When I went to Dakar, Senegal, I didn’t expect to merge into the culture. I knew something would remind me that I am an African American, not an African.

I didn’t expect that something would be eye shadow.

It happened on the first weekend. I stood in the door of my guest house, watching people headed to a wedding reception on the roof. It was easy to tell who had organized the affair. A group of women wore identical hot pink cotton blouses and skirts sewn in the traditional Senegalese style. They had coordinated their makeup, too. Their eye shadow and even their lipstick were as pink as their clothes.

I was stunned. In America, black women don’t wear colors like that.

We wear earth tones, deep golds and coppers, maybe a silver occasionally as a highlight. We outline our eyes with a black or brown pencil, or perhaps navy-blue if we’re adventurous. But bright pastels aren’t our colors. They belong to the white women whose skin supposedly provides a better palette for such tints.

So there I stood, an ocean away from home, in a place I hoped would provide a refuge from the burden of race. Instead, I was once again confronting the fact that race colored my most mundane decisions: the makeup I bought, the colors I chose for my clothes.

African Americans have always had an ambivalent relationship with color. We love so-called high-effect hues like red, orange and purple. But Eurocentric society used our affection as proof of our inherent inferiority. They claimed the colors we loved were “loud” and jarring. In a bid for acceptance, many blacks abandoned bright colors for a paler, more acceptable palette.

Both men and women got the message. I’m old enough to remember when my father wouldn’t wear anything red because he was convinced that he was way too dark for such a bright color.

And that is one reason why my own closet is a paint box. I wear warm colors like oranges and peaches, accented with an occasional beige or cream. My blouses and dresses do more than compliment my complexion. They symbolize my insistence that I will not compromise my identity in order to fit into a society that, quite frankly, views people like me with disdain.

The Senegalese women, however, were much less self-conscious than I. No one had told them that certain shades of eye shadow and make-up should be reserved for whites, or that wearing certain colors confirms and reinforces white society’s stereotypes about blacks.

Why would those issues even come up? White folks are barely a presence in Senegal. During the two weeks I stayed in the Dakar, I could count the whites I saw on one hand. Even the generic images I saw on billboards and in advertisements were of black people.

No, the women I was watching didn’t need the us-them division that had ordered my life. They don’t have to wonder whether the brightness of their clothes or the style of their hair would be used to bar their economic and social progress.

So they wore eye shadow in eye-popping colors: a blue so bright and pure, it seemed to be pulled from the cloudless sky that greeted me each morning; a green that reminded me of the Granny Smith apples I’d bought before I left the United States.

I smiled as I watched these beautiful women running up and down the stairs. Theirs wasn’t a style I would imitate, but it was a point of view I could appreciate.

In that moment, I began to get what I wanted most from my visit to Africa: the freedom of being in a place where nothing seemed to refer to race — not even the make-up.

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs