Walking target for killers
Azad Essa is a journalist at Al Jazeera. He is also co-founder of The Daily Vox
ON A warm evening late last month, two men broke into Gift Notisi’s house in southern Malawi. One held him down and the other tried to cut off his arm.
While they were truggling to hack away at his limb, a scuffle broke out and the attackers were forced to flee.
Notisi was lucky to survive, but the 38-year-old now lives in constant fear, perpetually reminded of that horrific evening.
A few weeks earlier, a group of thugs had tried to drill a hole through the wall of a man’s house late at night.
If it wasn’t for the intervention of his neighbours, he too would have been butchered while he slept.
People with albinism, a congenital disorder that often results in a lack of pigmentation in the skin, hair and eyes, have come under fierce attack in Malawi over the past two years.
Twenty people have been murdered and more than 115 have been assaulted.
Last year, the UN warned that if action was not taken, there would be “systematic extinction” of a community made up of nearly 10 000 people.
There are some in Malawi, as they are in other parts of southern and eastern Africa, who believe that the bones of such people are worth a lot of money.
These beliefs suggest that the bones of people with albinism contain gold dust or that if crushed and mixed in potions they will bring wealth.
With poverty at critical levels, people with albinism have become a walking target for hunters and killers.
People with the disorder tiptoe around their towns and villages, staying indoors after dark and are hesitant to talk to strangers. No one is to be trusted. And understandably so.
Many of the attacks have been committed by people close to the victims. We know of fathers who have tried to sell their own children, uncles who have tried to abduct their own nephews, even neighbours conspiring with strangers to dismember a person in their community, all in the name of making some money.
To its credit, the Malawian government has admitted that its laws are insufficient, its actions slow and they have committed to working to end the scourge.
But activists are concerned that words have not been followed up with appropriate action. For instance, only 35 cases have been prosecuted, while 43 others are under investigation. No one has been sentenced
Albinos face hostility in at least 23 African countries yet not much is being done to protect them
for the murders.
The lack of corrective action has left the community feeling as if the government and the courts are not taking the matter seriously.
Understanding why the attacks continue to take place is difficult.
There is no obvious market for human bones in the country. Certainly, we have not been able to find anyone who has benefited from the sale of bones. And the issue is certainly not limited to Malawi.
If anything, it is said to have been exported from Tanzania and Mozambique, where the problem has existed for years.
In South Africa, there have been attacks as well.
Amnesty says people with albinism face hostility in up to 23 African countries.
And while it may be easy to look at the brutality levelled at this community as some sort of unique human abomination, the targeting of people with albinism in Malawi is in no way different from the rise of attacks on refugees in Europe and in the US.
Neither is our home-grown xenophobia in South Africa any different.
The hate of “the other” often comes from an instinct to conflate insecurity with opportunity, often leading to vile acts of terror on a disenfranchised community. Before the attacks on this community in Malawi, the vitriol had long been planted in the society. Persons with albinism have long been mocked, taunted in the streets and looked down upon.
And while “education” is touted as being the difference between acts of savagery and civility, there is little proof education has assuaged hate for its own sake.
And so it remains: people have grown so desperate, everywhere, they will believe anything, if it comes from a source they trust. In Malawi, where traditional healers are important in the face of an absent state in rural parts of the country, they wield tremendous influence. In other places, it is politicians or tribal leaders who speak to the concerns of the poor, who exert that type of influence. At both ends, the desperation gives rise to con-men, crass opportunists who seek little more than to exploit the pain of others.