Caring for people “without” value: movement, reciprocity and respect in Kinshasa’s retirement homes

This chapter aims to bring the retirement home into the conversation about care services in African societies. While there are indeed not that many retirement homes operating on the continent, they nonetheless exist and are part of the urban landscape. The homes de vieillards constitute one category among the various spaces of care available in the city. Hospitals, rehabilitation centres, compounds of tradi-practitioners and nganga (healers and diviners), orphanages, but also places such as churches (see Hoffman, Chapter 9), family houses (see Obrist, Chapter 6 and van Eeuwijk, Chapter 3), associations for the elderly, and informal support groups where care is provided in less formal ways, can all be called “spaces of care”. By focusing on how retirement homes are situated within these various spaces of care and the overall urban environment, and by focusing in particular on how movement in and out of these spaces occurs – i.e. why are elderly people in retirement homes, for instance? – this chapter addresses larger themes such as intergenerational relations in contemporary Africa, urban infrastructure, and public services. An ethnography of urban space, care, and the elderly will unsettle the image of the African city as a space of youth, will hopefully provide a new grid for “the urban experience”, and will contribute to the anthropology of old age/ageing, which has long focused on health problems and intergenerational relations. While for obvious reasons youth have been a privileged category in anthropological analyses of postcolonial African urban lifeworlds, an approach to the city’s “spaces of care”, and in particular an analysis of the social spaces where senior residents are being cared for, brings novel perspectives on urban livelihoods.status: publishe