What is the focus of your poster?
This model promotes factors to ensure that disabled people are able can carry out economic activities that are gender-specific and locally relevant within the wider cultural-political environment. Understanding each other, respect and acceptance of others will create a more suitable habitat for human kind.
• Use disability as a tool to help African society work for Africans Navigation-The route for getting to the root of it.
• Accessibility is an issue for disabled people as they can’t get to their environments of choice.
• Unveiled- related to mystery and assumptions of disability, draw comparison with Islam.
• Rethink what it means to be African, how Africa relates to itself and positions itself in the world.
• Accommodate our diverse histories and their intersections and see it as social wealth.
• Afribility not Afrobility because AFRO is not African as it refers to First Worldness.
• Critique UCT’s drive to be Afrocentric and Afropolitan- copy the west? First world? An African who identifies with their African and European heritage and mixed culture?
Why is this focus an important issue to consider?
There are many reasons for a focus on promoting an Afrocentric perspective on disability such as intersectionality and positionality . This is because the distribution of money, power and prestige is based on axes of discrimination: social, economic, gender, ethnicity, age, education, disability, language, dialect, sexuality, religion and class.
What is the most important message/conclusion you would like to share with us?
• Recognise that: Identity, power, privilege, positionality is relational
• Understand the views of mental health and wellbeing along the spectrum of: individual, carers, community, country, nation and the world.
• Sensitivity and awareness of wisdom, beliefs and cultures.
• Move away from disability as a negative identity.
• Model is:
–Ageless
– Universal
– Transcultural
– Humanitarian
– Indigenous
– Socially conscious
– Disability confidence
– All humans have universal, existential conflicts
– Fear of being unaccepted- Othering (embodiment)
– Economic freedom as the route to wellbeing advocacy tool
