; long intervals between births. The social norm prescribing a period of prolonged sexual abstinence for a woman after the birth of a child is widespread in numerous African societies (Benefo, 1995). One of the fundamental works in this area was the work of R. Schoenmakers and co-authors, who noted that "the close interweaving of (I) the cultural norm prescribing an interval between births of at least two years, (ii) the custom of prolonged breastfeeding, and (iii) the existence of a postpartum taboo, which resulted in sexual abstinence of the mother after each birth It was described already at the time of the first major waves of colonial administrators and Western missionaries, doctors, and anthropologists in sub-Saharan Africa "(Schoenmaeckers et al., 1981, p. 25). Another classic work in this area belongs to the well-known anthropologist J.-F. Socier, who presented the distribution of 172 societies according to the duration of the period of tabooing sexual contact after childbirth. He showed that more than half of all cases for which the duration of such a period exceeded a year were related to African societies, while, for example, in Eastern Eurasia, the duration of the postpartum taboo rarely exceeded 6 months (Saucier, 1972).

The prominent demographer R. Lestag suggested that the taboo on sexual contact for a long time after childbirth and the resulting long intervals between births partly played the same role in limiting fertility in Africa as the increased age of marriage in Western Europe (Lesthaeghe, 1980).

The socio-economic context that led to the emergence of the norm of tabooing sexual contact for the mother for a long time after childbirth was first explained by J. R. R. Tolkien. Whiting. He revealed a causal relationship between the climatic conditions of the tropics, the low protein value of food and the need to prevent the onset of a new pregnancy during breastfeeding in order to avoid further reducing the already low protein value of breast milk (Whiting, 1964, p.520). Developing this hypothesis, J.-F. Saucier suggested that the major role was played not so much by the protein value of the food grown, but by the type of agriculture, and revealed a significant correlation between population density, the extensive nature of agriculture, and the duration of the postpartum taboo of sexual contact (Saucier, 1972, p.242).

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R. Schoenmakers and his co-authors made a significant contribution to establishing the correlation between the presence and duration of postpartum tabooing of sexual contacts and other socio-economic characteristics of societies. After collecting data from 167 African societies to map the prevalence of postpartum taboos, they concluded that the duration of postpartum tabooing of sexual contact (a) is positively correlated with polygyny; (b) is indeed the main factor that ensures long intervals between births; and (c) this norm is likely to erode and disappear with modernization (before the introduction of new technologies). Overall, with increasing levels of women's education and / or urbanisation) [Schoenmaeckers et al., 1981]. This last point is of particular importance for understanding the demographic dynamics and features of the birth rate transition in Africa: it should be taken into account that modernization in the first stages obviously leads to a dilution of the social norm prescribing postpartum abstinence, and therefore may initially lead to an increase, rather than a decrease, in the birth rate, thereby delaying the transition of the birth rate to modern type of reproduction.

Polygyny. The presence of polygyny in Africa was documented by classical anthropological studies (Radcliffe-Brown and Forde, 1950). Numerous attempts have been made to establish the nature and strength of the relationship between the prevalence of polygyny and the birth rate, but no definitive answer has been received. For a review of the literature devoted to the study of the mechanisms of the influence of polygyny on fertility at various levels, see [Burch, 1983, pp. 534-556] 1. Nevertheless, I consider the phenomenon of polygyny as one of the most important elements of my hypothesis about the reasons for the formation of a" pronatalist " culture and the factors that maintain the high birth rate regime in Africa. Of particular interest are two chains of causal relationships, described and empirically substantiated in the anthropological literature, between polygyny and some traditional African socio-economic practices, as well as patterns of reproductive behavior.

First, the prevalence of polygyny is positively correlated with long periods of postpartum abstinence, and the causal relationship here is interdependent (see, for example, [Saucier, 1972]).

Secondly, an extremely important link between the prevalence of polygyny and the traditional African economic system was traced by R. Klin in the fundamental study of polygyny "Many wives, much power". Having measured the frequency and intensity of polygyny on the data of the Interregional Database of Social Relations (Human Relations Area Files) created by J. P. Murdoch, R. Clinier concluded that in Africa

"in societies where the production of livelihoods depends on agricultural production and where such production is highly dependent on available labor, especially on the productive value of women, each family group seeks to use its additional income to increase its labor force and, more specifically, the number of polygynous households and the number of wives in them." [Clignet, 1970, p. 22-23].

Almost simultaneously with R. Clignet, another hypothesis explaining the relationship between polygyny and women's participation in productive work was developed by E. Boserup. In short, the chain of causal relationships underlying her hypothesis can be

1 Polygyny can negatively affect fertility by reducing the frequency of sexual contact among women in polygynous families compared to women in monogamous families, but it can also contribute to an increase in fertility due to the competition of wives seeking to strengthen their position in the polygynous household by having more children.

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It is presented as follows: the low population density in sub-Saharan Africa has determined the spread of slash-and-burn hoe farming and women's labor as the basis of the traditional economic system; in such a system of management, a woman is the main agricultural worker, which implies her high economic value, which, in turn, leads to the emergence and spread of polygamy [Boserup, 1970]. This line of reasoning is supported by empirical evidence (Lesthaeghe et al., 1994).

Extended families. Numerous classical works on the anthropology of African societies have noted the widespread use of a vast variety of behavioral patterns, norms, and values designed to support the existence of extended families and prevent their nuclearization. Among them are the extremely high importance of blood relations and the support of close relations with blood relatives within the extended family, which persists for spouses even after marriage; the widespread temporary separation of spouses for a number of reasons; polygyny; maintaining separate budgets by spouses; widespread adoption of children within the same extended family / clan / clan, including living biological parents (Radcliffe-Brown and Forde, 1950; Lesthaeghe, 1989; Caldwell and Caldwell, 1987; Kingsley, 1964; Marris, 1961; Notermans, 2004). For my research, one of the most important "pronatalist" functions of extended families is of interest, namely, providing women with easily accessible and relatively cheap (or free) services for caring for young children, which are provided by other wives, older children, sisters, daughters-in-law, grandmothers, etc.

In well-organized polygynous households, it is common for each of the wives to take turns staying at home to look after their children and the children of other wives while the others perform agricultural work [Clignet, 1970, p.35-38]. The probability of such cooperation between wives in a polyhypic household increases with age and the number of children. If wives do not get along, they can count on their sisters, daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law, and sisters-in-law to help them care for their children (Madhavan, 2001).

The availability of child care services within an extended family makes it much easier for a woman to combine the birth and upbringing of several children with agricultural work in the field (or work in another field). Extended families are much more likely to exist and their prevalence is significantly higher in societies where the need to work outside the household makes it more difficult for a woman to look after and care for young children (Ember and Levinson, 1991; Pasternak et al, 1976).

Women's participation in the production of means of subsistence. The availability of multiple possible caregivers for young children (provided by extended families) is key to understanding another specific demographic feature in Tropical Africa: both the birth rate and the female employment rate have traditionally been extremely high compared to the rest of the developing world. Here it is necessary to pay attention to the fundamental difference between traditional socio-economic systems in the complex 2 societies of Asia and North Africa, on the one hand, and in the countries of Tropical Africa, on the other. All complex ones

2 Of course, there were also some simple management systems based on hoe farming, particularly in some remote mountainous areas of South, East and South-East Asia, which were not so different from those in Tropical Africa. However, by the beginning of intensive modernization in Asia, such systems covered a small minority of the Asian population, while the vast majority of the population was organized into complex socio-economic systems of the plains based on plow farming.

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Traditional agricultural systems in Asia were based on plow farming, while in Tropical Africa they were almost entirely based on hoe farming. It has long been established that hoe farming tends to be associated with significantly higher levels of female employment and greater female contribution to the production of livelihoods than plow farming. Indeed, in hoe farming, the main part of agricultural work is performed by a woman, whereas in plow farming, the main worker in the field is a man (Boserup, 1970; White, Burton, Doe, 1981; Ember C. R., 1983; Korotayev, 2004).

Increasing female employment has long been recognized by demographers as one of the important factors contributing to the decline in the birth rate during modernization. However, in Tropical Africa, the role of this factor may be completely different. Indeed, in Western societies, for a long time, the responsibilities of raising and caring for young children turned out to be poorly compatible with work for women. As it has been shown in studies explaining the mechanism of influence of female employment on fertility, a woman's wage labor greatly increases the cost of her time and increases the lost benefit for her if she leaves work to give birth and raise children. At the same time, women's work responsibilities compete for time spent with child care responsibilities. All these factors have led to a negative correlation between the level of female employment and the birth rate; only in recent years has the situation changed dramatically in developed countries - higher birth rates are generally observed in those developed countries where the level of female employment is higher. However, this change did not occur spontaneously - in almost all such countries, considerable attention is paid to family policy measures aimed at making it easier for parents (primarily mothers) to combine parental responsibilities with work; one of the most important measures in this regard is to maintain a broad, variable and affordable system of child care services [Luci-Greulich and Thevenon, 2013; Harknett et al., 2014].

In the recent past, the level of female employment in developed countries showed two age peaks - before the birth of children and at a later age, when mothers returned to the labor market after their children reached school age. In Tropical Africa, the distribution of female employment at different ages was different, significantly more "even", and was much closer to the distribution of male employment by age than in developed countries. This distribution did not provide any evidence that women in Tropical Africa were forced to leave the labor market for the time of giving birth and raising children [Ware, 1977, p.2]. At the same time, this statement turned out to be true both for women working in agriculture and for workers in modern sectors of the economy, who continued to actively resort to the system of practices and norms established in traditional society that made it easier to combine parental responsibilities and work, primarily using the services of numerous assistants from extended families to look after and care for young children (Delancey, 1982; Weller, 1984).

Thus, it is possible to state with sufficient confidence that the traditional management systems common in sub-Saharan Africa have some fundamental historical differences from those in other regions of the developing world. These differences have a strong impact on the values, social norms, and behaviors associated with fertility and reproduction, supporting the sustainability of the high birth rate regime in Tropical Africa and making African societies more resistant to a variety of factors that have significantly accelerated the fertility transition in other regions of the developing world.

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