10 Facts Tragic In Africa About Albino Hunting

African folklore holds that persons of albino skin are not actually human. Many people think they are ghosts or demons. Additionally, they think albinos possess magical healing abilities and are immortal. Witch doctors continue to use dark magic in several nations, but Tanzania and Malawi are where albinos are most frequently persecuted.

10 Tragic Facts About Albino Hunting In Africa

Due to the fact that albino body parts may be employed in rituals to invoke luck and success, customers are prepared to pay exorbitant rates for them. Being an albino is, to put it mildly, horrifying. These 10 horrific tales of persecution and desecration are so unreal.

Racism and Misunderstanding

Albinos have been the target of discrimination for hundreds of years, but up until very recently, nothing had been done to put an end to it. A Chicago-based scholar called Charles Staniland Wake was exploring Africa in 1892. Memories of the International Congress of Anthropological, a book he wrote after researching numerous tribal cultures. He was stunned to encounter an albino man while out hunting. He acknowledged that it was unsettling for him to be the only other white person he had seen in a year. Because albinos are typically slaughtered when they are infants, the local villagers said that they think of them as evil spirits and that it is unusual to witness an adult albino.

Charles came to the conclusion that, despite being told about the superstitions, the killing of albino kids was actually done to maintain the village's darker skin tone. For many years, the general public was unaware of how human recessive genes function. According to Charles Wake, Africans must come in a variety of tones, from extremely dark to immaculate white. "White may never turn to black," he adds, "but black can transform to white." The race's dark of humanity appears to be becoming extinct for good.[1]

Body Parts for Profit

The girl named Kabula an albino was heading home from school in Tanzania. While driving, a man noticed her and discovered where she lived. Three males visited Kabula's home a few days later. Her arm was severed, put in a plastic bag, and they fled.

Kabula is not by itself. The same fate has befallen hundreds of albinos in Tanzania,[2] and they are currently waiting for prostheses supplied by foreign nonprofit groups.

Selling albino body parts to witch doctors may turn someone rich, which makes it hard to understand how anybody could be so cruel to a youngster. In Tanzania, the annual average salary is barely around $400. A full corpse may sell for up to $75,000, while body parts are sold separately for about $2,000 a piece. It is simple to understand why individuals might be prepared to do it without regret in a society where the majority of people live in abject poverty and superstition informs them that albinos aren't even human.

Exhumed Bodies

Stephane Ebongue, an albino, experienced prejudice when he was a youngster in Cameroon. When he was an adult, he attended college and worked as a journalist in Italy. He went back to Africa in 2016 and made the decision to challenge a witch doctor alongside other BBC reporters. [3]

The witch doctor didn't treat Ebongue like a person; instead, she gave him the look of a lion about to pounce on its victim. During the interview, he coerced Ebongue into holding several magical wooden sticks. The witch doctor incessantly emphasized Ebongue's financial value. When an albino passes away, he often exhumes buried remains, he said, since they are so precious.

Since the witch doctor readily acknowledged all of his misdeeds, Ebongue attempted to inquire about the witch doctor's feelings of regret for the deaths of others and whether he was ever scared of being charged with murder. The man said that because of his wealth, he can pay the cops to leave anytime they come to see him.

Camps and Special Schools

Many albino youngsters never leave their homes since it is too risky for them to attend ordinary schools. Those who want to pursue an education board at specialized institutions. They can frequently go to summer camps, at the very most, to socialize with other albinos. However, many parents leave their kids at boarding schools and never return. [4] There is an antiquated belief that the family will be cursed if they have an albino kid. Without murdering them, parents are willing to give them up.

 Only when the government declared it needed to intervene to stop the killing of so many albinos were these camps established. The grounds are guarded by security, and massive gates are sealed every night. Albino children are therefore protected from harm, but this also effectively separates them from society and does little to further their acceptance as individuals. Teenagers are forced to learn how to survive in a society that despises them since they are too old to remain in school once they reach that age.

Destined for Poverty

Albinos are despised by society and unable to obtain employment because of the widespread superstition surrounding them. Many albinos adult are compelled to rely on their families for financial support. A 50-year-old albino guy called Said was assaulted and had his hand amputated in the documentary Fear & Loathing: Albino African Survival in Tanzania, which was made by RT. He was given permission by his sister to "live" with her, but she simply let him use a mosquito net to outside sleep of her house.

Education has historically served as a path out of poverty in many countries. Albinos have trouble getting a good education since they are born with weak eyesight. Many instructors believe that all albino youngsters are unintelligent, including the Red Cross. They are unable to see the blackboard, though. As many albino children are practically blind, one of several activities the Red Cross is doing to assist them is making sure they know how to learn braille. For reading assistance, they also include magnifying glasses and eyeglasses.[5]

AIDS and Skin Cancer

Albinos are more prone to getting skin cancer. Their lack of melanin production leaves their skin without color and without any built-in UV protection. Albinos need always wear helmets and reapply sunblock all day long.

African albinos usually develop skin cancers on their necks and faces, according to research conducted by the Organization European for Research on Treatment of Education Cancer Branch in Sweden, Stockholm. These tumors can become enormous without receiving appropriate medical care, which frequently results in early death. That study found that African albinos often do not live past the age of 30.

To complicate things worse, due to the albinos' "magic abilities," a notion that an AIDS-stricken man will be healed if he had intercourse with an albino circulated.[6] This has resulted in the abduction and rape of young females. As a result, they also develop AIDS.

The Albino Island

Many albinos choose to form their own village on the tiny Ukerewe Island in the pacific of Tanzania since they are frequently shunned by society. There are about 70 albinos living there as of 2014.[7]

Some of them seem to be fortunate enough to come from families without superstitions, allowing them to coexist peacefully.

Albinos' safety is not guaranteed by their residence on Ukerewe, though. An albino guy called Alfred Kapole was attacked in Ukerewe, which is three hours distant from the greater Mwanza City. His parents raised him on the island because they wanted to provide him a better life. Kapole understood that albinos would never be secure as long as people on the outside continued to think they were magical.

Kapole established the Albinism Tanzania Society after relocating to Mwanza City. "We do not melt in the sun," he has scrawled on the building's wall. We don't just vanish. We experience life and death like everyone else. He has committed his life to lecture in an effort to raise awareness of albinism among the adjacent communities. He also uses radio and television to promote the word.

Political Motivations

One would ask how such a terrible practice could still exist in the present day when there ought to be a large number of educated officials in the government. Tanzanian investigative journalist Erick Kabendera found a sharp rise in albino murders during the election presidential season. It is commonly known that many African politicians still use magic and would buy witch doctors for remedies that will ensure a win.

Only one people who can afford to purchase to pay the exorbitant price to buy the body parts are politicians. Politicians have responded that they don't agree with this viewpoint, stating that they think fishermen are the ones paying for the spells.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that politicians would not take action to try to save albinos if they were really the ones calling for their execution. It was necessary to involve Human Rights Watch and the United Nations. Tanzania's President in 2015, Jakaya Kikwete, deemed this behavior repugnant and embarrassing for the country. No other president Tanzanian has ever been ready to cooperate with the arrest of witch doctors before him.

Villagers Fight Back

While many superstitious Africans think that albinos need to die, many people educators are outraged by this. People are practically getting off easy because the administration is that corrupt. In order to find these murderous witch doctors on the loose, several activists young have taken matters into their own hands.

There was a report that Jane Faidha Bakari, 58, was a witch who hired men to kill an albino for a charm in 2015. People came to Bakari's home in the dark of night out of fury. She was pulled from the house by more than 200 enraged townspeople who had gathered. Her husband Moses watched as they cut up her corpse into little bits. They set fire to both the home and her body. Moses and their three kids had to flee. Later, he alleged how these activists killed the wrong lady and that his wife was not a witch doctor. [8]

Unfortunately, because witch doctors frequently conceal their actual identity, older ladies are typically held responsible. They conform to the preconceived notion of what a "witch" is. Villages in a world where they constantly worry about if the serial murderer is among them leap at the first hint of "proof"

Arrests

Tanzanian community leaders, the legal system, and the police did virtually little for generations to halt the murder of albinos. After UN representatives and advocates for albinos spoke out about the difficulties in 2015, the government at long last took action and took the necessary steps years earlier. They detained witch doctors who have been famous to ask bounty hunters for albino body parts, as well as 225 "healers" who were operating illegally. Animal parts that witches combined and forced victims to swallow as part of their "healing" rituals included warthog teeth, lion skin, monkey tails, and many more during the police raids on the homes of the witch doctors.[9]

This is a significant accomplishment since fewer individuals will be motivated to hunt albinos once the funding source is in jail. Any witch doctors who evaded capture earlier will now be wary of disclosing their identities in public since they are aware that they risk being apprehended. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of witch doctors operating in various African nations.