Living in fear: Tanzania's albinos

Living in fear: Tanzania's albinos

news.bbc.co.uk

Once, albinos used to seek shelter from the sun. Now they have gone into hiding simply to survive, after a series of killings linked to witchcraft.

In Tanzania, 25 albinos have been killed in the past year.

The latest victim was a seven-month-old baby. He was mutilated on the orders of a witchdoctor pedalling the belief that potions made from an albino's legs, hair, hands, and blood can make a person rich.

(visit the link for the full news article)

I hope no one hear will speak out in support of this practice. Albinos are very rare, and perhaps that is why they are being targeted. I hope they people doing this are found and stopped. The perhaps the albinos can get back to livening there lives like most other people.

news.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by RedGolem


What debauchery and superstition!
I don't know what else to say!

reply to post by Clearskies


Thanks for posting, and yes I was rather shocked also. But the source article also says this.

He was eating dinner outside in his modest rural compound, when a gang of four strangers burst in, and threatened to arrest him. As his wife Susannah looked on helplessly, the men began to hack at Nyerere's arms and legs with machetes.

"We want your legs," they shouted, "We want your legs," his wife recalls, still deeply traumatised by what she saw.

I would hope someone here with an anthropological background might shed a little light on this particular mythos. Why would anyone be driven to do such a horrifc thing to another person. Surely their belief system (the perpetrators) can't be practicing anything mainstream.

I have never heard of this kind of practice before. Even Santeria which approximates some elements of African-primitivism doesn't extend this kind of violence (or maybe it does, I'm no expert on the subject).

I say re-colonize Africa if this stuff is still happening

Bring on imperialism... the world was a much better place.

I know, that's a sad statement, but I'm starting to believe in my own sarcasm

reply to post by RedGolem


Can anyone really say they are surprised by these events? Raping virgins to cure AIDS? Stoning 'witches' because they cause impotence? Cannibalism of pygmies simply because they exist? FGM? And now hacking off the limbs of Albinos for use in a magic potion. Revulsion is the proper response; not surprise.

Africa is a continent populated by our worst nightmares.

I hope I don't offend anyone with this, but I was quite interested to see what these albinos actually looked like. I've seen my share of mixed race people growing up here in NY, some with quite unique traits. But when I think of albinos, I still had the impression of a very white white person. I was mesmerized by the images of these African albinos. Here is a collage I found...

reply to post by jackinthebox


I went to middle school with a black albino girl. She was very disarming to look at at first, but in no time she was just one with the crowd.

My interpretation of the "Magical Albino" superstition in Africa is that - of course - it's probably based on their almost-complete "otherness" to your average sub-Saharan African (I use this as it's the most geographically-relevant term, and because the "Magical Albino" belief is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa):
You have these mutants that have skin and hair completely alien to their societies majority - very white skin and blonde hair, in contrast to a very dark-skinned and black-haired society.
And, as humans were want to do before the advancement of the sciences, explained it away on purely supernatural terms - the albinos in question were decided to be "witches" or "magical", just as those unfortunate enough to be cursed with joined eyebrows, or particularly hairy palms etc in Europe were declared to be "werewolves".
And unfortunately - despite the best efforts of the European powers in Africa - the belief in such superstitions remained, and even spread after the European powers abandoned Africa to the natives.
Really, this is troubling - but so is most news from Africa, unfortunately.

I thought that true albino’s have no pigment whatsoever, so that their hair is white and eyes are pink due only to the blood flowing through them. These pictures of ‘black albino’s’ seem to be people who simply lack the genes that give dark coloration. They’re no more lacking in pigment than my Irish stepfather.

What barbaric behavior. The Dark Continent indeed.