Fashionably Black? Not in Africa.

  I have no idea why but recently I have been spending time with more and more fashion models. I never would have consciously chose this as a chubby black woman. In fact I would have imagined it the third circle of hell in Dante's schema; where I would be forever punished for my gluttony and over consumption of food by listening to vain women who eat ice all day. But Cape Town is crawling with beautiful tall skinny women of every ethnic background, and low cost locations; so it is here many global brands do photo shoots. In fact I have come to realize many brands that seem to play on a sense of Americana or Britishness actually have their brand identity produced in Africa where it is easier and cheaper. The result can make some photo shoots look pretty comical. Out of nowhere in the middle of Africa, a group of freakishly tall white women appear. Mostly blonds. One could wonder why brand producers came to Cape Town to find models who clearly look like they came from Copenhagen.
  There is some local "talent" (to the extent that smiling in front of a camera can be called talent) in modelling. Overall in the industry these women are viewed as inferior. The one I have spent the most time with comes from another African country. She is 6 feet tall, a beautiful ebony color and has thighs about the size of my arms. Whenever she runs into people in her industry they chastise her for being too fat this season. "I'm the fattest model in Africa!" this woman has told me. By comparison I am a hippopotamus, and mind you I'm still inside what is medically considered a normal, not overweight range of BMI. Another black African model has told me that she is considered ugly, but that is good because at least it's interesting. I was fascinated by the trials and tribulations of these "ugly" models. I asked a lot of questions. Basically what I figured out pretty quickly was that any model who didn't look like an Aryan was of questionable beauty.
   None of this nonsense of whites being projected onto our collective imagination as superior is particularly new or unusual except that it happens in Africa. Local tastes are pretty varied, but big girls walk with a lot of pride. I often see obviously overweight women coming down the street dressed and walking with such obvious and attractive confidence it surprises me.  Africans remind me of middle Eastern people in their taste for women. There is a certain combination of nostalgia and sexual attraction for the chubby woman with black hair. I was able to do much better as a belly dancer in the middle east than I ever could have in the USA, and not because I changed in talent level.
  In Africa where all kinds of beauty are appreciated one very foreign mold has come to be seen as the ultimate model in advertising. Fashion and ads are about fantasy. And who would ever fantasize of looking like me and by extension having a totally banal life? A woman who looks like me works and struggles. Theoretically a woman who is skinny and blond plays on her family estate all day ordering around darker servants.
  South Africa has some kind of racial hiring quota system but it has skipped right over fashion and more broadly advertising somehow. But advertising dictates the psychological fantasies and dreams of the masses. If you walk into any local African store selling soap here you will notice lightening soap on sale, as if lightening one skin will deeply alter one's life. Perhaps it will. But it is deeply ironic that in RSA, a country ruled by those ostensibly dedicated to black empowerment in terms of economic reality, has no stance on black empowerment in terms of group psychology. The compromise seems to be that although black and brown people are now allowed to enter any profession outside of those about projecting an image; the image of whites as ideal will never be seriously challenged.

 In a funny ironic note, those who work most closely with projecting images of fashionable whiteness may be the most tired of it. Several local photographers here have taken pictures of me as if I'm some sort of muse...and in ways that emphasize my 'ethnicness' and em, substantially full body...go figure!