Reading time: 3 minutes
Identity · Revelation
Episode #12
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You use the cream and secure your place in the company.
B — You refuse, keep your skin intact, and risk everything.
If you chose A
Choosing A is recognizing that the system is stronger than you. — For now. It's a survival calculation, not a moral abdication. But every cream application starts a little more image than you had of yourself.
If you have chosen B
Choosing B is a silent act of resistance that no one will measure the price. It's betting on your dignity when your fridge might be empty. Courage here has the bitter taste of insecurity.
This dilemma is not about cosmetics. He's talking about power. Behind the cream tube lies a whole building: a colonial heritage that has prioritised skins, a capitalism that monetizes the inferiority complex, and a professional environment that rewards compliance with an imposed ideal from the outside. Awa is not facing a beauty choice — It is faced with an architecture of oppression that has transformed its body into a variable of economic adjustment.
If she chooses the cream, judging it would be indecent. Millions of African women do this calculation every day, not out of vanity, but because colorism has become rooted in the very structures of social success. Skin whitening is a symptom, not a disease. Disease is a world where the value of a black woman fluctuates according to its colour on the scale of depigmentation.
If she refuses, her gesture is political, even if she does not. But individual resistance, however noble it may be, does not feed a family. And that's where the dilemma becomes cruel: the system was designed so that rejection costs too much and submission seems reasonable.
So the real question is not what Awa should do, but why she is forced to choose. Why does an African company, selling products to Africans, reproduce the aesthetic codes of domination? Why is the Machiavalism denounced in our presidential palaces also found in an open space of Abidjan?
The Baobab never changes the color of its bark to please the wind. It roots deeper, expands further, and ends up creating its own shade — the one under which others come to take refuge. Awa's true victory will not be the cream or the refusal: it will be the day no woman will have to put her dignity on a balance to weigh her future.
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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