BLEACHED SKINS, FAKE HAIRS AND HORSE WIGS
(Native Girls: Inferiority Complex of Cultural Nonentities)
--Attorney Patryk Utulu

I love my homeland. My TWO homelands. Truly. But only one is ancestral. The place that – however long I live or however far I travel and however apart we stayed – my heart still murmurs "YES" any time the word HOME is mentioned. Being in Diaspora is pleasant pain. You SEE things when you live in the culture into which you were born and grew to adulthood. You NOTICE things when you move to another culture in adulthood. Diaspora can be both a blessing and a burden: You are forced to interpret culture, if only to yourself. Routinely, your brains compare mannerisms and -- despite your best efforts -- the objects of culture!

Culture is the true fabric from which we are socially woven. It assumes even greater role when in Diaspora and you live trans-culturally. In Diaspora culture becomes a permanent visa application to ancestral homeland. The nursery school rhyme, “East or West, Home is Best” feels like Solomon’s wisdom.

Liberated Africans (U.S. Blacks, Caribbean Blacks and Brazilian Blacks who are now the majority population in Brazil) regard Africa with curiosity and dread. "Dread” as in uncertainty. When, as happened in America, a dominant culture used its 245 year monopoly (of slavery, 1620-1865) to falsify the history of another culture (Africa) simply to brainwash its people (enslaved Africans) and destroy their bonds to Africa you can see why liberated Africans are curious about Africa as the Internet opens diverse doors to reconnection. And when that dominant culture also used the 100 years post-slavery (JIm Crow Laws to Civil Rights Act 1864-1964) to dehumanize the liberated Africans you can see why descendants of liberated Africans seek pride of place in Africa...free of farce, force and fiction.

Liberated Africans truly want to embrace Africa!

The Center of America is weakening as divisive ethnic forces grow stronger. We Americans don't like publicly discussing much less admitting it. The fear of being labeled unpatriotic or Un-American is too strong. But the signs are there: Whites can't get enough of Nascar or of A&E's Duck Dynasty, AMC's Mad Men, and Downton Abbey all of which indulge the nostalgia of irreversible absence of non-whites as common factor, though not through any present-day conspiracies. Asians finally are losing the fear of communism-tag and are embracing a rising China for ethic pride. Hispanics are using the issue of Immigration to flex their collective muscle (against USA?) and to unite their community that traditionally splits along racial, creed, color, and nationality lines.

Did I mention that Liberated Africans really want to like Africa?

Increasingly they are giving their children authentic native African names, openly tapping into African historical roots and creating Americanized versions of native African social cultures like Kwanzaa. Hot combs are gone. As are greasy Jerry Coils. African weave and clean cut natural hair are in. Despite well-publicized incidents of police brutality and generalized U.S. economic struggles Blacks are starting to have a sense that they are finally entering the American mainstream. Even media representation is rising. Confidence levels are up and black pride in.

Then Black Americans look at Africa and what do they see?

Skin-BLEACHED African women and insecure Nigerian girls selling pride and “moisty” middle for cash to buy Taiwanese goat hair and Mongolian horse wigs known as Brazilian hair. As a transplanted African just recently married I know that I will have to explain to my American born children – especially if I am lucky to have daughters – why 38 years after Fela Kuti’s 1976 Album (Yellow Fever) warning colonially-inferiorized African women against pitiful skin-bleaching the daughters of those women now have the skin color of washed-up dead fish.

And I am still struggling to find a proper explanation for when my daughters will ask what degree of inferiority complex compelled native African princesses to become horse-wigged cultural nonentities.

Patryk A. Utulu is a U.S.-based attorney and Strategic Communications Specialist
Global Defense Analyst and Global Events Commentator
Executive Vice President, Nigerian Diaspora-North America
Executive Director, The Center for Community Empowerment and Lifeskills, Inc.
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