Your beauty African women is not a fairytale story

I do not remember a time where I heard a story about a girl with African curves and tough, rough hair being a woman whose looks brought the adoration of great princes. The inferiority complex of whether our beauty as African women is true and real lives some where at the back of our minds.We live this reality of a psychological "your not the best" complex due to the fact that there are very few occasions where African features are upheld as being truly beautiful.


The truth is that the world is very with-holding in providing images of the African women in African shape with African textures in hair as being an image to love and adore. Even though we live in good old Africa ( as i am South African)  , Africans still have the pressure of not feeling that we are truly beautiful just as we are. Before the relaxer to straighten our hair, before the weave to replicate the length and bounce of Caucasian hair, do we see ourselves as beautiful?

Many of us truly do not. It Is not because we want to feel this way. It is because the world is such that it is easier to be the western version of beauty which is an international standard of beauty. Even in good all Africa it is hard to be African, it is easier to be close to white to speak really good English, to look a certain way this is an African standard of beauty, still today. Do not get me wrong we modern African girls with our English twang don’t go around thinking we want to be white. We do not think we idolise white features and looks and hair but our actions reveal that we do.


We are not totally to blame for our passive rejection of our heritage & looks. We have just become use to embracing ourselves in halves(meaning not totally). It is because some where along the line it became easy to fight our nature.

When at crèche we heard and saw illustrations of pretty white girls in fairytales but never heard ones that reflected us. When our mothers thought they were doing us a favour by straightening our hair from as early if not earlier then at six years. We were rejecting a part of ourselves. The addition of black dolls in stores is a new and refreshing inclusion. Us oldies had only white dolls to play with. And so these small actions had an impact.

They made African children take in this sense of what beauty was. To be an African girl is hard even in Africa, it is not a fairytale scenario where you can look and judge and fault us for not being African enough.



The way we as women look has always been a crucial area of importance. At the tender age of our crèche years we girls were being socialised to seek validation in looking a certain way which is why so many of us continue to find some validation in weaves & cosmetic surgery .We were told of stories of girls with immense beauty, the traditional western blonde, blue eyed slender framed beauty and how she was whisked away to eternal happiness. So it is no wonder that it takes a movement to shift mindsets. You have to really take the time to embrace the things about you that are not unobjected beauty. Because we object that frizzy african hair is beautiful. That thick girls are beautiful. That thick lips , a flat nose, a hude ass and a really dark skin is beautiful.Those are the things that are distictly who we are . Those are the things that are distictly african.


By Lindi Khumalo