From Algiers to Libreville, people watched incredulously as Europe's elderly died, often alone, during the heatwave that swept across the continent in August.

In Africa, where temperatures often exceed 40 degrees Centigradedegrees Fahrenheit), people often die young, from AIDS, malaria, war or hunger -- not from too much sun or heat.

Europe's neglect of "the older ones" deeply shocked Africans, who often look up to the elderly as a source of wisdom.

In France alone, 11,400 people died during the heatwave, most of them elderly. The bodies of 57 Parisians whose families never claimed them were buried on Wednesday.

"Africa may not be on course for development, but the West is going nowhere when it comes to fundamental human values and principles such as humanity and solidarity, respect for the elderly and, to put it in a nutshell, a sense of community," wrote Le Quotidien du Senegal in its Monday edition.

The Dakar-based daily went on to say: "In the West, in societies where unbridled individualism has become a supreme value, people can dream of only one thing: staying young at all costs."

The story was headlined: "Africa reveres its elderly, the west abandons them: the price to pay for individualism."

Europe's heatwave provided Africans with the ideal occasion to turn up the heat on Westerners -- often Africa's former colonisers -- to change their egocentric way of life.

Under the headline "Heatwave: the great slaughter", Tunis-Hebdo remarked that "all the dead are elderly people.

"More shocking than their deaths is the way they died, often through lack of care, attention and concern in the houses of the dead where they lived."

Senegal's Quotidien de Dakar agreed: "In Africa, old age is definitely not an attraction, but we revere it.

"The old are a burden for their children, but we only need to remember the burden we once were for them, and we pay them back in kind and drink the wisdom from their lips."

Tunisia routinely experiences temperatures up to 50 degrees C (122 degrees in the shade, without any rise in mortality.

The same holds true for Algeria, a country that has few of the modern conveniences -- like air conditioning -- or high-tech hospitals that can help a country to cope with this type of emergency.

Algerians also struggled under a heatwave in August, but no heat-related death was recorded in the north African country. People there expressed shock that, across the Mediterranean, a rich, well-equipped country like France, the former colonial power, was unable to cope with its own infernal summer.

Other Africans blamed Europe's heatwave deaths on a moral and physical meltdown.

In tiny Equatorial Guinea, people heard about the deaths in former colonial power Spain, where suffocating temperatures caused some 6,000 deaths last month.

Sipping a cool beer in the capital, Malabo, an old man quipped: "Just watch them all on television, those Europeans, most of them will eat too much and too many things, and they end up putting on weight."

The man next to him at the bar chimed in: "All those people died because they were melting down inside. They ended up suffocating."

TERRA.WIRE