African women are loosing sense of self-worth. Their
idea of feminine elegance is to wear white female hair styles. Flip
through any issue of our week-end newspapers and picture magazines to
see how far this disturbing trend of self-hate by our females has gone.
No class of black women is exempt: film and sports stars, musicians,
students, models, literary gurus, politicians, academics, business
executives, civil servants, religious leaders and followers, unemployed
or working class spinsters and housewives, are trying desperately to
pass for white.
They are all pampered as teenage daughters, with charming African
hair styles, which they promptly abandon for white female hair styles as
soon as they become of age to choose hair styles for themselves.
Advertisers of cosmetic products are the architects of the assault
on our sense of self-worth, telling our women that light skin and long,
shinny, bodiless, straight, white female hair styles, are the ideal for
our women. The advertisers hide the truth that light skin colour age
faster than dark skin, and that every race has natural hair styles that
suit and compliment her. Africans have the greatest variety of elegant,
feminine, beautiful, sexy, creative, ennobling, envied, open to further
innovations, female hair styles, than all the other tribes of the world
put together. Our women have hundreds of matchless teasers from the
ancient Nubian, Kanuri, Calabar, Edo queenly varieties, to the modern
exquisite resourceful African tribal traffic stoppers.
The proper African female hair styles fall in the range of low/full
cut, to thick, rich, woolly, curly, alluring, lively, dramatic,
healthy, luscious, moist, sheer, knotted, kinky, plaited, jumbled,
tangled, crown of part-collected, massed or cascading hair, confirming
(like the peacock’s crown for the birds’ kingdom, or the lion’s for the
animals’ dominion), our females’ ordained status as the human queens:
brave, proud, confident, real, important, dignified, feminine,
irresistible.
African women, wearing hot combed, straight, stretched, compacted or
other white female hair styles, look inferior, like cheap substitutes
and slaves, standing besides their true to nature white female peers;
and like grandmas besides their proudly African peers with African
female hair styles. They invariably look like white headed black dolls,
doubly empty inside, or like cats emerging from a forced bath of hot
oil: ugly, slimy and abnormal. So, one is tempted to ask, do our women
wear white female hair styles out of a feeling of self-hate or because
they are angry and want to shock and terrorize with their, I don’t care
how I look pose, blacks they are ashamed of and whites that reject them?
Most modern African and Black women from around the world are ashamed
to be African because African continental women are copying their
African American peers. There was this actress looking like a precious
jewel in her African hair style at the Pan-African Night of Tributes in
Los Angeles and a few hours later, was looking like grandma in her white
female hair style, at a Pre-Oscar Gala. Every April, Ebony magazine
features black College Queens. All of them wear white female hair
styles that make them look like jokers and pretenders to the throne of
beauty queens of any tribe, black or white. Obviously, a great deal of
confusion is going on in our women’s heads at the moment. A kind of a
split personality crisis. If they cannot change their ‘black skin
blemish’ fast enough, they can at least, jump start this with white
female hair styles.
Of course, 400 years of slavery dealt a devastating blow to our
feeling of self-worth. While Hiroshima bombing happened over a few days
and the Jewish holocaust lasted a couple of years, without causing
either of them the loss of cultural focus and identity, our
dehumanization went on for 400 years and it was brutal and total. It
obliterated our languages, culture, traditional mores, religions,
history, individual names and identity. It was 400 years of no
industry, learning, or progress, because we were running and hiding, not
knowing who they would kidnap or murder next.
Over two hundred million of our relatives died on the run or during
the Middle Passage. It was 400 years of unbridled rape of our women and
the inhuman and ungodly castration of our men; 400 years of slaving
like beasts of burden without pay on the plantations of Bible totting
slavers; 400 years of not knowing what we did wrong to be visited with
so much hate, violence and destruction; 400 years of not knowing if and
when it would end, and it has not ended 600 years after.
The Jews and the Japanese received compensation for the terrible
wrong done to them but our tormentors do not consider us human enough to
deserve their apology and reparations. We do not count in their
records of human history, not even as a footnote and we are powerless to
exert restitution because we are not united. When men are powerless,
their female folks tend to ride with the winners as booties, or in the
hope of some of the master’s spoils robbing off on them.
In a recent Ebony magazine feature on black female senior executives,
directors, and vice presidents of some leading US corporations, all of
them wore white female hair styles that did severe damage to their look
and age. They obviously believed they reached their merited heights by
being dowdy and loyal servants. White leaders and bosses are not likely
to be telling themselves, “I trust her absolutely because she is not
true to her nature?” There is courage and strength in not living a lie,
which all sane leaders and bosses, whites inclusive, recognize and
quietly respect. Our girls cannot hide their basic nature under alien
and unbecoming hair styles and assume that all is well.
Senior black female holders of political offices in the US and
African governments, including Michelle Obama, our first, first lady,
think, passing for white with white female hair styles, encouraged their
ascendance or appointment, and that foreign white leaders would resent
them if they looked their natural African selves from head to toe. For a
start, it makes them look older than their real age, unattractive and
undignified. It definitely offends the trust implied in the truism that:
“real is more likely to be honest and reliable to deal with.” That is a
conflict we all face right now, we are not real but we think we are, or
do not care.
The current US Ambassador to Nigeria, Robin Rene Sanders, is an
exception. She proudly wears dreadlocks and proud Africans love her
madly for her courage. We trust her; see her as our own; as a sister
and a friend who wants the best for us. It is an instinctive feeling
because she identifies famously with us. Another great Diaspora African
mommy and beauty is Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick of the US Congress. I
wish all our women, at what ever age, would emulate her and Robin Rene
Sanders. They look ageless, regal, strong, trustworthy, dependable and
beautiful. They inspire our confidence by being proudly African. That
is what African women not contaminated by Western decadence look like.
It confirms that the Queen of Sheba’s extended family has not been
completely wiped out by European’s plastic culture.
We have great female poets who, despite their age, could still win
the Miss World title if they would be true to their African nature. We
have others in public eye, people others look up to, such as artistes,
authors, film stars, who ought to know better, in terms of the correct
public image to project, who do not feel there is anything wrong with
their unnatural hair styles.
We have daughters with long straight hair, of course, who look
becoming because they are natural, but we also have black female TV
hosts who wear pathetic, short or long, weightless, graceless,
revolting, fake styles, thinking they look cute. Such hosts would not
get me out of bed in the morning to watch a ‘Good Morning’ TV show?
When African American men were wearing pressed or hot combed hair
styles not too long ago, many of us pined and prayed for the phase to
pass. Our urgent critical worry now is that we may not find proudly
African sisters to marry by the morning. May be we should buy our
African American females, mirrors to look at themselves with the African
eye every morning, before stepping out into the world? Better still,
we could send them the mirrors left behind in Africa in payment for
slaves by slavers? That way we might find some value for the mirrors,
by using them to see what the slavers are still doing to our daughters’
mentality because, Diaspora Africans are continental Africans’ mirrors
in modernity.
Female newscasters and talk show hosts on African television
stations such as TVC, Mitv, Ltv, Galaxy, Silverbird, Channels, AIT
partially at dusk and not day light, habitually wear white female hair
styles. NTA is the only exception and I influenced them when a listening
patriotic African, Segun Olusola, was in charge of programmes there.
Typical cultural African programmes, such as Gbedu, Mo, Oge, on our TV
stations, are routinely hosted by females unsure of their correct racial
image. The confused message they pass on with their unsightly
non-African look, as against what they say on the programmes, apart from
irritating their proudly African captive audience, discomforts the
non-African viewer, eager to be treated to genuine and honest African
scenes and entertainment.
There was this presenter the other day on Ltv, with long, straight,
artificial hair, drooping all over her face to below her shoulders. She
was shaking her head every few seconds to re-arrange the hair, and
using her hands to transfer hair falling over her eyes to the back of
her ears in typical white female manner. It was a lot of trouble for
her, but that is not the issue here. On the programme, she was
admonishing her listeners for not being true to their nature. “We
should be proud of our culture, stick with it, and show it off to the
world,” she said, stoned face. I had to touch my television set to
assure myself, I was not dreaming.
When a Nigerian won the Miss World title in 2001, she was looking a
delectable African queen. A year later, after her European sponsors had
taken her around the world as their queen, she visited Nigeria looking
like a masquerade. No one could recognize her. She had added 30 years
to her age in twelve months, with her European hair style.
If you ask our females why they take so much trouble to disfigure
themselves, they say it makes them look beautiful. It is all so very
sad for our race because they (as our mothers) pass their feelings on to
the average African child who prefers a white baby doll to a black one
because the white one is more beautiful. Then when you ask the child
to point to the doll that looks more like him or her, he or she
helplessly and slowly points to the black one.
The typical African right now, would tell you he or she is proudly
African, wearing a suit in our noon day heat, and answering names like
John, Jane, Stella or Stephen. The young men are wearing hair styles
the females should be wearing, with earrings and all to boot; the women
are looking like scarecrows or extraterrestrial beings, repulsive,
masculine and strange to our environment, in compacted, stretched,
alien, unbecoming hair styles. They look neither black nor white from
bleaching to sore point, with accentuated stretch marks all over the
covered body.
Non-African tribes that would not try to change their nature as a
race, by switching wholesale to African hair styles, religion, fashion,
or answering African names, or burning black (in counterpoise to us
bleaching), with injurious health consequences, that include kidney
ruin, aggravated or heightened diabetes and hypertension, are difficult
to fault for thinking that black IQ might be lower than that of the
Chimpanzee.
NAIWU OSAHON Hon. Khu Mkuu (Leader) World Pan-African Movement); Ameer
Spiritual (Spiritual Prince) of the African race; MSc. (Salford);
Dip.M.S; G.I.P.M; Dip.I.A (Liv.); D. Inst. M; G. Inst. M; G.I.W.M;
A.M.N.I.M. Poet, Author of the magnum opus: ‘The end of knowledge’. One
of the world’s leading authors of children’s books; Awarded; key to the
city of Memphis, Tennessee, USA; Honourary Councilmanship, Memphis City
Council; Honourary Citizenship, County of Shelby; Honourary
Commissionership, County of Shelby, Tennessee; and a silver shield
trophy by Morehouse College, USA, for activities to unite and uplift
the African race.
Naiwu Osahon renowned author, philosopher of science, mystique, leader of the world Pan-African Movement.
Culled from:
http://saharareporters.com/2009/11/06/nature-self-hate
