The main purpose of this brief chapter on miscellaneous aspects of farming households is to provide background material needed for the discussion in subsequent chapters of our central theme of economic inequality.

THE SIZE OF THE HOUSEHOLDS

Since, as we know, the majority of households in both Batagarawa and the Anekal villages are basically nuclear, essentially consisting of parents and children only, it comes as no surprise to find that in both regions the great majority of non-joint households have between (say) 4 and 10 members – 74% in Batagarawa and 76% in the Anekal villages, as Table V(1) shows. The proportions of such households with one or two members only is little more than 10% in both regions, the proportions with more than 10 members being negligible.

As Table V(2) shows, as many as 85% (Batagarawa) and 88% (Anekal) of the members of non-joint households live in households with between 4 and 10 members.

As for joint households, Table V(1) shows that more of them are large in Batagarawa than in the Anekal villages – the respective proportions with 16 or more members being 34% and 19%, the average sizes being 11.7 and 10.7 persons. Even had it been possible to define joint households identically in both regions, the Batagarawa joint households would have been larger than those in Anekal owing to Hausa polygyny, for the heads of the former households had more wives, and hence more children, than the average householder.