Why must women bleach their skin?

When I was just knocking my mid 20’s, way back in 2005, I lived in a bedsit which was an extension of a main house belonging to my landlady – a Sudanese woman who worked for the UN and was gone for long stretches of time.

There were two bedsits; the other was occupied by a female tenant, also starting out her life like I was.

STROKE OF LUCK

She was a pretty girl who spent Sundays washing her clothes outside in the common laundry area. At some point she started washing my clothes as well.

How did this stroke of good fortune befall me? I had a mini-fridge and she didn’t, and because she loved ice cream, she would keep her big tub in my fridge.

Ice cream for laundry seemed like a nice trade-off, right? And she washed my clothes... right up until her boyfriend found out and said he wasn’t comfortable with that developing story.

From that point of discovery, he became very suspicious of me and as time went by, completely refused to even say hello to me.

We had never interacted before; he was the kind of fellow who only said hello to me when he was with his girlfriend, perhaps to show that he was a social animal.

Otherwise, in her absence, he would treat me like a tree trunk. So I can’t say I was heartbroken when he stopped saying hello to me all together. No skin off my back.

TERRITORY

Since he didn’t buy his woman a fridge and she liked her ice cream, she continued keeping her ice cream in my fridge and started washing my clothes on Saturdays instead of Sundays when he would be there to pee on his territory.

She told me that his issue with me was that he was sure that I was eyeing her – which I won’t confirm or deny in the absence of my lawyer.

But I will say that a priest would have eyed her. She was a hippy, chocolate girl with a small waist, and she would knock on my door at 8.45pm after her dinner wearing this one small short red dress and then proceed to eat her ice cream on my bed (I had no seats), with her legs crossed while we watched the 9pm news on my very small TV set.

I don’t want to regale you with what happened next, but just know that one night she announced that she was moving out. She was going go live with her boyfriend.

“He has insisted that we get married immediately.” She moved out after two weekends, leaving her half-finished ice cream in my fridge, the only thing she left me with. Oh, and my dirty laundry.

We lost contact for years. At some point I realised that we were friends on Facebook where we spoke a few times, but since I’m not really into Facebook we completely lost touch.

WE MEET AGAIN

A dozen years fell off the calendar. Two months ago my friend and I, and a lady newspapers would describe as an ‘unidentified woman’, were leaving this famous bar.

We were waiting for a cab when a sweet voice screeched, “Heeey Biko?”

I turned to look at the person and it turned out to be a lady because I’d have hated if it was a man with a sweet voice calling out my name melodiously like that.

I couldn’t place her. She was very, very light, but not the natural kind, the unnatural kind. Like those girls who dance for Koffi Olomide.

She had a very long, very loud blonde weave. And she was wearing leather pants and loud lipstick.

She looked like one of those girls you can’t take to a family gathering because everybody would be talking about her for months after.

Only after I had spoken to her for a minute did I realise that it was the ice cream lady from my bedsit days.

Oh boy, was I taken aback! She was as close to being white as a ghost is.

In fact, after she was gone, the unidentified woman and my pal asked me suspiciously, “How do you know that lady?” to imply that she was furthest from the kind of person I would know.

I said, “I used to keep her ice cream,” and my friend laughed loudly thinking it was a metaphor.

WHY BLEACH?

A woman can do whatever she damn well pleases with her body. You can pierce it, tattoo it and cloth it in any garb. Free will.

I’m also sure that there are very good reasons why a woman would inject her body with toxins to make her lighter.

But good grief, up close, a bleached woman looks like the underbelly of a monitor lizard. You can almost see her blood flowing. Her skin looks like carbon paper.

Then somehow, embarrassingly, knuckles always refuse to turn light like the rest of the body, making them look like she spends her days doing push ups on bare knuckles.

There is a tackiness to it. A gaudiness about bleaching. But the underlying message is even more disturbing; that black isn’t worth wearing on your skin.

And that’s also okay, I guess; there is no covenant that you have to appreciate the colour you are born in.

It saddens me though, that the lady opted for that colour because she was a million times more beautiful with her caramel colour.

But what do I know? Maybe she is happier now.

What I know for sure is that with that colour and with the kind of nails I saw on her, she isn’t washing clothes any more.