Africa’s Lost Generation
By: Joyce Maxwell
“The future appears to hold little hope for the
children of central Africa trapped in a world of horror”
I was so struck by a story
last September in a Nairobi local newspaper, Daily Nation, that I
clipped it for my files. To me, it captured the hopelessness of the
AIDS tidal wave facing Africa’s children.
A photograph accompanying the story moved me in particular. The
picture shows a woman named Veronica and her newborn daughter.
Veronica’s baby looks calm and alert, loose curls framing her face.
Her long fingers curl under a chin tucked into a soft, fringed
blanket.
Beyond the blanket, the baby’s world looks much less secure. Her
mother’s dejected hands barely keep her from sliding off her blue
cotton lap. Her mother’s face is lowered, eyes avoiding the camera,
and avoiding her daughter. Her mother’s forehead is concentrated in
a confused frown.
Clearly unhappy about having her photo taken, Veronica seems
resigned to this intrusion only because she doesn’t know how to make
it go away.
According to the newspaper story, the baby was conceived when
Veronica was raped, and infected with HIV, in an AIDS cleansing
ritual in western Kenya. Veronica’s baby, yet unnamed, will be
affected by AIDS her entire life.
Children face a double
threat
AIDS in Africa touches children in two ways -- as a disease that
kills their parents, leaving them orphans, and as a disease that
infects children themselves.
Ten percent of the world’s people live in Africa, but it is home to
90 percent of the world’s HIV-infected children. In sub-Saharan
Africa 470,000 children die every year from AIDS. For more than 90
percent of these children, the deadly virus is transmitted from
their mother.
Of 30 children born to HIV-positive mothers, approximately 10 will
acquire the virus simply by being born. Another four will become
infected from breast-feeding. Most of these children will not live
to see their 5th birthdays.
Extended families
overextended
In Africa, where medical care and drug treatment for HIV/AIDS is
unaffordable for most individuals, families and governments, an
HIV-infected person can expect to live six to 10 years before dying
of AIDS.
More than 5.5 million children in eastern and southern Africa, at
the epicenter of the epidemic, have lost their mothers or both
parents to AIDS.
The existence of orphans is not new. Orphans in Africa are by
tradition absorbed into extended family networks. With the advent of
AIDS, however, the extended family has become overextended.
AIDS has by now orphaned 9 percent of Zambia’s children. In Zimbabwe
7 percent are orphans; in Malawi 6 percent. Eleven percent of
Uganda’s children are AIDS orphans, the highest percentage in the
world.
The numbers continue to grow. In the hardest hit countries the
number of AIDS orphans quadrupled between 1994 and 1997.
AIDS orphans suffer on many levels. They may need to drop out of
school to care for a dying parent or to care and provide for younger
siblings. They are likely to have been exposed to tuberculosis and
other opportunistic infections plaguing an HIV-positive adult.
They may be sent to live with relatives, all too often a grandparent
already catering for grandchildren from three or four families.
An orphan is even more
vulnerable
Orphans are less likely than are other children to be able to go to
school or to have access to adequate health care. They are more
likely to live in poverty and to be malnourished.
They are more likely to engage in hazardous labor, including
commercial sex work that in turn exposes them to greater risk of HIV
infection.
Orphans in some cases have no choice but to form child-headed
households in which older children raise their younger brothers and
sisters. Child-headed households are among the most economically
vulnerable in Africa.
Orphans are more likely to live in communities in which services and
institutions have been weakened by HIV/AIDS and they are more likely
to suffer from psychosocial problems.
Young people already make up the majority of the population in
sub-Saharan Africa. As adults continue to die of AIDS, the children
are left behind in a vacuum deprived of parental guidance--a sea
of youth, disadvantaged, vulnerable, undereducated, without hope and
opportunity.
Will Veronica’s daughter become part of this “lost generation”? She
need only to look at the confused but resigned frown on her mother’s
face to get a glimpse of what the future holds for her.
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