Murdered for their eyes: people with albinism living in terror in Madagascar
The country is struggling to address a rise in attacks, with a record 13 people – mostly children – killed this year for body parts, which some believe can bring good fortune
Not long after midnight in late May this year, three men barged through the door of the small room where Nicole Soalala lived with her family on the outskirts of Toliara, a coastal city in the south of Madagascar. Her husband got up to ask what they wanted, but they attacked him with a piece of wood and an axe.
Soalala, 32, grabbed her youngest child, Landricia – an 18-month-old girl with albinism – and hoisted her on to her back, holding her there with a piece of fabric she started to wrap around herself. Her eldest daughter, 15, hid under the table with her other two children, aged six and three.
As Soalala’s husband lay on the floor on the verge of losing consciousness, the attackers turned their attention to her. “I felt that I was the one they were coming for and I waited to die,” she says. “But then the one with the axe suddenly started trying to pull my child away from me.”
Soalala tugged on the fabric, pressing her daughter closer to her body. “Let the child go,” said the man. Soalala pulled tighter still. “Let the child go, or we will kill you,” he repeated. Losing patience, the men wrenched away the little girl and ran.
She chased after them, screaming for help and crying. “My heart hurt me so much that I couldn’t stand it and my legs gave up on me,” she says. She collapsed about 100 metres down the dirt road, outside the large faded red gates of a school.
Days later, Landricia’s decapitated body was discovered at the home of a witch-doctor. Her head was found wrapped in plastic bags in a suitcase at another property a couple of kilometres away from where she was taken.
Landricia is among 13 people with albinism who have been killed in the country this year, according to Albinos Madagascar, an organisation set up in 2022 to advocate for people with the condition. Every one of them was beheaded. All but three of the victims were children, ranging from nine months old to 14 years. According to the association, this is already the worst year on record for killings of people with albinism in Madagascar.
“The situation is very critical, very cruel.” says Fulgence Soja, the association’s president, who lives with albinism himself. “There are a lot of big problems facing us, and we feel really unsafe.”
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Albinism is an inherited genetic condition that reduces the amount of melanin pigment formed in the skin, hair and eyes and occurs in all ethnic groups. It often leads to poor vision and heightens the risk of skin cancer.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the prevalence of albinism is the highest worldwide, affecting more than one in 4,000 people in some countries, according to the World Health Organization.
People living with the condition face severe threats, including ritual killings, rape and mutilation, in several African countries. These attacks are driven by harmful superstitions that their body parts bring wealth, political success and good luck.
In Madagascar, the eyes of a person with albinism are particularly sought after. Children are targeted because of beliefs suggesting their innocence will make any potion made from their body parts more powerful. They are also vulnerable and easier to kidnap.
Nobody will talk openly about what goes on, but everyone is aware. Witch-doctors the Guardian spoke to denied all knowledge of any beliefs surrounding people with albinism, or what they might be “used for”. They, and others, say these beliefs must come from “outside”.
This level of brutality against people with albinism is said to be a recent phenomenon in Madagascar. Soja remembers first hearing about a beheading of someone with albinism in 2017. Muluka-Anne Mitti-Drummond, the UN independent expert on albinism, started receiving reports of killings in Madagascar in 2021.
“We had recorded more than 28 cases of attacks between late 2020 and 2022; the majority were against children. I was very concerned,” she says. She visited the following year and compiled a report on what was happening.
Mitti-Drummond found that profiles of attackers varied, and included relatives of victims, community members, people who travelled from other regions, and dahalos (cattle raiders). “Most perpetrators are acting with the intent of selling body parts or exploiting a person with albinism for financial means,” she wrote. “In many cases, only the middleperson is caught, while the masterminds of the attacks remain unknown.”
Life-altering sums of money are paid to those willing to kill a child with albinism and procure their eyes. Often entire networks are involved, and violence is said to increase in the run-up to elections. Sources told the Guardian that, because of this and the expense, high-powered people, including senior politicians and business people, were probably ordering some of the killings.
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Madagascar is one of the poorest nations on Earth with about 80% of its population living on less than $2.15 (£1.60) a day. Since it gained independence from France in 1958, the country has experienced bouts of political instability, disputed elections and violent coups. In October 2025, youth-led protests toppled president Andry Rajoelina, and Col Michael Randrianirina declared himself head of a transitional government for what he said would last 18 to 24 months.
The country is also among the most vulnerable to the climate crisis, with drought, floods and cyclones causing death, displacement, and damage to crops and infrastructure. A lean season and El Niño threaten to push the south into emergency conditions this year, with high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition.
Sabina Lauber, a senior human rights adviser to the UN in Madagascar, believes it is this that is driving people to target individuals with albinism. “Madagascar is one of the very few countries in the world where every development and wellbeing indicator has decreased over the last 10 years,” she says. “At the same time, the population has dramatically increased and so there is a level of desperation for survival. People are turning to harmful practices to address the problem.”
In the hours after Soalala’s daughter was taken, a phone and a flip-flop were found in the courtyard outside. They had been left behind by the attackers and were taken away by the police for investigation.
Soalala divided her time between searching for Landricia alone and with members of the police and her wider family and visiting her husband, Mario William Solovenin, in hospital. It was a few days before she remembered where she had seen one of the attackers before.
About three months earlier, she says she and Solovenin had taken Landricia to hospital to treat sunburn on her shoulders. On the way they met a man that Solovenin knew through his work as a rickshaw driver. That man later came by the house, which the family now believe was to scout out their home.
Soalala told this to the police, who went to arrest him. He gave up the names of his accomplices. Chantal Rasoavahininoro, Soalala’s cousin who also lives in Toliara and acted as an intermediary between authorities and the family, says the men were tortured to extract confessions and information as to where Landricia’s body was.
When Soalala was told her daughter had been beheaded, she was inconsolable, says Rasoavahininoro. “Her first question was, ‘Are the eyes there?’” she says. “She almost went mad, she lost her mind.”
Four months on, a team of lawyers representing the family is in the preliminary stages of putting a case together. According to one of the team, Arlette Rafanomadio, 18 people, including two women, have now been arrested and are being held in custody.
One is a Sri Lankan national involved in mining.
Madagascar has a wealth of natural resources, including gold, manganese and copper. The island produces at least 40% of the world’s sapphires, alongside rubies, emeralds and semi-precious quartz. Tohovery Razakamanana, a UN human rights officer, says a significant proportion of attacks against people with albinism have occurred in or near mining areas, particularly mines for precious stones and gold. He also notes that while these attacks used to be concentrated in certain areas of the south, widely seen to be poorer and with higher levels of food insecurity, they are now happening all over Madagascar.
“To get back to the very beginning,” he says, “it all started in the deep south. Then we observed some cases in the south-east, south-west, midwest, and then in the north. But rarely in the capital and surrounding districts.”
While data collection has been poor, making it difficult to determine the origins and extent of attacks against people with albinism, human rights organisations say the situation this year is particularly worrying because of the geographical spread and grisly nature of the killings. People in cities are now being targeted rather than just those in remote rural areas.
An atmosphere of terror now exists for people with albinism and their families. Odette, 20, lives in a city in northern Madagascar where it is hot year round. She doesn’t understand why she is a varira (the Malagasy word for someone with albinism), but she knows her eyesight is blurry and that she burns easily. She squints as she struggles to see, there are sores all over her arms and legs and her lips are cracked and swollen from the sun.
In February, her cousin Marcellin, 14, who also had albinism, was murdered. She remembers him as a cheerful and talkative boy, who used to come round asking for soap.
Marcellin was beheaded and his body left under a mango tree across the dirt track from the wooden property where he lived with his older sister and her family. His head has never been found.
When the Guardian visited, two young girls sat behind a table under the same mango tree selling vegetables. The tyre Marcellin was sitting on outside his front door when he was snatched is still there. According to Soja, four people linked to a local politician have been arrested.
Odette has a three-year-old son and struggles to make money; she earns about 3,000 ariary (50p) a day from working in the fields and doing odd jobs. She is not with the father of her child. When she told him she was pregnant he didn’t stick around. She says: “He told me, ‘I love the colour of your skin, but I’m not going to be with you, because you’re varira.’”
One evening about a month ago, she was at the home she rented with her son when she heard a group of men approach and bang on the door. She ran to her mother’s house. After that, she decided to move in with her wider family and now sleeps sharing a mattress with about a dozen people in a small mud hut with a straw roof overlooking a patch of water not far from the city centre.
“I am a varira like Marcellin, so I’m really scared,” she says. “The house is not a good one, it’s not secure. I worry that there aren’t enough people here and that if someone comes, they will murder me.”
About 90 miles (150km) west, nine-year-old Veroline and her younger brother play outside the mayor’s house in a village near a Unesco-recognised national park where tourists go to see lemurs and other wildlife.
Both children have albinism. Three members of the armed forces watch over them; one carries a shotgun, another wears a handgun at his side.
They are here, living under the mayor’s protection, because in May, their older brother, Rakotombelo, 14, was killed. Veroline was sleeping in the same room when some men crashed through the wooden door. It remains broken to this day. She has very few memories of that night, other than her aunt telling her to run. Her father, who lives in a nearby town, says she told him she hid under a cart parked outside, against the wall of the house. “Some people came and I found out they were enemies,” she says. “I saw them carrying my brother. I told them, ‘Why are you doing that? Is he a child you gave birth to that you can do that to him?’”
Her aunt, Rasoa, and her husband were held hostage by two men in the next room. “They carried knives and said ‘Don’t move, or we will kill you’,” says Rasoa. When they left, she screamed until neighbours came. It was then that she realised her nephew’s head had been cut off. His body had been left, and the wall was covered in blood. “What happened was scandalous,” she says. “I was so sad because he was like my child. Even now, I’m devastated that a child I raised was violated like that.”
While she was at Rakotombelo’s funeral a couple of days later, there was a secret ballot held among the villagers to determine who they suspected had committed the murder. Fourteen people were arrested and are being detained, according to Francois Xavier Zaranaina, the mayor. Rasoa’s husband is one of them. “We don’t have any proof, but all I can say is that some of them might have done it, some of them probably didn’t do it, but because of various rumours and conflicts, those people were arrested,” says Zaranaina.
He has heard the superstitions about the eyes of people with albinism and suspects that is why Rakotombelo, who he says was good at football, was killed. He is eager for Veroline and her brother to no longer be his responsibility, particularly as the killers may come back. “They are burdens,” he says.
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The killings have become an issue of national concern. The president has deployed his personal guard to hunt down perpetrators, and the first lady has promised to open a centre in the south where people with albinism can seek refuge.
On 4 August, a video was posted on the president’s Facebook page showing the alleged perpetrators behind the murder of a child with albinism who were caught in a sting operation; among the accomplices were the child’s grandfather and police officers. Two days later, the president wrote in a post accompanied by photos: “Because I heard that there are still people threatening to kill this albino child and her mother, I have decided that the family will be brought up to [the capital] Antananarivo immediately, and I will personally take full responsibility for their lives!” The Guardian could not independently verify the information in the posts, or the videos.
UN experts and local advocates emphasise that addressing the crisis facing people with albinism in Madagascar requires collaboration. Soja, who is now advising the president on the issue, wants a national action plan that addresses security, education and health “so that we can live like everyone else”.
Before that, he says: “The priority is to stop [the killings] because any solution for people of albinism to be able to educate themselves and go to work, depends on that.”
Razakamanana at the UN says a lack of accurate data remains a stumbling block. He is urging the government to conduct a census to determine how many people with albinism there are in the country.
Much needs to be done in terms of raising awareness, he adds. “Even educated people in the capital are not aware [that albinism is a genetic condition]. We have to start with awareness-raising campaigns and education.”
Four months on from the murder of baby Landricia in Toliara, Soalala and her husband’s grief is still raw. They look broken, weary and like every last drop of joy has been drained from them. Tears form in Soalala’s eyes as she talks about what her daughter was like. Landricia had a reddish tint to her hair with chocolate-coloured eyes. “She took after her father, and was a calm and happy child,” she says.
Soalala still cries often and so does her eldest daughter. Her youngest remaining child, Patricia, who also has albinism, often asks where nanke (an affectionate Malagasy term for a younger sibling) is. “I tell her she is dead, I don’t want to lie. I also tell her I don’t want to talk about it,” says Soalala.
When Patricia was born, Soalala says people in the community warned her: “The child has albinism. Be careful, protect her because she might get stolen.” For that reason, Soalala doesn’t work and rarely goes out, preferring to keep her children hidden. The family relies on her husband’s daily income of about 6,000 ariary (£1) from driving a rickshaw.
The family lives in a constant state of anxiety and terror. As Patricia starts to cry and demands attention from her mother, Soalala says: “I can’t sleep at night because I’m so scared and anxious. The evil people might still be seeking this child.”
Translation and additional research by Holifeno Hantarinoro