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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Ageing and old age in pre-industrial Africa
— elderly persons among 19th-century Xhosa-speaking peoples | | Author(s) | Andreas Sagner |
| Journal title | Southern African Journal of Gerontology, vol 8, no 2, October 1999 |
| Pages | pp 7-17 |
| Keywords | Ageing process ; Histories ; South Africa ; Africa. |
| Annotation | African gerontologists have paid little attention to pre-colonial ageing, except to subscribe to a "timeless" perspective rooted in modernisation theory's "golden age narrative". This paper sketches some dimensions of the ageing experience in a pre-industrial African "nation", the Xhosa-speaking societies in South Africa. It outlines pre-colonial residence patterns, older people's economic status, and issues concerning cultural representations of ageing and old age in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Notwithstanding the intimate association of (male) ageing with accumulation of economic resources, the belief in ancestors functioned as a fundamental instrument by which old-age authority was upheld, apart from its colouring the very notion of Xhosa old age. The religious basis of the ageing experience is examined, and the gendered nature of old-age security is discussed. Although age was different in social and cultural terms - and thus an important aspect of any individual's identity - age alone never defined anyone's economic status or social identity. Gender, kinship, and biographically conditional factors, affected the experience of old age. The notion of old age as an abstract entity is a Western-based construct which reflects an ageist conception. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-000114245 A |
| Classmark | BG: 6A: 7PM: 7J |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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