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9. Hunting and Gathering by Children and Youths in Owerri Urban, Nigeria: Negotiating Dietary Supplements
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9 Hunting and Gathering by Children and Youths in Owerri Urban, Nigeria: Negotiating Dietary Supplements Okechi Dominic Azuwike Introduction In the suburbs of Owerri, children’s struggle to survive comes to the fore when one observes the phenomenon of bands of chattering children and youths browsing the bushes on some nights with their local light sources and gathering snails for food or for sale. On occasional nights, in the rainy season, they may gather flying termites. In the daytime, other forms of hunting may also be practised. These children’s perception of their hunting activities differs from the perceptions of those who have developed the mindset of saving the children from themselves by opposing these activities. Work forms that appear unpleasant for children in popular perception may be perceived as fulfilling by the children concerned (see Bourdillon, 2009:20).1 Hunting children relate with the home as well as the street. This suggests that these two platforms of children’s existence are not necessarily mutually exclusive but rather coexist in the lives of children. The ‘street child’ may be interpreted more broadly than only to cover street residents.2 Gimsrud and Stokke (1997: 21) include as street children, ‘those living within the family whose earnings (on the streets) contribute to household survival’. The child hunters described in this chapter provide an example of children who combine activities on the streets with life in their homes. A further question is whether or not economic hardship, which in many cases drives foraging behaviour, predisposes households to factor such informal engagements as children’s hunting in their survival toolkit? The rewards of the children’s enterprise are managed by adults, who are considered most capable of Negotiating the Livelihoods of Children and Youth in Africa’s Urban Spaces 136 resource management. In hunting, children therefore largely remain a factor of adult’s production processes. Surrendering their earnings is necessary for retaining critical adult protection. Should hunting among children be called work or play? If it is work, is it exploitative work? What are the hazards involved in this form of work? The fact that child hunting is usually informed by enlightened self-interest on the part of the child and is at times approached with excitement tends to hide aspects that might be deemed abusive. The family can in some circumstances be a subterfuge that masks the exploitative nature of activities which children may successfully be cajoled or cowed into only in the authoritarian environment of the family. Thus, Lange (2000) interprets use of children’s work as ‘processes geared towards production and domination’. Is this generally or ever a true interpretation? Do children involved in hunting perceive that they are being exploited? Rather than exploitation they tend to perceive an opportunity for self-expression and agency in general. In many quite different circumstances, attempts to protect children by stopping them from working have failed to attend to the positive difference that working made to their lives: stopping the work sometimes leaves them worse off than when they were allowed to work (Bourdillon 2009: 6-7). While night hunting may be deemed hazardous and while the hazards may be acknowledged by the participants, the willingness among them to meet the challenge of hazards is very real. Is this indicative of possible benefits that outweigh perceived risks? The children have invented strategies to cope with culturally imposed work requirements and to negotiate their existence in a largely adult-controlled world. In this study, we look at the phenomenon of child hunting as a social activity and in the context of urban social ecology of space contestation. Contexts This study deals with urban people who are rural in orientation, having been generally raised in rural areas surrounding urban Owerri and having migrated to the urban area. It also deals with children who may have been born to these migrants in the urban area as well as non-migrant indigenous populations that have been swamped by urbanization. The process of urban acculturation is scarcely completed among these groups, most of whom maintain a strong link with their rural roots. In the 1980s, Gugler (2002) repeated studies he carried out in Nigeria in the early 1960s on urban people’s connection to their rural roots. He found that urban people who expressed strong reservations about visiting their villages in the 1960s when they were children or youths, often established strong connections to their rural roots in their adulthood. The urban experience did not translate into the erosion...