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Aged in Africa
By Aroun R. Deen
August 11, 2004
In almost every corner of the world, old age is revered, if not for nothing else, but its gift of longevity and wisdom. Older persons almost always are respected and held in high esteem. Because of their wealth of knowledge, the aged in Africa, for example, serve as advisers to those people who lead their communities. The aged play significant role in the extended family relations that is prevalent in Africa and elsewhere. They baby-sit and take care of young children while the parents go to work.
Due to their life long experience, older persons account for the majority of traditional healers in rural settings, particularly where conventional medical practices are not available. The duty of midwifery is also the responsibility of older women. It is, therefore a taboo for a community or a family to abandon its elderly. Those who fail to take care of their older relatives (no matter how well-off they may be) are considered worthless. However, older persons tend to lose such respectability in times of conflicts.
In a conflict situation, the younger generations often see the elderly as responsible for the present crisis. They not only
lose their respectability but also, their self esteem. They are left to suffer, as they become too dependent on the young for mobility and safety. During war, many older persons are abandoned by their fleeing relatives who might view them as burden. Because of physical impairments that are all too common among older people, they may not be able to escape, but they stay behind to face the horrors of brutal and inconsiderate combatants.
With the young generation accounting for the greater part of war casualties, their surviving aged relatives are the ones who bear the anguish of such lost. With little or nothing left, they face the task of caring for themselves and for orphan children. Like women and girls, older women are also subjected to the horrors of rape and other sexual abuses when a war occurs.
During a 1998 TV news coverage tour of a displaced people's camp at Grafton, outside Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, I learnt from some women that very old women were among a group of women and girls abducted for several days and gang-raped several times by rebel fighters from neighboring Liberia, who in October, 1996, attacked their village in Pujehun district, in east of Sierra Leone. The rebels' reason for molesting the aged woman was because, unlike their younger pairs, they (the older women) were regarded as 'virgins', since they might have refrained, for a long time, from sexual activities. Similar incidents of sexual molestation were also recounted by Liberian refugees at the Waterloo refugee camp, located some sixteen miles away from Freetown, during the Liberian war.
During the most recent war in former Yugoslavia, aged women were among victims of mass rapes in rape camps, by Bosnian Serb soldiers in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
When the Sierra Leone civil war started in 1991, there were constant reports of ill treatments (by both rebel fighters and government soldiers) of older persons. Both sides always accused older persons of 'collaborating with the enemy'. For example, if a rebel group raids a village finds out that all the younger people had escaped, the rebels will vent their anger for the escape on the older people left behind. They are sometimes beaten or ever killed.
When RUF rebels besieged the Sierra Leone capital and its surroundings in January, 1999, a seventy-two year old parish priest who got trapped for days in his church at Waterloo, eventually died from hunger. Everyone including his parishioners had fled the village.
In refugee and displaced people's camps, it is a dog-eat-dog world. The few older persons who are fortunate to make it to such camps (some of which are located hundreds of kilometers away from their homes) have to fend themselves if they are to survive. Camp authorities hardly pay much attention to their plight, such as their health problems. Sometimes they compete with the young for relief items. Invariably they often starve or die, most often broken hearted. They also have to cope with insults and other forms of abuses. In fact, in Sierra Leone, none of the non-governmental organizations (both local and international) operating in refugee and displaced persons' camps during the war were old persons oriented. There were those that catered for child soldiers; there were those responsible for women and girls.
Older persons are vital component of everyday life. Their human rights in society, whether at peaceful times or at war, should not be compromised. After all it was partly due to the wisdom of old age that India's Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela of South Africa were able to beat the odds that may have led to bloody wars in their respective countries.
Unfortunately, unlike Gandhi and Mandela, many old men and women find themselves in the midst of war where they are unduly subjected to neglect, deprivation and even death with the perception sometimes, that they have outlived their usefulness and that whatever evil or tragic event they face does not matter.
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