In the great movements of population going on around the globe, there are 300 million people living somewhere other than their country of birth – and three times as many have migrated within their own country. But for every migration there are those left behind and most of them are women and children.
The city of Daloa and its surrounding villages in western Ivory Coast encompasses all of this. An important regional hub, the trade in cocoa and coffee made Daloa prosperous and provided people with a relatively comfortable life. Small landowners could employ people to work the land for them and extend their fields to the forests. Labour came from elsewhere in Ivory Coast and from Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali, but also Ghana and Liberia. Ivory Coast is home to between 4 million and 5 million foreigners, more than a quarter of its population.
In the countryside, where it was once possible for a family to live off their land and afford seeds and fertiliser, send children to school, pay for a medical visit, and be able to save a little, hard choices now need to be made between shoes for the children or pesticides to guarantee a harvest.
Where there was once joy at seeing crops grow, now there is a fatalism: pray for the best, expect the worse, as the seasons are disrupted and the erratic fluctuations of commodities make every decision a gamble.
In the hamlets of the Sassandra-Marahoué district you can see what the new economic reality means – people ranging in age from teenagers to their mid-30s are absent. The village elders have a word for this exodus, l’aventure: younger people who have left the strictures of village life for the city, jobs, anonymity and freedom. But they have also left their children.
In village after village, grandmothers are bringing up four or five or six grandchildren, in some cases great-grandchildren, too. Often the parents slip away in the dead of night, without warning, leaving their children behind.
The grandmothers become sole breadwinners, toiling in fields in heat and dirt. It’s hard to imagine the physical toll as well as the impact on their emotional and psychological wellbeing as they again feed and raise children, but without the vitality of their youth.
These women have to rewrite traditions set by their ancestors. A life that once followed the seasons, gave an abundance of crops, provided a retirement plan, has changed irrevocably in the face of the climate crisis.
Kouakou Amoin Audette
“My ID card says I was born in 1956, but they reduced my age by years”, says Kouakou Amoin Audette. “I gave birth to 13 children, but two didn’t live beyond their first year and two others have since died. I look after five grandchildren and a great-grandchild, two grandsons and three granddaughters. Some are old enough to go off to earn in other people’s fields. It’s difficult because they’re impolite, they don’t listen to me, and it’s been very difficult to ensure their schooling.
“I even have great-grandchildren – imagine becoming a mother three times over. First, you have your own children, then when you expect your children to look after you, they have children and you become a grandmother who is left with all the duties the mother would normally take care of, and if that isn’t enough, I am now doing it all over again for my great-grandchildren – mothering them.”
She says the same thing many of the grandmothers say: “My retirement will come the day I’m buried.”
It’s no surprise that many older women complain of back pain, arthritis and poor eyesight, but they continue with all the household work and tending their smallholdings. “I will continue to work as long as I have my health even though my back gives me terrible pain,” says Audette.
“I think it’s because I gave birth to so many children. I did have an X-ray and they gave medicine for the pain, but as soon as I started working in the fields again the pain came back. It used to be that the fields gave us enough, now they don’t provide enough to support families.
“What’s more, either one child inherits the land, or several of the children divide the land. Either way, that leaves most families without a means to a living.”
In Audette’s village, like all the surrounding villages, work only ceases at prayer times and on holy days. But for the grandmothers, this never means getting up later than the sunrise.
Grandchildren: Epiphanie, 17, Deborah, 16 (in the photo), Gisèle, 13, Junior, 12, and Albérique, four
Kouame Aya Marie
“It’s good they left here, there’s nothing for them here,” says Kouame Aya Marie, 50. She had five children, but only the youngest, aged 16, remains at home. Three are in Abidjan, one in Soubré.
“Some of them return home once or twice a year, one of them I never saw him again. Those with children have sent them to me. It’s really difficult to look after the grandchildren, the cooking, the cleaning, working in the fields and then also I have to wash them and get those who are at school ready for school. I need to give them 100 francs (12p) a day so that they can eat something at school as I don’t have time to come home from the fields to give them lunch.
“It’s tough this year. Like recent years, the harvest isn’t good, there’s too much sun and not enough rain. Last year and this year our fields didn’t produce enough, so I had to buy food for the first time, but I needed to borrow money. Sometimes I pay a young person to help me in the fields as it’s difficult to manage on my own. Only one of my four grandchildren is old enough to help.
“My last child has only one thought, to leave here. She says it’s too quiet, no electricity, you have to fetch the water, no television, she listens to music on her phone, but from time to time we don’t have any network.
“There’s no future here. They need to at least learn a trade, otherwise at best they’ll work as a domestic. That pays 25,000 francs (£30 a month).
“The grandchildren suffer, they don’t see their father or their mother. They call me ‘mum’. I have to pay for the grandchildren’s clothes, for the school registration, schoolbooks, school materials, uniform, their shoes. The schoolteacher chases them from class when they don’t have shoes. There are more than 40 pupils in the classrooms.
“Even when their parents have jobs they don’t earn enough money to send any to help me with their children. My daughter-in-law is pregnant, she’s going to give birth here and then leave me with her child as they don’t have enough money to look after the child. I’m obliged to look after the children.”
Her eldest grandchild, Konan, tells me he remembers Abidjan. “There the school had a sports ground where we played with a football and I learned to play basketball, here there’s nothing … I want to be a policeman in Abidjan. Because here there aren’t any policemen.”
Grandchildren: Konan, 10, Bernice, six, Gloris, five, and Maële, four
Kouassi Akissi Jeanne
Like many grandmothers, Kouassi Akissi Jeanne doesn’t know her age but has an identity card with a date of birth which may or may not be correct. Jeanne has two sons and two daughters. She has a disability that keeps her from working, although she can manage small household tasks such as going to the communal pump to collect water.
“After my children left town to find work, at first I looked after two of my grandchildren: Kouffia, who is 13 and my eldest son’s child, and Samira, who is eight, and then Divino, a third grandchild from of one of my two daughters, but five months ago, Amennan, my other daughter, was abandoned by her husband and she was left with twin girls.
“What’s she going to do? She has no qualifications. She hopes to sell barbecued fish. She’s an additional burden.
“I can barely cope, I couldn’t manage them all, so I sent Divino, temporarily, to my sister. My granddaughter Kouffia was our only source of income. She used to sell sweets from a stall outside our front yard, but business is slow, so I have now sent her and Samira to a restaurant to do dishwashing and bussing tables. They work there six days a week from 8am in the morning to 6pm in the evening and bring home 500 francs (60p), enough to buy rice and some vegetables to make a sauce.”
The restaurant owner knows it’s illegal to employ children, but they work for less than half of what she would pay an adult and she knows that without a job they will go hungry. There’s no shortage of children willing to work, but she’s often exasperated and threatens to sack them because at the first chance to play, they’re off.
Kouffia, 13, is a quiet, shy and devoted granddaughter. “My mother is in the village, she can’t look after me. I was still small, I don’t remember my father, but I do have memories of my village. I begin my day at sunrise sweeping the yard, I help prepare the breakfast, I know how to cook the rice when my grandmother is tired, and I wash our clothes.
“After I have finished the household chores and cooking the breakfast, I go to school. When I return from school and on weekends I sell sweets that I place on a table because my grandmother can’t work. When there are no buyers I play with my sisters, or in the evenings when there are no clients I do my homework.
“I’d like to become a teacher. I ask God to protect me and my family so that I can continue at school. Now times are tough, the children no longer buy as many sweets as they used to, so my sister and I have to wash dishes and pots and pans at a restaurant. She [the owner] tells us to go clear the tables or serve the food.
“I hope God gives grandma a long life. I often think of my mother. I would like my mother to come and visit me.”
Grandchildren: Kouffia, 13, Samira, eight, Divino, five, Princia and Priska, 17 months
Bokwaya Angel Naonou
Bokwaya Angel Naonou, 57, has spent two hours walking to her ricefields, her six barefooted grandchildren following her. They…
