Dudula — and Malema — show their colonised minds
Who determines normalcy in these things? Who decides that a straight nose is more normal than a broad one?
When black people use skin colour to demean or discriminate against other black people, what does it reveal about the perpetrators? The question occurred to me this week when members of Operation Dudula were reported to have stopped black migrants from accessing health services at Kalafong Hospital in Tshwane. The self-appointed gatekeepers decided whether to accost patients, check their papers and possibly turn them back, or let them enter unhindered.
Apparently, the only criterion was skin colour. Unsurprisingly, white people got a free pass. Black people were split into two groups — of a darker and a lighter skin tone. The spectacle of black people using blackness as an instrument of discrimination against fellow blacks is rich with irony.
Black skin has a long history of being used as tool of exclusion, repression and exploitation.
In colonial and apartheid SA all dark-skinned citizens were consigned, at birth, to a lower station in life. It determined where one lived, worked and got educated, among other things.
Those in power designated everything black as a backward aberration — from physical appearance to spiritual, social and cultural life. Inversely, they fostered the notion that all that is white is better and superior.
All this was designed to justify a racial hierarchy in which whites, a superior race, would dominate and control blacks, giving rise to crimes such as slavery and apartheid. This spawned the logic that, if white skin was the standard to aspire to, the lighter the skin the better for blacks. As a consequence of years of indoctrination, many blacks of a lighter hue assimilated that mentality and would, in turn, inflict colourism on fellow Africans with darker skins.
Even within black families children with darker skins would be mockingly referred to as mnyamane or mantsho — the dark one.
In response, darker-skinned blacks, having themselves accepted the discriminatory terms of reference, sought ways to lighten their skins in a quest to be as close as possible to “perfection ”— to whiteness, essentially.
This provided and sustained a profitable market for pharmaceutical companies, not only in SA, but in many places where black people lived. The products left many users with excoriated facial skin, often giving us twotoned people with light faces but black ears. Which would have been comical were it not so heartbreakingly tragic.
Despite attempts by governments, including here, to ban some of the products, the industry has survived and sought to reinvent itself, continuing to sell gullible black people the preposterous ideal of white perfection and superiority. The global beauty industry is today a mega business, projected to be worth $8.9bn (R154bn) by 2024.
Sections of the media have acted as the industry’s handmaid, seeking to promote black people’s aspiration to a lighter skin. Even top magazines have been called out for “whitewashing” black celebrities on their pages to give them a lighter skin appearance.
Those who elect to make their black skin lighter will invoke their right to personal choice, and they aren’t wrong. But more important in this instance is the motivation for that choice, which is the belief that a lighter skin is more beautiful and will make them happier about their looks.
The negative connotation attached to blackness has been promoted by spiritual means too, with many black people having been fed a Christian supremacist staple of whiteness being next to godliness, with Christ portrayed as a long-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian — despite having been Middle Eastern. The angels, of course, were invariably white, never black.
Opting to keep and revel in a skin that’s “too dark” can potentially have financial consequences. A World Economic Forum report cited research showing that wage gaps tended to widen as workers’ skin shades darkened.
Yet the casting of blackness in a negative light and the elevation of whiteness does not stop at skin colour. It extends to other physical features, where colonialists held their own, white, features as the standard, and black attributes (such as in the lips, nose, buttocks, etc.) as a deviation. People with different features from the “norm” were, therefore, seen as freaks of nature.
It would have surprised many that Julius Malema, who styles himself as the anti-colonial champion of “the black child”, has of late shown an obsession with the size of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s nose. This comes straight out of the colonial playbook, which informed the placement of black people in human zoos in Europe.
Who determines normalcy in these things? Who decides that a straight nose is more normal than a broad one? That straight long hair is more beautiful than curly black hair? Or that a substantial backside is a human digression even? What are the measurements here?
And need we say it again, in a country and continent where the majority of people are darker skinned, why should white skin be the yardstick?
The Dudula people used darker skin as a tool of discrimination, just like the colonialists. It is almost as if they did not know that black South Africans, like black people on the continent and everywhere else, have different skin tones — from the very dark to the light. Meanwhile, Malema seems to think a broad nose, an attribute of millions of fellow Africans, is to be poked fun at.
This is more than a case simply of the pot calling the kettle black. It is a reflection of the extent to which black people have internalised the colonialists’ judgment values
— while professing to fight colonisation and its effects.