Monday, February 23, 2009

Being African is a misfortune

Dear bell hooks,



I am glad this forum exists, for where else would I vent, where else would I show my disgust at the endless gaze of Africa that the rest of the world clings to?



The global media has embraced and standardized Africa's image as the get-away safari destination on the one hand, and the starvation-poverty-disease continent that swims in eternal hopelessness; they have held Africa in this light as proof that Africa, the homeland of most of the world's black population, will never be as advanced as the 'white' continents. Africa, of the inferior race. Africa of the corrupt shortsighted leaders, and of the world's surviving primitives.



This 'dark continent' image has turned my continent into a pityful and sneer-worthy non-deserving continent. This continent where I have lived all my life, been happy in, and successful in, survived in. This Africa, from which fellow Africans have run away, embrassed to be associated with it, in preference for the heavenly west as portrayed in the media. Our young people, barely out of high school, are being ensnared by this image of the West, an image they hold on to, until they arrive in Europe or North America, and realise they are nothing more than modern day slaves. Some exist illegally, in the hope that the system will not detect them. Others live on the mighty green card, awarded to foreigners who have to pay using their lives.



And yet, these people withstand humiliation. Rather this than go back to the motherland and be seen as a failure, they argue. Rather this than the laughter of the damned. If Ben Okri slept in the streets, who am I, a nobody, to think I deserve more? While back home i would have been assured of a warm meal and a warm bed, it is better to be here, where my sense of purpose and sacrifice is sharpened.



But is Africa really that bad? Ought we be ashamed of being called Africans? Ought we be ahsamed of being black? What about the laughter and the education and the cultures? what about the joy of playing in the dust with friends whose names you will always remember even in your old age? What about the normal lives we lead? Are these successes not worthy of the media's precious spaces? What about the fact that Africa produces super-intelligent human beings? How else can you explain how Africans have excelled with minimum resources usually made available to students their ages in the West? What about the punishment of existing in a double life, that of the home and that of school, both heavily demanding and both equally important? The double burden of being the educated one, and the provider? and yet we survive in the same world as kids who have known nothing but over-protectiveness, whose every need has been tended to? If it is about survival for the fittest, who most deserves to survive? whose survival skills has been sharpened beyond question?



And so, while the only sport where Africans have outperformed the rest of the world is athletics (minimum resources required to achieve this goal), it is also the most inferior sport. After all, isn't it defined through funny looking, non-English speaking (hence lacking eloquence) black people from some god-forsakken land whose name periodically pops up to remind us that the world's first black leader hails from a father with humble beginnings.



It is easier for the West to typecast Africa using images of starving children. That is our public image. we are content with this image, because it prevents us from dealing with this complex continent. We marginalize and fragment its narratives, because we do not want to cause trouble, raise the expectations of the masses of Africa, give ideas of possibilities.



If the world is currently geared towards the superiority of capital, how can Africa be integrated into this dream? Easy! By making them give us whatever resources they have, so we can continue being the superpowers; by attracting the best brains using green cards, scholarships anything that will move the most diligent, strongest of them out of their holes, and making them grateful for the opportunity.



Now Asia rises and threatens to become the world's next superpower. Can the West let this happen? This would be extremely bad, because a breakdown of these societies would mean a change of power focus! Now we cannot have that. The under-dog race will edge its bony arse closer to the 'it' and soon we might just become powerless. This would be a big let-down. So we must fight on, we do not want to become the 'empy' continent.



So even now, while African crawls on its knees, hangs its head in shame as it begs for money from the Big Brother, accepts the disguised and sometimes open insults from the west, it continues to hope for release, relief. The West on its part continues to hold an image of eternal desperation and primitivity to measure how far its come and how far it can still go.



To succeed, it needs a failure.



Warm regards,



Hopeful African

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

the sensitivity of being blacker

dear bell hooks,

its an honour to finally write to you, you, whose name defies rules and order, you who is fed up with what is supposed to be. i believe that you have brought to my life what i did not have before, for before, i never had the courage to spit into somebody's thoughts and express the anger i feel inside. you liberated me.i do not say these words to flatter you, for perhaps i will never meet you, but i say them to liberate myself, of thoughts, feelings and chains that tie me up so tightly i can only smile politely for fear of crying out loud.i come from a society that is near-free of direct racism. until i travelled to my present country, i had not encountered the kinds of direct racism that i experience here. as such, your words on racist ideologies are new to me. however, i understand discrimination, ethnic discrimination, color discrimination among blacks, for I lived in a society of blacks only until I was more or less a grown woman. i understand black on black discrimination all too well, and like the child in toni morrison's bluest eye, i am the one who one day realised i was different because i was a shade darker than most of my friends, and i learnt early in life to regress and hide in the shadows. i come from a community where dark skinned people have a special place in childhood taunting games called mchongwano. in these games, there is a series of choice phrases used to shoo away the dark-skinned person - dark-skinned people are so black they do not have shadows, or so black, day turns into night when they walk into rooms, or so pitch black that it is possible to see their fingerprints on charcoal. but such games are taken as norm and fun, more like the 'yo mama' jokes/games in the african american community. we all grew up accepting these games, in fact, playing them, embracing them, laughing at ourselves.however, i have asked myself in the recent years, just how dangerously we have embraced white ideology. why do we automatically see ourselves as more beautiful and acceptable because of our skin-tones, why have black people generally bought into the concept of the ‘whiter the better’? and why oh why do i have to constantly be dragged into it? for every time dark skin is scoffed at, i feel it as if it were a personal insult. it does not matter if this takes place in the media, or in song, or in social circles i am part of.

it is our thought patterns of ourselves as black people that have led to such dire consequences as having dark skinned brothers and sisters trying to smear themselves with skin lightening creams, what ngugi wa thiongo so eloquently writes about in his stories, and in the process burning themselves and hurting themselves. often, it is something we experience within our own social groups, the slight disapproval because the many years in the sun has only managed to make you darker, the lack of 'fairness' of skin, that pumps new skin-cream products into the market, the flurry of it all! sometimes i play a game. i watch tv adverts in the hope of catching a really really dark alek wek like model being used to promote a beauty product, or being used as a mark of true beauty, or even in music videos, just one glimpse that we as black people are beginning to realize that we are one, and all beautiful. i lose all the time, but still i try. i remember listening to a radio programme on a local fm station. it was a late night show where callers were being encouraged to use the medium as a space for finding new love. the dj had people calling in to describe what kind of men/women they had in mind. most of those who called had one consistent demand: they must be light skinned! yo! imagine a poor teenage girl or boy sitting somewhere longing for love but never having the courage to go the route others were taking!in your books, specifically black looks and salvation, you suggest that black people have to learn to love themselves from inside. but i am in a society where black people have embraced the violence of oppression so much that it is spilling onto their ability to love and embrace each other. i am in a society where to be of a certain skin tone means people will want your blood at a certain period and point in time. i write this to you, not in a splurge of self-pity, but as an outsider. for i am outside of me as i write, me who has reached a stage in my life where i no longer matter. but certain issues have to be voiced, recorded. i believe if we want to fight the bigger monster called white supremacy that has made sure the black person's lot has remained at the level of destitute, that we have to love one another. but we are all so busy struggling to get better, richer, lighter, better, richer, lighter and standing in line to receive compliments. i trust that we should develop a new way of looking at ourselves, a new way of appreciating ourselves and a new way of understanding, so that the generation that comes after us may begin to understand how we survived in a system as vile as the one we live in now.

yours,

skinless