In Sudan, pale is beautiful but price is high

In Sudan, pale is beautiful but price is high
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-08-02 09:21

KHARTOUM - At the crowded Beauty Queen parlour in Sudan's capital Khartoum, beautician Selma Awa says she just cannot understand why so many of her clients want to get their skin lightened.
"One hundred percent of women who come here have it done," she said. "People think it's prettier to look white. In my opinion, dark is prettier. I don't know who they want to look like."

In many countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia lighter-coloured skin is considered prettier and paler women are believed to be wealthier, more educated and more desirable.

This attitude has led to a boom in the use of skin-lightening products in Sudan, a vast country torn by war where skin colour also has political connotations.

Rasha Moussa, a maid, pulls some skin-whitening cream from her handbag.

"I use it on my face to make my face shine. The Sudanese see the light colour as better than dark. I think it's a complex that we have," she said.

"People judge you here by your colour ... If they see me and someone else with lighter skin wearing the same clothes, they would say she is living a comfortable life and I'm a poor woman," she added.

Millions of women throughout Africa use creams and soaps containing chemicals, like hydroquinone, to lighten the colour of their skin. But the creams can cause long-term damage.

Dermatologists say prolonged use of hydroquinone and mercury-based products, also found in some creams, destroys the skin's protective outer layer. Eventually the skin starts to burn, itch or blister, becomes extremely sensitive to sunlight and then turns even blacker than before.

Prolonged use can damage the nerves or even lead to kidney failure or skin cancer and so prove fatal.

"It's a very bad problem here. It sometimes kills the patient ... It's bad, bad news," said a doctor at a Khartoum hospital. He said the number of women coming to the dermatology department with problems caused by skin-whitening treatments had grown to at least one in four of all dermatology patients.

In Khartoum, skin-whitening creams are displayed prominently in stores and on roadside adverts. Products advertised on Arab television channels promise the creams will also make a woman more confident and glamorous.

In one advert, a previously unremarkable female television presenter delivers a stunning report after using whitening cream. Her handsome male colleague, who has previously ignored her, says: "You were great. What are you doing at four?"

In another, a singer leaves the stage with stage fright but returns after lightening her skin and performs wonderfully.

At the Modern Style bridal store, an array of skin-whitening creams adorn the front desk. Next door, a photography studio displays wedding portraits of women with very pale skin.

Modern Style's Egyptian owner Samira Magar tied the growing preference for white wedding dresses, which are not traditional in Sudan, to the desire for pale skin.

"More Sudanese are getting white wedding dresses, so they want to look like Egyptians and Europeans," she said.

"I think it's an inferiority complex. They think that if they're white in colour, they are more beautiful," she added.

Magar said some women had resorted to mercury and harsh prescription creams not meant for cosmetic use, leaving their faces disfigured on their wedding day.

Natural methods of skin whitening have been used for centuries, Magar said, but in Sudan the use of chemicals began in the 1980s and has thrived since.

The doctor at the Khartoum hospital, who declined to be named, said the creams now used can cause irritation and infection, blotching, eczema, and that most contain steroids.

The doctor said that rather than ask why women use the creams, men should be asked why they prefer pale skin.

"Here, all men want to sit with or marry a woman with light skin. If any man wants to marry, he says the first choice is for a woman with light skin ... Why is this?"

While a tan can be seen as something of a status symbol in the West, darker skin marks out women in Africa, the Middle East and Asia as poorer people who have no choice but to toil under the hot sun.

In Sudan, Africa's biggest country, over two decades of civil war between lighter-skinned northerners and darker southerners has given skin tone more sinister connotations, and the meaning of the various shades is nuanced.

Northerners, who are mainly Muslims and claim Arab lineage, have traditionally held power. A north-south coalition government now shares power after a peace deal last year.

During civil strife, skin tone often meant the difference between life and death. Southerners, traditionally Christian or animist, complain of prejudice against them in everyday life, and some northerners privately claim superiority over their darker and non-Arab countrymen.

Hello Mr. A'dil
Thanks for this interesting issue. It's so importnat to discuss such realities of sudanese life. Such phenomenon can be intepreted in terms of the influence of Arabic culture in the country. In school curriculum, white color, and particularly a white woman, is associated with perfection in all aspects of life. A woman is praisd if she's white, sometimes regardless of whether or not she's beautiful. Even in Holy Quran white color is always postive with black color being negative. Sudanese people were, and still, brought up with the understanding that they are arabs, and part of this identity is to acquire an aran feature: color.
The topic is vital and interesting and vital. I'll sure come back with more comments soon
stay well
Sadig

Dear Al-sadig

Thank you for your interesting input. the topic is very important indeed. this is why i posted it here as soon as i read it in the news a few days ago.

why do people think there is a standardised form of feminine beauty?
and they associate this standard with the colour of skin?
who made them think that black is ugly or unappealing?

in my view, all women, of all colours are beautiful. of course there are variations, but this has nothing to do with the colour of skin. some white women are very ugly, despite their colour and long hair. while some african women are very attractive despite being black with short hair. and vice versa.

i believe the more human beings from different races intermingle and intermarry, the more beautiful they become.
add to the fact that beauty and appeal are not confined to physique or features. there is also personality and sense of humour and beauty of the soul. here we recall the proverb سماحة جمل الطين, the beauty of a statue referring to a woman being lifeless and spiritless.

thank you again and please come back to enrich the discussion. look at this beauty!

What's interesting is the fact that Caucasian women (white women) seek to tan their skin during summer time. Some of them, even, resort to artificial "tanning" clubs. Of course by doing so, they want to acquire that bronze or dark colour, which -they think- makes them look beautiful.

Now, Alek Wek, the Sudanese model, is a very powerful and different symbol of balck beauty

and Nasma Mohammed, the beauty queen of Trinindad and Tobago in 2002, and who is half Sudanese, is another example of African beauty


I have been to Malakal, in Southrn Sudan, in the 1990s. There, I have come across a lot of women from Shiluk or half northern, half southern, who were of magnificent beauty and presence.

Anyway, they say, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder!


Charlotte Church, the young British (Welsh) opera singer

Dear Adil

Hello i think we have met in the Arabic forum, anyway the issue you raise is very important, where beauty is only one side of it, have you ever came across the phrase " The rightness of whiteness" ?
The believe of the superiority of the white race, makes it inevitable for other people to imitate them in whatever way possible.
I think the main problem is that people weren't brought up to handle human differences well, whether within their communities or outside, they either copy them if they are believed to be superior, or destroy them and look down upon them if inferior, but no one actually values difference
Lastly i think the greatest problem a person could have is not accepting who he is, or changing to please others. I like to believe that ladies who use products to change their skin colors are mostly teenagers who are at that age concerned with male attention more than their identity, but hopefully they will grow out of it

Raga

When a Muslim was trying to proselytize Malcolm X in prison to the cause of the nation of Islam, he showed him in the dictionary how the word white stood for everything that is beautiful, while the word black stood for quite the opposite.

One could understand such bigotry in USA at that racially-charged era, when the black man was considered a quarter of a human being.!


However, in the case of our beleaguered Sudan the issue is a bit perplexed and ironic:

How come that despite our being predominantly black, and despite the dozens of popular songs that tend to glorify the beauty of the black colour, we abysmally failed to incorporate the perception-Black is beauty-in the Sudanese psyche?

Thank you Raga and al- Fateh. I shall comment on your valuable contributions in due course.


miriam makeba, the renowned south african singer