Tanzania: Anti-Albino Racism Hurts All Workers

Tanzania is home to the genocide of workers who have a condition known as albinism. The genocide occurs mainly in the city of Mwanza and in the mining regions of Geita, Kagera, and Shinyanga. The Progressive Labor Party in Tanzania is the only group connecting this genocide to capitalism, and we fight for a communist world where it will be abolished!
Albinism is an inherited, genetic skin condition caused by a mutation affecting the enzyme in human skin responsible for skin, hair, and eye color.  It’s believed that albino workers were persecuted in many other places and fled to Tanzania, which may explain why Tanzania has the greatest concentration of albino people in the world.  Tanzania is a former British colony, and the British encouraged beliefs that albino workers were cursed. These racist superstitions led many albino infants to be thrown away in the forests.
Capitalism Keeps Racist Colonial Legacy Alive
British colonialism ended in the early 1960s with an upsurge of anti-racism and anti-imperialism among workers and peasants.  The sellout nationalist government was pressured to outlaw violence against albino workers. Under capitalism, however, all reforms are short-lived. In 1985, a capitalist crisis struck Tanzania, forcing the government to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the U.S. imperialist-backed bank. After waves of IMF decrees destroyed the educational system and welfare and led to a massive increase in poverty, the ruling class of Tanzania brought anti-albino racism back with a vengeance. Murders of albino workers began again, this time out of the belief that their body parts would bring wealth if presented to a witch doctor.
Since 2006, 76 albino workers were killed and 56 injured, 11 of those with permanent injuries. Eighteen albino graves have been desecrated and the bodies removed. In 2014, an albino child known as Upendo Emanuel was kidnapped and still hasn’t been found. This past February 15, another child, one year-old Yohana Bahati, was taken from his mother, who was cut up with machetes. Later, when the child’s grave was dug up, some of Yohana’s body parts were missing.
Only Communism Can Protect All Workers
Violence between workers will continue as long as capitalism remains. The capitalist government of Tanzania can never truly address these crimes because it’s the capitalist ruling class that profits off of the division of the working class. These capitalists support the racist superstitions against albino workers, along with apartheid-like laws against many of the country’s 120 ethnic groups. This keeps workers from seeing capitalism as their enemy and communist revolution as their solution.
In 1992, greater “freedoms” were supposedly given to workers here by allowing multiple capitalist electoral parties to compete in elections. The result has been more poverty and more terror, especially against the albino population.
Workers in Tanzania, like workers in Greece, the United States and everywhere else, must unite behind the red banner of the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. PLP will eradicate the capitalist dictatorship that thrives off imperialism and genocide worldwide with a dictatorship of millions of armed workers organized in our Party to build communism.
PLP in Tanzania has been organizing CHALLENGE study groups among workers on anti-albino racism. We are bringing this fight against superstition, racism, sexism, and capitalism to  schools and workplaces to demand an end to the killings. These struggles are strengthening us for the revolutionary struggles to come.