I happened to travel back home for a close friend’s white wedding, it was a rare opportunity to mingle and bustle with my old folks. Amid the course of chit-chatting, a fair lady was introduced to our table, her name was familiar with our memory but her face? Not at all, back in those days she was an African queen; always shining with her brown skin but now she’s all fair even fairer than most Europeans. She bleached!
What is bleaching? According to Wikipedia; it is the practice of using chemical substances in an attempt to lighten the skin or provide an even fair skin colour by reducing the concentration and production of melanin.
I had to conduct wide arrays of surveys, to determine why most Nigerian no longer feel comfortable in the African colour.
I knew immediately I had to get my hands soiled if I was to get the most accurate grassroots details, so I ventured into conducting polls and questionnaires. A total of 523 people of different religious, ethnic, and social backgrounds were sampled for qualitative insights.
Most classes of my interviewees; totalling 369 were of arguing, the bane of the bleaching cream menace in Nigeria is low self-esteem and inferiority complex.
A lady who choose to talk under the condition of anonymity disclosed how most dark-skinned ladies felt out-classed and out-gunned by their fair competitors. Most of them feel the moment they bleach and become fair, racial slurs and diatribes will no longer be associated with their ears.
One lady divulged how she wants to be identified as an onye oyibo (Igbo for European) and not a black monkey (a racial slur) which the Europeans call us.
Another lady by the name of Chiamaka (name changed) narrated how she chose to bleach because her significant other was addicted to European pornography and always stole glances at fair-skinned ladies.
Another woman stated how her daughter of 17 requested she bought her a whitening cream, all because the fair girls in her school were getting the most nods and comments from co-pupils whilst on social media platforms their likes were astronomical too.
According to the World Health Organization, 77% of Nigerian ladies bleach. The highest in Africa and the world. Closely tailing behind happens to be our neighbour Togo at 59% and the bleaching trend continued to South Africa at the rate of 35% and then 27% in Senegal.
Meaning that once again we have proved to be the giant of Africa, we have successfully demonstrated our prowess in disbanding our melanin pride by sitting atop the bleaching chart.
Another 118 argued that bleaching got a beachhead when youths started paying attention to celebrities. To them, celebrities have been very instrumental to sway unsuspecting protégés. All these yeyebrities (according to an old woman) are always dark, but once the searchlight of fame beams on them, you see them becoming fair automatically out of a wink.
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Linda was very specific that the infamous Big Brother Naija show has been successful in birthing unwanted and confused celebrities who happened to be brand influencers for whitening cream industries thereby helping to confuse their observers that “that which is fair is beautiful”. These people are recruited by foreign cosmetic brands as ambassadors to drift fans.
Meanwhile, 28 percent of my interviewees attributed this whitening trend to peer pressure. A man, Mr Uche noted how a group of girls in his class – for he happens to be a senior secondary school teacher – started to bleach. First was Ogechi, she started to bleach and there was a significant uptick in the romantic gestures she got before you knew it, the other girls who were regarded as mgbeke (Igbo for ugly and undesirable) started to bleach.
They got influenced by their ring leader Ogechi, hopeful that shedding the African skin for the European colour will be a form of renaissance for their Romanticism.
Popular whitening, toning or bleaching creams as most users prefer to address this nefarious act in the Nigerian market are; Caro white whitening cream, Bio carrot lightening body lotion, Maxi light lightening lotion and Bio Claire body lotion amongst others.
These lotions, manufactured by the European and American cosmetics industry travel all the way to Nigerian (African) markets. Prior to this, different suppression techniques are employed by these European firms to suppress the reasoning capacity of their target market.
A popular technique happens to be the overt advertisement of European ladies with these bleaching creams claiming to have been fair and beautiful from the constant usage of these creams. This makes the audience to be racially subjugated to believe that fairness is superior and better than black.
Clearly, the trend of bleaching in Nigeria traces its roots to the clandestine, subjugative and psychological machination of the European cosmetics industrial base to sway African consumers to appear and behave inferior to the melanin-free skin.
Allwell is a socially conscious writer and a freshly baked graduate
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