Academic Papers: Albinos

‘What kind of witchcraft is this?’ Development, magic and spiritual ontologies’ Article available in the link

What kind of witchcraft is this Development magic and spiritual ontologies[732]

Media Analysis of Albino Killings in Tanzania: A Social Work and Human Rights Perspective

by Jean Burke, Theresa J. Kaijage & Johannes John-Langba

Media Analysis of Albino Killings in Tanzania A Social Work and Human Rights Perspective

Paper on Sorcery and Witchcraft-related Killings in Melanesia: Culture, Law and Human Rights Perspectives Conference at The Australian National University, Canberra, 5-7 June 2013. By Dr Miranda Forsyth

Overcoming sorcery 2016

Available here

A paper concerned with the rights of persons with Albinism (Available here…)

Article available here

Waiting-to-disappear-International-and-Regional-Standards-for-the-Protection-and-Promotion-of-the-Human-Rights-of-Persons-with-Albinism-June2017

An insightful piece exploring the role of Christianity in responding to African health crises.(Available here…)

Rasmussen Sickness in Africa – holistic integrated Christian understanding and response – Jan 2016

A Case Study of Christian Response to Sickness, Death, and Witchcraft in Northwestern Tanzania.

Rasmussen – chapter 08 in African Missiology – newly revised

Extract: “When someone develops a serious illness or his child dies, people everywhere try to discover the real cause. Every culture has causal explanations for illness, but the usual options and emphases differ between cultures. For example, Eliphaz, one of Job’s three friends from the land of Uz, attempted to explain Job’s suffering suggesting, “Consider now: who being innocent has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed? As I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it. At the breath of God they are destroyed” (Job 4:7–9).”

African Study Bible on Witches by Steven Rassmusun: available here

ASB witch article final 11-1-2015

Cannibal-witches, zombies and the making of an African modernity in the Cameroon Grassfields

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Egress and Regress: Pentecostal Precursors and Parallels in Northern Mozambique

Based on fieldwork among the Makhuwa of northern Mozambique, this essay explores how non-Pentecostal models of transformation shape a people’s manner of relating to Pentecostalism. Radical change has long been constitutive of Makhuwa history and subjectivity. Yet Makhuwa patterns of change, commonly conceived in terms of movement, entail regress as much as egress – circular mobilities that disrupt linear teleologies. State administrators and Pentecostal missionaries attempt to reform local inhabitants by, respectively, ‘sedentarising’ and ‘converting’ them. Deploying their historical proclivity towards mobility, those among whom I worked appear simultaneously eager to partake in resettlement schemes and reluctant to remain settled by them. I argue that their ambivalence towards Pentecostal churches and teachings, in particular, challenges two prevailing assumptions within anthropological studies of Christianity: that discontinuity is definitive, and that it is exceptional to Pentecostalism.

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Media Analysis of Albino Killings inTanzania: A Social Work and HumanRights Perspective

Murders of people with albinism are a recently emerging human rights issue in Africa, particularly Tanzania. Thus far, public debates about albino killings inTanzania and other African countries have been dominated by media reports rather than academic writing. This paper presents the findings of a content analysis of Swahili and English Tanzanian media reports published between 2008 and 2011 onalbinism and albino murders in Tanzania, and the diverse activities that haveunfolded in response to these attacks. Using a human rights framework, the articleexplores these responses from a social work perspective. It finds that interventions are often framed with reference to African conceptions of humanness. Theseconceptions are found to be compatible with notions of human rights as relational,in which the various rights and responsibilities of different members of society areseen as interconnected. In practice however, some interventions have resulted intrade-offs between competing rights, causing further harm to victims and their  families. To become sustainable therefore, interventions should aim to support allthe human rights necessary for the well-being of Africans with albinism, their  families and communities. Further research to this effect is recommended.

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