Loss of respect is, perhaps, the greatest humiliation that comes with old age.
?When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn?t go, and doesn?t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we?ve no money for butter ??
? Warning by Jenny Joseph
It?s not the need for an outing or fresh air that makes Jenny Domingo* (74) rise at dawn and take to the streets these days. Or walk around in the heat for hours with a flimsy umbrella until it starts to get dark.
It?s fear for her life.
?Ag, elke dag moet ek op die pad is, wanneer gaan dit aan die einde kom [Every day now I am on the road like this, when will it come to an end]?? she asks, shaking her head.
Two weeks ago she had to flee her Coronationville, Johannesburg, flat in the dead of night and run nearly six blocks to the house of a friend in neighbouring Westbury for help. Her middle-aged son, Lessie*, had broken the terms of a protection order issued against him by the courts, preventing him from harassing, intimidating or threatening his mother. Again.
In the order, obtained in February this year, Domingo wrote of Lessie, a well-known teetotaller and by-hearter of the Bible:
?My son has been abusing me for a very long time now and few occasions I had to call the police to assist me when he started to verbally abuse me. Every day he swears at me of being a whore and a bitch. He says I fuck with the pastors at the Church, he is accusing me of a compulsive liar (sic). He calls me a stupid and says that I am an illiterate witch.?
Domingo also said her son repeatedly threatened to hit her, tells her to leave the house and go sleep with the dogs outside.
?He said to me he wish I can die because he hates me.?
She begged the court: ?I cannot tolerate it any more because I am no longer healthy and young to protect myself. I need the court to allow my son to treat me with respect and dignity and not push me around like a dirty rag, because I need my freedom and peace as a senior citizen.?
For some reason that?s not clear, her son is still allowed to threaten her. Though the police did come and arrest him, he was soon released. Because, they said, the order ?was no longer valid?, Domingo needed to apply for ?a new one?.
?By the way,? she was asked when she reported the matter at the local police station, ?what did you do this time, didn?t you annoy him or something??
By 4pm the old lady in the white scarf is tired and hot, but is adamant that ?to avoid trouble? she will only go home when her son is asleep.
The woman Domingo ran to for help, Sophie Boyers, says it has become like a drill for her and her two daughters. A pebble being thrown on to the roof of her house means another terrified person is looking for her help. Although Boyers operates from a modest room in Westbury?s Dorcas Centre, hers is no nine-to-five task. The Easter holidays have come and gone, but she knew that no matter how many ?closed? signs she put on her door, she wouldn?t be going anywhere.
Boyers and her colleague, Yvette Jansen, are the knights in shining armour of Westbury?s down-and-outs, poor, helpless, hopeless and frightened. For long hours and with no pay the two women are the self-taught secretaries, counsellors, shoulders-to-lean-on, mediators, administrators and if necessary, bulldozers.
Everybody around knows if you want to get a job done, like following up on a complaint laid at a police station, the two women are the best to get it done.
Two years ago they started the Women of Vision project. Though initially not short of volunteers, these slowed to a trickle, leaving only Boyers and Jansen to do the work. Every day their office sees queues of people wanting advice on child maintenance, disability, pension and other grants. And, sadly, protection orders taken out by elderly people against their own children.
In January this year Lizzie Melk*, a Westbury pensioner in her late 70s, obtained a protection order against her adopted son, Des*, to prevent him from intimidating her. In her court papers, she wrote: ?I have rear (sic) this child since seven months old and I struggle to give him everything of the best because I had my own biological children of five.?
She said her son repeatedly brought his friends into her yard to smoke dagga and mandrax, and that when she complained he told her he would ?moer? (beat) her, told her to ?fuck off?, and called her a bitch.
Melk, who suffers from high blood pressure and diabetes, concluded: ?I need the court to act on my behalf because I gave this child a home and now that he has grown into a man now he forget (sic) I struggle to make ends meet for him to survive ? he has lost his respect for me and he has stripped me of my self-esteem and dignity.?
Another of Boyers?s clients, a 62-year-old Bosmont woman who also got an interim protection order against her son, wrote: ?I need the court to act on my behalf because I fear that my son will just snap and kill me because when he is so aggressive, I just see hate in his eyes.? It ends with a heart-rending plea: ?I need to get my dignity back; I am his mother and I need him to treat me like a mother and human being.?
Despite this, old people at the receiving end of ugly words are often better off. One afternoon in 1999 Boyers was walking home from work when she noticed a group of children huddled around the window of a neighbour?s house, whispering and giggling. When she reprimanded them and asked what they were doing, one told her, ?The man is doing funny things with his mother.?
Boyers looked in the window and saw the neighbour, a 40-year-old man, raping his 79-year-old mother at knifepoint. She called the police and the man was arrested, but for Boyers what was the most disturbing part was that the other neighbours said they had known about it for more than 12 years, but had kept silent because they ?didn?t want to be involved?.
Silence is a common problem in the case of elder abuse. Not only by those who witness it, or those who perpetrate it, but the old people themselves, who do not know they have recourse.
Boyers says that of those who come to her office every day, three out of 10 do not even know they can get help, like protection orders. ?I tell them here is the law ? the law is here to protect you,? she says.
But some elderly people, despite abuse of the worst kind at the hands of their children, are afraid to press charges. Not out of fear for their own safety, but for the very children who abuse them.
?They are always concerned about what will happen to their children if sent to jail,? Boyers says.
By the year 2050 the number of people aged 60 and over is expected to reach the two billion mark ? making it the first time in history when older people will outnumber those below the age of 14. Eleven percent of this growth will occur in Africa.
Traditionally, in Africa older people make significant contributions to their families, communities and society as a whole. Many continue to work, helping support families. But now old people face more challenges than ever. Family structures are fundamentally changing. Poverty is on the increase. Few old people have any income security. Few health services catering for old people exist, with escalating medical costs leaving many without both basic and life-saving medication. Then there is the impact of HIV/Aids ? leaving old people, who need care themselves, as caregivers.
Selinah Motau?s* face, without any sign of a wrinkle despite its 72 years, contorts into an expression of disbelief when asked why she doesn?t put her three grandchildren into foster care.
?Somebody else! Heavens ? what would the community say?? she gasps. The Mamelodi granny, who attributes her youthful looks and sprightliness to her unswerving belief in the Almighty, has raised her three grandchildren, Unathi* (12), Nomfundo* (11) and Sizwe* (6), in her home from birth. Pulling out a big brown envelope, she proudly shows off their birth certificates to visitors. But times are getting harder, and her R570 pension no longer stretches as far as it used to ? after the rent, telephone bill and burial society have been paid. Now she has school fees to pay ? R100 a child. Then there is food to put on the table for three hungry mouths. At the end of the month she has nothing ? except her pride and her good humour.
Earlier in the day one of her grandchildren asked her for bread, whereupon she sent him, with four cents, to the nearby spaza to see if he could get a few slices. He was sent back with a sarcastic reminder that bread did not cost that much. She relates how visitors came to her home later that day and she offered them a cup of tea, only to mutter to herself: ?How can you offer tea when you didn?t even have bread this morning??
Motau?s cheerful pink-painted house, where a picture of President Thabo Mbeki and a bishop?s staff from the Emmanuel Baptist Church stand cheek by jowl in a corner, has always known the ring of children?s laughter. But things were easier when there was another income. ?I used to do some sewing, and other things, to make a bit of money, but now my eyesight isn?t what it used to be,? says Motau. Then there was the little, but handy, income from her daughter Christina?s jobs, which helped to make ends meet. But her daughter, the children?s mother, then in her early 30s, died in June last year of Aids. For a moment Moutau?s calm composure breaks when talking about her child. ?Ag, my kind, my baby ?? she says softly.
Motau nursed her daughter after her discharge from the hospital until she died, never knowing fully what was wrong. Something, says Rita Mabusela, a volunteer social worker with the Pretoria-based Tateni Home Based Care, is a common problem.
Despite the high-profile nature of HIV and its publicity in the media, older people are not given proper information on the disease and, in many cases, nurse family members until death not even knowing what the cause of the illness is. Mabusela, whose organisation conducts home visits to families affected by HIV/Aids and trains communities in how to care for people dying from Aids, says she often comes across cases where the old parents of people who have died from Aids-related complications are not even told by hospital authorities what their loved one has died from. When the death is sudden, an older person is left caring for orphans on a meager pension, and without any help.
Tateni, like other home-based care organisations, assists such families with food parcels, and according to Mabusela, such families are on the increase. Boyers concurs. ?With every second person dying of Aids, more often than not we get the granny turning up on our door asking how she can get help.?
But grandparents are not automatically entitled to a child-support or foster-care grant in return for caring for their grandchildren without any other means of support. Like other potential foster parents they are subject to screening, an assessment and report by a social worker and a determination made by the courts and the commissioner for child welfare, before they are eligible for the grant. Motau is one of undoubtedly thousands of grandparents in a paper queue. A corner of Boyers?s office is stacked with a wad of files containing child-grant applications, many of them by grandparents who can no longer shoulder the financial burden alone. Boyers says it has been a year since a social worker came to Westbury to assess the cases. She has also been told of old people who go to the Department of Social Development to apply for grants personally, only to be told by officials: ?Between you and me, forget it, you are too old to take those children.?
Mabusela says the process of subjecting biological grandparents to screening is ridiculous, more so because it is a time-consuming process during which hardship is exacerbated. ?It is unethical to remove an orphan child from the environment he or she is used to, and the best people to care for them are their own people ? so why not hasten this process?? she asks.
Against the backdrop of what Help Age International, an NGO lobbying for the rights of the elderly, has called an ?age quake? on the continent, on April 8 the United Nations convened the Second World Assembly on Ageing in Madrid, Spain. A regional committee comprising the Commission on Gender Equality (GCE), Help Age International, Age in Action and a number of NGOs working for the rights of older people, took Africa?s case to the meeting.
There are problems facing old people in South Africa and other developing countries that simply don?t occur on the same scale in other countries. Like what happened to Yoliswa Mbete* ? who still cannot recall what occured that day three years ago without tears welling in her eyes. Her grandmother, in the early stages of Alzheimer?s disease ? a debilitating illness, one of whose effects is memory loss ? had wandered into the house of a neighbour in their Soweto street where, insisting the house was hers, she refused to budge.
The three people in the house, not aware of the woman?s condition, beat her and shoved her out of the house. Mbete?s grandmother died a week later. Her granddaughter is sure it was a blow to the head during the beating that killed her beloved grandmother.
The neighbours still talk of what happened in hushed tones: the old woman was accused of being a witch. Which is another particularly African problem facing aged people.
The CGE, which has done extensive work and research on the subject of witchcraft violence, has found that in the majority of cases, the victims have been those most vulnerable in society ? old men and women.
?Those accused of witchcraft have been faced with death, injury or exclusion from their communities.? In 1995 a special tribunal, the Ralushai Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders in the Northern Province, found that, traditionally, women were mostly accused of practicing witchcraft, despite the fact that males were also victims of witchcraft burnings or purges. Police statistics collated for the period confirmed this ? 97 females and 46 males were killed as a result of witchcraft accusations. In September 1998 a special conference on the subject was convened.
Elderly people living alone or without children, it seems, are particularly vulnerable to abuse and to accusations of witchcraft. A section in a series of reports published last year by the Department of Social Development on the abuse and neglect of the elderly reported on the case of a old woman from Piet Retief who was accused by neighbours of killing a family member through witchcraft, and victimised to such an extent that she had to flee her home.
But sometimes the fear of being accused is enough. Another old woman who lived alone had her house broken into and all her belongings stolen. She was warned that if she did not keep quiet, she would die.
The reports, entitled Mothers and Fathers of the Nation: The forgotten People?, received scant publicity. They summarised the results of public hearings held countrywide, which invited the elderly to ?speak out? against the problems they faced.
Not surprisingly, financial hardship was high on the list. Some of the ?community issues? reported were: ?Four pensioners reported that their children were taking their pensions and chasing them out of their homes.? And ?a pensioner gave his house to his daughter before he died. Now his widow is denied food and her pension is taken from her. She is seeking her own house.? In another place, the report says: ?cases were reported of beatings, theft of money, rape and evictions and of elderly people being forced to sleep in outside toilets?.
Other elderly people reported abuse at the hands of municipal authorities, who charged exorbitant rates for rent and water. In other instances conditions in old-age homes were brought under the spotlight. At one home on the East Rand in Gauteng, 14 elderly people were being housed in containers. The caregivers, all volunteers, reportedly took half of the residents? pensions every month, reluctantly handing over the rest to a funeral scheme. Every pension day the residents were transported to pay-points in wheelbarrows and a wheelchair.
The CGE, together with other NGOs, has been at the forefront of pressing for the government to get involved in the Madrid conference. In the months leading up to the conference the CGE held press briefings and meetings with government officials, and sent information packs on the conference to each MP.
The government initially decided to send a delegation, but just weeks prior to the conference no action had been taken. According to lobby groups this was worrying ? because there are ?demographic, economic and human rights arguments for integrating ageing issues in Africa?s development agenda?.
Their work has eventually paid off ? the Department of Social Development recently announced that a delegation would be attending the conference. It included Minister of Social Development Zola Skweyiya, the Director General in the department, Angela Bester, and a number of provincial MECs.
?We?re very pleased the lobbying has been successful,? says Dr Sheila Meintjes, a CGE commissioner, adding that the presence of the South Africans would go a long way towards putting the plight of Africa?s aged on the agenda.
?The real struggle, of course, is to make sure the issues of the Third World don?t get overlooked by the dominance of the G8 countries,? says Meintjes. She says South Africa would also have the benefit of hindsight from the conference, in implementing its own social security reform.
Meintjes says taking the process of social-security reform further will be largely dependent on what the delegation brings back from the conference; a report-back meeting will be held with the delegation and lobby groups like the CGE once the conference is over.
But unless the likes of the recommendations in the departmental reports about improving the plight of the elderly, in the form of jargon such as ?improving service delivery?, are matched by action the government will stand accused of not doing enough. By the time this is read, the Madrid conference will have come and gone. The problems facing old people in Africa and South Africa may or may not have been given a voice, amid the plethora of plenaries, caucuses and debates.
A greater African participation in the world assembly, lobbyists say, means all the more because, despite the hardships they endure, the sense of responsibility old people continue to assume for those in their care, indicates that though times may change ? the spirit of ubuntu has not.
Describing old people in Africa in one of its brochures, Help Age International says: ?They [old people] are the guardians of African social values and play a key role in maintaining culture and tradition. Yet, these roles are generally unrecognised and older people?s potential is undervalued.? Motau says she would rather die than part with her grandchildren, no matter how hard times become.
?They were born in this house, they are my children,? she says.
* Names have been changed