Explore the vast range of titles available.

The African albino figure is a narrative trope that concerns both Western and African writers. In this study, I conduct a close reading of Tara Sullivan’s Golden Boy (2013), deploying ideas from disability studies and theories of vulnerability and agency to examine how it empowers its protagonist with albinism. I argue that the narrative employs literary devices, including metaphors of curving and carved statues and elephant poaching, to frame the protagonist’s vulnerability, cultivate his agency, and foster resistance. I demonstrate that the novel negotiates the paradox of cultural representation of PWA, which oscillates between commodification and reclamation. Unlike African-authored texts on the topic, the novel significantly affords the albino figure the means to reclaim his belittled humanity and subjectivity through its deployment of a first-person narration and metaphorical representations of carving under the mentorship of a blind sculptor, Kweli. It juxtaposes carved statues, acts of carving (the protagonist’s metaphors for creative reclamation), with elephant poaching, the metaphor of the destructive commodification of life. The juxtaposition crucially destabilises myths surrounding albinism in Africa and reimagines albinism as a site of resistance and of self-making.

Despite the unification of East African states to form the East African Community, the member states also aspire to grow as integrated selves within the unification. This article draws on African philosophy’s Ubuntu and Benedict Anderson’s (2016) ideas of imagined communities to investigate whether the East African Community’s anthem and those of its three member states enmesh the concepts of individual nations’ self-integration and communal aspirations with the community’s insistence on ‘oneness’. A close reading of Uganda’s, Tanzania’s, and Kenya’s anthems reveals that they symbolically represent individual member states as integrated selves and aspire to fortify communal relations with neighbouring states, thereby signalling that individual states will flourish amongst others—the very things addressed in the EAC’s anthem. Anthems’ fictitious worlds metaphorically shed light on the materialisation of a healthy East African Community and the growth of individual member states, grounded in the principles of self- and communal integration. The paper argues that the EAC’s anthems embody the philosophy of unity and, at the same time, convey the idea of unification among the member states.