On a cool Saturday afternoon, hundreds of football fans gathered at the Jakaya M. Kikwete Youth Park, a non-profit, multi-sport facility, in Tanzania's port city of Dar es Salaam, to watch a unique football match.
DAR ES SALAAM, July 22 (Xinhua) -- On a cool Saturday afternoon, hundreds of football fans gathered at the Jakaya M. Kikwete Youth Park, a non-profit, multi-sport facility, in Tanzania's port city of Dar es Salaam, to watch a unique football match.
The match was played by albinos of Albinism Sports Club, which trains albinos to play football and athletics, against Sauti Parasports Club, a club of amputee footballers based in Dar es Salaam.
The match played for one hour with a draw of 1-1 showed footballing talents of both teams.
"The match was coordinated by Sauti Parasports Club to express our condemnation of killings against persons with albinism in Tanzania," said Sauti Parasports Club chairperson and coach, Abdul Ali Machine, 52.
Machine told Xinhua that his club of amputee football players was joining the government in condemning the killings of albinos in the country.
"The killings of albinos resurfaces as the country approaches elections. We invited our albino brothers to play a football match with us as a way of condemning this barbaric inhumanity," Machine said, referring to the country's general elections to be held in October 2025.
According to Under The Same Sun, an international organization that promotes the well-being of persons with albinism, people with albinism are targeted by politicians for their body parts in witchcraft-related killings.
There is a false belief in some African countries, including Tanzania, that the body parts of a person with albinism can bring politicians and businessmen prosperity or good luck when made into a potion or talisman by a witch doctor.
"We amputee footballers feel that after our albino sisters and brothers are exterminated, the killers will turn on us," he told Xinhua after the match.
Joseph Magutu, the general secretary of the Albinism Sports Club, said he was motivated by efforts taken by Sauti Parasports Club to organize the match that was aimed at condemning the killings of people with albinism.
"And this match has been organized after the recent kidnap and killing of a two-and-a-half-year-old albino child in Bulumula village, in Muleba district in Kagera region in north-western Tanzania," said Magutu.
He said the belief advanced by some witch doctors that the body parts of albino people have properties that confer wealth and good luck was one hundred percent wrong.
"If the body parts of people with albinism have properties that confer wealth and good luck, all of the albinos in this country would have been stinking rich. But to the contrary, most of us are poor," said Magutu.
Magutu said the only way to get rich is by working very hard.
Meck Hussein, an 18-year-old albino who played in the match, said he was in total condemnation of the killings of people with albinism.
"I support efforts being taken by the government to punish people implicated in the heinous killings of albinos," said Hussein, a second-year law student at the Muslim University of Morogoro.
In March 2015, more than 200 witch doctors and traditional healers were arrested in Tanzania in a crackdown on the murder of albino people.
The United Nations says more than 80 albino people were killed in Tanzania between 2000 and 2015.
According to figures by the Tanzania Albinism Society, a national organization of persons with albinism, there are 18,833 albino persons in the country. ■
