Does Miss South Africa still matter?

So someone called Nicole Flint is our new Miss South Africa. Do you care? Does anyone?

I remember the halcyon days of a pageant that enjoyed real cultural power. Anneline Kriel was a bit before my time (she was in the process of divorcing Sol when she starred on page 3 of the Sunday Times during my childhood). But there were others who stood out. Remember when Michelle Bruce dated Tony Leon and advertised condoms? Andrea Steltzer, who managed to be both Miss South Africa and Miss Germany?

Miss South Africas in those days were genuine celebrities and they had real star power. To this day we remember them. Remember Kerishnie Naiker, who got trapped speeding in her Hyundai Tiburon, Peggy-Sue Khumalo and Jacqui Mofokeng who were so controversial at the time and, more recently, Claudia Henkel and her Veet ads.

Some Miss South Africas went on to achieve even greater fame after their reign: Basetsana Kumalo is perhaps the best example of a woman who turned her celebrity into a business opportunity; Joanne Strauss followed her stiletto footsteps onto the swish sets of Top Billing. Amy Kleinhans is still a regular feature of social columns and slightly dodgy TV promos while Cindy Nell — perhaps best known for meeting her intellectual match in Jacques Kallis — is promoting some fake tan product. The website assures readers that she is “working together with Cosmetix on some new exiting editions to the range for Summer 2009” (sic).

(Then there’s Diana Tilden-Davis, who briefly courted fame again after being attacked by a hippo in the Okavango a couple of years ago.)

In more recent years, however, all the Miss South Africas seemed to have blended into a sort of vague amalgamation of long legs, dazzling smiles and lots of hair. They show up at launches and fashion shows, but they make no impact. Why is that? What has happened?

Maybe it is because in an age where everyone can be a celebrity thanks to the ubiquity of reality TV and new media, beauty pageants seem oddly anachronistic. The prestige conferred upon one young woman who now somehow represents an entire nation has been undermined by competition from other forms of media and, I would guess, by a certain cynicism. We’re just not impressed by beauty pageants any more, and the winner is just one more pair of boobs amidst all the others.

Nonetheless, South Africans still seem to care who wins, if only on the night. I did not watch the pageant on TV — my grandmother was watching Midsomer Murders on Hallmark at the time — so I followed it, as one does, on Twitter. This was the first year that Miss South Africa has featured so strongly on Twitter (I am of course making a huge assumption here, since I was not on Twitter this time last year, but neither were most of my fellow South African tweeters). As Clive Simpkins observed, “Ain’t twitter amazing? You can be doing something else but by proxy attend all sorts of events as a virtual participant”.

It certainly revealed the power of Twitter as a medium to facilitate a nation’s conversation with itself. A conversation that is largely restricted to the tweet elite, granted, but nonetheless revealing of many of our current concerns.

And yes, we’re still obsessed with race. Many people were not at all happy that a white woman won.
“Eugene Terblanch is celebrating with Helen Zille whereever they are” wrote one. Or, in this charming example of the ability of social media to facilitate intelligent discussion: “Fuck every judge! Hope ur roof falls in on ur head! How the fuck is ths stupid lookin dutchmangirl gon rep us in miss world? Fokof”

Granted, others were more conciliatory, arguing that the judges were merely rotating the winners between races. The comedian Tshepo Mogale argued, “Its often disappointing when people bring in race when they don’t get what they want … in all realms: sports, jobs; pageants or whatever”.

Still, it strikes me how divisive this all was. A friend of mine who was in the Superbowl at the time commented on how excited the entire audience was, that it was the real rainbow nation in there. But from where I was sitting, the pageant seemed only to fuel our peculiarly South African obsession with racial categories.

Miss South Africa still matters, it seems. But not necessarily for the right reasons.