peanut work

 People working behind a peanut stack

My brothers putting peanut stalks on the donkey house

The Peanut Harvest

Is an entire family affair. Up to this point the peanut work has been mostly the women's responsibility, while the millet fields were worked by the men. Each woman in the compound has her own field. After a few weeks of rain, they will go out and begin weeding. Its a lot of work so generally two or three women will team up to work on one field. When it's clear the men lend a hand by driving the plows through before each woman plants. Women then weed their own fields ( or in teams) until the peanuts are big enough to out compete the weeds. The men are doing the same in the millet fields. When everything has outgrown weeds, there is a break in work until it stops raining. Then when it stops,  each woman is responsible for getting her own peanuts out of the ground. Since the millet takes longer to mature, the men will go out together every day and help pull peanuts in one woman's field. It takes 2 or 3 days in each field before all the peanuts are up. They rotate through the fields by age of the women, oldest first. The days when men aren't in a woman's field she will still work pulling more up, stacking them to dry, or sweeping the ground for loose nuts. When all the peanuts are up a woman will stack them in a big donut, then the men will come around and build a big huge mound for them to dry out. The mound is covered with thorns and grass to keep goats and cows out. When its time to work the stack, all the men and women take two sticks that look like canes held backwards and pull peanuts off the top of the stack. They walk backwards beating the pile they pulled down until the ground is a a carpet of peanuts, and the stalks are stacked behind you. The work divides again as women pick up and drop bowls of peanuts letting the wind blow away the pieces of dirt and stalk. The men do the opposite, dropping the stalks to clear out peanuts so that they can carry home a big mound of stalks for the donkeys to eat. It goes until all the nuts are cleaned and bagged. Then the men load up the donkey carts and the women head for home on foot