Autism Spectrum Disorders in Africa

“.......... Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness............ And darkness is not a subject for history” – Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper. This chapter is necessitated so that similar comments to Trevor-Roper’s on African history would be avoided as it relates to autism spectrum disorders in Africa, even though there are limited research works relating to autism spectrum disorders in Africa at present. Since Leo Kanner first reported autism in his classical paper titled, “Autistic disturbances of affective contact” in 1943 (Kanner, 1943), knowledge and research about autism spectrum disorder have been on the increase in Europe and North America. However, the situation in Africa had remained largely obscured until about the last decade. The pioneer works on autism spectrum disorders in Africa had been by Longe and Asuni (Longe & Asuni, 1972) and Lotter (Lotter, 1978; Lotter, 1980) about three decades after the first report of autism spectrum disorder by Kanner in 1943 (Kanner, 1943). Lotter discussed cross-cultural perspectives on childhood autism. Africa, because of its peculiar sociocultural environment may have divergent conception on various aspects of autism spectrum disorder compared to that envisaged in the Western culture (Bakare et al, 2009a). In the same vein, cultural factors have recently been documented to influence characterization, diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorder worldwide (Bernier et al, 2010). It may be important to recall therefore that until about two and half decades ago, autism spectrum disorder was thought to be exclusively an illness peculiar to Western civilization. The existing evidence then suggested that autism occurs mostly in countries with high technological development, high level of industrialization and with salience of nuclear family system. However autism spectrum disorder was also believed to be relatively uncommon even in Western Europe and North America at that time. Nevertheless, the idea that autism may not exist in Africa was further supported by very infrequent report of cases on the continent and other parts of the world outside the West. These observations led Sanua to raise a debate and a pertinent question in 1984 in a paper entitled, “Is infantile autism a universal phenomenon? An open question” (Sanua, 1984).