EENHANA – Skin lightening is about fashion, not inferiority and it is an issue ripe with hypocrisy.
Toning, lightening, brightening and whitening. The marketing slogans promoting skin enhancement in Africa might be varied, but the underlying effects are pretty much identical. On offer are myriads products designed to make dark skin lighter such as kojic acid soaps, fade creams, hydroquinone creams, whitening shower gels made from goat’s milk and for the more determined, skin lightening injections. So when popular Namibian models and socialites like Magdalena Phillipus and Anna Ndeshy Penavali publicly admits on Face book platforms to spending tones of money, bleaching and face lifting their skins, they added fuel to an already hot-fire fashion or fad as it may be. Just one admission was enough to reignite the fierce debate about African’s perception of beauty. They joined a Face-book page titled Beau de BellusTM sponsored by Glutathione for Skin Whitening – Namibia.
Phillipus says she is proud of the way she looks and think African societies were hypocritical about the issue. Her honesty aroused the ire of social media users across the country and beyond. Passions inevitably ran high among Africans whenever someone brings racial issues into play. On the topic of skin whitening, emotionally charged slogans such as “black is beautiful” are often employed in an attempt to make women like Phillipus feel as if they are somehow betraying their own race. They are accused of having inferiority complexes in relation to white people. In Namibia, where about more than 60% of women use skin-lightening products, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and in most African continents, male project a strong bias against this practice.
“Sandra Ndevashiya from Ondobe here in the Ohangwena region says she is a dark-skinned Namibian women but she feels that although there are valid health concerns about the side effects of skin-lightening products, it should remain an individual’s prerogative to be who or what they want to be.”
“Yes, black is beautiful but so are white, brown, yellow and the many shades in between. When white people use tanning lotions, solariums and other methods to darken their skin, it is treated as par for the course and other white people do not feel the need to remind them that white is beautiful,” she says
In fact, such a statement would likely be regarded as racist by members of other races. “Yes, I understand that there was a specific historical context in the United States and elsewhere that, at the time, necessitated the use of the “black is beautiful” slogan in order to boost black people’s sense of self-worth and identity, but this is 2014 and we should have got beyond that by now,” Ndevashiya believes. Or are self-affirming slogans going to be needed by black people forever? People’s desire to have a particular skin tone, be it darker or lighter, stems from them wanting to be more attractive and more often than not, in the case of an individual who has undergone skin lightening here in Africa, it works.
The critics might be unwilling to concede this publicly but the harsh truth is that lighter-skinned girls in Africa, and indeed in Namibia, do get more attention and are more appreciated than darker-skinned women. It is not unusual to hear Namibian men say things such as “Oh O met this beautiful girl the other day. She had a great body and she was fair in complexion.” But these same men would hypocritically voice outrage if a Namibian woman, especially one in the public eye openly admitted to bleaching her skin. If skin tone didn’t matter at all to Namibian men, skin lightening creams and soaps wouldn’t be flying off the shelves here.
In Namibian music videos, too, there is a glaring preference for lighter-skinned females. The niggling suspicion remains that our societies are more self-delusional about questions of identity, and its perception of beauty than it cares to admit. Physical attraction is instinctive and lighter-skinned women are bound to attract more attention from men in a dark-skinned society such as Namibia – just like darker-skinned people do in predominantly white societies. Such interest does not have to be due to any sort of complex and is often simply mere curiosity about differences.
Skin lightening should not be automatically regarded as an individual’s outright rejection of their race. If a woman believes that lightening her skin will make her prettier or more confident, society should let her be and not impose itself as judge and jury of her concept of beauty. It is high time Africans stopped being hysterical and overly defensive about issues of their self-worth and identity.
ENDS
By Clemence Tashaya