Tanzania: Albino Workers Murdered for Profit

Albinos workers are being mutilated in Tanzania (76 since 2007), and their body parts sold to witch doctors.  Men are raping albino women to cure themselves of HIV-AIDS.  Who bears the blame for these atrocities? So-called “human nature”? The ignorance and superstition of the masses?  Corrupt Tanzanian government officials?  Profiteers—the witchdoctors and middlemen who abduct, mutilate, and kill?
Knowing who or what to blame leads us to the solution.  The international Progressive Labor Party lays the blame squarely on imperialism, the competition among capitalist bosses that keeps the working class mired in ignorance, misery and desperation. Capitalism has transformed the centuries-old discrimination against albino workers into a profit-inspired atrocity.  Only by destroying this system can we liberate our class from the rule of profit and build a truly humane society: communism.  
Tanzania Workers Enter a Dark Night
In 1985, the capitalist class in Tanzania agreed to comply with the U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund (IMF) to boost profits. The Tanzanian government eliminated free health care, subsidies for farmers, laws that prevented politicians from investing in business, and many more gains won during Tanzania’s earlier pro-Soviet/Chinese period.  In order to fool the workers into accepting these attacks, the ruling class promised the workers empty “get rich quick” schemes, the illusion that everyone could become a capitalist boss.
The working class in the fishing industry around Lake Victoria and the mining industry around Shinyanga and Geita were the most vulnerable.  These industries were European capitalist-owned with an all-African workforce. For years, the workers had seen these bosses become wealthy from exploiting Tanzanian resources and workers.
But without a communist movement, they had no way of understanding the inner workings of imperialist exploitation.  When their livelihoods collapsed, they were susceptible to being lured into a strange and horrible new “occult economy”—the buying and selling of the body parts of albino people.
Modern Origins of Ritual Murder
In the 1950s, British colonial officers stocked Lake Victoria with a fish called Nile Perch.  It was to be a new “cash crop,” exported as a delicacy more profitable than coffee or cotton, while the European bosses exported automatic weapons on the return flights to fuel imperialist-backed civil wars on the African continent.
But for 40,000 local fishermen in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, all bordering Lake Victoria, this capitalist ecological experiment turned out to be a disaster.   The locals couldn’t afford to buy the motor boats or fishing gear that were necessary to catch the Nile Perch that lived in the rougher, deeper parts of the lake.  Furthermore, Nile Perch, like the British, turned out to be vile predators—killing every living thing in the lake, from algae to the smaller fish the locals depended on.
In the 1980s, European, Asian, and Israeli capitalists were allowed by the Tanzanian government to build fish processing plants in the cities around Lake Victoria.  The fishing industry was booming, but true to the capitalist business cycle, the predictable bust followed. By 2005, the lake was overfished, factories had closed or were operating below capacity, and workers’ livelihoods were ruined.  This story is told in the documentary film, Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), by Hupert Suaper.
It is no coincidence that the first murder of an albino person occurred shortly after this crisis, in 2007.  Witch doctors made a promise to desperate fishermen that the golden hair of albinos, spun into their fishing nets, would attract fish and make them rich, and that albino body parts, made into amulets, would usher in other kinds of good fortune.  Some workers, infected by capitalist greed and individualism, became middlemen in the trade of albino body parts to witch doctors.
Bosses’ Solution: Blame the Workers
Predictably, the capitalist press has reported extensively on this “barbaric, backward, human rights disaster” while neglecting to connect the ‘occult economy’ to the crimes of capitalism—the destruction of workers’ livelihoods, imperialist exploitation of resources, and the failed promise of the “free” market.
There is no justice under capitalism. President Jakaya Kikwete and other politicians are using these atrocities to expand their power and establish legitimacy with the international capitalist community. They have reinstituted the death penalty for those found guilty of participating in the trading of albino body parts, and instituted a method for neighbors to anonymously turn in those they suspect of being middlemen. These measures help them pass the so-called “human rights” test, guaranteeing a steady flow of money from the United Nations, NGOs and other funders who use “human rights” as a smokescreen for imperialism. At the same time, these politicians created tax laws that exempt most international companies from paying taxes for the first ten years. Along with tax evasions by businesses, this amounts to more money per year than what the UN says cut poverty levels in half (http://www.policyforum-tz.org/files/Howmuchrevenuearewelosing.pdf). Politicians are rewarded with luxury for fanning the flames of poverty -that make the working class of Tanzania vulnerable to the witchdoctors’ scams.
Good Morning, Revolution
When the Tanzanian ruling class unleashed this era of naked exploitation and robbery in the 1980s, they left the workers as bad off or worse than they were during British colonialism.  The murders of albino people have to be seen within this context.  As dark as the situation seems, the solution – communist revolution- must be seen in context as well. Throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century, under the leadership of the international communist movement, workers around the world, including Tanzania, made great strides in the class war.  The capitalists have been on the offensive since then to take back everything the workers won. The Progressive Labor Party fights to end the dark night faced by our international class by organizing a mass, PLP for armed revolution, from East Africa to Latin America. Only communism can outlaw profit-making and build a society that values all workers’ lives, because communism means the working class is in power. Under communism we will put behind us once and for all the depraved practices spawned by capitalism, and unleash a new era dedicated to the health and well-being of our class throughout the world.