The Helsinki Notebooks

Violence against people living with disabilities is often preceded and legitimized by language that dehumanizes them. Throughout history, language has been used not only to mark social difference but to construct hierarchies of human worth, asserting the superiority of the ingroup, dehumanize the outgroup, and justify acts of hatred.¹

In Nazi Germany’s euthanasia programme, people with physical and mental disabilities were said not to measure up to a “master race,” considered “unfit,” “handicapped,” “useless” to society, “a threat to Aryan genetic purity” and “unworthy of life”. They were killed by gassing, injection of a deadly dose of drugs or starvation.² This programme was arguably the most radical and violent implementation of the eugenics policy. The term eugenics was coined by Francis Galton, who initiated the eugenics movement founded on the doctrine that mental characteristics such as intelligence, similar to physical characteristics, are hereditary.³

In this vein, the establishment of eugenics societies in many Western countries popularized the idea of limiting the number of the ‘genetically inferior’ in a population. Language was used to justify this project; its necessity was equated to the tending of a garden or the pruning of a tree, sparing and nurturing only the most valuable plants, or parts of plants. In the ‘perfect garden’ there was no room for ‘disabled’ plants.⁴

Similarly, there is evidence in some African languages, of the dehumanisation of people living with disabilities. However, this is frequently called discrimination or stigmatization. For example, among the Gusii people of Kenya, a person living with a disability of the limbs is called ekerema. The syllable eke– is for objects such as ekerandi (gourd). The syllable is also present in words used to describe some animals such as ekemoni (a cat). The syllable denoting a person is omo– such as in the words omonto (a person), omosacha (a man) and omongina (a woman). There are some other disabilities that are denoted by the syllable omo-. Two examples will suffice: omouko (a blind person) and omotino (a deaf person). Here, the individual is primarily identified by the disability. This categorical marking by impairment contributes to a form of linguistic dehumanization.

In Nazi Germany, the killing of people living with disabilities was a government ideology. It was concentrated in one region, during a set period, using specific techniques involving science, and the numbers killed were high. In Africa, the killing of people living with disabilities has so far not been demonstrated as government ideology; the killing techniques are not similar to those in Nazi Germany; and the number of killings reported are much lower. However, the killings are reported in several African countries, occurring intermittently but spanning many years. This could be part of the explanation for the failure to attract more serious global attention and stricter measures to bring them to an end.

The case of Sudan in 2025 nevertheless attracted some international media coverage and condemnation. Since the outbreak of war in April 2023 between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) — following the 2019 toppling of President Omar al-Bashir — the two sides have been locked in a struggle for power.⁵ According to one report, the RSF seized control of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, on 26 October 2025 after an 18-month siege, during and after which they abused and executed people with disabilities, who were singled out, mocked as “insane”, and told they were not “complete”.⁶

According to disability rights activists interviewed by Human Rights Watch, similar RSF abuses on people living with disabilities had been reported in other parts of the country. One witness, a father, recounted how RSF fighters cruelly told him that his son living with a disability was “slowing other people down” as they fled the fighting. The son was then executed as the father watched. Another witness, whose family member was living with disability, said the RSF told them, “let us help you get rid of them”, implying that RSF believed that people living with disability were viewed as a burden.

Other witnesses reported that they saw people living with disabilities being executed by machine gun fire. The witnesses included other people living with disabilities and healthcare workers. For instance, a healthcare worker reported that among those executed were a young man suffering from Down Syndrome who was being carried by his sister. She was ordered to put him down and he was executed. A blind child, a blind teenager and a young woman who could not walk because of her disability were also executed as family members and other people pleaded for mercy. Other people living with disabilities were severely beaten, their assistive devices such as wheelchairs stolen by the RSF forces, while others had to buy their freedom by paying ransom to the RSF.⁷ All these people were killed or abused because of their status: living with disability.

The RSF arose from the Janjaweed — government-backed Arab militias that carried out widespread atrocities against civilians in Darfur from 2003 onwards.⁸ With the backing of Sudanese government forces, the Janjaweed were responsible for killing people with disabilities and the elderly by burning them to death in their huts on 18, 19 and 22 February 2008 during attacks on Jebel Mun in West Darfur.⁹ It is evident that the torture and killing of people with disabilities is a key strategy that the RSF uses to achieve its objectives. It is their ideology.

The targeting and killing of people living with disabilities is not limited to armed conflicts in Africa. Abductions and killings of people living with albinism for their body parts have been reported in several African countries, including Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Burundi, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa, driven by beliefs related to witchcraft, empowerment and cleansing. Children born with albinism are often perceived as curses on their families and are abandoned, excluded from the community, or even killed.¹⁰ This situation prompted the African Union to adopt the Plan of Action to End Attacks and other Human Rights Violations Targeting Persons with Albinism in Africa (2021-2031).¹¹

These attacks form part of a broader pattern of disability-related violence that has been documented across the African continent, where entrenched cultural beliefs have legitimised the killing or abandonment of infants born with disabilities. It has been documented, for example, that when a woman gave birth to a child with a disability, the community could pressure the family to kill the infant. In northern Ghana, babies born with disabilities, referred to as “spirit children,” were believed to be possessed by evil spirits and were given poisonous drinks to end their lives.¹² Similarly, in Cote d’Ivoire, children born with intellectual disability, known as ‘snake children’, were killed or abandoned.¹³

The use of language that dehumanizes people living with disabilities — frequently dismissed as stigma or discrimination in Africa — creates a moral framework in which violence against them becomes thinkable, justifiable, and, in some contexts, socially acceptable. Across parts of the continent, this dehumanization has been linked to the persecution of people with disabilities during armed conflict, the killing of infants born with disabilities, and the targeting of persons with albinism for ritual purposes. While these acts differ from the state-directed euthanasia programme of Nazi Germany in their scale, institutionalization, and historical context, they share a disturbing underlying logic: the construction of disabled lives as less valuable, burdensome, expendable.

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References

1. Kennedy, B., Golazizian, P., Trager, J., Atari, M., Hoover, J., Mostafazadeh Davani, A., and Dehghani, M. (2023). The (Moral) Language of Hate. PNAS Nexus, 2(7): 210. ↩︎
2. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Murder of People with Disabilities.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-murder-of-people-with-disabilities. ↩︎
3. Grue, L. (2010). Eugenics and Euthanasia–Then and Now. In Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 12(1): 33-45. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Council on Foreign Relations (2026, May 8). Civil War in Sudan. cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/power-struggle-sudan. ↩︎
6. Human Rights Watch (2026, February 24). Sudan: People with Disabilities Targeted in North Darfur. hrw.org/news/2026/02/24/sudan-people-with-disabilities-targeted-in-north-darfur ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Hashim, M. (2022, April 26). Darfur: Why are Sudan’s Janjaweed on the Attack Again? bbc.com/news/world-africa-61217999. ↩︎
9. Human Rights Watch (2008, May 4). “They Shot at Us as We Fled”: Government Attacks on Civilians in West Darfur in February 2008. hrw.org/reports/2008/darfur0508/darfur0508.htm. ↩︎
10. UN Human Rights (2017, April 4).  People with Albinism: Hunted for Their Body Parts. unhumanrights.medium.com/hunted-for-their-body-parts-6715baa8b6b. ↩︎
11. OHCHR (2026). Albinism in Africa: Independent Expert on Albinism. ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/ie-albinism/albinism-africa. ↩︎
12. BBC (2013, April 29). Ghanaians Ban ‘Spirit Child’ Killing. bbc.com/news/world-africa-22335634. ↩︎
13. Bayat M. (2015). The Stories of ‘Snake Children’: Killing and Abuse of Children with Developmental Disabilities in West Africa. Journal of intellectual disability research: JIDR, 59(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/jir.12118. ↩︎

To cite this article:

Augustus Nyakundi, ‘”Euthanasia” in Africa? Evidence from Language, Culture and Armed Conflicts,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 2, No. 17 (03 August 2026).

“Euthanasia” in Africa? Evidence from Language, Culture and Armed Conflicts © 2026 by Augustus Nyakundi is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0