AGEING IN AFRICA:REVISITING TRADITIONAL SAFETY NETS
NANA ARABA APT
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
UNIVERSITY OF GHANA
LEGON.
Introduction:
Until recently, the social arrangements of traditional Africa were, in the main, viewed simply as a barrier to economic development: the imperative was for modern social behaviour and values as the necessary pathway to economic success. In this overly simple tale of what was required for the future of Africa, the positive economic functions of the African family system were forgotten. The arguement here and building upon earlier work (Apt, 1971, 1991a,b,c, Grieco, 1987) is that the African extended family system operated as a social welfare system, a social welfare system which has been hidden from history by intellectual and colonial stereotyping which viewed the traditional in any form whatsoever as a barrier to economic and social progress.
A consequence of their cultural blindness has been the failure to realise that the destruction of traditional relationships will result in the destruction of the operating welfare system. Consequently, policies have been promoted both by national governments and international agencies which have as their goal, radical change in existing social arrangements without the development of accompanying social welfare policies which would compensate for the destruction of the traditional arrangements.
Here we argue, using the example of Ghana, that explicit attention must now fall upon the need to design and implement social welfare systems which are appropriate to the African reality. Economic development and urbanisation have put the old social welfare system under pressure whilst at the same time there has been a general failure to develop alternative social welfare arrangements for those social categories who have lost out in this process of change. For example advocating for smaller families without policy thinking on elder care introduces other welfare problems. The destruction of social insurance relationships without the provision of a viable functional alternative generates both social and economic crisis. There is a gap to be filled by new policy thinking, a gap which must be filled before the traditional arrangements are put under such pressure that they collapse altogether.
An enquiry into the social situation and the development process must start with a determination of the position of the family in the face of modernisation and the changes that are taking place. The role of the traditional family may be broadly subdivided into its social role, its economic role and its role as an agent for the transmission and renewal of socio-cultural values. Under tradition, there was a complex interaction between the members of the family and of a community. The economic and, political and socio-cultural values of present day Africa with its sprawling urban centres and industrialized zones are increasingly different from its traditional values. The family is disintegrating and social change has brought in its wake a host of new social problems which remedial social welfare services are not adequate to meet. Using Ghana's experience my paper will examine these key issues and make recommendations for effective social policies and programmes that must be incorpoarted centrally into national development plans.
Where Has UBUNTU Gone?
In Africa, the concept of development has been greatly influenced by the colonial experience and Western modernisation theory which posited that economic development and growth, mainly through industrialiastion, would automatically raise the living standards and meet the social needs of the population. In this respect, social welfare was viewed as a non productive activity and therefore accorded a low activity in national development planning and resource allocation. In such a context, the scope of social policy is limited and cannot deal with the critical problems of mass poverty and deprivation afflicting the majority of the people, especially in rural areas.
In order to understand the effect of modern change on the African family, it is necessary to describe the traditional family system, which is very different from that of the Western world. Here, I fall on the Ghanaian tradition.
Tradition:
A typical traditional household consists of multiple generations - the old, the middle-aged, and the young. Mutual help reinforces family solidarity (Fortes, 1971; Ayisi, 1972; Ellis, 1978): adults provide for the needs of the children and the elderly, the elderly socialize the children and give advice to other adults, and children provide labour and companionship to parents and grandparents. The hand of the child cannot reach the shelf nor can the hand of the elder get through the neck of the gourd on the shelf (Akan proverb). Thus, old and young support each other in economic and social activities.
Traditionally, the bond between parent and child does not weaken after the child's marriage, and it is this continuity of relationships with the extended family throughout life which affords some form of security in old age. The elderly are especially honored and respected under tradition. Among the Akan groups for example, in social gatherings, the order of precedence is based on age. For instance, the oldest person in any gathering presides over the meeting except when chiefs are present. The elderly are also given priority in seating arrangements, greetings, and welcomes. Traditionally the ancestral house was considered a temple where the living paid their respects to the ancestors. Sometimes, important ancestors were buried in the house or room in which they lived in order to anchor the family and give the impression that the departed were still part of the living. For elderly people, an important benefit of the extended (or ancestral) family, in addition to financial support, is the provision of `replacements' for intimate members of the family lost by death or migration. The availability of family substitutes for absent children, grandchildren, or siblings can reduce the social isolation and loneliness which are the most serious problems for older people throghout the world. For the purposes of training and socialization, younger members of the family usually live with the elderly, and provide reliable assistance in domestic and other duties. After they have grown up and become independent, they are still obliged to provide a proportion of their earnings to the elderly.
In its widest interpretation, the Ghanaian family can extend to three or four generations in the direct line to include brothers, sisters, and their children. When economically necessary, a traditional Ghanaian household can include grandparents, in-laws, cousins as well as brothers and sisters: The family is a crowd (Akan proverb). The emphasis on the extended family is strong, and members are obliged to assist each other. Even when blood relations are separated geographically, family ties generally remain intact emotionally and financially.
African Families under stress: the social organisation of welfare in low income urban communities
What are the policies which contribute to the disintegration of the family and which thus contribute to the disintegration of the traditional welfare system? In Ghana, over the years, government investment priorities have added to this disintegration, most particularly in respect of the imbalance between investment in rural and investment in urban areas. In Ghana as in most countries of tropical Africa, concentration of government investment in urban areas has widened the disparities of economic and social infrastructure between rural and urban areas resulting in substantial rural-urban migration. Meanwhile, it is the rural areas which provide food and raw materials for the urban sector, despite increasing out-migraion of the young.
In the wake of these demographic pressures, the family is disintegrating and social change has brought in its wake a host of new social problems which remedial social welfare services are not adequate to meet. Migration to the urban areas has contributed to high unemployment and overcrowding in the towns, as well as to the isolation of the elderly in rural areas where they become deprived of their social and economic support. This trend if not seriously tackled, is expected to continue.
The problems of the elderly in the modern context are not confined to the rural areas. Increasingly, the indicators are of a trend away from the traditional perceptions and practices of obligations towards respect for the elderly. Support of the elderly in kind was a traditional practice of rural Ghana; support of the elderly in cash is increasingly a requirement of urban life in Ghana. However, a small formal sector, low wages and employment insecurity, work against urban Ghanaian offspring being as unable to meet these income requirements of an urban life as their rural counterparts are to meet the need requirements of the rural elderly in kind (Kroboe, 1992).
Clearly, the domestic separation of the urban elderly from the traditional family structure tells us something about the changing image of what the traditional family is and should be. Conflict of loyalties is evident between newer urbanised conjugal family and the extended traditional family (Fortes, 1971, 1981; Oppong, 1981; Korboe, 1992). In a study of the views of Ghanaian youth on aging (Apt, 1991 ), it was evident that young families will not be living with their elderly much longer as 81% of the youth interviewed were of the opinion that this arrangement was not feasible in the present.
However, it would be a mistake to think that such separation is simply the outcome of the adoption of `modern' values and attitudes for there are obvious infrastructural and structural factors involved in this change of practice. Urban housing conditions provide a good part of the explanation for these changes. In the rural Ghanaian context, the provision of accommodation for all social categories is largely unproblematic; shortage of land is not a factor and simple additional dwellings are constructed of local materials as the need develops. In the urban context the provision of accommodation is radically more problematic. Low income accommodation is frequently found where there is little or no space for the erection of supplementary dwellings as families increase in size; urban accommodation typically requires cash payment to a landlord/lady and is frequently subject to the landowner's limitation on the number of persons entitled to inhabit a property. These factors taken together place pressure upon families to sub-divide into component units (rural/urban), especially where family size is large. Such sub-division, in its turn, adversely affects the internal budgeting arrangements of the conjugal family in respect of its ability to meet its traditional welfare obligations.
It is not only the budgeting capabilities of the conjugal family which are affected by sub-division for such sub-division has consequences for the arrangement of the various personal service and care arrangements within the extended family. For example, the traditional functions performed by the elderly in respect of child care are negatively affected by this domestic separation. Similarly, the caring services extended to the elderly with the traditional household become more problematic, sporadic and on occasion, even impossible, when elderly people become geographically separated from kin even within the same area of a city (Apt, 1993). The reciprocity which existed between the generations in the traditional extended family is thus disrupted by urban life; in this process, the elderly who were previously valued for their services increasingly occupy the unenviable position of being viewed as useless consumers of scarce resources. Nevertheless, and although the signs of an imminent crisis of social welfare in respect of the elderly in Africa are already visible, presently in many African countries, due to the lack of a comprehensive social security system for all, the family continues to be the dominant source of care and support for the elderly.
Incorporating indigenous structures in donor activities: the challenge of empowering the family.
Africa's resource situation means that she must obtain assistance from outside agencies in delivering social welfare. Whilst the contributions of the donor community are essential, it is important that such contributions be disciplined into a cohesive welfare policy which is appropriate for us. The temptation to let the donors determine the direction of development has to be in many cases resisted. But resistance is not sufficient. There is a need for Africa and Africans to advise donors on the limitations of many imported policies, to educate donors on the strengths of harnessable indigenous institutions and to develop with donors the correct local solutions. There is an agenda which donors can usefully follow in helping to develop appropriate social welfare policies for Africa.
Conclusion :The search for appropriate Indigenous arrangements.
The economic development of Africa, it seems clear, can not proceed further without more detailed and sytematic policy thinking on social welfare needs, priorities and arrangements, not least because of the imminence of demographic changes. The comprehensive re-consideration and re-design of the classic social welfare systems of the advanced industrial countries, creates the opportunity for forcing the explicit consideration of what forms of social welfare organisation are appropriate for Africa. The opportunity should not be lost; indigenous welfare arrangements should be identified and efforts made to provide the complementary services which can maintain and support these.
That the family, even the African family, can provide all the social welfare needs of the society is surely a myth; that it provides the central structure of social welfare in a developing society is surely a truth. The time has arrived for the design of policies which support the family rather than destroy it.
Our suggestion in this paper is that policy be developed in such a way that it lends support to the traditional family based social insurance arrangements; social welfare arrangements should not seek to replace the insurance function of the family as they did historically in Western society but rather should seek to support and buttress the family in its performances of the important economic role of social insurance.
The family has been the cornerstone of social welfare arrangements in many African countries; contemporary policy making must recognise this legacy and seek to incorporate it in the development of the national social welfare programmes which are increasisngly becoming necessary as Africa experiences a social welfare crisis. Affordable social welfare must make use of the traditional social welfare institutions. The policy question is: How can we best support these institutions accomplish in the modern period what they accomplished so effectively in the past?
The role of the state, given the existing resource constraints, must be one of support not of subsitution. The same relationships which were once viewed as barriers to development must now be seen as an essential source of support for the development process. The main thrust in the arguement hinges on inadequate and inapropriate research on the family. Although research designed to fill the gaps in knowledge is very urgent and important, high priority should be given to research oriented to the specific problems of the African region including methodological studies. Such research is best carried out in African countries themselves and by competent persons especially acquainted with national and regional conditions.
The following areas are considered to require research inorder to fill existing gaps in knowledge:
If the family is to be expected to serve as the primary safety net as it was, once upon a time, it is necessary that more be known about how social changes have affected the family's ability to undertake such responsibilities. Developing an empowerment perspective, a movement away from the deterioration medical paradigm of the West, enables older persons within the family confines to define an active part for themselves in social and economic life. Similarly, mutual support structures, well used in traditional African societies, provide older persons with more control over their own lives.
Although there is a general consensus that the low income world that is normally representative in Africa does not have resources for catering for either the ageing of society or large increases in the numbers of older persons through public sector provision (World Bank,1994; Tout,1989), and although the policy focus has largely been on the family as the key agency in meeting the ageing crisis (Phillips,1992), this simple opposition between the public sector and informal sector provision conceals a wealth of policy options which must be explored.
The tendency to view the old simply as recipients of care and services is certainly no model for Africa and has served to conceal the prospects and opportunities for mutual support. The UBUNTU philosophy which pervades throughout Africa's indigenous culture must be revisited. The consequence of this current gaps in knowledge about indigenous structures and values on ageing in respect of Africa, leaves many key policy topics largely left undiscussed and therefore untaught. Ageing has not yet taken its necessary place on Africa's development policy radar. In discussions of older persons and development, older persons are simply regarded as constraints and not a resource and yet emerging information on this presents the contrary view. The need for the empowerment of older people is obvious. But the empowerment of older people is not only about rights: it is also about obligations. There must be enabling conditions created in order for older persons to have the maximum autonomy and less pressure on scarce social resources. This area needs extensive study.
Lack of education represents as large if not a larger problem than physiological constraints to the social and economic participation of older persons in Africa. An increase in the number of generations in a fast changing world necessarily accentuates the educational distance between the younger and older generations (Apt,1996) if education is viewed purely as the preserve of youth.
The issue of gender and ageing however has barely been addressed in Africa. Yet women progressively live longer than men and women more than men experience financial and cultural constraints which affect their quality of life as older persons. Longevity in Africa clearly has consequences for female workloads and work opportunities if care for the old- old is to take place within the family. It has consequences for the life opportunities of the care giver and stresses and strains are likely to take its toll on Africa's women care givers.
There is definitely a need for ageing policy in Africa to address the poverty problems of widowhood. Gender and ageing is clearly an area which research activities should immediately be activated as part of poverty alleviation strategies.
Finally, let me end as I started by reaffirming my belief in UBUNTU. For the large majority of African countries, mutual support schemes should be the more sustainable alternative to blanket social security provision. Tout (1989) discusses precisely these issues in his proposed new approach to the problems of older people in developing countries. Mutual support however should not be viewed simply as the cheaper option but should be viewed in terms of the active participation benefits it brings. Mutual support offers the opportunity for enhanced sociability, greater bargaining power across the generations and greater security in the context of shrinking kinship structures.
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APT, N. 1971
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