Melaniña

By: Lerato Mthembu

One of the most difficult things a writer is tasked with, apart from finding the perfect beginning, is finding a perfect title. These few short words need to embody your entire story from beginning to end. This is why finding a title for this specific story was quite a mission – how does one capture the events of a story that is far from ending? Not only that, it is also multifaceted so which face is more important than the others. Whether you find this title appropriate or not, is not the point – everyone is entitled to an opinion. But if by the end of this piece of work, you have an opinion then my job is done, I have succeeded in moving you, you now know what its like to be a black girl – a melaniña.

I am a 20 year old South African female, living in Johannesburg. According to official legal documents, I am “black” – note this is in reference to the exact shade of my melanin. When finding their place in society, every South African – for “statistical purposes” – has a variety of options, an array of boxes to choose from in terms of their race – white, black, coloured, Indian, Asian or other.

I am not quite sure what you would see as “other” considering the fact the basic shades of grayscale have been discussed. Here is the dilemma, this is essentially the integral flaw in the system under which our society operates, in my opinion it was the straw to break the camel’s back when it comes to anything regarding racial issues. It’s easy to base my argument on opinion so let’s base it on something a little more solid, consider the biology of skin colour: the smallest functional unit determining who we are is the gene and thousands of these determine how you look, how you function and even how you behave so skin colour is just a variation of a gene which determines how much melanin your melanocytes produces.

The exact shade is a combination of your parent’s genes and obviously their parents before them and so on and so forth – it’s sort of like God playing Russian roulette. So honestly, it baffles me when people are convinced that their prejudice can be substantiated by some theory that one shade is faultier than the other as if by some error the Painter added too much black to the perfect white pallet. But if I’ve learnt anything from my upbringing it is this, there is honour in defending your values and beliefs but respect is not something you should forget in the process so, in an attempt to respect the (somewhat unfounded) values and beliefs of another, one sometimes needs to just agree to disagree – it is an honourable defeat, honourable because you chose to be the bigger person. It has become a vital survival tool for me – being the bigger person.

My generation (those born in the years following South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994 after the fracturing of the apartheid regime) are known as “born frees”. A daunting title to have bestowed on us but our parents were far too optimistic about
the future that lay awaiting us.

Notice how I described the apartheid regime as being fractured instead of “dismantled” or “ended”? Indeed the democratic elections were supposed to signal the end of racial segregation in post-apartheid South Africa but our nation (in its entirety) would soon understand the saying, “Rome was not built in a day”. Apartheid wasn’t just a social system, it was etched into the values and beliefs of white South Africans at the time – it was a way of life, a culture, a tradition and just as our black forefathers passed on tradition and culture to our grandparents and parents and our parents to us, white South Africans taught their kids and grandkids about white privilege.

Tradition and culture is only as strong as the willingness of the society to accept it. This vindicates why a white mother in 2015 would, in hushed and unassuming tones, push away the black child trying to make her wailing white baby smile. Although somewhat diluted it is still very much alive. These things are subtle.

I am fortunate to have never experienced racism in its raw and unfiltered form, which is odd considering I was born in the Free State, a province predominantly Afrikaans – a subset of South Africans whose forefathers are the masterminds of apartheid itself. If anywhere, you are bound to find racist South Africans in the Free State (side note: not to say that everyone in the Free State is racist or that this is the only or most common place to find racists).

The most prejudice I have experienced came in the form of bullies. My bullies were not white – ironically – my bullies were black and yet their abuse towards me was based on the same reasoning behind a white South African calling a black South African a kaffir – my shade of black. I’ve attended many schools over the years, all of them Catholic (my mother’s attempt at distancing my from my nation’s dark racial black hole). One of these schools was called St. Conrad’s College in Klerksdorp, North West.

Ask anyone who has been to the North West province, summers there feel as if the equator relocated to our side of the world but for some reason natives of the North West are what we colloquially term “yellow bones” and despite the blaring heat they never seemed to get any darker. Which was the opposite with me: naturally I am dark skinned and with added exposure to the beloved summer sun, I only got darker. I was also much taller than my peers.

This combination essentially put a big bull’s eye on my back, I was to forever be marked as an outsider – not only socially but it seemed that my bullies were convinced there was no way I too was South African, I mean how could a tall dark skinned girl unlike them be South African? So for years my afternoon walks to the parking lot after school where marked by taunts from boys several years older than me – the height confused them, you see to them I was someone their size and someone must’ve told them to go and pick on someone their own size and so they did. Remember when I said being the bigger

person was a survival tool for me? Their taunts where essentially one sided conversations because as they went about shouting things like “go back to where you belong, you kwere kwere” – the colloquial term for foreigner, I simply ignored them and willed it to end. I managed to make it out, not unscathed but relatively stronger.

Looking back at it now, those years of taunting where one of the reasons it took me a while to grow to love my height and shade of melanin. As a woman it made it that much harder. Growing up, acceptance and social achievement is often measured by means of popularity – the number of girls who want to be you, the number of guys who want to get with you. Two things I didn’t seem to have in large numbers but it is true what they say, good things come to those who wait.

I may have been a late bloomer but I grew in mind before I grew in sexual awareness and it turned out that the one bolstered the other. I am a smart, educated young woman with more to offer than the big booty, wonderful rack and pretty face I have been blessed with but it took me appreciating these things myself before anyone else could have.

That’s the tricky part about growing up in a generation as tech savvy as ours. Our perceptions are rarely ever based on only the things that are directly said to us but rather the subliminals that we are consistently bombarded with via media platforms. Once again, it is the subtle things – perceptions of what normal is, from the colour of your skin to the shape of your body. Its below-the-line advertising at its best, you don’t even realize it’s there but the power it has over the perception of yourself is stronger than you care to admit.

I could eloquently describe it to you but perhaps it would be easier for you to see for yourself. I want you to do something for me, I want you to do a Google image search on “beauty”. How many pages did you scroll through before you saw a black woman? How many black women did you count before that sickening feeling in your gut had you too tired, infuriated or disgusted to keep scrolling?

See the point I am trying to make? I take nothing away from the beauty of white women but it personally makes me livid that my beauty is substandard in comparison to theirs. What makes me even angrier is our response – or lack thereof – as black women to these consensuses formed by society, mind you – a society that black people make a large majority of.

Do we lack that much self-love that we cannot move to change people’s outlook? And when I say change I don’t mean making black the newest fad – we all know fads rarely ever last. Black men, can we not show the world that black women are beautiful – soil of the earth, one of God’s gifts to man? Black women, can we not teach ourselves and our young daughters that we are queens deserving of the praise, respect and dignity that comes with such a title? Why do we allow others to pin us against each other to the point where a trivial topic like, “which one is prettier: dark

skinned or yellow bone hunnies” is a daily debate on social media platforms? I have always hated my dark skin because of such opinions but it is the most beautiful thing when someone you deem “the one” adores the very thing you hate. It doesn’t change my view on beauty it just means I’ve accepted that I am one of those definitions of beauty.

And that is one thing I commend the organizers of the Victoria Secret Fashion Show for, because the highlight of this year’s show for black women was when Angolan born, Maria Borges donned short hair reminding black women were of the same calibre as the Kendall Jenner’s and Behati Prinsloo’s of this world, even without the weave.

Something a little closer to home, something that made me proud to be a (black) female youth in South Africa, were the female representatives from the University of Witwatersrand SRC (student representative council), Nompendulo Mkatshwa, and Shaeera Kalla, that lead the nationwide #FeesMustFall movement – a crusade to reduce the increasing higher education fees and to put into place policies that made access to education a right for all.

We have always believed in our power as women, throughout history we have seen it over and over again but it is often a tale read in history books. To have bared witness to a movement that mobilized thousands across the world behind a common cause, to have seen women lead and change what was dubbed “a group of angry students” to what the world revered as “a student revolution”, was something in itself. Taken from a poem by Relebone Rirhandzu eAfrika called #BobbiesTake, comes a perfect ode to them:

To the women of the revolution
Who don lipstick like war paint
Headwraps like armour
Defying the sky Defying the patriarchy
You are magic.

Life as a black woman will never be something to take lightly, but for generations to come they will speak of us as titans, legends in our own right but only after we recognize that we are women before we are black and it is on our shoulders to teach the world about the 50 (and more) shades of melanin.