3.4. Kinship and social factors

The deep sense of kinship has been one of the strongest forces in traditional Bantu life. The kinship system is based on descent and marriage. Kinship controls the social relationships between people in a community, governs the marital customs and regulations and determines the behaviour of one individual towards another. The kinship system is like a vast network stretching horizontally in every direction to embrace everybody in a local group. It also extends vertically to include the departed and those yet to be born. All those who can trace their origin back to a common ancestor belong to the same kinship group, the members of which have a special relationship. Clan is the major subdivision of a tribe. The clan system is not uniform in Africa; e.g. clans may be matriarchal or patriarchal. Normally, clans are totemic. (Mbiti 1994.)

The concept of family has a much wider meaning in Africa than it has in Europe. In traditional society, the family includes children, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters, who may have their own children and other immediate relatives. The household in Africa is what European societies call family. The African household could be called “the family at night”, as it consists of the people who spend the night in the same house, usually parents with their children and sometimes the grandparents. They discuss the private affairs of their household and the parents transfer traditional knowledge to the children. (Van Pelt 1982, Mbiti 1994.)

Bena, as the majority of Bantu in mainland Tanzania, belong to patrilineal societies, which means that their descent is followed through males and the property belongs to the male family members. The wife is seen primarily as the mother of one’s children. The terminology used to indicate the different relatives is strongly influenced by the differences in generation, sex and proximity. For example, the father’s brothers are called fathers, but his sisters are not called mothers. The mother’s sisters are called mothers but her brothers are not called fathers. The children of the father’s brothers are called brothers and sisters, but the children of his sisters are cousins. The relations are not just in terms; they are expressed in the daily behaviour towards each other. (Van Pelt 1982, Juntunen 1994, 1997.)

The institution of marriage is religious, because it forms a link with the living dead: the names which children bear link them with their grandparents. Marriage is social, because marriage and the procreation of children go together. A marriage is only complete when the first child is born. Marriage is economic because of the distribution and payment of bride wealth. The payments of bride wealth has several meanings: a surety payment for good behaviour on both sides, compensation to the wife’s family for the loss of her labour and payment for the cost of bringing her up, establishment of the husband’s legal title to his wife’s children, a seal of the marriage contract between the two families and a reminder to the girl’s parents that although she has left their home, she is not dead since the cattle and goats are living symbols of their daughter’s continuing existence. (Anderson 1986.) Getting married to two or more wives was a custom found all over Africa, though in some societies it used to be less common than in others. The custom fits well the social structure of traditional life; e.g. a large number of children increases the immortality of the family. (Mbiti 1994.)

In the present-day Tanzania, the description of familyhood based on traditional African philosophy is too idealistic, when compairing it to the writings of Swantz (1983, 1985, 1998a, 1998b) and Vuorela (1987). The traditional family structure is breaking especially in big cities, and women run single-head families with little or no support from their relatives.