A cultural interrogation of fairness as beauty across different generations of Batswana women

Abstract

What counts as beautiful remains a complex and greatly contested phenomenon in most African countries including Botswana. In present day, Batswana women and girls continue to consider fair skin as the criterion for feminine beauty. The aim of this project is to establish why this is the case. It does so by interrogating the colonial history of Botswana, a former British colony from 1885 until 1966. The project specifically interrogates the historical context of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) of religion, colonial education, beauty contests, the media, and family as major forces that have shaped and maintained this notion of beauty over the years. Employing an ethnographic approach, I interviewed different generations of Batswana women to place their voices at the centre of the project. The project further discussed and interrogated neighbouring South Africa’s own history of racism from apartheid and how it further compounded the narrative that fair skin counts as beautiful through Batswana who worked and lived in South Africa. A media analysis was also conducted in the form of an archival research on Drum magazine to establish how beauty was represented. This South African magazine has been widely read in Botswana and the rest of Africa since its establishment in 1951. I conclude that the notion of fairness as beauty is ever present, deeply rooted and complex, in the past and present. While today we see an international version of “cosmopolitan whiteness” or fairness represented through various digital media platforms, we also see the emergence of counter cultures of beauty with the rise of “cosmopolitan blackness” on the international stage. However, what counts as beauty in Botswana unfortunately does not mirror this international dynamic, and Batswana women continue to navigate these parallels and contradictions to redefine beauty for themselves.