Mentalacrobatics Person of the Year 2006

Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 9:46 PM

… a word about grandmothers. They have emerged as the heroes of Africa. The physical ravaging of extended families and the desperate poverty of communities means that grandmothers step in when there’s no one else to tread. I wonder if such a situation has ever occurred before in organised society … in the instance of Africa today, these old and unimaginably frail women often look after five or ten or fifteen kids, enduring every conceivable hardship for the sake of their grandchildren, alongside additional numbers of other abandoned waifs who wander the landscape of the continent. The trauma of the grandmothers equals that of the orphans; in fact, every normal rhythm of life is violated as grandmothers bury their own children and then look after their orphan grandchildren … that’s not the end of it. When the grandmothers die, there’s no one coming up behind, and so you have the phenomenon of what we call “child-headed households” or “sibling families”, where the oldest child is the head of the household.

From Race Against Time, 2005 CBC Massey Lectures, by Stephen Lewis

Africans make a big deal of family, of the community, of brotherhood, of sisterhood, of kinship. We believe we are all our brother’s keeper. And rightly so. I sincerely believe that it is through these social structures that Africa’s solutions will be found. The doctrine of individualism, every man for himself, would destroy us faster than any pandemic we face today.

The group of people that symbolise above any other group, this unselfishness, this sacrifice for community, the group that is the rock of African societies up and down the continent, that provides a family home, a sympathetic ear, a lesson in discipline. The group without whom African society today would NOT exist are whom I’ve given the Mentalacrobatics Person of the Year 2006.

The Mentalacrobatics person of the Year: The African Grandmother.

I love you all and I appreciate you all.

Previous Mentalacrobatics Person of the Year:

2005 - Mzee Kimani Nganga Maruge
2004 – Sven Goran Eriksson
2003 - Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

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