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Disability Rights and Inclusiveness in Africa Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2022
Introduction
I am a person with albinism. I have lived with my family and worked in a small town in Southern Nigeria for nearly a decade. My wife is a coloured (Black) woman and my kids are too. As an individual, I have lived in this space for decades. I had my childhood and my education in this small town. I only left this town for my graduate studies and then returned to work in the university. So I am quite well known in this town. But when I move around town with my family, there is always this gaze of awe from people who know me quite well and those who do not. They wonder how a person with albinism could have a wife and children with melanin. Some tell me right to my face that I am fortunate not only to have a coloured woman as my wife – they are often in awe that she agreed to marry me – but to have children who do not have albinism as I do. What is responsible for the attitude of community members to what they see about me and my family? In one word: representation. These lived experiences just described show how powerful deeply entrenched representations of a group made manifest in beliefs can be. How a group of persons are presented and represented over time to a community of selves, which becomes codified as forms of beliefs, determines largely how members of such a community of selves understand, relate with, and perceive members of such a represented group. As Richard Dyer aptly puts it in The Matter of Images (1993: 1),
How a group is represented, presented over again in cultural forms, how an image of a member of a group is taken as representative of that group, how that group is represented in terms of spoke for and on behalf of (whether they represent, speak for themselves or not), these all have to do with how members of groups see themselves and others like themselves, how they see their place in society, their right to the rights a society claims to ensure its citizens. Equally re-presentation, representativeness, representing have to do also with how others see members of a group and their place and rights, others who have the power to affect that place and those rights.
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