What is a family?

written 12/12

As we have been getting to know the people in Tabora, one of the things I’ve tried really hard to do is place kids with their parents and gain some understanding of the families we are interacting with. However, this has been more complicated than I was expecting. To begin with, this is a small town, so we keep finding family members of our friends popping up everywhere. Last week we learned that two of our friends are sisters, a realization that blew our minds. We had never heard them talk to each other, seen them together, and they don’t have a strong family resemblance.

Just as in the US, families here don’t all follow one strict pattern. We know a mother who has a different father for each of her children, we know sister-in-laws that live together, we know a niece that lives with her aunt and uncle, we know grandchildren that live with their grandparents. However, life here has some added twists that I wasn’t expecting.

Men in Tanzania are allowed to marry more than one woman. (This leads to many men being in search of a wife- which accounts for the large number of proposals we have each received.) In many cases, it seems that the wives live in different houses and comprise different family units. This means siblings can live across town from each other if they each live with their respective mothers. The two households seem to have totally different lives (although we were invited to marry a woman’s husband and move in with her, creating a two-wife household under one roof.) However, for one family we know, the children of the 1st wife (who does not live in Tabora) live with the 4th wife (who lives right next to us). This confused me quite a bit at the beginning as the mother told me she only had two kids, when I could clearly see that she had four.

The kids also seem to wander fairly freely between parental figures. We know kids who may eat dinner in any number of relative’s houses, and even may leave their home at night to go sleep at their grandparents. Our landlady’s niece lives with her and, when I asked why, it seemed as though they didn’t share the assumption I was operating under (that children live with their parents.) They explained to me that the two were related, but didn’t understand that despite knowing that, I still found the arrangement unintuitive.

Women here also have many children and can spend the vast majority of their life having kids. One of the members of KCJ has six children that range from ages 25-1. We know one man that, between his two wives, has 15 kids. This means that siblings can be of drastically different ages. In America, when someone’s sibling is born after their child (causing a niece that is older than an aunt), it is a delightful reversal. Here, it is almost surprising to be in a family in which that does not happen. It’s hard to classify people’s relations to each other in terms of ‘generations’ because of this and you can’t guess relationships by relative ages as easily.

The hardest part of trying to understand all of this, however, is the fact that people in Tabora don’t seem to attach the labels ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ etc to people as stringently as we do in the US. Not only are ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ used as ways of addressing people, but when I ask people how many brothers or sisters they have and how old they are, their answers don’t always make sense. People will tell us someone is their sister or son or father that we are pretty sure is not. Often these people are closely related to them, just not in the way we are being told. This has led to huge amounts of confusion on my part as I try to map things out. I suspect the reason for this difference is that the meaning of nuclear family is a bit difference- your uncle and you father can hold the same role for you, so differentiating between them is less important.

update 1/5/13
Apparently only Muslims here marry multiple wives; the Christians don’t.