Reading time: 3 minutes
Identity · Revelation
Episode #4
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You give him the cream to calm his immediate pain.
B — You refuse and accompany her in a fight she didn't choose.
If you chose A
This is to recognize that principles do not weigh anything in the face of the distress of a child. It's choosing the mother against the activist. But it is also, perhaps, teaching that society always wins.
If you have chosen B
To refuse is to believe that dignity is even transmitted in pain. It's a long-term bet. But it's also risking turning your daughter into a soldier of a war that isn't hers.
This dilemma affects the most intimate knot of colorism in Africa: the moment when ideology meets the flesh of your flesh. Aminata does not face an abstract debate on beauty standards. She faces a teenage girl broken by a system that centuries of racial hierarchies — of Trafficking in Contemporary Advertising — have been rooted in everyday life.
Choosing the cream means admitting a brutal truth: one does not heal a sick society by letting his children bleed. Aminata knows that the tube contains poison, both in its proper and figurative sense — hydroquinone, mercury, and especially the idea that darkness is a defect. But she also knows that Fatumata is not a symbol. He is a 14-year-old who simply wants to exist in his playground without being insulted. Motherly love has no manifesto.
Refusing cream is an act of resistance that requires an exorbitant price — And Aminata doesn't pay for it. It's Fatumata. We can accompany, explain, surround, but we cannot erase the harassment by a speech about Frantz Fanon. The risk is immense: that the girl end up associating black pride with her mother's indifference to her suffering. Let the fight become a cage.
Behind this choice is a political question disguised as a private matter: who should bear the weight of the decolonisation of minds? Convincing adults or vulnerable children? The activist in Aminata knows that every tube purchased finances an industry of self-respect. The mother in her knows her daughter won't sleep tonight.
Baobab does not choose between its roots and branches. It grows in both directions, slowly and stubbornly. Maybe the real answer from Aminata is neither the cream nor the refusal, but the time spent kneeling in front of her daughter, showing her — day after day, photo after photo — that beauty never needed to be lightened to dazzle.
To go further
Politics and Machiavelism in Africa: the roots of deep evil and possible paths of transformation
In a large part of Africa, political life seems to be trapped in a relentless logic where obscure manoeuvres...
Under the mask of beauty: the silent drama of skin whitening in Africa
The hidden face of « Xeesal« In the streets of Dakar, Abidjan or Lagos, the stalls are full of creams promising a...
Between black, mulatto and « Chabin » : The secret history of colour hierarchies in the West Indies
In the West Indies, skin colour remains a social and cultural marker inherited from colonization and slavery. ...
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