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WHERE IS THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS AFRICAN?
By Jane Musoke-Nteyafas
Toronto, Canada
Afrocentric Beauty
Black
women of antiquity were legendary for their beauty and
power. During this time, the African
woman with her typical African physiognomy was believed
to be the standard of beauty in that part of the ancient
world. Yet today with very few exceptions it is very
rare to see a black woman who is reflected in the media
as a more natural African appearance with pronounced
African features as opposed to stylized European
features (aquiline noses, thin lips and eyebrows). It is
rare to see her portrayed as an ideal of beauty in
magazines and other forms of media. It would seem that
all over the world, beautiful African princesses are
encouraged or better yet subtly pressured to follow the
standards of lily white beauty. Whereas there is nothing
wrong with Eurocentric beauty, there is something wrong
with presenting it as the standard which all women must
follow. There is something wrong with lording straight
hair and lighter skin as the more acceptable ideal of
beauty and therefore negating authentic African beauty.
Unfortunately it’s the African woman that is at the
bottom of the heap when it comes to this.
Since slavery and colonization, the
colour caste system within the entire African and
Diaspora community has promoted a hierarchy that
suggests the more European one's features - the lighter
one's skin, the less ethnic one's facial features and
the straighter and longer one's hair - the greater one's
social value. Therefore it is becoming increasingly
important to pioneer the representation of Afrocentric
beauty. It is important that African women challenge and
transform this universal standard by making the choice
to just be themselves without the European enhancements,
without the contact lenses, the damaging chemicals in
our hair, and the skin lighteners. The standard of
beauty that abounds today is certainly not universal.
How can it be when we have Native Amerindian, Chinese,
Latina, Scandinavian, Indian and Afrocentric beauty
which are as diverse as the stars in the universe? Even
the universe itself does not embrace a universal
standard of beauty. The stereotypical views of beauty
which do not seem to include the African woman are
man-made laws.
Freedom of choice and style is a
great argument. So is the argument that variety is the
spice of life. But not when it’s to the detriment of
many young black girls’ self-esteems. To be taught from
infancy that looking anything but authentically,
naturally African is the acceptable standard when one is
born with inherent African features is WRONG. To be told
that African hair has to be covered up, straightened and
is just too nappy to be seen in public is WRONG. For
skin lighteners to be big business in Africa is WRONG.
We need to embrace ourselves as African women. We need
to love ourselves as God (For those who believe in him)
created us. We need to love our hair, hips, lips,
buttocks, skin colour and noses. We need to value the
African wombs we came from. No one else can do that for
us. Our ancestry is thousands of years old; we have been
black for thousands of years and now is not the time to
be erased or disallowed.
What about our hair?
There is a commercial in Essence
Magazine which shows a flustered-looking, very
pretty, black woman with wild African hair. The
commercial then shows her on the next page with
bone-straight permed hair looking more relaxed, relieved
and smiling. The ad blatantly says that she now looks
better and more presentable. It’s sad that many of us
believe the false adage that straight hair is better, or
blonde hair is better than African hair. Once again many
Africans have been bamboozled into thinking the
Eurocentric way is better. It has permeated so deeply in
our societies to the point where an African woman with
chemically damaged hair, a perm, will look at a natural
haired woman and ask her how she has the guts to walk
around like that.
To quote a famous African writer Kola
Boof in her book Diary of a Lost Girl,
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“Black women come from Africa blood…so
most of them do not have long, naturally flowing hair
like the women in movies, television, commercials and
the women in the NBA….Long flowing hair simply
isn’t a biological characteristic of authentic black
women and of course there has NEVER been a single
pre-colonial society in Africa, not even in Egypt or
Ethiopia where long [flowing-added by writer]
hair was the standard of beauty (at least not until
1900)…” |
Many Africans have been poisoned and
brainwashed into thinking that the genetic beauty of a
European woman is better than the genetic beauty of an
African woman. There is no standard or colour which is
better; there are only physical and physiognomic surface
differences. These differences, in the Africans case
being the kinky hair, wider noses, thicker lips,
considerable buttocks and high levels of melanin in our
pigmentation are what give us our different cultural
identities.
Is light skin better?
One would never expect to see this
phenomenon. As a matter of fact, a lot of blacks from
the Diaspora are shocked when they go o Africa and
witness this, because they consider Africa to be the
source of blackness; the genesis of black pride and
black beauty. But bleaching creams are big business in
Africa. One would not think that colorism exists in
Africa but it does, just like it does in the USA where
light skinned Africans are considered more beautiful and
better than darker Africans. In Uganda for example it is
not unusual to hear people say “those Nubians are so
black!” with a derogatory expression as if being the
colour of charcoal were a crime. Many women who are not
born light-skinned will use artificial means to lighten
their skins; even to the extent of using clothing bleach
which does lighten their skin, but also has detrimental
results, including burning and scarring their skin. To
make matters worse there are numerous African men who
encourage this practice and buy the products for their
women. Such is the psychological damage to many African
women that they think that their darkness is a stain.
If the purchasing power were higher in
Africa, plastic surgery would probably be big business
as well. What is ironic about this is while many African
women are trying to remove themselves from their
darkness by bleaching their skins, many Europeans and
North Americans frequent tanning lounges to ‘get some
colour.’ They visit the Caribbean to darken their skins
and show off their never-lasting tans with pride. More
Europeans and North Americans are braiding their hair
and dread locking it. White women are botoxing their
lips to have the fuller look that most Africans have
from birth; the Angelina Jolie lips. Even more
remarkable are those who are having operations to
increase the size of their buttocks. Yet African
beauty is vilified and nullified throughout the media.
From the few portrayals of Africa on western
televisions, you would not know that some of the most
beautiful women in the world are African.
One of the biggest injustices done to
black people all over the world, including Africans is
the lie that the standard of European beauty is far more
superior than any other standard. As mentioned before, I
have nothing wrong against Eurocentric beauty; there are
many beautiful Eurocentric people. My problem is with it
being propagated as the standard which everyone else
should follow including Asians, Indians, Latinos and
blacks. It’s very unreal to expect every single human to
have long flowing hair, blonde or brunette hair and
blue, green or light brown eyes. That negates the
identity of all the other cultures.
Slavery and colonization did its damage
to blacks all over the world, but it did not eradicate
the last threads of African identity. That is being done
by subtly forcing Africans to embrace Eurocentric
culture as theirs at the expense of their own.
Cultures and traditions
Some of our cultures and traditions are
still considered backward, primitive and savage. Young
Africans are taught that the modern way is better; most
times the modern way is a negation of the ancient way of
doing things. The youth have bought into the
Europeanized standard of peer pressure where old
heritage, customs and traditions are considered old
fashioned. It is not cool to kneel for your elders, it
is not cool to respect elders, it is not cool to speak
native dialects, it is not cool to wear African
clothes-because European ones are better and more
fashionable, it is not cool to wear African jewellery-because
you will look old-fashioned and like a villager. So this
slow eradication of cultural norms, as subtle as it is,
is slowly making African culture extinct. It’s happening
very slowly, but it is happening.
Whose history is it anyway?
It never occurred to me until I had
moved to Canada how little we Africans really know about our history. It never occurred to me that
a lot of the history that we learn in African schools,
at least in Ugandan schools was written by non Africans,
non black people. Despite the fact that I did history in
my A’ levels (college in Canadian standards) I learnt
the important contributions that people like Cheikh Anta
Diop, Joseph B. Danquah,
Phyllis Wheatly, W.E.B Dubois,
Booker T Washington had made long after I had left
university. I learnt it on my own. To quote
The Ghanaian historian, Joseph B.
Danquah, in his introduction to the book, United West
Africa at the Bar of the Family of Nations, by
Ladipo Solanke, published in 1927:
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"By the time Alexander the Great was
sweeping the civilized world with conquest after
conquest from Chaeronia to Gaza, from Babylon to Cabul;
by the time the first Aryan conquerors were learning the
rudiments of war and government at the feet of the
philosopher Aristotle; and by the time Athens was laying
down the foundations of European civilization, the
earliest and greatest Ethiopian culture had already
flourished and dominated the civilized world for over
four centuries and a half.
……Thus, at the time when Ethiopia was
leading the civilized world in culture and conquest,
East was East, but West was not, and the first European
(Grecian) Olympiad was yet to be held. Rome was nowhere
to be seen on the map, and sixteen centuries were to
pass before Charlemagne would rule in Europe and Egbert
became first King of England. Even then, history was to
drag on for another seven hundred weary years, before
Roman Catholic Europe could see fit to end the Great
Schism, soon to be followed by the disturbing news of
the discovery of America and the fateful rebirth of the
youngest of world civilizations." |
I was never taught that in my history
classes. Nor did I learn about the greatness of the
ancient Egyptian era and its links to the rest of
Africa. I was not taught that the Greek writer Herodotus
repeatedly referred to the Egyptians as being
dark-skinned people with woolly hair. "They," he says,
"have the same tint of skin which approaches that of the
Ethiopians." I never learnt how many of our languages
are linked to Egypt to the point where Egypt had kings
called Shabaka and Shabataka and the
present day Buganda king is called Sabataka Kabaka.
I was not taught that Sudan has several pyramids.
I was not taught that there was
historical, archaeological and anthropological evidence
which supported the fact that all civilization came from
Africa. In fact a lot of our history focused on
Africans being discovered by Europeans, being colonized,
and slavery, not to mention the preaching of the
superiority of Europeans, which one would still read
about in old school books. African people, whose
civilizations were old before Europe was born, have been
systematically erased out of the reverent interpretation
of human history. Western historians, for the last five
hundred years wrote or rewrote history glorifying the
people of European extraction and distorted the history
of the rest of the world. That is why you can still go
to parts of Africa and see small children get excited
over white people, or young girls who have the ignorant
notion that marrying an older white man gives her a
better value as a person socially, or people who think
that all white people are wealthy.
African fashion or European
fashion?
For a long time there were many
Africans who would rather be caught dead than wearing
clothes which were made in Africa or by African
designers, with the exception of traditional wear. This
dread of made-in-Africa clothes was manifested mostly
among the youth, who would rather wear second hand
clothes from Goodwill and had made-in-USA/Canada/China
tags. These are the same youth who think speaking their
dialect is an affront and African music is not worth
listening to unless the musician has won accolades,
awards and recognition from the west, for example
Youssou Ndour.
Why? Simply because African have been
taught that anything is great as long as it’s not their
culture. We have been conditioned to embrace other
people’s religions, ideologies, standards of beauty,
architecture, music, fashion, cultures, and histories as
our own or as of superior value than ours. We have been
conditioned to think that anything African with the
exception of our wild life and landscape is of inferior
quality including the way we look physically. Those are
all lies and it’s time we Africans woke up and smelt the
coffee. Being African is a very beautiful thing. All the
other cultures in the world started in Africa and we
should be proud of that. *
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posted 9 August 2006 |
