No one is likely to adopt Hermina. At 14 she is too old and she also has a younger brother. So, because their father disappeared some years ago and their mother died last year at 32, probably of HIV/Aids, the pair rely on the generosity of others. They live in their mother’s tiny corrugated iron and wood home in Soweto but the family next door has taken them under their wing, making sure they get to school. A welfare association ensures they get a square meal every day.
”It is strange not to have a mother,” said Hermina. ”Children need their mothers to help them and when you do not have one any more you cannot be sure there will be someone to help you.”
While Madonna’s controversial adoption of a 13-month-old boy from a Malawi children’s home has focused attention on Africa’s orphans, Hermina’s plight is more typical of that of millions of children across sub-Saharan Africa orphaned by HIV/Aids, malaria or conflicts.
Adoptions by foreigners are welcomed by many Africans working with distressed children, despite concerns about plucking youngsters from their own culture. But Madonna’s choice of David Banda emphasises the fact that foreigners almost always want to adopt babies, overlooking the older children who account for a large proportion of the orphans, and that for every child taken overseas, hundreds of thousands remain in institutions or grapple to survive on their own.
The United Nations estimates that more than 48-million children in sub-Saharan Africa can be counted as orphans. In countries such as Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola, this situation is primarily linked to conflicts. But it is HIV/Aids that has driven the shocking rise in orphans in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa.
According to the UN, between 1990 and 2010 the numbers orphaned by HIV/Aids in sub-Saharan Africa will have risen from less than a million to more than 15-million; it estimates that one in five children in a handful of Southern African states will be orphaned by HIV/Aids by 2010.
Many of these children will be taken in by the extended family but others will struggle to survive on their own with older children forced to take charge, often abandoning school for work and sometimes selling sex to survive.
Only a minority will find a place in one of the children’s homes in Africa that are now overflowing. Even fewer will find a new family. South Africa is grappling with an estimated 1,1-million Aids orphans, a number expected to double by the end of the decade.
”There are children sitting all over this country in children’s homes and institutions that are adoptable,” said Sue Kravitz, a Johannesburg social worker specialising in adoptions. ”The numbers have surged in the past couple of years and there are definitely more children we need to place, and it’s related to the Aids crisis. There are a lot of mothers, sometimes fathers, who come forward [needing] help. They want to make sure their baby has a home when they die. But the system doesn’t work for those children and they end up sitting there for years. Children get lost in the system. In South Africa, social workers are unbelievably overburdened.”
In the face of such a crisis, almost anyone willing to adopt is welcomed. African countries say they favour local families where possible, and South Africa prefers to place children with their own race. But almost everyone involved sees that the gap between the numbers of children and the families willing to take them in requires compromise.
Many of the few hundred families a year who adopt in Kenya and South Africa come from Scandinavia, Denmark or Germany. ”The attitude of the people who are coming here is very open and they work very hard at keeping the links open to South Africa. But in reality the children go back to Denmark or wherever and they become Danish,” said Kravitz. ”Is it ideal? No. But a child needs to be in a family, which is far better than growing up in an institution. We are in a crisis and there are a lot of children who need homes and that is the real issue.”
Critics of Madonna question why the baby she wants to adopt, David, is being taken from a place where he had regular contact with his father, Yohanne, who placed him in the institution for fear he could not afford to look after him.
Irene Mureithi, head of the Child Welfare Society of Kenya, the largest such group in a country with 600 000 Aids orphans, said: ”Why not give support to the father instead? I’m in favour of foreign adoptions because we need all the families we can get, but here’s a father who says we don’t have the resources to bring up this child. He’s not saying he doesn’t want this child … [David] will realise later in life he was taken away just because he was poor.
She added: ”Is adoption the only solution for African children? There are other things that can be done so African children can grow in African communities. Children get confused. They ask why they are black in a white family: Why am I here? What happened?”
It is a view echoed by some aid agencies. ActionAid says that while Madonna may make a difference to one child ”there are better ways to help”. The priority should be to keep parents alive by providing anti-Aids drugs; the charity favours child sponsorship by people in wealthier countries.
Gail Johnson, who runs a care centre in Johannesburg for mothers with HIV, said: ”Everyone is just trying to feed these kids. People talk about the rights of the child, doesn’t the child have the right to three meals a day? We have children going to bed hungry, we have children not being held. There is neglect, unintentional neglect, because of destitution. If someone from abroad wants to adopt, it’s great — but it doesn’t solve our situation.” – Guardian Unlimited Â