They are white-skinned blacks. In Tanzania, they are called zeru zeru, Swahili term meaning ” phantom “. Some are convinced that when a zeru zeru dies, his corpse disappears. This is why people end up killing them and then skinning them and selling them on the black market. The most popular pieces are the heart, the extremities, the ears, the genitals. They can cost tens of thousands of dollars. This traffic is based on the belief, centuries old, that the body parts of an albino are magical, that they have powers, that they attract luck.
In Malawi, when a child is born, it is customary to give him a name that describes his family. A mother who gives birth to an albino finds herself faced with thousands of unanswered questions, and the baptismal name she is going to give to the child reflects these questions. For instance, « Caller » means “It’s the end of us”, “Problems” means ” problem “.
[Le 29 août], nineteen people were killed by the police in Madagascar. It all started with the kidnapping of an albino child. A raging mob, armed with knives and machetes, stormed a police station to massacre the suspects. They had been arrested for having kidnapped the child before killing his mother. The little albino has not been found [ces émeutes ont eu lieu à Ikongo, à environ 350 kilomètres de la capitale, Antananarivo.].
“Sometimes people even hang the hand of an albino child from their rear view mirror, as an amulet”, explains Lluís Montoliu, researcher of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) at the National Center for Biotechnology [CNB, Madrid]. “It is a reality that is too little known. When an albino dies, some people sometimes throw cement on the grave so that he is not dug up and that his corpse cannot be trafficked.”
The fertile ground of poverty
Lluís Montoliu has studied in depth rare diseases such as albinism, an inherited disorder that consists of a defect in the pr