Old Fadama is about a friend I met in University in the late 90’s who passed away in 2007. She was a sufferer of Albinism.
She was born in Northern Ghana and she grew up on the e-waste slum dump in Accra called Agbogbloshie (this place was closed by the Ghanaian Government in 2021).
Her story is one that is very challenging and before passing she had charged me with telling it, but I really wasn’t ready back then.
Given that her anniversary recently passed, now is the time.
Old Fadama was the name of Agbogbloshie before it became a slum electronic dump. And my friend, being a person with albinism, was abandoned by her father. Her mother being a woman on her own with a child with albinism attracted the very terrifying and real
attention of people who believed such a child is a “curse” and should be sacrificed to release the “good magic” trapped in their bodies.
My friend’s grandfather living in Northern Ghana became her sole carer and was relocated by the government with many others from the North to Sekondi-Takoradi – a seaside village, but due to her albinism they were forced to move and were finally settled in Old Fadama
under the government missive for particular traders after the Non-Aligned Movement conference.
Here they remained after it became a slum and her grandfather passed away when she was 15, she spent the next 3 years surviving among the waste, allying herself to a gang leader for safety and it was through this connection that she was able to flee Agbogbloshie,
in that it provided her exit in the most unusual e-waste that once belonged to the US government.
People with Albinism rarely live to reach 40 years old, many are killed as infants and small children or burned en masse. My friend had beaten those odds though she died under 40 from toxins and poisons from her time living in Agbogbloshie.
Colleen Douglas
Pages from Old Fadama
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