.beyond nigeria’s antiblackness….

Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me: How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?
- Zora Neale Hurston, circa 1928
for a people who’re much heralded, who regard themselves, as (some of) this warped wide world’s most incredibly intelligent, witty and humorous, it is such an amusing thing that nigerians seem to think ridiculing people for being darkskinned is, like, top 3 most sharp-witted and offensive things anyone could do. beyond amusing, it is bemusing.
yesterday was another day in this white, men’s world. on twitter, someone chirped:
“Dark skinned people marrying dark skinned people
what is your agenda?
to reproduce crude oil?”
oomf retweeted this with a comment asking us, his followers, to “guess the country.” the guessings were invariably right: the bird was nigerian.
replies under the original tweet were cosignatory, which is to say: many of them found nothing alarming about it, which is also to say: many of the replies thought the tweet not asinine, but humorous.
in all of this, only one person seemed to not have been so carried away as to forget that a question, if rhetorical, had been asked. “No,” this person offered an answer, the agenda is not to reproduce crude oil, but “to produce a GHANAIAN”
aha, there we went again. ghanaians, the perennial nigerian chorus goes, are so black, so dark, so charcoal, so soot, so crude oil…..
the zinger, though, is that in the grand scheme of things here on this colourful earth, nigerians are neither white, not yellow, nor red or brown people; just as ghanaians are not immune from having the poison of antiblackness swimming good in their collective bloodstream (but then, who is, in this ‘postcolonial’ globe?)
here’s what, to spare this post any further circumlocution: i’ve had years old reservations about how ghanaians keep responsiding to nigerians’ pitiful foolishness on this matter.
these days, we thank goddess, it seems to have stopped, but i swear! i’ve seen, with my own eyes, ghanaians responsing to nigerians antiblackness with…..
lol, look at that — even you the person tweeting this about us ghanaians are as dark as…..
smh, we are not even that dark, have you seen the kenyans?
…..antiblackness. not successfully veiled, if there was any attempt to.
i come to the other, perhaps more pertinent, one of my qualms: much of the age-old responses to this particular crude ridiculing by nigerians is framed in wording/posturing that suggests that colorism, nah, its parent, antiblackness, is peculiar to nigeria. not in our corner. (and even if that isn’t exactly what these retorts say, even if what they actually say is: we all dey suffer from this antiblackness thing but as for nigerians dier, not. not. not!, i still get issue.)
no lie, we all dey shit, but why always nigeria up in our nostrils with their foulness? i’ll allow myself to chalk it up to this: nigeria is, comparaed to ghana or not, a rather big country — in landmass, in poplulation. and it follows, i theorise, that this their internalised bigotry and the expression of it, is proportional to their ‘rather big’ mass.
we can — and should — call out nigeria’s antiblackness. but it can be done in a way that is neither facile nor disregarding of the fact that this shit also lives in our chambers. and, in fact, everywhere else in this wide, white world.
for every Olasubomi Okeowo on the couch, there is, proportionately, a KSM on twitter. the forest is antiblackness, naija is merely a big tree.
*
every sunshine-day around this time, the setting sun settles on your skin. it bears a message, a reminder: dark is beautiful
- me, just the other day, in 2018.