WE NEED, NO, MUST CHANGE THE RULES OF THE GAME

Last week tourism state minister Geoffrey Kiwanda kicked up a storm, while in trying to promote the Miss Curvy beauty pageant, put his foot in his mouth and then some, by saying the Ugandan woman’s fame curves  can become a tourist attraction.

The way women took offence to this reminded me of how many years ago the headmistress of Maryhill High School, Mbarara took issue with the government school truck.

Sr Felice could not imagine transporting her girls around in the truck, which had “Produce for export” emblazoned on its side. She promptly had it changed to “Support girls’ education”.

Earlier this week President Yoweri Museveni while speaking at the 32^nd Summit of the heads of State at the AU called on his counterparts to generate a sense of urgency in pursuing a common market for Africa and an eventual political union.

He argued that it’s only by coming together economically and politically can we banish the stereotype of the continent as being bedevilled by hunger, disease and poverty and also prevent a repeat of the colonisation of Africa.

Two seemingly unrelated events but which highlight the major challenge of our continent.

"While some sections took offence at using our women as marketing tools and objectifying them, if you looked at it another way it’s a clever, if not original way, of shifting the measure of beauty...

Western media through its sheer dominance has created a standard of beauty characterised by tall, slim and light skinned women, which we have come to accept, even if only at a subconscious level.

It is this thinking that, I was reminded years ago, saw no Ugandan lady nominated to contest for the “Face of Africa” model search competition almost a decade ago, because our women were not tall enough and had too much around the waist and hips.

It is the kind of thinking that subconsciously has men hankering for lighter skinned partners, with straightened hair.

But as mentioned above, because of this standard of beauty, our women have next to no chance at foreign beauty pageants, which is why Quin Abanakyo’s run at the Miss World beauty pageant was such a surprise.

"When you get into a game in which you do not make the rules, chances are you will be competing at a disadvantage. You either muster the rules and hope you can excel despite your lack of input in their formulation; you can contravene the rules and guarantee that you will lose anyway or walk away and go and start your own game with your own rules...

The organisers of the Miss Curvy competition have in essence gone away and created their own game, where their contestants can compete from a position of strength rather than from other people’s measure of what constitutes beauty.

Whereas they may not, or never, get world wide acclaim, because they don’t fit in the “conventional” definition of beauty, you can rest assured they will do just fine controlling a niche that makes sense in our context.

The call for a unified Africa falls somewhere between learning to play by established rules and breaking the rules anyway, which is the only way one can hope to compete better in a game not of ones making.

The colonial era saw Africa split up by arbitrary boundaries based on a logic that was not our own. That is how you find our border communities everywhere on the continent just don’t take this political boundaries seriously.

"But the boundaries never the less have served to separate our populations, disaggregate our resources with the net effect being the basket case that the continent is today...

We have to contravene those rules on one hand, so that on the other hand we can compete more effectively in the global arena, where size is might.

Africa’s resources are so vast that it’s a scandal of prodigious proportions that we are the poorest continent on the planet.

By one example it is estimated that the mineral resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo have an estimated value of $12trillion. That’s just a number, but when you realise that this is the total economic output of the US, you have to wonder.

When you drill down to its essence, the reason this is so is because we are divided, playing by someone else’s rules, which invariably work in their favour not ours.

So yes taking a leaf from the Miss Curvy organisers, if we are to have half a chance of not only surviving, but thriving as a continent we need to take a hard look at the rules and tweak them, scuttle or ignore them altogether. The sooner the better.