As I was considering Josephine Baker adopting a dozen children of different races, ethnicities, and cultures to prove that people of diverse backgrounds can live in peace and harmony with each other, I remember a conversation I had with an East African friend a few years ago regarding the AIDS epidemic that orphaned so many children throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Usually, in healthy, self-contained rural areas children are absorbed into other families. With so many orphaned Black children, did Africans adopt their own?

I learned that folks in that part of the world did not want to take on any orphan’s family karma. The term ‘karma’ is actually not an accurate translation. The African belief is that there’s an interminable and intricate connection between every living soul and their ancestors. The spiritual connection is thought to influence someone’s behavior, thus presenting the possibility of having an ancestral history that has issues. In the western world, the closest “scientific” example is the inter-marriage among the “Pennsylvania Dutch” families; one study has shown how this has perpetuated a form of dementia and mental turpitude amongst part of a group descended from a particular line. (You can read about this in Wikipedia, or a TIME Magazine article titled Medicine: Inbreeding & Dwarfism.)

It is not quite the same thing, but there may well be a genetic element involved. In most African communities, the mental illness aspect is never explained as a mere physiological disorder but is considered as something brought upon an individual by the spirit world. Thus, the risk of bringing in someone with a possibly “hidden” potential for mental illness is a great concern.

Orphaned children who have close relatives are, however, adopted into their relatives’ families. And indeed, there have always been accepted ways of caring for orphaned children in Sub-Saharan societies. For instance,

–  a family who wants children but for some reason can’t have any, can request that a relative who is blessed with many kids to “donate” a child to them;

–  a well heeled relative may invite the child of an indigent relative to become their “ward” with the intention of offering better opportunities to the child than his/her own parents could ever afford;

–  another custom is “inheritance” and succession, which involves taking over the wife and children of a deceased relative, usually a brother.

It’s beyond painful to see how the AIDS epidemic has demoralized Africa’s society on every social, cultural, economic, political and above all moral level. In the end, fortunately, the African term Hillary Clinton appropriated in the 90′s “It takes a village to raise a child,” is still at the core of Sub-Saharan family values.