Historically, disabled people have always been placed at the margins of society. Various texts in the Old Testament insisted for instance that lepers could not be admitted to the world of normals.

In the Old Testament, legal uncleanness, attached to the disabled, who even though permitted to participate in cultic observances, could never become priests who made sacrifices (Lev 21.16-24). On the other hand, Jacob, a founding father of the Jewish nation, was left lame in his wrestling match with an angel (Gen 32.23-33).

However, it is not possible to associate Jacob directly with the social problem of the disabled. His lameness, which comes after his struggle and not before, is the mark of a special status in the eyes of God. It is the New Testament that finally puts paid to the social ostracism of the disabled. Christ insists that the only sign of disability is in the mind.

He shifts the focus from external signs of otherness to an ethical area of mindfulness. Each time, there is a question of deciding between cleanliness and uncleanliness, the New Testament subverts the traditional prohibitions (Mark 7.19ff; Matt 15:11; Acts 10:28 etc). The fact that the New Testament has a more complicated attitude to these issues , and of the place of the disabled in the scheme of social acceptability has not prevented Christians all over the world from harbouring all kinds of negative attitudes towards them. In antiquity also, the Greeks saw disability and disease as punishment from the gods.

Children born with deformities were routinely left on the mountainside to die. For the ancient Egyptians, disability and disease were no longer instances of punishment for sin but the signs of a metaphysical drama. Disability then required interpretation as to what it meant about the status of the cosmic forces. All these serve to show that disability has from time immemorial been used as a sign of the proximity between the world of men and that of the metaphysical or divine world.

In the Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the links between contagious diseases and disability were compounded by being connected to sexual behaviour. Syphilis was the key culprit in this mix.

Since extreme forms of syphilis led to blindness, it did not take long for blindness itself to be read as an unambiguous sign of bad sexual behaviour. There was a particular concern that disabled people did not pass on their deformities to any children they might give birth to. There was concern to monitor the sexual behaviour of the disabled since the children they might give birth to in their turn become burdens on society. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Blind, the Deaf, and the Dumb et Cetera of 1889 worried particularly that disabled offspring might result from sexual intercourse between disabled people, leading to 'one more of the minor streams which ultimately swell the great torrent of pauperism.'

The concerns with a perfect body evident in this and other sources in Europe in the period were ultimately to lead to the horrible practice in Germany during the Third Reich, when disabled people were exterminated along with the Jews and other undesirables. But well before this, in the Middle Ages, the disabled were routinely associated with monsters, criminals, and beggars. The point about all this is that the disabled have historically been associated with anything that happens to lie on the margins of society's imagination, thus taking on the colouring of anything that a given society wishes to repudiate and demonize.

Even though the condition of the disabled in the West is much improved now, it is still the case that social attitudes to the disabled do not match the disabled's access to technological and other resources that make their lives easier. There is still a lot of stigma and confusion that attaches to the disabled.

In Ghana, it is not uncommon to see the disabled, especially the blind and those with mobility impairments, begging at street corners and traffic lights. To be disabled in anyway in a modern African society is a very terrible thing indeed. Families abandon the disabled, they are not sent to school, and even when they do go, the expectation that they will end up badly are very high.

The problem that much of society does not realize is that all of us are in reality temporarily able.

Disability can strike anyone at anytime. It just takes missing a step, being involved in a road accident or being exposed to environmental pollution for one to become disabled.

What is more, growing old is universally acknowledged to carry the risk of disability. The situation in war torn places such as Sierra Leone and Angola should give us all pause for thought. In Sierra Leone, the rebel soldiers used maiming as an instrument of terror, routinely hacking off the limbs of their victims in order to sow fear among the rural population.

The situation in Angola is even more complicated. Cold war politics meant that both the Western and Eastern blocks had a strategic interest in the country. Landmines were generously sown into the land to the extent that, now it is costing more to find and take them out than it cost to place them there in the first place.

More importantly, innocent people lose their limbs and sometimes their lives on a daily basis, leading to the very scary situation of the land itself giving birth to disability.

The effect that this must have on the psyche's of individuals and on the society in general is yet to be fully understood. The point to be made, however, is that able-bodidness is never to be taken for granted. We are all slaves to fate, chance, environment, and desperate men. In other words, the disabled remind us constantly of the degree to which our bodies are dependent on chance and good fortune. We are actually all lucky not to be disabled.

Beyond the need for rehabilitating the disabled and providing them with the means by which they can attain fullest potential, Ghanaian and African society in general must be brought to understand the various meanings of disability. Charity and the odd two hundred cedis at the traffic light are not enough. They are only the means by which we put off the final reckoning when we come to recognize the absolute frailty of our own bodies and find that like all else that is most important in life, we failed to take account of what was being told us on a daily basis on the streets and byways of our lives. We routinely turned away from them then, and may find that the rest of the world will also turn away from us when the terrible moment of our own physical dependency is inescapably and finally upon us.