The Sunday News
MY people are in trouble. On 3 April, I attended my sister’s graduation ceremony at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. It was a beautiful evening function and you could tell that everybody there was dressed to kill or had at least made an effort to look stunning.
I noticed that there were people from all walks of life, rich looking, poor looking; people of all races and people of all shapes and sizes. One thing united us in our differences, we were all happy and proud, one way or the other.
There was a beautiful young lady whose outfit I cannot remember, and whose shoes I will never forget! She had on beautiful beige high heeled sandals with straps all around. I noticed her as she wobbled across the stage with her heels unlaced.
From the moment she stepped on the stage, you could see that disaster was about to strike. She was wobbling from left to right like jelly in a bowl. We all sat in our seats with our hearts pounding in our chests, praying that she wouldn’t fall on the stage.
She seemed to be in so much pain and had her head down in embarrassment. Halfway across the stage, she decided to take them off and brave walking across the stage barefooted. I looked at her and said to myself, “That there, is the bravest girl I have ever seen!” but as she knelt before the chancellor to be capped, I asked myself why she had been suffering in the first place?
I thought back to how painful my own high-heeled shoes had felt as I entered the graduation auditorium after a long walk from the car park. As soon as I got to my seat, I had took them off because they hurt so badly that I wanted to cry.
After the ceremony, I noticed that the majority of women had discarded their heels for bare feet or more comfortable shoes. I then realised with sadness, that all of us had been putting on a show. And as soon as the show was over, we discarded our roles and went back to our comfort zones.
This got me wondering. Who do we dress for, when we leave our houses? Do we dress to look good? And if it is to look good, is it to look good for others or for ourselves? Do we dress to feel good? This got me thinking of all the tight jeans we squeeze our voluptuous bodies into. Jeans that we rush to take off as soon as we get home because we would have spent an entire day feeling uncomfortable. Jeans that we spend the majority of the day pulling up because they keep falling below our waistlines and exposing our undergarments. Jeans whose top button we unbutton if we are sure nobody will notice.
My mind goes back to all the short, extremely tight dresses I have worn in my lifetime. Dresses that were meant to make me look fabulous but instead left me feeling self-conscious as I had to pull them down every few minutes; for no matter how hard I tried to prevent it, they kept riding up my thighs.
Looking good does not stop with uncomfortable shoes and clothes. We also strive to have flawless skin, shapely eyebrows, bright eyes and the famous “rosy cheeks”!
We spend hundreds of dollars on hideous make up that stains our clothes and those of our loved ones when they hug us. As if that is not enough, if not applied right, it leaves us looking old and ashen-faced, leaving people wondering if we are sick or bereaved.
I cannot count the number of girls forever looking surprised because of eyebrow shaping processes gone wrong! What possesses us to shave off all our eyebrows, only to draw them back on in the worst possible shapes and sometimes colours?
I once came across a joke that said “a black girl with pink lipstick looks like a Zulu Bible!” in reference to those black Bibles with a bright pink rim that our grannies are always reading. I saw some truth in that, for I have many pictures of myself looking ridiculous in bright lipsticks of all colours.
Where are our friends when we need them the most? Why do we let each other step out of the house with colourful, unnatural looking eyelids and red cheeks? I remember an incident back in university, when I told my friend her make-up needed toning down for she was bordering on looking ridiculous. “What do you know about make-up Mamo?” She asked me. Well, what did I know, for, regardless of my few cases of experimenting with different looks, I am mostly a no make-up kind of girl!
In my ignorance though, I know the difference between ridiculous and beautiful. Most of us are unfortunately on the negative side of the game.
I ask myself what goes on through an African child’s mind. Is it because we have told ourselves that we are so ugly that we have to go through all this trouble to look good? Have we been told that our African look is not suitable to walk on stage with pride and showcase it?
Is beauty really worth the pain that comes with wearing burning shoes that leave us with blisters? Are pencil thin, high-heeled shoes really designed for the full bossomed African woman?
What drives a beautiful black girl with lovely afro hair to burn her scalp and kill her hair with chemicals leaving it thin, lifeless and unnatural her entire life? What causes us to whiten our skin by removing the melanin, the dark pigmentation in our skin that protects us from the dangerous sun’s rays?
What makes us spend fortunes on the hair of white people, dead or alive, just so we can look like them? Is the pain of sewing in a weave really worth the beauty that comes with it? Is the loss of our hairlines a worthy price to pay? Is the endless itch worth it?
I cannot deny the need to “keep up appearances” and pretend we should not consider others when we choose how we want to look. But I believe there should be a balance between appearance and comfort. I am sure we are able to look presentable and authentic at the same time. I truly believe we can respect others without sacrificing respect for ourselves.
Take for instance the Indians, who fully embrace their culture with pride. All of them who walked that stage on graduation day were proudly geared in their delicate looking saris and flat shoes with no care in the world but only pride; firstly because they had achieved a milestone in obtaining a qualification and secondly; proud enough of their Indian culture to show it to the world.
I dream of a day when I will see a Ndebele girl, graduating from the University of Stockholm in a comfortable, traditional outfit, flat shoes and a shockingly huge afro. I dream of a time, when we will design our own jeans, which can accommodate our curvaceous rears and hips comfortably. I pray I live to see the day when we finally define our own beauty.
We do all we can, sacrifice our comfort, our values, our confidence, in order to look beautiful. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself: beauty according to who?
