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Identity · Revelation
Episode #52
Reminder of the dilemma
A — You accept the post and lighten the skin to survive.
B — You refuse clean and go back to looking for a decent job.
If you chose A
Choosing A is recognizing that the system is stronger than you. — For now. It's a survival calculation, not an ideological surrender. But it's also feeding the machine that crushes millions of black women.
If you have chosen B
Choosing B is an act of silent but radical resistance. It's defending your dignity at the price of your stability. But it's also a risk that your mom won't eat this month, and no one ever knows why you refused.
This dilemma is not about depigmenting cream. He's talking about power. An economic and aesthetic system inherited from colonization, where whiteness remains a monetary social capital. Aminata does not confront a capricious director: she faces decades of conditioning that have made the complexion clear a synonym of respectability, success, desireability.
If she accepts, who will judge her? She joins millions of African women caught in the same vice — xeesal is not a whim, it is often a survival strategy in a labour and marriage market that punishes dark skin. But every tube of lightening cream sold consolidates a racial order that Africa claims to have exceeded. Individual acceptance feeds collective oppression.
If she refuses, her gesture is noble, but invisible. No social movement will arise from its unpaid electricity bill. Resistance without a safety net is a heroism that society demands of the most vulnerable without ever supporting them. Refusing alone is burning in a fire that no one will quench for you.
The real question lies ahead: why do African companies, led by Africans, reproduce the colorist hierarchies? Why is the machiavelism of economic power in Africa exercised even in the pigmentation of its employees? Politics and the intimate join here, in this grey area where identity becomes commodity.
The baobab never changes the bark of its trunk to please the wind. But it took centuries to become unshakable. Perhaps true wisdom for Aminata is not to accept or refuse — but to take the post, keep his skin, and force the world to get used to his light as it is. For the baobab does not bend: it grows slowly until the entire landscape is reshaped around it.
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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