Several phenomena have contributed to the increased attention paid to albinism in the past decade. The terrible atrocities inflicted on persons with albinism in East Africa made international headlines. In response, local and global actors – from the Tanzania Albinism…
Singing Albinism in Global Tanzania: “Demanding” Inclusion through Music
Medical transnational goods, ideas and conceptions, spread by humanitarian institutions and NGOs, intersect with the production of new local understandings and knowledge of illness and healing and are critically appropriated by local communities (Hahn 2004). Specific outcomes of these cultural…
Blind Pathways and Precarious Power in Inner-City Johannesburg
In the city of Johannesburg hundreds, perhaps thousands, of blind and otherwise disabled cross-border migrants – mostly from Zimbabwe – try to survive in the city. They live under conditions of extreme precarity, many residing in unlawfully occupied buildings, subject…
People with Albinism and Humanitarian NGOs in Tanzania: Identities between Local and Global Worlds
This photo essay discusses the interactions between international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governmental organizations on the one hand, and local populations and people with albinism on the other, in Tanzania. From the mid-2000s onward, international attention started to…