Colourism and Nigeria: Two truths and a lie

Let’s play a game called “Two Truths and a Lie.” I’ll state three things, one of which is a lie. If you can pick out the lie, you win. Here are my three statements:

1. A friend of mine looking to adopt a baby, whose preference was for a dark-skinned girl, was discouraged multiple times by adoption officials who asked, “Why would you willingly choose a dark-skinned baby girl?” b. An ushering service in Nigeria, as a matter of policy, pays light-skinned girls more than their darker-skinned companions for the same service. c. Colourism doesn’t exist in Nigeria.

In case you didn’t already know, C is the lie. Isn’t that something? There is rampant and obvious discrimination against our darker-skinned sisters and brothers, and the belief persists that the lighter one’s skin, the more beautiful, attractive, and ‘better’ they are.

The origins of colourism in Nigeria can arguably be traced back to colonialism, where European colonisers imposed their own standards of beauty and hierarchy onto our people. Whiteness was set up as the ideal, and proximity to whiteness became the goal, planting the seeds of colorism that still persist today.

In Igbo, to call someone “ocha ka o maka” (one who is light-skinned as if they were beautiful) is an insult. It means that the light-skinned person addressed would be “ugly” if they were dark-skinned; their complexion is just giving them cover. It implies that the person is only beautiful because they are light-skinned, equating light-skinnedness with beauty. In our music and films, and in the women many of our celebrities choose to date and marry, light-skinned girls are presented as the ultimate ideal.

That desire for whiteness naturally goes hand in hand with self-hate. This self-hate drives people to find ways to lighten themselves at every cost, and to take pills, as some pregnant women allegedly do, to ensure light-skinned babies at birth. However, the stakes aren’t always just about beauty or the appearance of it. Sometimes, the stakes are higher: opportunities and chances for success.

In 2016, the writer Igoni Barrett published Blackass, a novel set in Lagos where its protagonist, Furo, who has been unsuccessful in his job applications, wakes up transformed into a white man (except for his buttocks). Suddenly, all the doors that were closed to him opened up, his non-European accent notwithstanding. Even his prospective dating pool expands.

Furo lives in fear of his secret being exposed (one only has to look at his behind to know that he isn’t quite what he says he is) because exposure means a fall from the ladder of success. Yes, whiteness and whiteness-adjacent attributes attract opportunities and success. For the girls who are too dark to get the ushering job, their complexion is the only criterion that disqualifies them. Imagine what it does to one’s self-esteem to constantly face discrimination and exclusion in one’s own country, among one’s own people, based on complexion.

It feels like it ought to be obvious that basing our beauty standards on someone else’s ethnic appearance is nonsensical. The arbitrariness of the Western standard as the global ideal is captured so well in Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo’s early novel, Blonde Roots, where there is an inversion of the trans-Atlantic slave story.

Evaristo’s world in the novel is one where Africans have enslaved Europeans and force their slaves to plait their hair and dress like Africans so they can look civilized. The Africans find the silky European hair to be so terrible that they pity these poor white people whose hair won’t stay in a twist. In that world, the beautiful woman is one who is dark and full-bodied.

This is one book I wish I could press into the hands of every young person, particularly young women struggling with their self-image because they have swallowed the idea that looking as European as possible, at whatever cost, is better than how they have been made. I want to tell them, see, these beauty ideals are subjective and cultural.

The media, advertisers, Nollywood creatives, musicians, writers, and all those who shape and influence culture should rethink the narratives they are pushing. Narratives that promote colourism should be eschewed in favour of those that celebrate all the shades of us.