This last was clearly fantastic even to Linnaeus’ contemporaries. Not so Homo troglodytes. By the 1750s it was well known that Africa at least contained creatures similar to man; Edward Tyson, after all, had dissected his ‘pygmy’ or chimpanzee more than fifty years previously. Another such creature, half man-half ape – the matter was all very obscure – was thought to live in the Malay Archipelago. The Dutch naturalist Jacob Bontius had illustrated just such an ‘ourang-outang’ in his Historia naturalis indiae orientalis (1658). Bontius’s ourang is a fairly human, if hairy, female wearing nothing but an alluring expression; a century later Linnaeus borrowed this woodcut and relabelled it Homo troglodytes. Bontius himself had little to say about his ourang (though he rightly questioned the Malay belief that it was the progeny of Javanese women and the local apes), so Linnaeus grafted onto its image the ancient tradition that spoke of a remote and secretive race of unnaturally white, golden-eyed and profoundly photophobic people. It is these characteristics that yield the identity of the remainder of the melange that is Homo troglodytes. Shorn of its body hair and cavernicolous habitat, it is clear that Linnaeus’ Man of the night is just an ordinary human albino.
GENEVIÈVE
Linnaeus was not the only eighteenth-century naturalist with an interest in albinos. His French rival Buffon was another, but unlike Linnaeus, Buffon actually met one. In his Histoire naturelle, he writes of an encounter with a girl named Geneviève. She was eighteen years old, a native of Dominica, the daughter of slaves transported there from the Gold Coast, and now the servant of a wealthy Parisienne. Buffon examined her minutely. She was 151 centimetres (four feet eleven inches) tall, with slanted grey eyes slightly tinted orange towards the lens, and skin the colour of chalk. Yet her facial features, he said, were absolutely those of a négresse noire, a black African woman. True, her ears were stuck unusually high on her head, yet even so they were quite different from those of the Blafards, the albinos of the Darien Peninsula, whose ears were said to be both small and translucent. Buffon measured her limbs, her head, her feet, her hair; he devotes a paragraph to her breasts, notes that she was a virgin, and then, with interest, that she could blush.
What made Geneviève white? Buffon was certain that Linnaeus’ Homo troglodytes was just an ape. As for the Blafards, Kakurlakos and Chacrelats, these were merely descriptions of anomalously depigmented people living amid an otherwise dark-skinned population. One in ten children born in the Caribbean islands, he was told, was an albino. Geneviève’s parents were black, as were her siblings; whatever the cause of her whiteness it could not be contagious or even racial. Though he failed to solve the problem of albinism, when compared to the fantasies of Linnaeus, Buffon left it immeasurably clearer. He also commissioned a lithograph of Geneviève, which shows her standing amid tropical fruit, quite naked and snow-white, as if in a photographic negative, smiling gently, perhaps at the absurdity of scientists.
THE PALETTE
We are a polychrome species. Yet the palette of human colour has only two pigments on it. One, eumelanin, is responsible for the darker shades in our skin, hair and eyes, the browns and the blacks; the other, phaeomelanin, for the fairer shades, the blonds and reds. As a painter mixes three primary colours to get all others, so too the various shades of our skins are given by the mix of these pigments.
Blacks have lots of eumelanin; redheads have lots of phaeomelanin; blonds have little of either. Albinos have no skin pigments at all. The pigments themselves are made in cells called melanocytes that are found within the top layers of the skin, the epidermis. These melanocytes package pigments into sub-cellular structures called melanosomes which they then transfer to the skin cells immediately above them, giving them colour. Mutations in several genes cause albinism. The most common disables one of the enzymes that melanocytes use to make pigment. In such cases even the eyes are devoid of pigment, and their redness comes from the retina’s blood vessels. The absence of pigment makes albinos sensitive to light and they often squint – hence the photophobia and slanted eyes of the Kakurlakos and Blafards. But some albinos have at least some pigment in their eyes, and in these cases the defect lies in a protein that is called, somewhat enigmatically, ‘P’, used in the packaging and transport of melanosomes. Geneviève’s eyes were grey, not red, and it is almost certain that both copies of her P gene were defective. We can even guess what the mutation was. The most common cause of albinism in Africa is homozygosity for a 2.7 kilobase-pair deletion in the P gene. The same mutation is found in the Caribbean and among blacks in the United States as well, carried there by the slave trade.
There are no tribes, races or nations of albinos anywhere in the world; however, Pliny’s Leucaethopes are not entirely without foundation. About 1 in 36,000 Europeans is born albino, and 1 in 10,000 Africans. But the number jumps to 1 in 4500 among the Zulu and 1 in 1100 among the Ibo of Nigeria, and in very local populations the frequency can become even higher. In 1871, en route to his encounter with the Aka pygmies, George Schweinfurth came across some.
There is one special characteristic that is quite peculiar to the Monbuttos. To judge from the hundreds who paid visits of curiosity to my tent, and from the thousands whom I saw during my three weeks sojourn with Munza, I should say that at least 5 per cent of the population have light hair. This was always of the closely-frizzled negro type, and was always associated with the lightest skin that I had seen since leaving lower Egypt…All the individuals who had this light hair and complexion had a sickly expression about the eyes and presented many signs of pronounced albinism.
That albinism can be so common is a bit surprising. African albinos have, by any account, a hard time of it. Not only do they often suffer social discrimination and have difficulty finding marriage partners, but for want of pigment they cannot work for any length of time outdoors, and they are also prone to melanomas, a particularly destructive variety of skin cancer. These selective disadvantages should act to keep albino genes, and hence albinos, rare. Some geneticists have suggested that one reason for the high frequency (1 in 200) of albinism among the Hopi Indians of Arizona is that albino men, excused from working in the fields, stay at home and therefore dally among the women. But the evidence for this seems to rest on the charms of one old Hopi gentleman who was reputed to have fathered more than a dozen illicit children.
PIEBALDS