An African community's attitude towards modern, western adoption

M.A.South Africa has thousands of destitute children without families to care for them. The bulk of such children are, at this time, born to impoverished and destitute African women. Many such children have been abandoned. In the years to come we must in addition expect a huge influx of children whose parents have died from or become incapacitated by Aids. These children will also need families to care for them. Adoption is an effective way of creating permanent homes for these children. However, there is currently a dearth of prospective African adopters in the Gauteng Province. Numerous assumptions have been put forward to explain this problemsituation. Some people think that it may be related to traditional norms of the African culture which emphasize the importance of blood ties when it comes to family building. In traditional African culture it was inconceivable that blood ties could be extinguished, or that someone totally strange, let alone someone from a different clan, could parent your child. The majority of modern, western adoptions, involve the legal adoption of children who are not related in any way to the people adopting them. An adoption order vests the parental rights and duties in the adopters and is irrevocable. The adoption order extinguishes natural parental rights with respect to any other person vis-a'-vis the child. Mother cause for concern, is the fact that when African adopters legally adopt children, the majority tend to very secretative about the whole affair. They usually do not acknowledge the adopted child's biological origins because they wish to protect the child and themselves from a negative response by the general community. It is important to tell children they are adopted because children have a right to the truth about themselves. Enduring relationships are built on honesty, not deception. When there has been secrecy in a family about adoption, everyone suffers. The community has a responsibility to provide support and resources to families formed by adoption. Recognizing that support from the community for an adoption service will not be forthcoming unless the community is positively oriented towards such a service, this study seeks to explore and describe the contemporary attitudes of an African community towards the concept of modern, western adoption. The Soweto community is the largest African community in South African. In order to explore the attitudes of people in this community towards the concept of modern, western adoption, a descriptive survey has been conducted. A sample of 163 people was drawn from the Vista University and the Soweto Home for the Aged. A selfadministered questionnaire was used as the method for data collection. Although generalizations to the greater African population cannot be made because a non-probability sampling method was used in this study, findings indicate that the majority of community members in Soweto probably have a positive attitude towards the concept of modern, western adoption. It is hoped that this attitude will have a directive influence on their future behaviour. There must thus be an ongoing effort to expand adoption opportunities for African children in need of permanent homes and members of the community must be directly involved in these efforts