Are We Blacks Really Inferior? The Case Of The African Woman
Abukari Yakubu
When this question was posed to me by my white colleague student at a University in United Kingdom during a group discussion sometime back, my first instinct was that this guy was racist and for that matter I should report it to the police. I did not do anything but I left the discussion with the excuse that I was not feeling well. I had a sleepless night pondering over his comments. The next day when I met him for our group discussion, I courteously asked him why he had made such racist remarks about black women the previous day, and his answer was that, he has travelled the world over but has rarely seen black women with genuine natural beauty because most of them tend to copy the looks of the white including colour through bleaching and hair extensions. His answer really calmed down my nerves because his observation has been a source of worry to me for a long time as a black man.
History has taught us that 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 black princesses are encouraged or better yet subtly pressured to follow the standards of Western 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. This erroneous impression of beauty has been so much consumed by the black woman that her natural God-given beauty has been relegated to the background.
It is important that Black 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 their hair, and the skin lighteners. The standard of beauty that abounds today is certainly not universal. How can it be when we have Native Americans, 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.
My dear African woman, 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. This has permeated so deeply in our societies to the point that, 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 in public. What a shame? It is even sad to realise that, our own so-called intellectuals and those in respectable positions who should know better tend to share similar ignorant notion of beauty by allowing their wives to bleach, undergo skin surgeries, hair extensions (using hairs of white and Asian corpses etc.) A case in point is the sudden death of the wife of the former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, who died whiles undergoing surgery to extend her nose and others in Spain. In my heart of hearts, I have not seen any woman more beautiful than that of the African.
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 and natural make-up.
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 colourism 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 Ghana for example, it is not unusual to hear people say “this particular ethnic group or family 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 actually black women.
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 Europe and America. 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 ( a Senegalese international Musician).
Why? Simply because Africans 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.
My dear Africans, the time has come for us to change mentally and it is either now or never again. We are the most beautiful human beings God has ever created and this beauty can only be valued but none other than ourselves. We have got the most beautiful hair I can ever think of, unparallel anywhere in the history of mankind. We have got the most beautiful skin I ever observed and we must cherish it. We have the best proportional body-shape that others are jealous of. The nose is perfect and everything is excellent. As the most religious people in the world, it will be an insult unto the God (the creator) if we do not value what we have. These mental shackles must be broken otherwise; there will come a time when we, including our cultures will become extinct.
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 if not millions, and now is not the time to be erased or disallowed. We are the origin of all humankind as history teaches us and therefore, should be proud of that.
Thanks for reading. All comments and contributions are very much welcome.
ABUKARI YAKUBU
Birmingham, United Kingdom
(The writer is a social commentator and a product of Staffordshire University UK, and University of Cape Coast, Ghana.)