I think you might like this book ...

Title: Beautiful Ugly (African and Diaspora Aesthetics)
Edited by Sarah Nuttall
Published by Kwela Books

It’s difficult to be emotionally complacent when examining what beauty means in Africa, juggling between its oppressive misrepresentation during the colonial period and its redefinition during post-colonial restructuring.

Yet, with this book, it’s also easy to comprehend the complexities of this search. Africa and its predominantly black residents have been either exoticised or painted as grotesque via the colonial period. These notions left a hangover the height of Mount Kilimanjaro over the black population, whether on the continent or in offspring communities elsewhere. And this is one of the many facets Beautiful Ugly tackles.

Its contributors — established artists and scholars — delve also into the intimate ugly counterpart of beauty. Beautiful and ugly remain subjective perceptions informed by socialisation, community and varied sources.

With fluency, these well-read contributors use art, photography, fashion, food, politics and other platforms to project studies that inform and challenge perceptions about blackness, Africa and beauty versus ugliness.

It thoroughly challenged my own perceptions of blackness and Africa by revealing new ways of seeing. Beautiful Ugly, published earlier this year, is one of the few books that I packed as luggage when heading to Sudan in July. Its soft cover makes it great for travel and the 412 pages, which include memorable colour photographs, provide hours of enriching reading. Neat design and layout enhance its appeal.

I wanted to discover new ways of thinking about what it means to be black and beautiful. Of course beautiful and ugly in Africa is wide open to interpretation. But it’s also open to challenge, as, in South Africa, traces of the colonial and apartheid scarring of mindsets on what it means to be black does not ignite images of beauty. The mind-shifting begins with acknowledging that there is something diseased with the way Africa has been depicted by its conquerors. The lions need to tell their own beautiful stories.

One of the first chapters I read was related to my current resident state, Sudan. This chapter talked about how two different visual authors depicted the Nuba wrestlers of southern Sudan. Adolf Hitler’s filmmaking sidekick Leni Riefenstahl published books containing photo essays of her sojourns with the Nuba.

Riefenstahl was initially inspired by a George Rodger photo of naked Nuba warriors taken in 1949. The image, published in the book, shows a strong-bodied Nuba warrior airlifted on the shoulders of another warrior.

While her Nuba trips were about escaping her Nazi past, it was essentially influenced by the foundations of Nazism; that pursuit of finding the perfect human. Whereas Riefenstahl’s films had to depict Hitler’s perfect blue-eyed race, her naked Nuba warriors were her catalyst in continually attempting to define the perfect human.

These photos indirectly served another purpose. They popularised perceptions from the colonial view of an uncivilised Africa seen from a European gaze.

In November, when I travelled to the Nuba Mountains for an annual festival, I was confronted with a different Nuba face. This time, a few decades later, the Nuba wrestlers were fully clothed and it felt like I had stepped into a conservative and richly traditional setting.

Eight Nuba tribes had gathered for the three-day festival and among them were Muslim, Christian and animist believers practising their collective cultural heritage alongside each other. It raised again the question of perceptions of Africa: who sees what and how.

Questions about my own relationship with being an African with South-East Asian heritage also arose. How do Other Africans — those not black-skinned — fit in and contribute to the debates in this book? Almost everywhere I travel outside my homeland, I continually have to explain why I am not black-skinned but am from South Africa. Chapters looking at food delve somewhat into the mixing of cultures, recounting traces of communities that inherited Africa from their parents who moved to the continent from elsewhere. The kitchen borrows from various parts of the world and peoples to create beautiful and eclectic meals.

Spices from Asia, fruits from Africa and touches of European taste make something new. But this book does not provide avenues exploring that angle in-depth. Its justified predominant focus is addressing perceptions of black Africa.

Beautiful Ugly also delves into questions about the commodification of blackness, as seen among the black population at carnival time in a Brazil that has deep-rooted Eurocentric racist habits. The values attached to black Brazilians, brought to the country through a lucrative slave trade, remain largely unchanged after 300 years of Portuguese colonial rule. In Brazil, blacks were produce; bought and sold as slaves.

Further entrenchment of their perceived ugliness remain in a modern Brazil that features mostly white faces on TV and discriminates against their blackness in newspaper job adverts.

In Brazil, products used to erase blackness have been big business in a society where black citizens — even though a large majority — are expected to reach an unnatural standard of being, inevitably linked to a white normalcy. And so hair-straightening products and skin-lightening creams fuel the process of becoming “acceptable”; not much different to what has transpired in South Africa.

Other enriching chapters include notes by South African artist William Kentridge who writes about challenging his perception that landscape art works have to be in the vein of “light and saturated greens of 4 000 European landscape painters”. He didn’t find these greens in the mine dumps of Germiston, so he picked up his charcoal and created a new kind of beauty founded not on Eurocentric aesthetics but on his own visual experience.

Short stories by Mia Couto, the award-winning Mozambican poet, short-story writer and novelist, elicit the melancholy of dealing with Africa as a complicated ideological battleground. Beauty and ugliness are used as metaphors for the colonial and post-colonial struggles of his country and its coloniser, Portugal.

Couto’s collection of short stories, Voices Made Night, was staged in Cape Town a few months ago by the Magnet Theatre Company and continues to remind of the ugliness of the poverty-drenched African reality.

“The most harrowing thing about poverty is the ignorance it has of itself. Faced by an absence of everything, men abstain from dreams, depriving themselves of the desire to be others. There exists in nothingness that illusion of plenitude which causes life to stop and voices to become night,” Couto writes in Voices Made Night.

Artist Pablo Picasso is also brought to task for using Africans as objects for inspiration but keeping the human element at a non-intimate distance. This is further evidenced in the meeting between Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams when he meets Picasso for the first time in the mid-1950s.

“I remember the first comment he made when we met. He said that I had a very fine African head and he would like me to pose for him. I felt terrible … he did not think of me as another artist. He thought of me only as something he could use in his own work,” the book quotes Williams.

Beautiful Ugly is a worthy read that advances understanding Africa’s cultural life on the continent and in its diaspora. It firmly establishes new eyes ready to review perceptions of beauty, ugliness and Africa.