The persecution of albinos in Africa is everyone’s problem

Based on data provided by the NGO „Under The Same Sun“, in recent years at least 166 people with albinism have been killed and 273 assaulted in 25 different African nations. With no intention of minimizing the many injustices of all kinds that take place in our times, these events represent the most palpable, barbaric contemporary sample of racial discrimination. Not only because they entail rejection, discrimination, oppression or human trafficking – they involve systematic, premeditated persecution, mutilation and the ruthless murder of human beings because of their skin color.

When we have all accepted that rejection and oppression of blacks by whites must be fought with every weapon of law and reason, we are once again faced with the worst of humanity in the maltreatment and butchery of people with albinism in Africa: the rejection of „different“, of „other“, for the simple fact of being so. Despite all our immediate needs and particular challenges, the associations of people with albinism worldwide must be aware that this is, in fact, our greatest current task: to convince mankind that this persecution is not a misfortune of white-blacks in a concrete part of Africa, but is a problem for all of us. We must lead a movement to make everyone aware that these events are the current, most brutal proof of the same old racial discrimination, and that it is our responsibility to fight it until it is only an unhappy memory.

June 13th 2017