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Yellow Sisi

One of my uncles swore years ago that he’d only marry a really light skinned woman. He had no need for dark women, he himself…

One of my uncles swore years ago that he’d only marry a really light skinned woman. He had no need for dark women, he himself was already as dark as night, he joked. What he wanted, he said, was a yellow sisi so that his children will not be as dark as he was. Whomever he married, he hoped, would dilute his children’s complexion.  I can’t remember with whom he was conversing but I remember being struck that anyone would want to marry someone based on complexion. 

I was young but even I knew that marriage had to be constructed of stronger stuff. He ended up with a woman as light skinned as he had hoped. However, she was what another adult once laughingly referred to as iru fanta , okpa coke in his absence. Apparently, it was obvious to everyone but my uncle that his wife’s complexion was not natural. He didn’t realise that his wife had acquired her lightness by diligently ‘rubbing cream.’ I have often wondered what he thought when his children all came out closer to his complexion than to his wife’s assumed one.

If it had been now, my uncle’s wife might have mixed a skin lightening cream with shea butter and used it on her babies like I hear some women in Naija do or she might have taken skin bleaching Glutathioine pills. There was a documentary a few years ago about the popularity of these pills among pregnant women in Ghana who wanted to give their babies a head start in the complexion game. Despite warnings that the pills could cause birth defects and damage to limbs and internal organs, pregnant women still bought them illegally and ingested them so that their babies could come out like oyibo. If you’re wondering why anyone would put their unborn baby’s life at risk just so they can go through life light skinned, then you haven’t been paying attention to the hold whitening lotions have on our people.

Per a 2016 report by the New York Times, roughly 70 per cent of women in West Africa bleach their skin, and according to a (2020) report by The Borgen project, 77 per cent of Nigerian women use skin bleaching products (cream and non-cream based), followed by 59 per cent in Togo, 27 per cent in Senegal and 25 per cent in Mali. This makes Nigeria the country with the highest number of skin bleachers (in Africa?)  This is not a recent phenomenon. A Quartz report from a few years ago indicates that in the late 1960s, skin lightening creams were the fourth most commonly used household product in (urban) Africa after soap, tea and tinned milk. Crazy right?

But then, our people often equate light skin with beauty. I cringe each time I hear someone complimented for being fair.  A common Igbo insult for any (female) who is light skinned but considered ugly is ‘ocha ka o maka’ which literally translates to: ‘so light skinned as though beautiful’. I have heard someone insult a dark complexioned person, telling them they were   “as dark as the devil.” A friend was once told that her son’s light complexion was such a waste on a boy. His sister should have been the one with that ‘advantage.’ How have we bought into this nonsense that the darker one is the uglier and less desirable they are? Some have said it has to do with colonisation and our being forced to view the white woman as superior. Others have said it is self-hate and low self-esteem, both two sides of the same coin (and linked to the whiteness-is-superior crap). The consequence, as someone once told me is that the fairer one was, the higher the social capital one possessed. She too wanted to lighten her complexion. “Look at our beauty queens and wives of governors. How many of them are dark skinned?” Whatever the reason is, what isn’t in doubt is that skin lightening – these days known euphemistically as “brightening” is popular (especially among our women). It is so common that one may be tempted to believe it is harmless.

It is important to remember that the World Health Organisation has banned the active ingredients of skin lightening creams –  hydroquinone and mercury – from being used in any unregulated skin products because they could cause liver and kidney failure, ochronosis, hyperpigmentation and skin cancer. Yet these products are still being used in unregulated doses by people mixing and selling their own cream. In 2018, Safi George was on BBC talking about how she almost died from the blisters she got on her thighs and other parts of her body from the bleaching creams she bought in Central London. She ended up in hospital and was put on antibiotics for a while. On the online platform Etsy, vendors (who sound suspiciously Nigerian) are selling homemade lotions for skin lightening including the ridiculously named “Xclusiv Half cast (sic) lotion” and  “Half Cast (sic) Activator.” 

Apart from the lightening creams, there are the more expensive laser treatments which promise “flawless complexion” in half an hour. The assumption of course is that the lighter skinned one is the closer one comes to having a flawless complexion. It is no wonder then that the common narrative these days is that skin lightning procedures (lotion, laser, whatever) are there to bring out the “potential of your skin,” as if underneath every dark complexion is a fairer one waiting to come out. What silliness.

I’d like to think that my uncle eventually came to his senses, and that his wife did too because they stayed together and raised children who as far as I can tell have never bleached.

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