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Magazine
Contesting that 'right'
KALPANA SHARMA
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The Miss World show has been mired in controversy almost from the start, and not just because it is a beauty contest.
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Who would have thought a beauty contest could cause this ... People fleeing from Kaduna. (below) ... and the contestants "fled" to London.
UNTIL a few days ago, most people around the world would not have known about a city called Kaduna. Today, it is a recognisable name, that of a city in northern Nigeria where last week, over 200 people were killed in sectarian violence. The trigger that set off the killings was, of all things, the Miss World contest that was being held in the southern part of the country. Nigeria had apparently won the "right" to host the contest after a Nigerian woman, Agbani Darego, was crowned Miss World last year in South Africa. She is the first Black African to win this dubious crown. And the terrible price for that "right" has been the senseless killing of over 200 people.
Beauty contests are strange events. These days, if you say you dislike them, you are told that you are a stuffy old feminist who cannot accept that the world has changed. And that just as the American interest in Iraq is not about democracy but about oil, so beauty contests are not about beauty but about commerce. So we must stop objecting and simply accept that it is oil and money that make the world go round.
The world is certainly a big enough place to accommodate the promoters of the Miss World contest as well as those who oppose the commerce that flourishes on the basis of exploiting women's physical attributes. But that space shrinks when commerce overtakes commonsense, overrules logic, ignores reality and reeks of crass insensitivity. This time round, all of this happened.
Nigeria should be a rich country. It has vast reserves of oil. It is the sixth largest oil producer in the world and has earned $280 billion through its sales in the last three decades. But instead of prosperity, oil has brought with it greater poverty. There are more poor people in Nigeria today than there were 20 years ago. In terms of social indicators, this nation of 130 million people ranks as one of the 20 poorest countries.
A small segment of the population has prospered from the oil wealth. And it is in this section that the promoters of contests like Miss World are interested. For here is the potential market for cosmetics and fashion. In India, we know how the strategy works. In the early 1990s, all of a sudden Indian women became the most beautiful in the world. There were Miss Worlds and Miss Universes around every corner. It appeared as if this heady wave of success on the battlefields of beauty would continue forever.
Today, most of these beauty queens have disappeared — mostly as forgettable starlets in Bollywood. The only success story is Aishwarya Rai, who has been crowned by Mumbai's film industry. But even if individual beauty queens are forgotten, the beauty and fashion business has grown hugely in the last years. This is reflected also in the way the media now treats people who would not have merited even a passing mention a few decades back. Even serious broadsheet newspapers now consider the beauty business front-page news.
The beauty contest promoters must have hoped that Nigeria would follow in India's footsteps. But they chose to overlook the economic realities of the country and the political storm that has been brewing for the last three years after the end of military rule. Sectarian violence between the largely Muslim north and the Christian south has increased. Already 10,000 people have died because of the violence. The increasing gap between the few benefiting from oil and the majority who are deprived has also contributed to the tension and to the growth of sectarian politics. Oil companies have faced the wrath of ordinary people who now refuse to tolerate the exploitation of their resource without development. Last July, hundreds of women occupied the Chevron Texaco oilfields at Escravos in northern Nigeria demanding electricity, water and decent housing from the oil companies.
Against this background, an international beauty contest is decidedly vulgar and totally inappropriate. As Nigerian singer, Femi Kuti, told the BBC, "We have no light, no water, millions of children walk around the streets homeless, their parents can't feed them. What is the benefit to the people of Africa? I'm not surprised if the people revolt. They have my total support."
The contest was mired in controversy almost from the start, and not just because it is a beauty contest. Some of Nigeria's 36 provinces have introduced the Sharia law. Recently, there were worldwide protests when 31-year-old Amina Lawal, a single mother, was sentenced to death by stoning by a Sharia court. The international uproar almost led to cancellation of the event.
But the organisers were clearly anxious to go ahead and did so on the flimsiest of assurances from the Nigerian Government. It told them that the federal law is supposed to take precedence over individual or collective Muslim law and therefore no woman would be stoned to death. The Government, however, did not explain why, if this was the case, it could not challenge the stoning sentence. And the organisers did not ask. Nor did they bother to understand the basis of the sectarian tensions brewing in the country, or the fact that by holding an event such as this at a time when half of Nigeria, the Muslim half, was fasting and praying during Ramzan, they might be aggravating these tensions.
To their credit at least five contestants — from Costa Rica, Denmark, Switzerland, South Africa and Panama — did boycott the contest. But 92 young women trooped off to Nigeria, with not a worry in their pretty heads, and left the country without any evident remorse.
So another contest will end on December 7, which incidentally marks the end of Ramzan, (although at the time of going to press, the organisers were having difficulties finding a place to hold the event in London) and another woman will wear a crown — a crown with at least 200 thorns representing dead Nigerians. Will the merchants of the beauty business pause after this episode? Most unlikely.
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