Decolonizing Miss Namibia
Our
national beauty pageant marked 37 years of existence this month. A project that basks in the glory and privilege
legacy of colonialism, apartheid and racism facilitated by capitalism that
divides, discriminates, dominates and exploit. The implications of neo-colonialism degrades, disempowers, misinterprets and appropriates black
masculine and feminine identities. For centuries the experience of
colonialization entails the dehumanization, disregard and devaluing of African
people’s knowledge, roles, status and expression in the broader global popular
culture.
In different times and places, an elite class abuses, objectifies,
sexualizes, and victimizes women, reproducing a hegemonic order of class,
power, privilege and pleasure, through beauty pageants as the vehicle that
parades women in bikinis, pitting them against each other for the honor of a
sash/tiara. As is the standard unit, beauty is measured by contrasting and displaying
female bodies, within a set class prescription that secures and validates women
through a sexist racial lens and socio – economic order. And beauty contest
provide the perfect site wherein such display and manipulation takes place.
Miss Namibia an accepted cultural activity is viewed as a
nation-building project as the victors are validated to embody national values
and ambitions, inspired and subscribing to Hollywood standards of beauty.
Indeed beauty is measured using a foreign and white ruler, and in the struggle for
gender equality, this competition perpetuates the notion where the definition
of beauty and woman’s worth is but dependent on her sexuality, race and personality
associated with appearance, class and patronage.
This culture promotes euro-centered ideals of capitalism and consumerism,
as transnational commercial networks for entertainment, fashion and cosmetic
industries see Africa as nothing but target market for profits. To this effect
black people are socially engineered to internalize this colonial idea of
Hollywood beauty driven by its unrelenting mass media selling toxic values,
resulting in the assimilation of the Euro-American centered culture that
marginalizes, misrepresents, appropriates and stigmatizes the African culture
reproducing a misleading and degrading identity. Keeping Africans occupied with
sensationalized non-issues that they neglect the everyday black struggles and
relative human contradictions that women in majority are subject.
Again the legacy of colonialism complimented by capitalism is
that is has managed to successfully deter the organic evolution of black man
and woman’s role, status and expression in society, leading to the destruction
of feminine intellect as a significant element to national leadership discourse,
depriving generations to come of a proper consolidated leadership foundation
providing direction, clarity of purpose, confidence of the self and an
unshakable Africanist identity.
The issue of identity is at the center of our politics. Beauty
as a contradictory site of power, privilege and pleasure has seen a populist
manipulation of blackness as the politics of racial and body aesthetics,
combined with gender and class constructs, leads to the process of black devaluation,
given young women being more concerned with enticement, lacking self-love, self-worth,
in pursuit of a sense of belonging constantly seeking approval, antagonizing
anything naturally black and bold. More so, self-hate is well organized,
packaged and passed on from one generation to the next, facilitated by
westernized projects being amongst a number, Miss Namibia.
For instance, young black woman are rendered silent,
submissive, uneducated and defenseless to their everyday problematic experiences
and struggles of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class hierarchies, as
Miss Namibia takes no honor, pride or expression of at least designer clothing
reflecting multi-cultural national values and identities. In addition, our
girlfriends and sisters are not in proper social or health conditions as they
are subjected to food injustice and malnutrition.
Be that as it may, the obligation and duty to redress and address
the imbalances to this struggle in order to restore our values and national
identity that defines us as a people, is well captured by Pan-Africanist and
Black Consciousness scholars and academics. The likes of Ngugi wa Thiongo, Robert
Sobukwe, Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Sankara, Chinua Achebe, et al, who
accentuate the essence for a mental revolution accompanied by an economic
revolution that will permanently address structural inequalities that African
women are subject to.
This mental revolution entails decolonizing the
very standards of beauty appropriated by the oppressive and disenfranchising
Euro-American capitalist global popular culture by taking intelligent, calculated and active resistance to the
forces of neo-colonialism that perpetuates the subjugation and exploitation of
our minds, bodies, and lands, for the ultimate purpose of dismantling the
colonization structure and relegating it to the dustbins of history thereby realizing
pro-Africanist, pro-black emancipation.
Culture is the best site of resistance. For black culture is the
best location that makes provision for a de-colonialization process by which we
make loving blackness the option by subscribing to the philosophies and
ideologies of Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and Socialism. In fact, this are the best theoretical
tool of analysis for African contradictions, and the only route to transform our
society towards the love for blackness and the only condition necessary to move
against the forces of domination, exploitation and discrimination, thus
reclaiming black life of dignity, of gold and of excellence!
In the process of de-colonialization, civil society including the
business, family, church, and NGO’s are required to participate to effect
change and healing. While activist, scholars and academics must contribute
through knowledge production. While access to this knowledge as well as a
medium to transfer this knowledge will ensure power and balance. The more
efforts made toward this (re)education, the more respect and appreciation both
male and female will have towards their roles, as this creates a better
understanding and gives meaning to beauty with African characteristics.
Having addressed the beauty myths produced by the global popular
culture and the level of absurdity in pageants, the first aspect towards de-colonializing
Miss Namibia requires that we do away with this misogynist, retrograde and embarrassing
symbol of contradiction by giving it fresh energy, meaning and mandate centered
within our broader society and politics.
Informed by an understanding that Miss Namibia is the best arena
and instrument towards nation-building - to unify diverse ethnic communities, reinforcing
cultural pride and national identity. It is the best site for gender advocacy were
young women’s bodies will be a symbol of social respectability, expressing cultural
community values and behaviors that are fundamental to inspiring a sense of
self-identity, national and racial pride.
Inspired by the revolutionary ideology of feminism, Miss Namibia will
be able to redefine the meaning of beauty by creating an environment for intellectual
beauty development. This will be one of the best vehicles that can best
undermine and help resolve the contradictions in Africa. Because feminism is
the only civilizing discourse to empower and educate women, in an effort to
unchain women from the chains of gender and sexual contradictions, economic
bondage and structural inequalities.
Miss Namibia if well capacitated can be a symbol and path to power
for women culturally and economically, for she will have the potential to lead
public debate and opinion on gender, sexual, ethnic, spatial, socio-economic
and political contradictions, in that way participate in our democratic process
of holding political leaders accountable. This means transforming it into a democratic office with a work oriented contract of maximum two terms, complemented by regional offices occupied by deputy Miss Namibia's, that will facilitate programs and opportunities for women, with the support and
partnership of the state and civil society establishments, for example rewarding
excelling young women in rural constituencies with scholarships for tertiary
education, leading women social movements.
Finally, Listen to activist and author Malaika
Mahltsi as she submits: “As a young Black (wo)man, the worst crime you can
ever commit is to divorce yourself from your identity. We live in a world where
to be Black is to be an enemy. By virtue of being born Black, you are forced to
pay a race tax, where you must always prove yourself worthy of the approval of
the White world. You are not “proper” unless you speak in a particular way or
dress in a particular way. You are not “proper” unless you are defined within
the constructs of Whiteness…define yourself outside that, to love and embrace
your identity without fear of persecution from anyone. Learn and speak your
home language. Speak it so well that it should shock anyone to hear you
speaking any other… Do not fall into the trap of measuring your Afrikanness
using a White ruler.”
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