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 32nd 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.
