Introduction to the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, Special Issue on Aging and Social Change in Africa

Abstract

This special issue of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology is devoted to aging and social change in Africa. The status of older adults in Africa occupies a small but rapidly expanding share of the global aging literature. Several international forums in the past two decades have sharpened both the academic and political focus on global population aging, including Africa—two World Assemblies on Aging in Vienna (1982) and Madrid (2002) and, more recently, the 2002 workshop on aging in Sub-Saharan Africa, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging and the National Research Council (Cohen and Menken 2006), and the 2005 Research on Ageing, Health and Poverty in Africa Conference, hosted by the Oxford Institute on Aging. Unquestionably, the heightened publicity and scholarship about older people in Africa largely results from the unprecedented, continent-wide impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. AIDS has had a devastating effect on the middle generation of millions of African families, leaving older relatives as the primary caregiving and economic resource for sick and dying adults and for orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs). The United Nations Programme on Ageing reports that up to two-thirds of people living with AIDS are cared for by their parents in their 60s and 70s, and up to 60% of orphaned children live in grandparent-headed households in Sub-Saharan Africa (United Nations Programme on Ageing 2007). The lack of preparedness for this unanticipated shift in traditional social and economic structure has left individual elders, villages, and provincial and national governments reeling in an effort to cope. Exacerbating the poverty, poor health, and psychological stress of older persons affected by HIV/AIDS is the absence of national policies on aging in many African countries. In a cultural context where family care has been the main source of support for persons in later life, government-subsidized support is an unfamiliar concept. Although the role of elders in traditional African societies has been a long-established research focus among anthropologists and historians, interest in the topic has grown rapidly among gerontologists in the past two decades. Two gerontologists who have made J Cross Cult Gerontol (2008) 23:107–110 DOI 10.1007/s10823-008-9067-5