SPECTACLE: The Semiotics of Albinism in Tanzania

Abstract

In the past fifteen years, scores of high-profile murders of Africans with albinism have sparked a robust global movement for albinism rights. In Tanzania, disparate albinism stakeholders (wadau) attribute violence to an illicit market for albino body parts run by traditional healers and their patrons, who are said to believe in the extraordinary powers of these parts to access an unseen realm. This article tacks between stakeholders with albinism and composite sketches of a healer and her artisanal miner patient, to offer a theory of violence rooted in spectacle rather than belief. Focusing on albinism interventions as sites of spectacle, I employ a semiotics of quality to show how albinism becomes central to broader processes of illumination (kuongeza nuru). A semiotic approach to social movements moves beyond the sedimented categories and narrative tropes that compel activism to reveal a postactivist politics and ethics grounded in relationality.