Dove hurts
The Dove soap advertisement that has caused a lather on social media is just the latest chapter in a historic effort to convince black people that pallor equals power
Soft soap and dirty tricks
The kerfuffle over the racially offensive Dove TV advert has contrived to remind me of a sad little incident involving me and skin-lightening creams.
When I was still a fashionable teenager, the people who manufacture Supa Rosa, Mamafoza and Ambience skin lighteners who’d been doing research at nightclubs — and I was a club hopper of note — approached me with a proposal.
As I was the darkest darkie they’d ever encountered during their research for darkies that needed some lightening, the cosmetics peddlers wanted to use me as a case study, to prove the efficacy of their products.
They paid me an undisclosed amount of money and started supplying me with drums of skin lighteners. I was a conscientious guinea pig who used the products religiously. I was tired of being told that whenever I smiled, people thought they’d been struck by lightning — so bright was my smile, coming as it did from a very dark place.
I depleted the supplies of three factories in one year. But my skin tone did not change. After some head scratching, the researchers made me sign a non-disclosure clause, and quietly let me go.
But the skin-lightening peddlers are still doing good business elsewhere in the country. Kwaito artist Mshoza is one of their success stories.
They have also achieved a measure of success with brothers from the Congo. Have you seen the brothers from the Congo in Joburg? They look weird! Light-skinned faces, dark necks and arms. Blackface in reverse!
Long before the Dove secret was out — that it turns darkies into whities — I tried a bar of the soap, hoping it would do a better job than those skin lighteners. And you know what? The bloody thing turned black! I kid you not! Dove turned black after an encounter with my face. So, don’t believe the hype. It won’t turn all darkies white; it might succeed with some, Khanyi Mbau and Mshoza included.
Where am I going with this? Be patient. If I am famous for anything, it is that I am a teller of longwinded fibs. In my defence, the fictional sketch I’ve just painted — drizzled with some truths which a visionary reader will have to figure out — is being told for a good cause.
I had to find a lighter way of easing into the painful subject of what Bob Marley would have called mental slavery.
Flushable toilets
Miesies Helen Zille famously pointed out that in addition to the ugly things that colonialism brought to Africa, it also blessed us with such beautiful conveniences as flushable toilets and democracy (which our conquerors borrowed from the Greeks and never returned).
Colonialism also dictated to indigenous people that in order to realise their full humanity they had to try hard to look like their white conquerors.
Those generous buttocks were not good enough for a civilised species — they spoke of sloth.
Those lips simply wouldn’t cut it. They had to be cut. The crinkly hair had to be ironed flat, or pummelled into submission with chemicals. The
The long and short is that black people through the generations — here in South Africa and in the US – have learnt to believe in the undesirability of their physiognomy
dark complexion — which was reminiscent of the devil (yes, the conquerors had seen the devil!) — had to be brought under control. By any means necessary. If not by introducing some European blood into the African pool — it was a godly undertaking! — then by some other, artificial means.
The long and short is that black people through the generations — here in South Africa and in the US – have learnt to believe in the undesirability of their physiognomy.
In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove succumbs to insanity by the end of the book, obsessing as she does about having a pair of blue eyes so that everyone can love her.
Like Pecola, many black people perceive beauty in terms that are antithetical to their natural being.
Indoctrination, which led to self-hate, was channelled through many fronts.
The church proclaimed that you were not a full human being until you chose Christ. But in order to choose Christ, you had to disavow your “savage” attire. If you were a man, you had to stop wearing ibheshu in preference to trousers.
A woman had to dump traditional cosmetics — red ochre among others — and had to stop plaiting her hair in intricate patterns, but soften it with chemicals, or cover it with a doek.
The church had paved the way for the cosmetics industry which would tame black skin and untangle black hair.
The adverts which peddled cosmetics in the US and here did not beat about the bush. A black person was “dirty” until she used these products which made her an imitation of white.
People have written hundreds of academic papers about this. Google them.
Whether by naughty design or by mistake, the Dove advert is a continuation of a tradition. At a very basic level the advert shows us a before scenario (a woman who is naturally black), and an after scenario (the black woman transformed into white).
The campaign is reminiscent of an advert for Pears soap which shows two children, one white, one black. The white kid, clean and well-dressed, offers a bar of soap to a black kid. After an encounter with the bar of soap, the black kid is transformed into something almost white!
That ad was made in the 19th century. The lovely people at Dove have simply tweaked it and instead of putting it in a newspaper, flashed it across TV screens.
Black people in countries where the ad has been flighted have been outraged. Justifiably so. However, truth is: cosmetics which undermine blackness would not succeed without black people’s co-operation.
No one puts a gun to a black woman’s head and forces her to wear a weave made from some faceless Indian or Brazilian person’s hair.
No one forces a black woman to spend her hard-earned money on dangerous chemicals in an attempt to knock the blackness out of her.
In case you missed my point: black people are complicit in their denigration.