BEING dark-skinned in Africa can be so tiring, what with black people telling you you’re a foreigner when distant relatives and family members aren’t even commenting on your darkness – as if you have no mirrors. Imbeciles!
Then you get told: “Never mind, German men love you dark-skinned girls.”
Insults.
Being dark-skinned in Africa has always been so tiring. It’s tiring now because the obsession to be light-skinned is a bigger priority than adopting black babies or embracing our own.
Women spend thousands of rands monthly to look beige, because apparently men prefer “yellow bones”.
It turns out things are no longer about integrity, values or character.
It’s about how fast you can resemble the living dead.
There are “yellow-bone” parties where only light-skinned girls are invited to attend and the pain of the rejected
dark-skinned child is audible over the loud music.
You need to understand there are sane black people who even, without the threat of Witness Protection Programmes, still insist on permanently altering their appearance by bleaching their faces to be “attractive”.
Apparently, looking African in Africa is still out of fashion.
Yes, some black people believe putting your life at risk by using toxins is a sure way to find Mr Right.
That would mean Mr Right prefers you mutilating yourself and risking death. And you’ll end up conceiving children who’ll never look like you or your family members.
Some women believe “toning” their skin will lead to success, and that the brain has nothing to do with it.
With ludicrous aspirations of beauty, these men and women risk leukaemia and cancer of the liver and kidneys. Agents like cement, battery fluid and hydroquinone are used to alter the faces of Africans – just so they don’t die black.
I’m dark-skinned and I too have been told I look West African or as if a witch farted on me.
So I don’t get a husband because I won’t bleach?
Who cares?
I have various vibrators which don’t expect me to risk hypertension, diabetes or renal disease.
No thanks, really.