The Fetishization of Albinos in Tanzania.pdf - Under the Same Sun

and charms created from albino body parts to impact Tanzanian society socially and
culturally. Moreover, the rumors about albino killings perform a cultural function for
Tanzania’s political elite. It allows them to represent themselves as proponents of
“modernity,” “rationality,” and “economic individualism” while fighting together with
the international humanitarian community against the forces of “tradition,”
“backwardness,” “witchcraft,” and “corruption” that retard Tanzania’s progress towards a
neoliberal state, economic progress, accountability, freedom and democracy. I aim to
provide both an emic and etic view of albino killings and the consequent market that has
been produced by juxtaposing these conflicting arguments. I look at how the Tanzanian
media narrate stories of albino killings and the rumors and gossip that persist, while
taking into account the decline of the fishing industry as one factor influencing the
increase of occult practices around Lake Victoria. A complete understanding and
interpretation of events is only possible by presenting the conflicting etic interpretation
against a localized emic understanding of the events.
An emic understanding of any society rests upon the presupposition that members
of any society have a set of accepted ideas about their own society and how it differs
from others (McGaffey 2000, 2). Such worldviews influence the interpretation of
everyday events and shape responses to them. As Peter Geschiere illustrates, discourses
on the occult and everyday changes resulting from the influences of modernity are
interlaced in many parts of Africa. As he puts it, nowadays “modern techniques and
commodities, often of Western provenance, are central in rumors of the occult”
(Geschiere 1997, 2). The relation between modernity and the occult is of significance
because Tanzanian occult cosmologies have been influenced by development, thus
7