BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL I: A-DÚ-BÍI-KÓRÓ-ISIN*
Thinkers from James Baldwin to W. E. B. Du Bois to Frantz Fanon and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o remind us that the most destructive consequence of colonialism was not the control of the land but the control of the minds of the people. It is during the colonial era that we begin to see the effects of the widespread indoctrination of the type of “West is best” attitudes that are responsible for much of what is considered aspirational in today’s Nigeria. Beauty ideals remain a pertinent example. The World Health Organization estimates that 77 percent of women in modern Nigeria use skin-lightening creams. While a belief in the superiority of white skin is not innate, there exists a popular and entirely spurious claim that insists on a historic and worldwide preference for light skin. It’s a dangerous myth because it continues to subtly perpetuate the idea that lighter skin is objectively superior and that, deep down, on some evolutionary level, everybody knows it. This is untrue.
Yoruba people have skin colors of different shades, some lighter, some darker. Until the imposition of European beauty standards, this characteristic alone was not enough to confer or deny beauty. You might be beautiful and have lighter skin, but you would not be beautiful because you had lighter skin. A person who was fair in complexion might be called a-pon-bépo-re (“one who is as red as palm oil”), while a person with darker skin could be a-dú-máa-dán (“one whose dark skin is beautifully shining”) or a-dú-bíi-kóró-isin (“one whose dark skin is as beautifully shining as the seed of the Akee apple”).3 The desire to conform to an aesthetic that values light skin and straight hair is the result of a propaganda campaign that has lasted more than five hundred years. It is the imposition of a system that denigrates anything that is perceived as “too African.”
The only way Afro hair can fulfill the criterion of “beautiful” is if it is transformed and made to resemble European hair in some way. It wasn’t always this way. Yoruba proverbs such as Irun ni ewa obinrin (“A woman’s plaited hair is her beauty”) reveal that it was the intervention of plaiting that conferred the beauty; or the Mende “She is hair,” which demonstrates that while hair has long been central to beauty, the context was very different.
Sylvia Boone explains that indigenous judgments on hair refer to its quantity and volume. Beautiful hair is celebrated as kpotongo, which means “it is much, abundant, plentiful.”4 In reference to hair, kpoto, the root word, means long and thick; for the Mende, the significant feature of hair is that it grows, and kpoto denotes an abundant, numerous quality of growing things, which is why it is also used in relation to fruit on a tree, rice, or objects that can be gathered together and tied. In the same way, braiding, threading, plaiting, and weaving are used to style African hair. Other Mende words relating to hair develop the metaphor of hair as flora, the one ornamenting a woman’s head, the other decorating the Earth’s surface.5
Hair that is undesirable is not considered so because of its texture or its lack of similarity to European hair. “Coarse,” “nappy,” and “tough” don’t exist. Instead, undesirable hair is kpendengo: hair that is “stunted, not growing robustly.” The opposite term, papoongo, indicates thick growth, luxuriance, like on a farm or in a forest.6 Again, beauty originates from the bounty of the Earth rather than from the extent to which the texture resembles that of your oppressor.
Styles that suited the texture of African hair and played to its strengths were those admired by potential love interests. Boone learned that both elegance and sexual appeal were achieved through hair “shaped into beautiful and complicated styles.” In contrast to straight blond strands or indeed the “good hair” that seemingly occupies Eurocentric minds today, traditional braided and threaded styles were the height of sexual allure!
The concern was not to achieve either long flowing locks or tumbling, wavy “princess hair.” In fact, for the Yoruba one type of “princess hair” was a cornrowed style called moremi.
Moremi takes its name from the clever and courageous Moremi, a twelfth-century princess (see, for better or worse, black girls can be princesses) from the kingdom of Ile Ife, the cradle of civilization, according to Yoruba belief. Fed up with the raids of the forest people, Moremi allowed herself to be kidnapped and taken as a prisoner of war. Her fabled beauty caught the attention of the enemy king, who took her for his wife. Upon learning the secrets of the enemy army, Moremi stole away, returning to Yorubaland, where she revealed logistical information to the Yoruba, who used it to defeat their enemies in battle.
SORORITY
She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus
of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters,
neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends,
and what all to give her the strength life demanded of
her—and the humor with which to live it.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Hair braiding is a social time. For Hagar, a pivotal character in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the absence of this necessary chorus of black women has dire consequences. Without it, Hagar lacks the emotional resources to survive the heartache that eventually kills her.
Hagar dies of a fever, but one that is brought about by a manic chain of events kick-started when Milkman, the object of her obsession, rejects her love. Milkman’s rejection is fueled in no small part by the ravages of colorism, that internecine violence that we black people continue to enact upon each other.
The source of much of Hagar’s emotional inadequacy is located in the lack in her life of the networks of kinship, solidarity, and support that were central to many traditional societies in Africa. These relationships were prioritized through the extended family, through age-grade institutions, and men’s and women’s associations like Mende examples of the Sande and the Poro. Black communities have with varying degrees of success managed to reproduce versions of traditional African communities. In her essay “City Limits, Village Values” Toni Morrison contrasts the “Gopher Prairie despair” depicted by white fiction writers with the affection black writers typically express for the intimate, communal life built around “village values”7 (or one thinks of the quilombos* in Brazil or San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia).
In real life, too, the absence of this necessary chorus of black women can be costly. There was much that was wonderful about growing up in Ireland, but, beyond the explicit racism and the hostility I experienced, the most painful part was the isolation: no mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, or best girlfriends who might understand or relate to what I was experiencing. I felt a profound sense of loss. Having been uprooted from any extended family and the possibility of black friends when we left Atlanta, I found myself relocated from an affluent, sunny, black suburb to a cold, homogeneously white, often hostile, socially conservative Catholic country.*
Now, many white people—even anti-racist progressive liberals—seem able to conceive of blackness only as an experience defined by racism and unmitigated misery, a condition from which we would gladly liberate ourselves if only we could. I think this partially accounts for why people would occasionally, and with a palpable sense of generosity on their behalf, say to me, “I don’t even see you as black, Emma,” as though this was the greatest compliment they could bestow upon me.