The Great Head Count

AT the stroke of 12 one night this month, church bells rang, sirens wailed and gongs boomed the length and breadth of Ghana. The noise signaled neither a national holiday nor a sneak air attack. It was meant simply to remind Ghanaians that a new census was about to begin.

While the U.S. early next month will take its 19th census since 1790, heads are also being counted in some 90 other countries and territories--from the U.S.S.R. to Greenland--during this decennial year. When all the figuring is done, roughly half of the world's 3.6 billion people will have been accounted for. Census takers traveling on foot and horseback, by dugout canoe, reindeer sled and helicopter will collect the raw statistics that will enable developing countries to chart their next five-year plans and industrial nations to study (among other things) the migratory patterns of their people.

Minsks in Moscow. In the Soviet Union, the counting has already been done, and the raw data are being fed into Minsk-32 computers in Moscow that will print more than 800,000 separate tables. When the Minsks are finished, they are expected to show that the U.S.S.R. has a population of some 241 million (v. 205 million projected for the U.S.). More important, they are likely to indicate that for the first time the Russian people are a minority in the Soviet Union, outnumbered by the country's 109 other nationalities.

In many Communist countries there is little need for a head count, since everyone from newborns to nonagenarians must be registered with the police. Nonetheless, demographers in Czechoslovakia and Poland as well as in Russia hope to learn useful facts, including how many households have washing machines, radios and television sets.

Machiavellian Device. First undertaken as long ago as 3800 B.C. by the Babylonians and in 3000 B.C. by the Chinese, head counts have often proved unpopular because of their association in the public mind with taxation and conscription. When a national census was proposed to the British Parliament some 200 years ago, an enraged M.P. described the project as "totally subversive to the last remains of English liberty." Only in 1801 was the idea reluctantly accepted. The notion that the census is a Machiavellian device designed to enhance the power of the government is still strong; Machiavelli did, in fact, compile a statistical abstract for Germany and France in 1515 that might be called a forerunner of modern census analysis.

In ancient times, people sometimes had to travel to their birthplace or family seat to be counted, as in the case of Mary and Joseph's eventful journey to Bethlehem. In the present day, many countries order their citizens to remain at home for a specified period to await the census taker. All Cuba will be virtually paralyzed on census day this year except for ambulance drivers and census takers. In Mexico, fines for leaving one's house unoccupied on the vital day, Jan. 28, ran as high as $800.

The census takers have their problems too. A few years ago a careless counter in Tanzania was devoured by crocodiles while wading across a river. In Brazil's Baia state in 1960 one census taker, having asked how many maiden daughters there were in the family, was beaten up by an angry farmer. In Baia, the term "maiden" daughter refers to a girl who has been seduced and abandoned. In addition to general reticence, the census taker must contend with all sorts of regional vagaries. In Jamaica, for example, the Ras Tafarian sect believes not only that Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie is God and Ethiopia the Promised Land but also that head counting is forbidden by the Scriptures.

Margin of Error. Questionnaires have been standardized to some extent by widespread use of a form suggested by United Nations demographic experts, but a great deal of idiosyncrasy remains. The Brazilian form omits questions about color, but asks about personal income. Next year's British form will ignore income, but will ask several new questions about ethnic origins to determine the size and makeup of growing immigrant communities. Communist forms do not include the U.N.'s questions about religious preference, and the Soviet form lists "Jewish" as a nationality rather than a religion.

Even the best census may err by 10% or more, especially in nomadic or jungle areas or--as is suspected in connection with the 1960 U.S. census--in the slums of great cities. Nigeria's 1962 census was challenged by politicians who contended that their regions had been undercounted; when a new census was taken the following year, it showed 15 million additional people. In South Africa, current estimates place the black population at 13.3 million; but some officials believe that this year's census will show that the figure is closer to 17 million--a matter of some importance in a nation whose official apartheid policy assumes that the white minority will not be completely submerged by a huge black majority.

More than 30 countries, ranging from Somalia to New Guinea, have never held a census, and population figures for the world's largest country, China, are uncertain at best. Five years ago, U.S. Journalist Edgar Snow asked Chairman Mao Tse-tung how many people there were in China. Mao noted that estimates went as high as 690 million, but he doubted it. "How could there be so many?" he asked. Mao must be even more incredulous today. Latest estimates of China's population range from 750 million to 800 million.

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