In an appearance-driven world, the Pozteam decided to take a drive to Gugulethu, a township in Cape Town, to meet energetic Monwabisi Maqungo, a 20 year-old albino who is simply known by his friends and family as ‘Yello’. After befriending the sun and dealing with people’s way-out superstitions, Yello tells us how he copes with the stares as well as what it’s like to live under the spotlight (without the five Oscar awards to attest to his stardom).

Poz: Do people have certain beliefs about albinism?

Yello: (A lot of people believe that) “We don’t die, we just disappear, the latest one is that we turn purple when we die,” he laughs. “You also find people who will walk up to you and want to shake your hand because they think it’s good luck. So I’ll be standing somewhere and someone will just walk up, they won’t even introduce themselves, they’ll just shake my hand and walk away. I’m fine with it, I don’t say ‘don’t shake my hand’ or act out about it, most of these things I find very funny, actually.”

“Some people even have the guts that they’ll come up to you and ask: ‘Do you know what’s going to happen to you when you die?’, and I would be like ‘what do you mean, what’s going to happen to me when I die?’ And they’d say (in hushed tones) ‘people like you don’t die’, so that’s just one of a million.”

Poz: Do you face any health challenges given your lack of pigmentation?

Yello: “The sun, yoh! I even make a joke about it, we (his friends and him) were out and I was like, ‘Hey guys, I can’t walk now, because my best friend is out and I have to wait for him… you know he’s like standing there and I have to wait for him to go away’. I call the sun my best friend,” he jokes.

“You obviously have to protect yourself… If you don’t learn to take care of your skin at an early age, then it’s going to be very difficult. When I was growing up I used to have this sun block that I used to carry around with me all the time, so I grew up knowing that I had to wear sun block and stay away from the sun.”

Poz: Have you ever been badly burned?

Yello: “When I was about 12 years old, I was on holiday in Durban… I think it was at Ushaka. I didn’t have any sun block, I forgot about everything and I was wearing shorts! I was swimming the whole day and when I got home, oh my, my whole back was just one big, big blister. I couldn’t even lie on my back for a week! So I grew up knowing that you must always protect yourself from the sun and to educate yourself about yourself.”

Poz: Seeing as the sun can burn you so easily, do you now try to cover yourself up when you go outside?

Yello: “Sometimes when it’s really hot you put a little sun screen here and there, or if you are showing your arms, then you have to do your arms, neck and ears.”

Poz: What SPF factor do you use?

Yello: “The highest! I use 80,” he laughs.

Poz: Does being an albino prevent you from doing anything? How do you run errands if the sun is baking outside?

Yello: “I’m going to tell you my own way,” he smirks. “If someone says let’s go somewhere, I’ll ask them, ‘where are we going’? If the sun is then that side (facing the direction we’re headed to), I’ll tell them I’m not going there. If it’s against my back then I’ll go. But if I’ve got things to do then I’ll do them, it’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be, it goes away (the sunburn) it just takes about three days.”

Poz: Did people or other children at school for instance ever tease you or try to bully you because you were different?

Yello: “Nobody ever bullied me, ever!” he says sternly, yet jokingly. “Teasing, yeah. They’d call you weird names; they would come up with all sorts such as ‘pinky face’, ‘black-white’. The teasing is definitely there, but I think it’s because people don’t understand us. Some of them don’t even actually mean to offend you.”

“It’s all funny to me… I don’t see myself as different. I’ll even make jokes about me and people don’t understand it, because I’m supposed to be offended by it, but I joke about myself all the time.”

“I remember at college, the teacher would say ‘You guys, you making a noise’, and I’d be like ‘Ja! It’s the black people who are making the noise!’, and then they used to laugh and say ‘then what are you?’, so I told them, ‘no man, I’m not black, do you see black on me?’ and the whole class would laugh.”

Poz: It sounds like you take everything in your stride. Was it ever difficult to be socially active?

Yello: “I don’t find it hard to socialize. I talk too much and I’ve got a sense of humour the size of Table Mountain. I always tell people that if you are not confident, no one is going to go to Pick ‘n Pay and buy you a pack of self-confidence. You have to have it yourself.”

“I believe I’m famous in my own world. I don’t know why, I write silly things on Facebook and people would be like, ‘dude, do you know that you are weird? And I’d be like, ‘I know why people look at me, do you know why people look at you’? They find that very funny,” he laughs.

Poz: Do albinos associate with each other? Have you ever met another albino?

Yello: There’s this other albino guy, I think I’m a bit older than him, but he used to come and look at me and I’d ask him why but he’d just run away. I think I understand, because it’s not every day that you see another albino. And then my friends would be like, ‘Hey, there’s your brother’, or they’d say ‘Yello! Look there’s another Yello!’”

“It’s kind of weird, walking and seeing this other albino, people will look at you and then they’ll look at the other one and be like, that must be your brother or your family. They probably know that the chances of that person being a relative of mine is zero, but they’ll ask anyway. I don’t mind though, I just laugh anyway.”

Poz: Your nickname is quite peculiar, how did it come about that people started calling you ‘Yello’?

Yello: “A long time ago, there was this reggae artist and he was an albino. He was very famous for his music and they used to call him ‘Yello’. I was about four or five years-old, you know you find these stands where they sell fruit and you’ll find the Rastafarian guys, and they’ll be like ‘Yello, man’ because of that dude that they listened to.”

“So the people around me would ask why they calling me Yello man and I’d be like, I don’t know, but they liked the name, so my friends started calling me Yello and then my cousins found out about this name… my parents, family members and then everybody started calling me Yello.”

“They don’t call any other albino Yello besides me, and when I got involved in the entertainment business- when I started DJ-ing and organizing parties- I thought I needed some kind of stage name, so I thought why not Yello?”

Poz: What race do you regard yourself as?

Yello: “Black! You know people laugh, but I’m black and I’m proud! I’m me, being different, I only see that when I look in the mirror and then I’m like, oh ja, oh ja! (People) have to understand that we are people just like them. The only difference is we don’t have the same skin colour.”

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