He once encountered a beautiful light-skinned woman at a bar and they hit it up and left for his place. She was a very beautiful lady, but then when she took a shower, he thought he had taken home a leopard or cheetah; he said, her knuckles and toes looked remarkably different from her light complexion on the face.
“That is when I remembered that story when we were young of a man that took home a half-woman, half-animal; I figured this is what the situation must have been. I had to lie to the lady that I had got an urgent call and run away.”
Hadijah, a 27-year-old hairdresser, rolled her eyes as she scoffed at him. A small wave of laughter swept the room as everyone was aware and could see that Hadijah was using ‘Mama Lususu’ that had made her skin several shades lighter than her natural chocolate complexion.
Skin-whitening products contain hydroquinone, a topical ingredient that disrupts the synthesis and production of the melanin that can protect skin from intense heat. When you bleach, it takes off the outer layers of your skin.
With some estimates putting the number of women using lightening cream in Uganda at 70 per cent in some places, adherents to these products do not seem to be worried there could be a sharp uptick in skin cancer because these products attack the skin’s naturally protective melanin.
Here in the heart of Kampala sits a multi-billion-shillings industry of skin products meant to whiten skin, from common Jik bleach(!) to creams and pills, as well as intravenous skin treatments.
At Gazaland in downtown Kampala, endless shops and stalls have walls filled with potions and concoctions for skin bleaching. There is BB clear lightening eclaircissant vitamin, retinoids, White Secret – the whiteners even feature a helpful illustration of the before and after with a brown pair of legs and a white one promising the buyer “restorative ultra-fast action whitening.”
There has even been a new development in this sector referred to as laser skin lightening which is only done by qualified dermatologists. The process is made faster by the notable increase in the number of dermatologists offering this service to the women with a ‘heavy bag’.
So, now many a groom will not be surprised if the woman they proposed to was dark, but the one who walks down the aisle to them on the wedding day is white! Strange, but Ugandans’ standard of beauty seems to be, ‘the lighter, the better’.
MEN TO BLAME
Although they are not willing to accept this, men have not abandoned their decades-long pursuit of light-skinned women. In fact, the Baganda have an adage: ‘yadde yaddeko ng’omubi omweru’, meaning, ‘better a light-skinned ugly person’.
Call it an influence of colonialism, call it what you may, but from time immemorial, colourism has always been a thing in society, with light-complexion women getting unfair advantage almost everywhere, compared to their darker counterparts. It is no surprise, then, that the moment women found the means to do something against their dark beauty (they wouldn’t call it that), they went all in.
And it has long been the case here that the higher in society the man, the more likely his wife or girlfriend will have bleached skin. Do a Google-image search of wives of African presidents, celebrities, wealthy businessmen, pastors, etc, and you will see the common denominator.
After that, search for images of women in power and see something there…
“When I had a light-skinned lady here as my secretary, people were trooping into my office all the time,” said Abbas Kakembo, 42, a mechanic in Kisekka market. If you are to take note of the skin tone of receptionists, TV hosts and successful celebrities in Kampala, you will find that many are light-skinned or bleached. Would it be safe to say that these women that are mutilating their skins are doing so to get the approval of men?
“I am actually glad these men are the same ones now crying about bleached women. Women are now being chastised for bleaching their skins and at the same time, they are flooded with messages that tell them white is beautiful. The men are the ones that start their tales of the ideal woman; they want a light-skinned one with a huge backside, and their women run and bleach their skins and buy artificial bums. Then in a few days, those same men cheat on the bleached, Brazilian butt lift backside woman with an all-natural dark lady! They are to blame for this mess,” one married woman, who admits she uses bleaching creams, said.
“Growing up, my half-sisters were light-skinned and I was dark,” a 25-year-old American told The New York Times.
“After my mother married another man, she had my sisters that were as light as their dad. People always said how beautiful they were.”
The constant comparisons to her sisters became singed into her psyche and stayed. At 23, she started bleaching her skin and turned several shades lighter until a close friend sat her down and gave her a lecture, telling her she was truly beautiful with her caramel complexion.
“I realized I had low self-esteem,” she said.
It took her skin a year to return to its natural darker hue, and she has been working since then on coming to terms with her view of herself. People bleach their skin all over the world. In countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bleaching is almost part of their culture now, and even men bleach.
Only South Sudanese women seem genuinely proud of their blackness, and are known to broadly exploit their uniqueness. In the United States, Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison wrote about the election of Donald J. Trump – who largely won on the strength of the white vote – an essay called “Mourning for Whiteness”, which explored long-running assumptions that Americans believe that white is better.
In Asia, countries such as South Korea and India are obsessed with skin-whitening products, and in the latter, the class divide between lighter-skinned Indians and their darker compatriots is unfortunate.
WHY BLEACH?
Skin bleaching has a lot to say about the lingering effects of colonization. When Europeans colonized Africa, they brought with them the belief that white was racially superior; heck, even the God they introduced to our forefathers and all His angels were white.
And decades after independence, many Africans’ aspirations are limited to being as close as possible to the white man – in physical appearance and location/ residence. Uganda may be the pearl of Africa, but many dark Ugandan women look in the mirror and wish they were lighter-skinned, or wonder why they were not born in, say, Slovakia or Switzerland!
The influx of thousands of immigrants from Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia does not help matters, as even in the refugees’ sorrows of displacement, many Ugandan women look at their complexions and naturally long, bouncy hair with envy. In Nateete, Lydia, 46, a vendor who started bleaching her skin when she was 21, is happy to have stopped early.
“What has it done for me? Have you seen women like me after using bleaching cream at this age? They are not light-skinned; they are orangish. I get cuts easily from things that scratch me, that’s why I always wear long clothes. Sometime my cheek bones feel like they are exposed when it is too cold,” she said.
Her face is discoloured, with dark spots in some places and light spots in others. A few years ago, she stopped bleaching when she saw how discoloured her skin was getting. Eventually, some parts of her skin have returned to the original complexion, but many light spots still remain.
When another bleaching fan Harriet, 52, was solemnizing her relationship with her long-term partner a few months ago, the glam squad at the salon had a hard time applying her makeup, because her skin had become so loose and as thin as a polythene paper and would slide over her cheekbones and forehead with every makeup stroke!
“These things are addictive. Just like my natural nails that are always covered with acrylic, there is no way I am going back to my natural complexion after all these years in this skin! Even my man was attracted to this skin colour, so…,” she said with conviction. “At least my daughters are naturally light-skinned.”
And to think that bleaching is just the tip of the iceberg!
The modern Ugandan woman has very little left that is naturally her. From Brazilian butt lifts (BBL) to eyebrow lamination (microblading), fake eyelashes, wigs, nose jobs, boob jobs, artificial nails, botox, coloured contact lenses, etc, the woman with deep pockets can afford to purchase a complete new version of herself and finally be happy to look in that mirror.
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