Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
The beauty of youthful ambition
There’s quite a bit more to a roomful of Miss SA hopefuls than meets the eye, writes MICHAEL MORRIS
THEY all seemed inordinately tall, which had the effect of making me feel smaller than I think I really am. You can’t help being reminded of walking unawares into a fancy hotel bathroom and seeing yourself simultaneously in five different mirrors which, unlike the dissembling domestic setup, show you’re a little paunchier and seedier than you’ve ever had to admit.
With signature grace, however, my elegant colleague Nontando Mposo leaned in to reassure me.
“It’s only,” she whispered generously, “because they’re all wearing high heels.”
Although for a moment I thought she’d said: it’s because you’re not wearing high heels – but only as I was privately obsessing just then about discomforting footwear. On account of a car breakdown, I’d embarked on two longish walks with a train ride in between to reach the Waterfront and, arriving at the plush venue, I was more conscious than anything else of a damp and unignorable crease along the toeline of my right sock, an exigency all five digits kept trying to iron out with fruitless and annoying insistence.
It’s one thing being dwarfed by beauty, it’s quite another being reduced by onesize-fits-all sockery. But all things pass. Soon enough, invited to take our seats at the lunch table – and fortified by a high-end claret, the only red delivered to our table, I noted half guiltily – sock and stature fell in the scale of things worth worrying about.
And, as the pillared finalists took their seats, their appearance of lofty remoteness was resolved in a chatty, elbows-on-thetable ordinariness that showed them to be much more distinctive, varied, even easy-going individuals, and – it began to dawn on me – killer competitors for the title.
Not that there was ever a hint of nastiness. They’re all intimates in a convincingly chummy sort of way, they share rooms, they natter and giggle and agree with one another about important things like being true to their good selves, scorning the dim beauty queen stereotype, and urging young girls to believe in their dreams and themselves.
But it is a contest and a media lunch like this is a priceless practice run for the March 19 showdown at which only one of these young women will be singled out for a shot at the dizzying heights of celebrity.
Valerie Eliot once told the story of her husband’s somewhat dubious brush with fame when, after hailing a taxi, the driver said to him as he got in: “You’re TS Eliot.” When the poet asked how the man knew, he replied: “Ah, I’ve got an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him: ‘Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?’ and, do you know, he couldn’t tell me.”
Life is a performance for celebrities, which must be tedious at times.
It could be taken as an unkindness to say there were no such philosophical uncertainties for the Miss SA entrants (whom the organisers of the lunch thoughtfully circulated for the duration, a sort of interview by musical chairs, so that each of us could get face time with at least a handful of them).
But it would also be false to suggest these dozen young South Africans don’t know what they’re on about.
They are go-getting, ambitious and optimistic; most are students or have begun careers that are not to be sneezed at and most are involved in projects of one kind or another that help others.
They share an attractive feeling for the country as a place of widely divergent people whose inner resources deserve celebration.
Chiefly, they place women – strong inspiring moms, high-flying executives, doubting teens – at the centre of their mission to illustrate the possibilities of a femininity and a feminism that’s nourishing and fulfilling, that makes its voice heard on its own terms.
“The time has come for real models, not role models,” says Schané Venter of Alberton, “people you can look up to for being genuine and feminine in the sense of embracing the woman you are, not trying to live up to the standards of flawless beauty in the glossy magazines.” The 23-year-old sees the Miss SA pageant as an opportunity to “be a living example that through hard work, perseverance and being the best version of me, it was possible to live my dream”.
For 23-year-old Ntandoyenkosi Kunene, growing up in a township in Mkhondo in Mpumalanga (incidentally, the birthplace of South Africa’s opera star Pretty Yende) is a signal aspect of her message, which at once emphasises determination but also identity.
“You don’t have to come from the suburbs,” she said, implying that origins don’t forestall the journey.
“I come from a township, and I can show that it’s your outlook and determination that really count.”
But there’s another side to this: “You can get caught up in the glamour of the big city, and many girls do… but you must always remember where you came from, and what your parents taught you. Nothing is as painful as regret.”
“Authentic” is the word another 23-yearold finalist Elizabeth Molapo uses to express the idea of a successful beauty queen’s integrity and worth, noting also that “we have all struggled in different ways... it makes us more vulnerable”.
The final-year BCom economics student at the University of the Free State hails from a small chieftaincy in Lesotho, a village called Likhetlane and, like Kunene, she credits her “community” with shaping the woman she has become, that and the article of faith that is probably common to them all: “Dream big and realise that your dream is yours to make a reality.”
Motivational homilies do often seem trite, but if they encourage otherwise hopeless young people who feel snared in circumstances to “go out there, push, persist, persevere and defy the odds” – as another Mpumalanga finalist Felicia Muwayi puts it – mocking them does seem mean.
Motivating others, speaking up, making your voice heard, is a key theme that comes up repeatedly.
Sharon-Rose Khumalo, a 24-year-old volunteer tutor and co-director at Team Matric in Pretoria, said part of the job of the Miss SA winner is to “speak up for those who are not in a position to speak”. And if it’s not political activism she necessarily has in mind, inspiring young people with a vision of optimism arguably has every bit as much efficacy.
This is a theme Cape Town’s Ronette Chambers took up, too: being feminine is “being real, genuine women, being able to stand up as equals to men, to have a voice”.
Not that it was easy, especially within the contest itself.
“It’s a real test of character,” she said. “You’ve got to be consistent, you’ve got to know the ‘real you’, and that includes the flaws.”
Pulchritude can be marvelled at – even soft-porn sunsets at a push – but it can also be chilly, the kind of ice-queen perfection that could account for that distinct sense of sexlessness in the beauty industry, an industry, after all, that’s not about romance – less, romantic couplings – than a kind of ideal of self, superficial as it may seem, of solo esteem.
The super-beautiful can evoke an impression of liquid porcelain oozing not so much a do-not-touch as a this-isuntouchable animus – possibly because what it comes down to is a “model” female beauty projected not at men but at other women.
It’s a sort of closed shop – eroticism is not the thing; it’s femininity. Today, it’s an evolving, tricky standard against which the beauty celebrity must master a kind of thinking about self, idealism and audience that is essentially wholesome, even when there’s a kernel of contradiction at the heart of the proposition.
“Beauty with a purpose” is a phrase I overheard from further down the table, later elaborated on by 20-year-old Mikaela Oosthuizen from Port Elizabeth, no slouch in the beauty stakes, having been Miss Teen SA at the age of 14.
It was no surprise that, with what looked like a shudder, she confessed “the swimsuit shoot is not the highlight for any of us”.
“We are all different,” she said, “and are all celebrated for different things”... and she means hair, torso, thighs.
It’s the vulnerable side of being considered beautiful; embracing the risk of not being “beautiful” enough.
And it must jar with all their articulate sentiments about being authentic and true to themselves, having integrity and not being seduced by the glam and the glitz, but “winning” life’s race on the strength of these truer qualities.
Yet there does come a moment when the gowns are shed and the judges’ eyes dwell on the flesh.
“At the end of the day,” Oosthuizen said, “if I have to walk across a stage in a bikini to win and be able to contribute to this society, then it’s worth it.”
They will all have to walk that walk, though only one will win. It’s part of the beauty deal and, doubtless, a test of character too.
michael.morris@inl.co.za