Deadly Whiteness: Incredible portraits of Tanzania's Albinos

If you were born an albino in East Africa, then you start life right away with a price tag on your forehead: many locals believe that killing such people brings good luck, and parts of their bodies can be profitably sold to shamans.

Dutch photographer Marinka Masséus visited Tanzania and made a series of poignant portraits of albino children, trying to draw the world's attention to their problems.

(15 photos in total)

No one knows why, but East Africa in general and Tanzania in particular are places where especially many albinos are born. Their share in this territory is 15 times higher than the global average.

Anyway, albino Blacks are the most vulnerable part of the local community here. A hunt is arranged for them, they are chopped into pieces and eaten as medicine.

For at least five hundred years, the locals have shared a terrible superstition that albino meat can cure all kinds of diseases.

The excitement of hunters can easily be explained by numbers: the body of an albino, if sold to shamans and sorcerers in parts — tongue, eyes, limbs, and so on, costs 50-100 thousand dollars. And this is the average earnings of a resident of Tanzania for 25-50 years.

The demand for "transparent", as they are called here, has grown especially strongly with the spread of AIDS in Africa. There was a belief that you can cure this disease by eating dried albino genitals.

Previously, hunting for albinos was almost not punished — thanks to the mutual responsibility of local children killed for witchcraft purposes, they were usually declared missing.

98% of albinos in Tanzania do not live to the age of 40. But it's not just their murders that are to blame. Their skin and eyes are especially susceptible to ultraviolet radiation, and therefore by the age of 16-18 albinos lose their sight by 60-80%, and by the age of 30 they are 60% likely to get skin cancer.

It is not difficult to save their health — they need to constantly use sunscreen and wear sunglasses. But in impoverished Tanzania, people don't have the money for all this.

Tanzanian albinos have one hope for salvation — the attention of the West. Thanks to funding from abroad, special boarding schools are being built for such unusual children, where they are hidden behind high walls from the burning sun and greedy compatriots.