Loneliness has been a constant feature of Macyleen’s life since she was nine years old and her mother died in their home town in Zimbabwe. She was sent to live with her father, but he worked away from home a lot. His new wife resented his other children and was emotionally abusive.
Macyleen lived with three half-siblings, but they were much older. “We were there to survive and just get to the next day. I knew I was alone,” she recalls.
That feeling has never really left Macyleen, who is now 33, building a childminding business and bringing up four children on her own in Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth), South Africa.
There are many people in Africa experiencing loneliness, like Macyleen. According to a report in June by the World Health Organization, Africa is the loneliest continent on Earth.
Almost a quarter (24%) of people there reported feeling lonely, and adolescents aged 13 to 17 are the worst affected, the WHO says. The next highest rates of loneliness are in the eastern Mediterranean (21%), followed by south-east Asia (18%). Europe has the lowest rate, at about 10%.
The report comes after the WHO declared loneliness a pressing “global public health concern” and launched an international commission on social connection to examine the problem.
Africa is traditionally viewed as having a collectivist culture that prioritises the needs and goals of the group as a whole over individuals. But this is changing.
Dr Cleopa Mailu, a member of the commission and a former Kenyan health minister, says: “My initial reaction [to the findings] was one of rejection.
“I live in Africa and tend to think the society we are today is the one of the 1950s or 60s, and that there’s more loneliness in the western hemisphere. I came to realise that feeling I had was just an internalisation of our past.”
Loneliness is not recognised as a problem in Africa, says Mailu, and people do not want to discuss it. Instead, social wellbeing has been neglected in health policies in favour of focusing on communicable and non-communicable diseases.
Meanwhile, cities on the continent are rapidly expanding; over the next three decades, Africa’s urban population will double, increasing from 700 million to 1.4 billion by 2050.
“We never came alive to the fact that we have been globalising ourselves – living in conditions which are not traditional to the African people,” adds Mailu. “In a way, we rejected the notion that there’s loneliness and isolation in the continent.”
Mailu attributes higher levels of loneliness to a changing society, and growing urbanisation and globalisation, as well as new governance structures, migration, poverty and changing views of wealth and success.
“In traditional settings, wealth was defined differently,” says Mailu. “You just needed to have a cow and a farm or somewhere to cultivate. Everybody was the same level.
“Now there are different levels of poverty,” he says. “There is a lot of pressure and you find people are not together.”
Macyleen can identify with this. She says the Africa she grew up in is very different from the one she lives in today.
People are copying western culture, she says: “It’s all about me or my immediate people. Maybe that’s one of the reasons people are becoming more selfish.”
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Macyleen finds it hard to open up to people, fearing judgment over being a single mother to children with different fathers, all of whom abandoned her. She also has little opportunity to socialise, given that she is trying to build her own business and bring up four children with no financial help.
“I struggle with stress and things are getting hard in South Africa. There’s a lot of xenophobia and I have this heavy feeling that I don’t belong here any more,” she says.
“If something happens, I have to be the mother and the father [to my children]. It gets really lonely, especially because I’m scared of dating. Who can I find to trust?
“The world is changing so fast,” she adds. “And there’s too much pressure to do well, but we are in an environment that is not helping us.”
Lateefat Odunuga, a psychologist and global adviser for the African Network of Youth Policy Experts, agrees that Africa is changing from a continent with many people in close-knit communities to one where that traditional way of life is being erased by urbanisation.
She says loneliness is a pressing issue for young people across the continent. “Young people are frustrated,” she says. “There’s a lot of unemployment, drug abuse, mental health issues. We’re seeing a lot of young people dying [by] suicide.”
The increased cost of living, she adds, means people would rather stay at home than spend money on cultural events, for example.
She blames technology for contributing to the problem. More people are using apps such as TikTok for entertainment and, through her practice in Nigeria, she has heard of individuals turning to ChatGPT to check if they are depressed, instead of talking to a family member, for example.
While loneliness might not be recognised on a widespread basis in Africa, there are organisations dedicated to tackling it, she says. She cites Friendship Bench, an approach first developed in Zimbabwe that trains community health workers to provide basic cognitive behavioural therapy with an emphasis on activity scheduling and group support. The model has been replicated in countries throughout the world.
The WHO report highlighted the AgeWell peer-to-peer support programme in Cape Town. Older volunteers were trained to provide friendship and company to less able older residents in their community through regular home visits. South African participants reported less loneliness, and there was a significant increase in social participation.
“Depending on how committed we are to this work,” says Odunuga, “there might be a future for us to tackle social isolation and loneliness.
“But if we don’t bring people together,” she warns, “we are doomed. We’re going to have a lot of problems beyond mental health. It will be a disaster and a total shame to humanity.”
