CULTURE-SWAZILAND: Traditional Leaders To The Rescue

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MBABANE, Apr 4 2000 (IPS) - Swaziland’s orphans, whose parents have succumbed to AIDS, are having their plight addressed by an innovative programme based on the tiny kingdom’s greatest asset – its close-knit traditional society.

OrphanAid was launched this year by activist members of the clergy and health workers in towns. However the programme depends on the cooperation of Swaziland’s 200 chiefs.

These traditional community heads will help identify orphans in their areas, and formally turn them over to caregivers approved and financially assisted by OrphanAid.

Though some of Swaziland’s palace-appointed chiefs are illiterate, and most preside over rural communities where health clinics, decent schools and in some instances electricity are unknown, their response to this new effort to combat the devastation wrought by AIDS has been positive.

“The chiefs know their subjects and what is going on in their areas better than anyone,” says Prince Mguciso, one of King Mswati III’s royal councilors.

“They have seen the toll AIDS has taken on families, and the rising number of orphans the disease is leaving.”

OrphanAid seeks to locate orphans wherever they may be through field agents designated by chiefs from the community. The concept originated with Father Larry McDonnell, a Catholic priest who has been in Swaziland since 1963.

Already respected in Swaziland for his years heading the largest boys’ high school in Manzini, the kingdom’s second most populous city, McDonnell was disturbed at the way AIDS orphans gravitate to the urban area, and turn to begging for sustenance.

McDonnell ran an orphanage in the pre-AIDS 1970s, and though the facility has been taken over by government, it is inadequate to handle a rising tide of homeless children without parents.

Last month, McDonnell opened Hope House, Manzini’s first AIDS hospice where family members reside with stricken relatives in new bungalows on a green hill beside a clinic, where a nursing staff is on 24-hour call.

Budgetary constraints limited the project’s original vision to become a replication of a traditional Swazi homestead, where residents actively participate in life around them.

“We still hope to see patients growing crops, tending gardens, practicing handicrafts and rearing animals,” says McDonnell. But for now the Hope House complex, while pleasant and not a warehouse for the ill, might be located in any small African city.

OrphanAid is typically Swazi, and depends on the indigenous social structure to work. Once a field agent appointed by a chief locates an orphaned child, the chief consults with representatives from OrphanAid and the Department of Social Welfare under the Ministry of Health to place the child with a suitable caregiver.

“We want to find a caregiver in the child’s area, to avoid the traumatic disruption when children are torn from the life they have known,” says Father McDonnell.

“This will also cut back on urban migration that has turned orphans into homeless street children and beggars.”

The Manzini-based Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse reports that some of the city’s new population of homeless street children have become victims of sexual abuse.

Street children were unknown in Manzini and the capital Mbabane ten years ago, before AIDS struck Swaziland to infect at least a fifth of the population.

“The tragedy of AIDS orphans is that it is a social as well as medical problem,” says social worker Gugu Made. “It is a cultural problem as well.

The traditional Swazi family structure, where many generations lived together on a homestead, has fragmented.

When parents in the prime of life die, other relatives may be overburdened, and grandparents physically unable, to look after children. Chiefs seem to know where alternative caregivers can be found.”

Last year, the United Nations Childrens Fund, UNICEF, released a controversial report about AIDS in Swaziland that pegged the number of AIDS orphans at 105 000.

The Minister of Health, Dr. Phetsile Dlamini, objected to this figure as a distortion. “The number represents about 15 percent of the entire population, which is an exaggeration.”

With no reliable figures to go by, AIDS workers have resorted to going by anecdotal evidence, and counting the heads of street children.

OrphanAid will provide a true figure as orphans are located and coupled with caregivers.

Assisting with the programme is a group of volunteers, mostly teachers, assembled by Father McDonnell along with the organisation Hospice at Home, whose patron is Queen LaMbikisa, and the local branch of the Salvation Army.

The climactic moment arrives when the orphaned child and his or her new caregiver are united at a formal “ceremony of declaration” held at the chief’s residence.

“The chief tells all the people of the community that this child is now with this adult,” says Prince Mguciso.

“It is not a legal adoption, but as far as the community is concerned, it is just as binding.”

Father McDonnell says OrphanAid does not distinguish between children whose parents died of AIDS and children who have lost their parents other ways. People are buried in rural and urban areas without the cause of death known or publicised, and the subject of AIDS is largely taboo, frustrating health workers’ efforts to promote AIDS awareness.

Even people who know they have AIDS will not admit their condition because relatives may avoid their funerals out of an unwarranted fear of contagion.

But with OrphanAid, a reversion to the time when Swazis looked after their own, the children left behind are no longer in danger of abandonment.