When white skins are hazardous

Every now and then, I run across news reports that make me feel sick. (No, I’m not referring to Donald Trump.) Last summer, I read a report from Malawi. You may not have heard much about Malawi. It always ranks near the bottom on Africa’s poverty scales, for a variety of reasons.

First, because Malawi is landlocked. It has no seaports, no way to access world markets except through other countries.

Second, because it has nothing to market. Malawi has no oil, no minerals, and barely enough agriculture to support its own 20 million population — in onetenth the land area of British Columbia. It has lots of fresh water — Lake Malawi is second only to Lake Victoria among African lakes — but water is not exportable.

But Malawi does, apparently, have something that people in other parts of Africa covet — albino babies.

By some genetic quirk, it seems, Malawi and its nearest neighbours to the north and south, Tanzania and Mozambique, have a higher-than-usual proportion of albino babies. That is, black babies with white skin.

In most of the world, white skin — or at least a lighter skin — is a social advantage.

In India and the Middle East, the ruling elite almost always have lighter skins than their subjects.

In America, skin colour becomes an icon of “purity” for conservative causes. The U.S. Congress is predominantly white and male. So are most police forces. So are topfloor corporate boardrooms.

Far-right extremists target anyone who is not white (according to their own definitions), shooting, bombing, and vandalizing Muslims, Jews, and blacks indiscriminately. Also gays and Democrats, admittedly — who are considered beyond the pale.

Only in some African countries does the darkness of one’s skin offer a political benefit.

Which leads to the anomaly — in Malawi, albino babies are prized.

For — brace yourself — their body parts.

In a 2016 report, Amnesty International stated that people with albinism were “hunted and killed like animals” for their body parts. Just as poachers slaughter elephants for their tusks, and rhinos for their horns, attackers abduct and murder albino children to chop off their limbs and pluck out their organs to sell to witchdoctors. Are you feeling sick yet? Even the victim’s bones, Amnesty reported, are sold to practitioners of traditional medicine for charms and magical potions associated with wealth and good luck. Something like a rabbit’s foot, among western societies. (Which does not, as a child once observed, bring good luck to the rabbit.)

Albinism is a genetic condition. It cannot be blamed on anything its victims did, or did not do. A particular combination of the parents’ genes leads to little or no pigment in the eyes, skin, and hair.

Albinism occurs all over the world. In the U.S., it affects about one in 20,000 people. But, Tanzania and Malawi the ratio can rise as high as one in 1,500 — about 13 times higher.

Malawi alone has about 10,000 residents with albinism. Because of lingering superstition, they live in fear. Many albino children do not dare going to school because they risk death and dismemberment. Mothers who send their children to school, believing that education is the only cure for historic superstitions, gamble daily with their children’s lives.

In 2016, Malawi’s government passed a law to tackle an increase in killings of albino persons in the country. The Revised Anatomy Act created new offenses and tougher penalties.

But despite this legislation, Amnesty states that people with albinism were still being killed for their body parts. A United Nations report went to far as to claim that albino persons were “facing extinction.”

Don’t blame this situation on “backward” African nations. Halloween, earlier this week, should remind us that we still have our own share of superstitions, from black cats to ghouls and ghosties, carried over from ancient civilizations.

When we humans had no other adequate explanations for tragedy and disease, we blamed misfortunes on utterly unrelated factors. Like black cats, and cracks in sidewalks.

And, we reasoned, if there were malevolent elements in nature, then surely there must be beneficial elements too, that brought good luck. Or just better sex.

Iit is time we recognized that body parts — whether from albino children or rhinoceros horns — have no intrinsic powers whatsoever. They are an outdated relic of pre-historic fears, shared — as far as we know -- by no other species on earth. It’s time we named superstitions for the nonsense they are, and got rid of them.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca