Every year, the world comes together to celebrate the International Albinism Awareness Day that is commemorated on 13th June since 2015, when the United Nations dedicated the day for this purpose.
It’s now been eight good years ever since and thankfully, a lot of progress has been made towards the inclusion of Persons With Albinism within the mainstream of society.
Then, we had a single celebration event at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, with Eugene Wamalwa the Cabinet Secretary for Water & Sanitation as chief guest. It was a wonderful moment seeing over a thousand delegates assembled from across the country to give voice to a group of people that was heretofore so marginalised and forgotten.
This year, the celebrations were held in Kwale county as organised by the National Council for Persons with Disabilities. The theme of the celebration was ‘inclusion Is strength’ aiming at urging the society to embrace persons with albinism since they too had something to offer to society.
It’s amazing how we frown upon our differences in an effort to have everybody fit in an imagined definition of a ‘standard’ human being, yet in real sense, our diversity is as wide as there are individuals amongst the eight billion of us straddling the earth.
Persons With Albinism have been discriminated for far too long, to the extent of being killed for their body parts. It’s amazing to note that despite lots of efforts towards inclusion, there exists a good section of the population that still believes that PWAs deserve less in society. Majority of children with albinism are brought up by single mothers owing to the fact that the fathers take off due to stigma.
This is a war that needs to be won. Men need to appreciate that their children with albinism will turn out fine if given equal opportunity and space to attain their full potential.
In recent times, we have had the first tier of inclusion in society for a few PWAs. In Kenya for example, we have Mumbi Ngugi, who is a Court of Appeal Judge. She has distinguished herself with several landmark rulings, including one that compels the name of a child’s father to be included in the birth certificate.
This way, no child including those with albinism shall fail to know who their father is. Yours truly was the first MP and Senator with albinism and currently the first Chief Administrative Secretary (assistant minister, in the history of Kenya.
Martin Pepela has been elected MP for Webuye, and Timothy Aseka is serving his second term as MCA in Kakamega County. There is also the King of Meru music, James Imwari, popularly known as ‘Kamanu’.
Many others are also coming up as demonstrated by Gloria Mutanu Nzomo, a law student at the University of Nairobi, who wrote the following to someone close to me:
“Good morning pass my regards to Hon. Mwaura; we celebrate him on this International Albinism Awareness Day. He went ahead of us in academia, leadership and governance and paved way for us. We are now walking in certainties, because him, and a few others, were bold enough to walk in uncharted paths ahead of us — for us. Hon. Mwaura is indeed a towering icon who has been a trailblazer in the legislature and the executive. His success is not solely his, but a blessing to our family and the whole PWDs family, that we can sit in any table in the future. In the judiciary, we draw inspiration from Justice Mumbi Ngugi, and I joined the law school, to walk in her path someday. She is an admiration”.
Clearly, having key figures in society helps inspire the younger generation to rise up to the occasion by reaching their full potential. To all PWAs out there, we need to do more for ourselves.
It’s true that we need to be involved in all spheres of life and yes! We are all gifted and differently. The society still treats us as ‘one size fits all’. This is the essence of prejudice, stereotype and low expectation on us. We usually don’t look the part and more often than not, people find it hard to accept it when we make our contributions beyond their expectations.
We must however continue to demonstrate to the world what we’ve got to offer, without shying away from owning up to any extra need or support that we require in order to attain our latent potential and self-actualisation.
Ours is to keep providing evidence to the contrary, increasing content that challenges the imagery and characterisation of our abilities or lack of it, in order to have the correct representation of what we are!
As we go about celebrating our milestones, either individually or collectively, let’s pride ourselves that indeed, we need to demonstrate to the word that ‘Inclusion is Strength’.
