“My skin was rough like a snake’s and then it started peeling off. It was very painful, so I had to go to the hospital,” says Latifa Myinyikwale. While Latifa wasn’t bargaining for a chemical peel in her quest for beauty, that’s literally what she got — after two years of using skin-lightening creams, Latifa, a black Tanzanian, has scars, rashes, and blotches all over her body.  

Black is not beautiful in Tanzania and in other African nations; many women seek to look and become whiter since, as a result of social conditioning and media imagery, whiteness is often perceived as the epitome of beauty. Latifa explains: “You hear that if you want to look beautiful, then you have to look like a white person and to look like a white person you have to use these creams. Of course it is natural that women want to be beautiful.”

Women like Latifa spend a significant amount of their meager income on skin-lightening creams. Products range between four and six American dollars, and with the gross national income at $290 per capita, the pursuit of beauty is costly, dangerous, and disfiguring. Women also suffer from fertility problems and cancers of the skin and liver as a result of the hazardous chemicals, such as mercury and hydroquinone, that may be in the skin-lightening products. The Tanzania Food and Drugs Authority successfully banned 83 of these skin-lightening creams in 2003, and they are now attempting to enforce that ban.

While Tanzania is taking a proactive approach to curb the use of hazardous skin-bleaching products, the practice is by no means confined to Tanzania — approximately half the women in Mali bleach their skin.

As much as ever before, there is now a sense of urgency to convince people that black is most definitely beautiful.  

Mimi Hanaoka