OLD PEOPLE'S HOME, AFRICAN VALUE SYSTEM AND THE IMPERATIVE OF A CRITCAL SYNERGY

Abstract

The human society generally recognizes the care of the aged as a moral obligation and a social responsibility. The Old People's Home, as a feature of the contemporary human society, is a social institution established primarily to fill this need. This discourse is basically an assessment of this feature of the contemporary human society in the light of African value system that is essentially founded on communalism. While the paper acknowledges that this arrangement has a number of identifiable merits, it observes that the Old People's Home system of caring for the aged hardly squares with the African socio-cultural orientation and the core values of African communalism. The paper contends that the network of social relationship in the African belief system embraces the deities, the unborn, the young, the old, and the even the dead. The social exclusion, which the Old People's Home occasions, therefore, amounts to a severance of the relationship ties between the aged, their families, and their society at large. Hence, the paper recommends possible routes to achieving a synergy between the two value systems.