ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the major humanistic challenge that people with disabilities such as albinism face in Africa: barriers to being. In most societies, people with albinism are viewed as not just different; in some cases, they are murdered and their body parts are extracted for ritual purposes. This chapter compares the condition of people with albinism in Africa to that of black people in racist societies of the West. Very few narratives have engaged albinism in Africa. Against the backdrop of ample anthropological evidence, it discusses three fictional narratives: Jenny Robson’s Because Pula Means Rain, Tara Sullivan’s Golden Boy, and Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory. Deploying Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial theory, it examines the African world from the perspectives of the characters with albinism.
