Too Black to be African
Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina
Content warning: profanity, mentions of anti-Black violence
Last week, I happened to visit South African outlet News24 online to view an article. I don’t even remember what it was about. I glanced over at the top 5 trending stories, at the top of which was the name Chidimma Adetshina, along with Miss SA. I recalled that the annual pageant is held in August, and I thought, “Oh they crowned someone already? It happened already?” Yes, the competition took place on Saturday, August 10, 2024.
I previously watched parts of the 2022 Miss South Africa competition online and was so enamored by the show. The live singer, the DJ, the dancers, the creative choreography of the contestants as they dazzled the stage in their swimwear, which was crafted by Sanele Thabethe (judge Thando Thabethe’s sister); it was just such a beautiful, ornate and engaging spectacle. I compared it to the dry Miss USA pageants I had seen in prior years and I thought to myself, “This is how you do a beauty pageant show!” It was so fun, enthralling and entertaining.
I started to research and learn more about the Miss South Africa pageant. I learned about recent winners like Zozibini “Zozi” Tunzi (Miss South Africa 2019 and Miss Universe 2019), who I love, and my personal favorite, Shudufhadzo “Shudu” Musida (Miss South Africa 2020). I learned about how prestigious and well-regarded South Africa is on the global pageant stage, as many Miss South Africa winners go on to place well in and/or win Miss Universe.
According to Business Insider, South Africa holds the fifth highest number of Miss Universe wins in history, tied with a few other countries. I understood why as I personally find South African women to be some of the most beautiful women in the world, and they rightfully, thoroughly, and intelligently prepare for the portions of the competitions that require them to eloquently answer questions with thoughtful and fact-based responses.
Side note: Dominican Republic placed third in Miss Universe 2022; I remember that the contender was very pretty and I wondered why the country didn’t place higher more often. Then I remembered that the educational system in that country is absolute shit, which is why those women can’t get far in these pageants that require beauty, grace, advocacy and wit. I am familiar with the educational system as I studied abroad there and noticed that many of the local people did not even believe that there were Black people in the United States; they said that Black people were only in Haiti. The U.S. was built by Black people, everybody knows that. FYI Obama was POTUS at the time of these conversations. Womp!
I liked that the most recent South African pageants that I saw seemed to have contestants who represented the country equally. In the 2022 Top 10, there were about 7 African women, 1 Indian woman, and 2 white women. (South Africa’s population is reported to be about 81% Indigenous/Black, 8% Coloured/multiracial, 7% white, 3% Indian/Asian.)
Conversely, I found out that Jamaica is a country that is about 80% monoracial Black and yet approximately 80% of the winners of the nation’s beauty pageants over the last ten years were white, Asian or multiracial.
I especially liked that in South Africa, Zozi and Shudu won with their natural, low-cut and bald hairstyles, showing the African hair diversity that is usually shunned, labeled not feminine enough, and therefore regarded as unfitting for women’s beauty pageants. I know that some people online, including South Africans, protested and questioned how beautiful and worthy they felt Zozi and Shudu were due to their hairstyles and even complexions, but the ladies won in the end, so I felt positive about that.
To my surprise, last Sunday’s News24 article had nothing to do with the crowned winner of the competition. I clicked into the article and was met with an unsavory story about how South African people wanted to denigrate and eliminate a Top 9 finalist, Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina, simply because she had Nigerian ancestry; this apparently called into question the validity of her nationality and therefore her ability to represent the nation of South Africa.
Umm…
Citizenship
Okay. Countries’ definitions of what constitutes a citizen vary, but at the core of the qualification, is the fact that someone was born and raised in the country.
Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina was born and raised in South Africa. Chidimma’s mother is of Mozambican descent and her father is of Nigerian descent. Her mother, the person who bore and birthed Chidimma, was also born and raised in South Africa. Her parents’ ancestry and national origins are irrelevant.
The ancestry of someone does not negate their nationality.
I was born and raised in the U.S., therefore I am American. My race is Black. My ancestry is Caribbean. My parents were born outside of the U.S., and yet this does not change the fact that I am an American citizen. I am American. I am an American woman.
Chidimma is South African. She is a South African woman!
According to the rhetoric I have seen online, the only reasons that the public (and government) called her nationality into question is because of her names as well as having witnessed her celebrate her accomplishments within the Miss South Africa competition with Nigerian family members. Apparently people were also concerned that she had the flags of her ancestral homelands in her social media bio, which is what a lot of people rightfully put into their bios. Then people wanted to launch a very public investigation and call her a “fraud,” because she’s Nigerian.
Excuse me?
A large amount, probably the majority due to apartheid, of past winners of Miss South Africa have had non-African surnames like Joubert, Strauss, Coetzee, Flint, Nell, van Heerden, etc. I am sure these winners also celebrated their accomplishments with family members from outside of South Africa, i.e. family in and from France, England, the Netherlands, India, etc.
So Asian and European surnames and people are a go in South AFRICA, but African humans with African surnames are somehow a threat to South AFRICA that needs to be eliminated and neutralized?
WTF?!
Please read this personal account of the complexities of citizenship and belonging by a Nigerian who was raised in South Africa.
I am familiar with the horrific xenophobic, Afrophobic violence that has plagued South Africa. I recall hearing about the tragic, heinous murders that took place around 2019 at the hands of Black South Africans, and the ones I specifically recall were committed against Nigerians.
South Africans seem to have an issue with all African immigrants but I have noticed a specific prejudice towards Nigerians.
Nigerian Scammers
The Nigerian scammer stereotype is so tired. Are you serious?
Nigerians are some of the most hard-working, industrious, intelligent, educated and creative people on the planet. They know how to make a way out of no way, as one Nigerian woman put it, because of their tough economy and strict upbringings. They’re proud people who flaunt their wins.
So what? That doesn’t make them all scammers.
Are you ignorant South Africans jealous of Nigerians’ ability to thrive and succeed on a worldwide scale?
Yes, Nigeria, like many African countries, struggles with corruption and inequity. Many poor citizens go to great lengths to make money, as do poor people in any other corner of the globe. Why are you mad at people trying to survive and feed their children (by relocating)? How does that make them scammers?
As if South Africa does not reek of corruption.
South African actress Ama Qamata made a great point about Chidimma essentially being blamed for South Africa’s lack of organization surrounding its government affairs. Qamata wrote on social media, “It is so unfortunate that Chidimma is a scapegoat for a much bigger issue in SA. If anything, this exposed the level of corruption taking place in government. We need to hold them accountable for allowing such unethical procedures to take place under their governance.”
I visited the South African government’s website and one of the links labeled “citizenship” is broken; their system is clearly a mess.
Whether or not Chidimma’s mother committed identity theft/fraud, it’s the South African systems and people who have failed to do their jobs and due diligence to ensure that anyone they suspect is ineligible to become a citizen, or compete and participate in whatever national event, does not make it through, and certainly does not make it to the Top 9 of Miss South Africa.
I still don’t believe the fraud claim and I don’t think it matters; Chidimma’s mother did not commit a violent crime. Whether or not she did engage in identity fraud should not be public knowledge; it should be handled privately by the institutions that failed to catch it in the first place.
Anyhow, if a poverty-stricken African woman is trying to get government papers to live, how is that such a heinous crime that needs to be publicized and severely punished, when South Africa allows violent, racist white people in the country to establish and maintain whites-only settlements and towns, at the expense of the immediate safety, permanence and livelihoods of non-white, namely Indigenous South Africans? Bih, what? You don’t think that’s worth attacking via social media platforms and petitions in an effort to pressure those whites-only settlements that threaten Africans in South AFRICA to collapse/disband?
The corruption in African countries is borne of the colonial, white supremacist regimes that destroyed swaths of humanity and disrupted the ability for African people to make a decent, dignified living, as well as destabilized entire national systems of operation; this is also what has birthed a perceived lack of resources (scarcity), inefficient infrastructures, and vast inequality.
Whites and colonizers in general keep the imbalance of power strong amongst the colonized so that the subjugated (Africans) continue to lust after and compete for power, which is a white supremacist value and ideal, and pit themselves against one another to attain it. It makes Africans and Black people subconsciously but effectively do the so-called heavy lifting to maintain the white supremacist world order, while whites really just get to sit back and continue to enjoy the fruits of their violence and corruption.
The only scammers you really need to be concerned with are white people. And Arabs and Asians.
They have all created and sustained the biggest scam of human history: white supremacy. White supremacy is a scam. Europeans (and Arabs) invented a baseless system of supposed human superiority that envelops the entire world, and you believe it and buy into it. They have amassed unparalleled levels of wealth and unfettered power by enslaving, raping, pillaging, killing, displacing, torturing, and devaluing African human beings. Their wealth is the result of continuous conquests, land theft, human theft, exploited labor and dehumanization.
South Africans should really be examining and investigating the scammers and the frauds that are white, Asian, Arab billionaires. How is it okay with you South Africans that white European families are multibillionaires, the wealthiest people in your African country, whose pets live better than most Indigenous South Africans, including you, because of their (alleged) legacies of violence, discrimination, greed and inhumanity? How is the (alleged) fabrication of their companies off the backs of your ancestors, resources and land not a scam? Why are these corporate entities not worth destroying and eradicating, like you do to foreign-African-owned businesses?
Not to mention the many South African and Southern African “businessmen” — Kudzai Mushonga, Nzuzo Njilo, Leeroy Sidambe, Peter Matsimbe — who are associated with wealthy South African women celebrities and have ultimately been exposed for their allegedly fraudulent and unscrupulous business practices; those men are the supposed frauds. So if we want to use generalizations based on a few people, like you’re doing with regards to Nigerians, then you South Africans and Southern Africans are the scammers. Run investigations on yourselves. (I actually don’t care much about supposed African fraudsters because my attention is rightfully focused on the European, Arab and Asian scammers who are living large because of their oppression and exploitation of African and Afro-descendant people, resources and land.)
Asians and Arabs have fallen in line with white supremacy, using the system to impose upon, colonize, oppress and demonize Africans. Do neocolonialism and modern-day human trafficking ring a bell? (Arabs actually started it all but in this case of South Africa, Europeans are more relevant.)
They’re all in on it: England (the U.K. as a whole), France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Mauritania, Libya, U.A.E., Qatar, Tunisia, Australia, India, China…and of course, your personal favorite, South Africans: the Netherlands.
Ah yes.
The name Debacle
A prejudicial South Africa online said something along the lines of, “With a name like that, [Chidimma] needs to go represent Nigeria.”
The 2024 winner’s surname is le Roux. That’s clearly a very French surname. No smoke for this white woman who is a descendant of European slave owners and colonizers? A surname like that, and she does not need to represent France?
Prejudicial South Africans also posted things stating that, “The Miss South Africa competition isn’t Miss Africa.”
If Miss South Africa “isn’t Miss Africa,” it damn sure ain’t “Miss Europe” nor “Miss Asia” either!
Le Roux, Flint, Coetzee, Joubert, Nell, Ramos, van Heerden are clearly not Indigenous South African surnames.
They’re colonizer surnames.
“In all my life as a journalist who has covered different beats including entertainment, I cannot remember a white Miss SA being heckled in a township for her inability to speak isiXhosa or isiZulu.
I don’t remember any of our white Miss South Africa’s ever being quizzed about their nationality based on how their names sounded. We have had the Kriels, Vorsters, Gardiners, Strausses reigning as Miss SA at different points of our history.
Not once were they reminded that their ancestors came from Europe. There are some prominent public figures – who are white and who are on record as saying their own parents were not born here – but they have never been insulted for their foreignness. ”
Other surnames in the Top 16 of the 2024 Miss South Africa competition include Khan, Katz, Potgieter, Spinks, Zoubair — all not African, in particular not native to South Africa.
Surnames from England, Scotland, the Netherlands, France, India, and any other part of Europe, Asia or Arabia are fine by you South Africans.
I will give credit to South African Naledi Chirwa, MP and delegate to the South African National Council of Provinces, who pointed out this stark contradiction on the part of Afrophobic South Africans, and went on to call out Gayton McKenzie for his ignorant comments on the matter. Chirwa summed it up by writing on social media, “And it’s always Black women that you target and bully on this scale. Everybody else gets a pass. White men get a pass. White women get a pass. Black men get a pass… You hate Black women. Black women’s history matters. Our lineage matters. The children we birth, ARE OURS TOO!”
Afrophobic South Africans: welcoming colonizers and oppressors over your fellow (subjugated) Africans is stupid.
You’re stupid.
Afrophobic Lies
South Africans saying and thinking that African immigrants are descending upon South Africa to “kill” or “displace” or “drug” or “infiltrate” Indigenous South Africans is the biggest crock of bullshit I’ve ever heard anyone believe. Who even told you this nonsense?
I relocated cross-country (within the U.S.) a few years ago, by myself. No children. Little furniture to move. But I still had to get myself, my clothes, my possessions, my car, across the country. I had to find a place to live and get settled in an entirely new environment with no family around to support me. I also did not have savings to tide me over and I had to start working right away. It was a long, daunting and challenging process.
Can you imagine how difficult it is to pick up and leave your country, to go to an entirely new one? Sometimes with children? Leaving behind your home, land, family, community, customs, culture, and any sense of familiarity is no small feat. I suppose I can be more empathetic and thoughtful about this because my parents are immigrants; their parents uprooted their lives to emigrate to the United States with their children in tow, in an effort to create a better life for themselves and their children, grandchildren, etc.
Africans are not leaving their homelands to get involved in some convoluted, diabolical “anti-South African” plot. They’re leaving their homes for the chance to painstakingly, slowly, often honestly build better lives for themselves and their families. They’re leaving that which they know behind and risking everything, including their lives, to have what they perceive to be a better shot at creating a stable, content life. They’re putting in the work to do so. Life is hard. No one, especially no one who is poor, is uprooting and destabilizing themselves to go kill people (without a national war/imperial mandate).
As far as Afrophobic assumptions about violence go, human beings commit crimes based on proximity. Unless someone has a very methodical, maniacal plan based on a very specific prejudice, no one is picking up their lives to go to another country to kill people. Which is why you ignorant South Africans are not going to countries like Nigeria and Mozambique to kill those people, in spite of your virulent and ludicrous prejudices.
This is why “Black on Black crime” is a racist, prejudicial misnomer regarding the phenomenon of human criminality; most white people commit crimes against other white people and most Black people commit crimes against other Black people, because they are generally clustered into and live in the same neighborhoods, communities and vicinities (due to the enduring legacy of racism).
Regarding Afrophobic concerns about African immigrants being “drug dealers” — drugs will be dealt anywhere, by anyone, of any race or ethnicity, including native inhabitants, that is a fact of life. Drugs will not disappear from South Africa if foreign-born Africans are completely driven out.
South Africans are simply targeting Africans because they’re more vulnerable, in that they are both immigrants and Black, meaning that the state is not going to substantively protect them against such extreme levels of violence and abuse.
South Africans’ issues with poverty, unemployment, instability and inequity all started long before African immigrants entered the country and will continue after they leave the country. Those issues all stem from Arab and European slave trades, colonialism and apartheid. Duh! Read a book. Stop using more vulnerable populations as a scapegoat for your neocolonial issues.
Miss South Africa Host’s Nigerian Fashion
The strangest part of this whole pageant fiasco is that all of the Miss South Africa host’s dresses, makeup, hair, glam, and photography were crafted, completed and fulfilled by Nigerians.
These are the full designer, stylist and creative credits from the show host’s Instagram page:
Stylist: @dahmola
Makeup: @neetabeauty_
Hair: @_thedonhair_, @hairbybukks_
Headpiece: @urezkulture
Designers: @veekeejames_official, @somobysomo, @sheyeoladejo, @mazellebridal and @emaginebybukola
Photography: @thelagospaparazzi
Jewelry: @fabjewels_official, @raya.jewellery
So…South Africans are just going to exploit Nigerians’ creativity, fashion prowess and ingenuity? It’s exploitative because they otherwise treat and regard them like shit.
I think that South Africans have also casually been exploiting Nigerians’ musical influence worldwide. Amapiano’s global presence came off the back of the Afrobeats explosion, and the South African genre honestly has that to thank as a primer for the world’s appetite for African music; the same with film, Nollywood was the first to break into global mainstream media distribution, and then the South African industry soon followed.
Exploitation is a tool of the colonizer.
I know South Africans love to refer to whites as colonizers, and yet y’all are no better. How dare you look to Nigerians to fulfill your need for creation and labor, and then subject them to this ridiculous level of scrutiny, disdain, disapproval, exclusion and violence?
Displacing South African Women
A South African woman who brands herself as a gender and social activist took to social media to denounce Ms. Adetshina for weeks, making such nonsensical claims as, “South Africa yona is not for foreigners and no Nigerian is gonna be paraded here!” and, “Today you want to replace South African women with a Nigerian foreigner. We will not allow any foreigner to ascend to spaces meant for South African women whose issues and challenges haven't yet been given the much needed profiling and exposure.”
How is a white European, Asian, or even a multiracial (Coloured) woman more qualified to represent you as a (poor) Black/Indigenous South African woman, than another African woman who was born and raised in South Africa?
The white women who compete and win the Miss South Africa titles are direct descendants of the people who enslaved, raped, pillaged, imprisoned, violated, displaced, and killed your ancestors, including your grandparents and very likely your parents, South Africans. They are the people who are presently complicit in your continued subjugation within the country, as it relates to the amount of safety, resources and opportunities you are afforded, compared to the high levels of access they as whites are afforded. How are they going to give, and how have they given in the past, “much needed profiling and exposure” to your unique challenges as a Black South African woman?
The white women that you happily parade around your national stage and award are the very reason you as South Africans have the unique issues and challenges that you do. White women in South Africa are not impacted by the same levels of gender-based violence or any type of violence — whether governmental, state-sanctioned, medical, financial, professional, or in the realm of having adequate access to safe neighborhoods, basic resources such as water, electricity, internet, etc. — as their whiteness insulates them from various forms of extreme institutional and interpersonal violence. They are also and always have been active participants in white supremacy. Patriarchal violence is always statistically higher for Black women than women of any other race, and on top of that, Black women face racial violence. You call yourself an activist and don’t even have the facts, or rather, you’re choosing not to consider the facts.
Open your mind and use your brain: why the hell are Africans culpable for your miseries when it’s European (and Asian and Arab) people who have imposed themselves onto your land, resources, cultures, assets, minds, spirits, and bodies for no less than four fucking centuries? They continue to do so with impunity. You welcome it. And yet you feel the need to tear down Africans, who have risked their lives just to go to a country on the continent with more opportunities and a stronger currency? And those opportunities are only there because of the white and Asian imposition and occupation.
Why do you feel so sympathetic towards white people? Why do you feel compelled to offer them so much peace, comfort, grace and belonging? Stop loving your enslavers. Stop kissing white butt! You call them colonizers but are so happy to have them oppress and displace you. You happily visit and vacation in their countries and spend your hard-earned cash in their unscrupulous, racist businesses in the U.A.E., the U.K., France, Maldives, Germany, Italy, etc. recycling and refunneling white supremacist, anti-Black slavery-produced currency back into their ownership…get a fucking grip.
Black people really do love slavery. It shows in the U.S. and even more so in South Africa, which only makes sense as the latter country’s formal white oppressive regime is fresher.
In other countries around the world, especially in Africa, these white and Asian beauty pageant contestants and winners have a level of privilege and generational wealth that produces a starkly different existence for them as women, than it does for you as a Black African woman.
Multiracial White Supremacy
The sad next step for the world, if we continue at the rate we’re going, is multiracial white supremacy. Many societies already function at this level, but it will become a more widespread phenomenon as world populations continue to become more racially mixed and racially ambiguous.
People have been fed this stupid and false narrative that once there are less white people in the world – even though they’re already a minority – specifically once Black people “upend” white bloodlines by fucking and reproducing with white people on a grand scale, that racism will magically disappear. People, Black women included, are even out here lusting after interracial unions in these sick, twisted swirl/rape fantasies, and it’s creepy as hell. Wanting people of different races to be in a romantic union for the sake of their racial differences is the antithesis of progress, the antithesis of anti-racism; it’s actually one of the highest forms of racism, as it’s predicated on perceived racial differences and it’s based on the ideal that Black/African people should not form the whole of a union because that’s “not interesting enough.” If Black and African people, cultures, physical features, inventions, customs are only palatable, acceptable, and laudable to you when conjoined with or embodied by white and non-Black people and their features, you’re anti-Black, and those are racist views.
Newsflash:
White people have been fucking and reproducing with Black people since the beginning of time, specifically since the beginning of white supremacy;
White people do not need to be a majority to wield and exercise power over non-white people, which is how the world currently works, and specifically how a country like South Africa is administered;
You don’t need white people present for the system of white supremacy to function as it exists in a complex web of systems based on ideologies, institutions, interpersonal interactions, and internalized beliefs;
Exceptionalism means that white people’s close relationships with people of different or mixed races, ethnicities, backgrounds, etc. whether they be Black, Latin, biracial, etc. does not motivate them to challenge nor eradicate their prejudice against said social group of people;
White people still largely wield racism and prejudice against people in their lives whether they be their spouses, children, or other family members; abuse exists within families and can therefore occur at the level of race (racial abuse);
Anti-Blackness and white supremacy are still practiced by non-white groups including Asians, Arabs, non-African Indigenous groups, multiracial and biracial people, and Black people themselves, as evidenced by this particular controversy; and,
No prejudice in the world would exist today if marriage, children and families were really the way to eliminate them.
The following mixed-race, multiracial, majority non-white countries already operate with a multiracial white supremacist culture: Cape Verde, Brazil, Dominican Republic, and you guessed it: South Africa! You can study the enduring patterns of anti-Blackness and racism in each and every one of these countries to see how it works.
This level of anti-Blackness and conducting of “investigations” to justify exclusion in its name, happen on a grand scale in other multiracial societies and cultures, especially in Latin countries.
A Black girl competing in the Little Miss Hispanic Delaware pageant was denounced by the public and sore losers’ parents after winning; the girl was pressured and forced to prove her Latinidad, all because of her skin tone. The pageant organizers said that this is a “requirement” and yet allowed her to complete without receiving the proof, which is ridiculous. The requirements need to be fulfilled, filed and accepted by the administering pageant organization and committee before the event happens, submitted by and checked for each and every participant, if those are the rules and regulations of the competition. Whether or not she’s Latin enough isn’t really the point — the point is that the public’s suspicion and discontentment with her win are all the result of virulent, unchecked anti-Blackness. No one seems to want a monoracial Black person, especially not a girl or femme, to represent Latinidad. No one would have questioned anything about this girl’s heritage nor pressured her to renege her win if she had white skin, and not even if she had blonde hair and blue eyes.
Brazil
I hate how people like to overlook Brazil’s long, storied history of anti-Blackness and racism by stating that it’s “the country outside of Africa with the most Africans.” So what? The country is still a majority mixed-race, multiracial, multiethnic society that grapples with racism at a rate that is either comparable to or exceeds anti-Black racism in the United States.
Per the video above, rainhas de bateria (Carnival queens) in Brazil are often white or multiracial, light-skinned women with loosely textured hair and slim facial features. After a Black Brazilian woman by the name of Nayara Justino was crowned by popular vote for TV Globo’s 2014 Globeleza, she was met with an unimaginable level of backlash, hatred, misogynoir and racialized cyberbullying that led to the network stripping her of her crown without explanation, and replacing her with a light-skinned multiracial woman to appease the viciously anti-Black Brazilian public. Ironically, samba and the dances and customs from which Carnival stems are African, and yet this woman was deemed to be “too Black” (i.e. “too African”) to represent a country that is reveling in its African heritage.
So apparently it’s only fun to engage with African culture but we (women/femmes) cannot be African ourselves…OK…that’s anti-Blackness for you.
FYI Brazilian supermodel Adriana Lima is not an Afro-Brazilian and she is not Black. I laughed when I saw that she identifies this way when she’s constantly talking about her cyan-colored (blue) eyes and her multiracial background; further, she has white skin, European facial features, and straight hair. She is from Salvador, but growing up around Black people does not make someone Black. Lima calling herself Afro-Brazilian erases actual Afro-Brazilian women, like Nayara Justino.
Dominican Republic
My Dominican mother told me that a Dominican musical artist (she can’t recall who but she thinks it was Johnny Ventura) wanted to run for president of the Dominican Republic but by her speculation, the people would not vote him in because he’s Black. Too Black to be president. He was however mayor a few times, so perhaps she was wrong, but her suspicion at her country’s hesitancy based on deeply ingrained and normalized anti-Blackness is worth noting.
She also was extremely upset when Barack Obama won the Democratic ticket ahead of the 2008 U.S. presidential election because she is a staunch Democrat and was fearful that Americans would not vote for a Black person, and therefore a Republican would win by default. She, like many, does not understand nuance; in spite of the country’s rampant racism, Obama won because he is half white with a “nice white lady” for a mother, and his deceased, Black parent who was not directly in the view and conscience of the public, is an African immigrant, as opposed to an African-American person. White people associate African-Americans with American slavery (and their white guilt, etc.) whereas African immigrants give white people a semblance of psychological distance from slavery, and are therefore less of a psychological threat to them.
The Dominican Republic has a long, grueling history of wielding anti-Blackness and violent racism against any dark-skinned, monoracial Black and African people, but most notably and most vehemently against Haitians. The political disputes which boiled over into racial prejudice and notions of superiority over Haitians, started around the year of 1844 when the two countries were arguing over where the border between the two countries that share the island of Hispaniola lay.
During the Dominican dictator Trujillo’s bloody reign from 1930 to 1961, the country waged an especially murderous war against Haitians living in the country as well as along the border. Dark-skinned people were targeted and tested on whether or not they could properly pronounce perejil, a word in Spanish, and if they did not pass the test, they were slaughtered. (FYI Trujillo was put in power and supported by the white American armed forces who were occupying the land from 1916-1924. White people are never innocent when we discuss global manifestations of anti-Blackness and racism.)
I lived in that forsaken Caribbean country for a time and I can attest to the fact that people’s identity and heritage is often measured by how dark their skin is, the texture and style of their hair (African styles like braids are frowned upon and regarded with suspicion of foreign Blackness), accents and the ability to speak Spanish fluently; these are used to assess whether or not a person will receive respect, fair wages, and sometimes the right to live. In 2013, there was a huge row over the Dominican government’s decision to deny Dominican citizenship to four generations of people of Haitian descent who were born in the Dominican Republic.
Rendering people stateless is cruel, inhumane and unjust.
On the complete flip side, the Dominican Republic along with many other Latin American countries incentivized Europeans (and Asians and Arabs) to emigrate to the country with the promise of citizenship, housing, and financial rewards for the move. This was all done in a concerted effort to “whiten,” i.e. racially dilute and diminish the African and Indigenous populations of Latin America, formally referred to as blanqueamiento in Spanish and branqueamento in Portuguese.
Latinos are not all Black and they do not want to be Black; they use that stupid line and oversimplification to benefit from Black people’s labor, suffering, ingenuity, advocacy and sociopolitical and economic advancements, specifically within the United States, whenever and however they can. AOC is not Black and she just wants Latinos to get the reparations that are due to Black people.
Trust me, Latinos do not like Black people; I know from family, research and having lived there. Latinos dehumanize, objectify, and hypersexualize Black people the same way whites, Asians and Arabs do. Many Latin countries like El Salvador and Argentina even deny having Black/Afro-descendant populations, while others like Colombia and Ecuador significantly downplay and discount their Black populations in official records. As demonstrated in the clip above concerning Afro-Brazilian actress Nayara Justino, and as evidenced by the recent Colombian series Siempre Bruja, monoracial, dark-skinned Afro-Latina women are only cast in Latin television and film to play slaves.
Latinos (and non-Hispanic biracial people) call monoracial Black people gorillas, monkeys, apes, orangutans, cockroaches, criminals, niggers, etc. more than white and Asian people do. (FYI simianization was borne of the Catholic church and started in Portugal, which is why its very commonly referenced in Latin America.)
Internalized Oppression
I will say that this is where my dreadful experience during study abroad in Dominican Republic comes in handy in my adult life and maturity. I understand internalized oppression, specifically internalized anti-Blackness, and how it presents itself in multiracial populations, very well. I know what it looks like, sounds like, feels like, and I am usually able to check myself before I run with that sort of rhetoric in my own mind, ideologies, views, judgments and interpersonal interactions. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of internalized anti-Blackness simply because: 1) anti-Blackness is rewarded in nearly every society around the globe, 2) it’s highly normalized, and 3) people unwittingly put up the nonsensical shield of “being proud to be Black” or “loving Black people” and therefore thinking that there’s nothing wrong with their anti-Black ideologies, behavior and rhetoric. It’s vile. David Banner once said that the “nigger project” worked so much better than white people could have ever imagined (when they first created the construct of race).
People claim to be proud to be African, claim to be pro-Black, claim to be “for the culture” (stop saying that stupid shit), and hate actual monoracial African people, especially African women.
Black is a Race, African is an Ethnic Identity
People who are called/known as European are ethnic Europeans, with European heritage.
People who are called/known as Asian are ethnic Asians, with Asian heritage.
A Nigerian born in Japan is not “Asian”
A Somali born in China is not “Asian”
A Spaniard born in Thailand is not “Asian”
and,
A Korean born in Wales is not “European”
A Gambian born in Sweden is not “European”
An Indigenous South African (Zulu/Xhosa/Tswana/whichever Indigenous African) born in England is not “European,”
so,
An Afrikaner (Dutch/French/British/whatever European) born in South Africa is not “African”
An Arab born in Morocco is not “African”
An Italian born in Kenya is not “African”
An Indian born in Nigeria is not “African”
An Arab born in Egypt is not “African”
A German born in Zimbabwe is not “African”
A Swede born in Botswana is not “African”
Stop erasing and diminishing African people by saying that anyone who is born in Africa is African; that’s ridiculous and outright disrespectful. Everyone born in Europe is not European; everyone born in Asia is not Asian. Protect and respect African people and Africanness like you protect and revere Asian and European people and their ethnicities and cultures.
Conclusion
You all know from my blog how much love I have for the country of South Africa, its people, and its cultures.
However, I am disgusted by South Africans and I am highly disappointed in Black people as a whole. Tearing down fellow Africans while embracing the white, Arab and Asian people who infiltrate and dominate your spaces with impunity, is not the way to go. You claim to be pro-Black and proud to be African and this is the nonsense you choose to put forth.
Do not ever say you love Black women nor Black people nor Africa if you are arguing for this type of vile, hateful scheme that attempts to poke, prod, threaten and invalidate African and/or monoracial Afro-descendant women and femmes and our worthiness to be in any space.
Life is tough and sometimes we don’t see nor receive the immediate benefits of bad, traumatic, disappointing and unfair situations.
However, I am delighted to report that Ms. Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina has accepted the invitation extended to her by Guy Murray-Bruce, organizer of the Miss Universe Nigeria pageant, to join the upcoming Miss Universe Nigeria pageant as its 25th contestant. If she wins, she will represent Nigeria at the Miss Universe competition in November of this year. What a beautiful blessing!
Chidimma (and Nigeria) turned a nasty negative into a powerful positive.
This woman and her family were unjustly subjected to an unprecedented and unnecessary level of threats, violence, disapproval, vitriol, and an overall invasion of privacy, just for South Africans’ abominable agenda to blow up in their faces.
Chidimma was propelled into the global spotlight and is now more of a buzzworthy name in the pageant world than the Miss South Africa winner; the scandal has eclipsed South Africans’ shameful need to diminish an African woman in favor of a European colonizer. Haha! And so, these hateful South Africans have exposed themselves for the ignorant, anti-Black losers they are all while ending up with egg on their faces.
In an interview with Arise News conducted last week, Nigerian-British pageant queen, coach and lawyer, Sommie Maduagwu, discussed the technicalities surrounding the Miss South Africa scandal and why Chidimma should be regarded as a South African. Maduagwu went on to assert that South Africa is known as a “sash factor country” in the global pageant world, i.e. South Africa is highly visible and well-respected in the pageant industry. She discussed how Nigeria is not as well known on a global scale or even within the country as far as beauty pageants go.
Perhaps this snafu is not only an ultimate win for Chidimma, but also a win for Nigeria, as the country will hopefully be incentivized to invest and funnel more money, time and energy into building up its pageantry, which can only stand to benefit the country by producing millions if not billions of dollars for the economy (which is hopefully equally distributed to its people!). As Sommie Maduagwu noted, all of the Miss South Africa host’s fashions and glam were produced by Nigerian designers, and this is an easy way for the country to capitalize on its flourishing fashion sector and its immense creative talents.
Go, Chidimma! I’m rooting for you. I am sending you love, regard, positivity, and support as you gracefully navigate an already tough industry; I support you as you continue to build an influential, exemplary personal brand and platform from which to incite progressive change. I hope that African and Black girls and femmes around the world are inspired and empowered by you.
Go, Nigeria! I’m rooting for you. I think most people (in Africa and around the world) are truly envious of the Nigerian resiliency, brilliance, fortitude and spirit; I hope that the haters can look within themselves and learn to be more confident, well-rounded people, gleaning from the positive, admirable qualities and characteristics they see embodied by Nigerians, instead of casting stones out of insecure resentment and spite.
And I’m rooting for a world in which Black and African people can continue to interrogate their internalized anti-African and anti-Black biases, and heal in order to create a more equitable existence for and within ourselves. Hopefully this is a teachable moment for many. We as Black and African people have a lot of work to do as far as chipping away at the internalized hatred and colonized mindset goes, but we have to start somewhere.
South Africans: do better!
UPDATE: Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina was crowned the winner of Miss Universe Nigeria 2024 on August 31, 2024. She will represent Nigeria at the Miss Universe pageant held in Mexico in November of this year.
I spend an immense amount of time, energy and mental and emotional labor on my work. Please consider contributing support below or via this link if it impacts and/or resonates with you.