Our society is made for persons who can use vision and hearing. Much communication and interactions between persons require eye and ear contact. Facial expressions, body language and spoken language are very important. Many of us deafblind people live in surroundings where family members and friends come and go and interact with each other. Unless a sighted and hearing person keeps close contact and tells us what is going on, it is impossible for us to follow. That makes us very isolated.

The good thing for deafblind persons in some parts of Africa is that touching each other and body contact is not unusual or seen as strange. But it is not enough. Daily life skills are also needed. To go to the market, to get water, to cook and to do the laundry properly we need eyes, and the more technology gets involved, the more difficult it becomes without vision.

Of course, eye glasses and hearing aids could make the situation better for many, but few are able to pay for those solutions. The few programmes that provide eye glasses and/or hearing aids after medical diagnosis face problems of maintenance and most hearing aids needing batteries. Also eye glasses need to be controlled, because many of us deafblind persons loose vision during a certain period of time. In many countries in Africa deafblind people have not been identified and provisions in that direction have not been developed yet.
 
A deafblind child is not developing in the ways other children do. Of course, a good thing in Africa is that many mothers carry their babies around during daily work. The baby can follow the movements of the mother and has close body contact, but a child learns a lot by looking and listening to the other family members' imitating and discovering ways of communication. Here a deafblind child is already missing a lot. Not being stimulated from the outside, it does not develop ways of expressing much more than basic needs. The bigger the child becomes, the more it becomes a burden and a shame for the family. It often feels like a curse over the family to have a deafblind family member. The child becomes an adult, and often stays hidden and isolated in the family.

There is, also among professionals, hardly any knowledge about deafblind persons and the development of adequate communication skills and systems. The more deafblind people are identified, often by volunteers, the more reports WFDB gets of youngsters and adults with deafblindness crawling on the floor in a little room naked without contact or communication with the outside world.

Most deafblind children and adults have never gone to school. Even if family members want to place them in a certain school, many teachers think that deafblind people are not able to learn. In some countries, with help from outside and after a long process of training teachers, some special education of deafblind children has started. But it seems difficult to keep the "special" teachers in their jobs. It does not give a higher salary to become a special teacher for deafblind children and the job is very demanding.

There is, however, in every country in Africa a very small group that has had a form of education, often related to institutions for blind or deaf children. They become members of existing organisations of deaf or blind people. It is there the wish to meet each other and to form a group or organisation of deafblind persons starts.
 
Many deafblind persons feel that they are alone with their isolation and barriers. It usually comes as a breakthrough to meet other persons in the same situation. Forming of local groups of deafblind persons where they share experiences and don't feel lonely any more, is empowering. Usually it is easiest for deafblind people to meet in and around big cities. Rural areas are always much later and especially in continents like Africa.

The wish to form a national organization of deafblind persons always starts in big cities, where all the other disability organisations also are. The World Federation of the DeafBlind still has an active role in identifying deafblind persons and building up world wide networks to exchange information. Experiences from other parts of the world help WFDB to be a guide in the long process of development.
 
The desire to have an African Federation of the DeafBlind, AFDB, did not only emerge from nowhere, because there is already a Latin American federation of the DeafBlind and a European deafblind union. African deafblind leaders are aware of the special situation of deafblind people on this continent. It can be very helpful for African deafblind leaders to have a network exchanging experiences with others in more or less the same situation. Such a network functions best when deafblind persons meet face-to-face.

It is more than anywhere else needed to have a strong unified voice of deafblind persons on a continent where deafblindness hardly is recognized as a special disability, where deafblind people still are considered non-persons, where deafblind persons still suffer from poverty and isolation.

African deafblind leaders also want to have a political voice of their own in the African Union, as partners of other continental disability organizations. It is also necessary to use financial and human resources inside Africa to support AFDB and the development of national deafblind organizations. AFDB feels also the need to strengthen the voice of African deafblind persons in the WFDB.
 
With the possible ending of the African Decade in 2009, it seems for WFDB logical to have its next world conference and General Assembly in Africa. Our first option is South Africa, probably not far from Cape Town, where the African Decade secretariat is situated. WFDB's world conference and General Assembly takes place every four years and is the biggest event of the organization. This time the world conference will surely work around the implementation of the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. We hope to get as many representatives from Africa as possible, because WFDB wants to have African deafblind persons put on the world map. We also hope that the founding General Assembly of an AFDB can be connected to this conference. Similar actions in the past have lead to the forming of a Latin American deafblind federation and a European deafblind union, so why not Africa?

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This article was published in Human Rights Africa number 2, 2007.