Nyakagwa Mahaga Performing Arts

28/05/2026

A rare albino buffalo in Bangladesh named after U.S. President Donald Trump because of its blond tuft of hair has been spared from ritual sacrifice after going viral online.

The nearly 1,500-pound buffalo had reportedly already been sold for slaughter ahead of Eid al-Adha when videos of the animal spread widely across social media, turning it into a national attraction.

Crowds soon began flocking to the farm to see the buffalo in person, prompting authorities to intervene over growing security concerns.

Officials have now reportedly arranged for the animal to be moved to the national zoo in Dhaka instead.

28/05/2026

😉

22/05/2026

20/05/2026

18/05/2026

Adeti M, Writes

The First Shoes

The sisters laughed a lot during our recording session. The kind of laughter the of people touched by life and of women who have survived humiliation long enough to no longer fear memory. They kept looking at each other while speaking, correcting each other softly, interrupting one another with shy smiles and small jokes, laughing at things that perhaps should not even be funny. That is what survival often does. It teaches people to laugh from the exact places that once badly wounded them.

Mutanji Gentrix and Maureen come from Kakamega County, from a family of 8 children, 3 of whom live with albinism. Their parents are simple farmers, ordinary people trying to stretch little harvests into school fees, food, and survival. In their entire extended family, there are no other persons with albinism. They were the first. The explanation. The village mystery. Plainly putting it, villages can be very cruel places for children who visibly carry difference.

Growing up was not gentle. People mocked them openly, ridiculed them constantly, and called them names until self esteem slowly became something they had to consciously rebuild later in their life. Yet, while narrating all this, neither sister speaks with bitterness toward their parents. Instead, they defend them carefully, the way many African children do when they understand that love and knowledge are not always the same thing. Their parents tried. They truly did emphasised Maureen. However, trying to raise children with albinism without understanding the condition itself meant they were parenting through confusion, fear, and limited information.

Teenagehood complicated everything further because that is the age where girls begin wanting belonging, friendship, softness, compliments, and affirmation from the world around them. Instead, colour became the first thing people noticed about them. Gentrix laughs now while narrating how she fell in love with a man who “pretended” to love her. The word pretended made all of us laugh, including others in the office who seemed lost in their own worlds as the heavy rain pattered the bricked pavement a floor below. There was something painfully mischievous in the way she said it, like a woman who has cried enough over something and can now finally tease the memory of it.

Nonetheless, beneath that laughter sat betrayal.

She became full with child. The man denied both her and the pregnancy immediately. Worse still, she says quietly, he insisted he could never have a child with “a person like her.” At one point, she reveals something so horrifying she almost says it casually, that he wanted the child dead so that there would be no evidence connecting him to the baby. Better somewhat, life continued.

Today, that little boy is 7 years old and in Grade 2, growing under the protection of women who themselves once had to grow without much protection apart from being their for each other- that, that was sustainable resilience. Beside Gentrix sat Maureen, quieter, softer in speech, but carrying her own heaviness. She does not have children yet, but somehow she mothers everybody around her. She supports the family financially, helps care for her sister and the little boy. She continues pursuing her own education while balancing responsibilities many people twice her age would struggle to carry. She is a primary school teacher.

Their high school experience sounds almost unreal by all ordinary standards. They describe themselves as pioneers of the school. Meaning they entered it before it had properly become functional. There were barely enough resources, no laboratories, few trained teachers, and many lessons were handled by Form Four leavers instead of qualified educators. Yet, somehow they still persisted academically through all this. Gentrix pursued Community Development and Social Work and now volunteers at Sigalagala National Polytechnic daycare, though volunteer work itself comes with no payments and uncertainty. Maureen became a primary school teacher and is currently pursuing a diploma in Special Needs Education while still trying to financially support younger siblings and contribute toward the family’s survival.

What nearly undoes us, however, is the story of how they first came to Nairobi. Before meeting Dr. Choksey Albinism Foundation, their lives carried another kind of danger entirely. This was during the years when persons with albinism across East Africa were being hunted because of the myth that their body parts could generate wealth and power. Villages became frightening places. Families hid children indoors. Fear travelled through communities faster than truth itself. Then one day, someone connected to Dr.Prabha Choksey’s network arrived in their village.

Neither sister until today fully understands how the Foundation first heard about them. They only know that somebody came, spoke to their parents, and suddenly Nairobi entered their lives like something- it was both unreal and surreal to them. The year was 2011. Gentrix was in Class Seven while Maureen was already in Form Two. They packed quickly, carrying tiny bags not fully understanding where they were going.

This detail quietly breaks your heart. Gentrix arrived in Nairobi barefoot. Completely barefoot.

When she says this, she laughs with the kind of embarrassment that financially incapacitated people sometimes carry when narrating memories they themselves now find unbelievable. The first pair of shoes she ever owned was a pair of slippers bought for her after arriving at the Foundation. Ordinary slippers. Bathroom slippers to most people, but to her, they felt luxurious. She remembers them vividly, and while narrating the story, her face glows with the same excitement of that young village girl arriving in Nairobi for the first time, frightened, amazed, and unaware that the city would slowly become part of her survival story.

From there, things slowly began changing. They received spectacles, sunscreen, medical care, attention, and protection. More importantly, they began encountering a different version of themselves, one beyond ridicule, beyond village gossip, beyond fear. Life did not suddenly become easy. Money is still little. Responsibilities are still heavy. Employment remains unstable. The future still demands more than they currently possess. Yet now there is movement in their lives. There is confidence. There is language for who they are. There is the quiet dignity that comes from no longer hiding from the world.

At the end of the conversation, the sisters began speaking directly to other young women living with albinism. Their words were not polished or rehearsed. They sounded lived. Having albinism, they insisted, does not mean life ends there. One can still grow, still learn, still become.Sitting beside each other beneath the Foundation’s banner, laughing between memories that should have broken them completely, they already looked like women becoming far more than the world once expected of them.

“The sky is the limit,” Maureen said softly.

For the first time in a very long time, it sounded believable.

08/05/2026

Adeti M, Writes

The Silver Streaks on Rimiri’s Face

Some stories do not shard you loudly. They sit quietly in your chest way after the conversation has concluded. Long after everyone else has gone home. Long after the room regained its normalcy. This was one of them. I could not cry there, not in front of her, not in front of the child, but waited until I got home and entered my bedroom, and closed the door behind me.
Then, I cried alone.

She is a mother of very bright children. The kind teachers recall, the kind that carry infinite possibility in their eyes. However, beneath all her strength lives one persistent fear, that poverty might fail them academically before life gives them the chance to become who they are dream to be, and somewhere in the middle of our conversation sat little Rimiri. His tears slipping down slowly. Shy silver streaks glistening against his perfect skin. He had begun crying because his mother was crying.
Quietly. Innocently.
The way children absorb pain before they can even understand it. Children with albinism cry differently. Maybe it is because their skin catches light differently, maybe because emotion becomes too visible on them. Whatever it is, those tears stayed with me.

Her name is Irene Muthoni Rimiri. She is 48, educated, composed, and carrying exhaustion in the careful way many mothers do. She sat for her KCPE, proceeded with her education, and continued all the way to college where she pursued secretarial studies. Life, at least at first, had unfolded normally enough. She got married to the father of her children, and together they were blessed with three children, a first born daughter, then a son, and finally Jayden, the only child with albinism.

The day Jaden was born shifted the emotional rhythm of the family in ways she still struggles to explain without a tremble. There had been complications during delivery and she underwent a caesarean section. When the baby finally arrived, confusion filled the room. She remembers staring at him and thinking something was wrong, that perhaps the child was sick. Some nurses looked uncertain. Others reacted differently, joking loudly that a “Mzungu” had been born. You know what? That is how casually difference enters African hospital rooms- humour before humanity.

The father was there that day. He did not react immediately, nonetheless something shifted gradually. Finally.

She recalls that period like someone replaying a slow collapse. Visitors flooded the house, not necessarily to celebrate the baby, but to see him. To look. To confirm the rumours with their own eyes. Curiosity entered the home cloaked as concern. Meanwhile, her husband slowly began withdrawing into alcohol. She says, before Jayden, he had not been an alcoholic. After Jayden, something changed in him, silently and then completely.

…then one day, he left.Not just emotionally. Physically. He disappeared from the responsibility of fatherhood and from the marriage itself, leaving her with 3 children and very little stability. Since then, she has carried the full weight of raising them alone. At some point, the family house was sold. The ancestral home disappeared too. Whether it was alcohol, another woman, or both, she no longer has the energy to fully investigate. Survival has left her little room for detective work. Now they live modestly. Painfully modestly.

In the nights, her children sleep on the floor. She says this quietly, not as a show of performance or seeking pity. In fact, what nearly destroys you is not her despair but her gratitude. “At least they have a house,” she says. “At least we have shelter.” That is how mothers survive by shrinking catastrophe into something manageable enough to wake up beside the next morning.

Inside all this instability, her children continue shining academically. Her first born daughter studies at a national school in Narok and is currently in Form Four. Her second born son is also very bright, and in grade 8. Jayden, the little Rimiri with the silver tears, is thriving too. Bright. Observant. Doing well in school despite everything pressing against him. Irene speaks about them with a mixture of pride and fear, the fear that brilliance alone may not be enough when school fees, pocket money, transport, uniforms, and ordinary survival continue standing in the way.

There is a particular kind of helplessness that lives inside mothers who know their children are gifted but cannot always afford to carry those gifts safely into the future.That pain sat all over her.

She speaks about the Dr. Choksey Albinism Foundation almost like someone speaking about rescue after drowning. Before finding the Foundation, she says she had no hope. She did not know how her son would continue with school, how she would access spectacles for him, or how she would navigate the condition itself. Since joining the Foundation last year, she says everything has slowly started changing. Jaden now has spectacles. His education is stabilising. She has met other mothers carrying the same wounds she thought belonged only to her. There is healing in discovering that suffering has company. Amidist the tears and these words, she was in a deep state of gratitude to Dr. Prabha Choksey for accepting her into her whole family of mothers and children with albinism.

…perhaps that is why she cried so openly while speaking. Not because she was weak. Some women carry pain silently for so long that when safety finally arrives, the body no longer knows how to contain emotion properly. At one point, I reminded her about another girl from the Foundation, a young woman now interning at NCBA Bank through connections and support from Foundation.

She is the only child in her entire family to finish high school, let alone join university. I told her that her children are miracles. That one day they would surprise her. That one day the same child whose birth shattered her marriage will rebuild her life ten times over. For the first time since we started talking, she smiled properly. Small. Fragile. Real ( see the photo attached).

Mothers like Irene do not ask for luxury anymore. Life has already negotiated them downward into appreciating shelter, school uniforms, spectacles, one stable meal, another term completed successfully. What remains extraordinary is that despite abandonment, humiliation, sleeping on floors, raising children alone, she still speaks about the future as though she believes in it.

Somewhere beside her sat little Rimiri, his silver tears drying slowly against his beautiful skin. Crying simply because his mother was crying, unaware perhaps that his existence, the same existence that broke one man apart, might one day become the reason his mother finally rests

06/05/2026

Adeti M, Writes

Endless Sun

James Kinya was born in 1975 into a life that began with punishment before he could understood what he had done wrong. He comes from a family where albinism was feared, misunderstood, and tied to cultural suspicion, especially towards women. His mother was the second wife in that big home, and when children with albinism began being born, the blame settled heavily on her, and her body.

She was beaten often, humiliated publicly, and at times forced to spend nights outside after being chased away. James speaks about those years almost casually now, the way people do when pain has lived with them for too long to still sound shocking. In that household, several children with albinism were born. Some died young. Even now, he does not explain those deaths medically. He speaks about them from the cultural atmosphere that surrounded such children then.

That was where fear, neglect, stigma, and silence swallowed lives that were deemed voiceless as soon as they came out bearing a unique authenticity. Eventually, only 3 remained. One of his older sisters, who also lives with albinism, struggles with mental disability, and their mother bore and still bears the burden. After years of punishment and instability, their mother finally reached a breaking point. She left the marriage, and moved to Nairobi carrying the children and whatever else remained of hope.

They settled in Mathare where their common language of existence was absolute survival. He remembers arriving there as a young boy, around 7 years old, entering a world where poverty was visible in every direction, but strangely enough, Nairobi also gave them something the village never had, anonymity. In Mathare, everybody was struggling with something.

People did not stop and stare as much. Hunger equalised people in a strange way. Through missionaries from Italy, an opportunity eventually opened and James was taken to St. Francis School for the Blind in Makuyu. For a brief moment, life seemed to stretch toward a fair light. However, like many things in his life, that opportunity also came with interruption. The missionaries later returned to Italy. The support stopped, school fees disappeared with them, and he could not continue with his studies.

He reached Standard 8 and that was where formal education ended for him.

His mother could not afford to take him further, so he turned toward skill-based work instead. He trained in leatherwork, completed an artisan course, and received his certificate. After that, he became another young man moving around Nairobi searching for employment and dignity at the same time. It was not easy. Some people mocked him openly because of his appearance. Others took advantage of him because they assumed desperation would keep him quiet. He remembers working for a company for months with almost nothing meaningful to show for it, staying simply because opportunities for men with albinism were already painfully limited.

Eventually, he decided to create something of his own instead of waiting endlessly for acceptance from other people. He started a small leather workshop and began producing leather products. For a while, life steadied itself. There was structure. There was income. There was even pride in the fact that he could train younger boys interested in the craft. He was not just surviving anymore, he was building something. Then one day the workshop was broken into and everything was stolen. Machines. Materials. Products. Years of slow rebuilding disappeared overnight, and just like that, he returned to zero.

What is striking about James, is the way he speaks about struggle almost like a companion he has known all his life. Poverty, disappointment, instability, rejection, he no longer narrates them dramatically because to him they are not interruptions. They are ordinary. At some point, hardship stopped feeling temporary and simply became part of his existence. Still, life moved. In 2004, he got married. His wife comes from another community, and together they built a family with 4 children, 2 girls and 2 boys, none of whom have albinism.

When he speaks about his children, his voice softens slightly. They simply know him as their father. Not as a condition. Not as a cautionary tale. Just as their dad. That matters deeply to him because his own childhood carried too much awareness of difference. His eldest daughter recently joined college, and one can almost hear pride wrestling quietly against exhaustion when he mentions it. For a man who barely made it beyond Standard 8, seeing his daughter step into higher education feels significant, almost like history correcting itself in small ways.

James says fatherhood while living with albinism in Kenya has not been easy. He speaks openly about the economics of simply existing in his skin. Sunscreen, protective clothing, treatment, vitamins, skin care, regular medical checkups, all these things cost money many people living with albinism simply do not have. He explains how difficult manual labour becomes because of prolonged sun exposure. Construction sites, carrying heavy loads, outdoor jobs, these are not small inconveniences to him.

The sun is danger. Yet, responsibilities remain the same. Children still need fees. Food still needs to be bought. Rent still arrives. He believes strongly that the government fails people like him because disability support rarely reflects the realities of living with albinism. Many men, he says, suffer quietly. Some are rejected by families from childhood. Others fail to secure stable employment. Many survive through charity, temporary support, or luck. At this stage of his life, he says plainly that he survives largely on charity. There is no self-pity in the statement. Only fatigue. His withdrawn eyes say it all.

He met Dr. Prabha Choksey sometime between 2006 and 2007 after being referred through missionaries, and since then she has remained one of the few stable support systems in his life. He speaks about her less as a doctor, and more as a mother figure to many people living with albinism, especially those who have nowhere else to turn. He talks about how common skin cancer is within the community, how many people die simply because proper care is too expensive or inaccessible, and how exhausting it becomes trying to explain to people that living with albinism is expensive in ways most ordinary Kenyans never imagine.

Even relationships, he says with a rough laugh, are affected by poverty and myth. Some people assume persons with albinism possess hidden wealth because of the dangerous superstitions surrounding their body parts. Others approach them with curiosity instead of sincerity. Life has taught him caution. But surprisingly, not bitterness.

James’ story does clock in wrapped in triumphant language. There is no dramatic transformation waiting at the end of it. No miraculous breakthrough. No neat redemption arc. It is simply the story of a man who has endured disappointment so consistently that he learned how to sit beside it without allowing it to completely destroy him. He continues. He raises his children. He survives. He tells his story plainly.

Perhaps there is something profoundly human in that kind of endurance, the quiet determination to keep moving even when life has given you very few reasons to expect ease. He still continues to get manageable support from Dr. Choksey Albinism Foundation.

23/04/2026

We are among the narrative shifters of our motherland!

African has to be see for what it is.
1. Source of civilisation
2. Authentic cultures
3. A people still holding onto what should be of mankind- humane.
4. UBUNTU!

If you think “Africa = Safari,” this post is for you. Our groundbreaking 2025 study confirms that most UK and US respondents see wildlife, poverty, and bad politics when they think about Africa.
It’s time to rethink the lens by telling better stories about Africa.
Read ‘Stereotypes About Africa in Britain and the United States’ report here → https://africanofilter.org/evidence/dispora/new-report-reveals-uk-and-us-still-see-africa-through-a-lens-of-poverty-corruption-and-nature/