Whitey

African Pygmy Hedgehog

Originally uploaded by meantux

If you’ve ever been the only black / white / hispanic / asian person in a room full of opposites, you’ll know what its like to be stared at. It’s happened to me several times: at a carnival in Antigua, at a nightclub in Tanzania, and in a market up on Mt Kilimanjaro. People can’t help staring

But imagine growing up in rural Africa and looking like a photo-negative of every one around you – your parents, brothers and sisters. That’s the life of an African albino.

I meant to blawg this a while back, but there’s a great post about an albino sanctuary here. Sanctuary may seem a zoo-like term to use, but it is used in its original sense, somewhere safe from harm rather than a handy corral for people with binoculars. To be an albino in rural Africa is to risk being hacked to death by people who believe your body parts are useful only as lucky charms, or as a commodity to sell as such. Thousands are killed every year, for the same reason people hunt rhinos for their horn, or sharks for their fins.

We met an albino girl walking to market that day on Kili, back in 2001. While everyone else pointed, laughed, giggled and scowled at the strange sight of three western whities walking to a rural market (me carrying a stone weight of bananas on my head), the albino girl ran up to Blanche, one of our trio, and hugged her, just for being white. For many of the people in that particularly remote area, white people were an oddity of the nearby towns, something that  passed by at speed in a Land Cruiser.  I had kids run shrieking on remote forest paths because they thought I was a ghost, quite different from the ‘mzungu!’ cries of street kids in the cities and towns where white-skinned tourists are the norm.

The albino girl stared at Blanche with a broad smile and caressed her face before walking on. Just to see someone like her seemed to have made her day. Blanche was weirded out by the whole scene, unsurprisingly. She was from Belgium, and her sense of humour had been removed at birth, as is Flemish custom.