Black is truly beautiful
ALEXANDRA - You know the one thing colonialists did and did so masterfully well before colonising Africa was doing their homework.
You know the one thing colonialists did and did so masterfully before colonising Africa, was their homework. In their quest to ensure their perpetual dominance over us, and us our perpetual subservience to them, they stripped our brains naked of the main ingredient that made us walk tall.
That ingredient was our dignity and self-esteem. Without those two qualities, you’re nothing and you can hardly stand on your own two feet. You will always want to be supported by someone somewhere.
Hence the masterful art of giving fish, coupled with the steadfast unwillingness to teach us how to fish. This has made us perpetual beggars who cannot survive five minutes without them.
Eroding people’s dignity and self-esteem means we will always look up to them for leadership and trendsetting. Today you hear people calling each other with funny names such as ‘yellow bone’ for the light skinned and ‘dark dindy’ for those with a darker shade.
And in our quest to look beautiful, be loved and accepted, we spare no effort in ensuring our yellowness through all sorts of dangerous, disastrous and dubious means. First it was the skin lightning creams such as Ambi from the 60s up until the 90s, and now it’s the bleaching craze that has hit our shores all the way from Nigeria.
When will African women decolonise themselves and learn to accept that black is beautiful, that short hair is magnificent and that there is no need to dye your hair white to be blonde or to elongate it so you can flip your hair from time to time.
It was because of all this that Steve Bantu Biko started a movement towards self-decolonisation that swept the country in the 60s to the early 70s with the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’.
This was before his life was cut short by those who realised he had a sharper mind than many of whom we continue to adore and idolise for selling us short, or who are still short-changing us.
This whole notion about beauty being eurocentric must stop, that if you’re not yellow you’re not beautiful and that without long hair and a newly-found straight nose like Michael Jackson, you should stay in hibernation.
