'Decolonizing Beauty': The campaign to showcase Africa's diverse cultures

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00:00And in a bid to spotlight the beauty and value of traditional and diverse African aesthetics,

00:05the Decolonizing Beauty campaign has been launched by the pan-African company Zicora

00:10Productions. Throughout the year, projects are launched across several channels centering

00:16African hair, African art, African culture. I'm joined now by its founder, Chika Odawa,

00:24to ask about what they are hoping to achieve with this push. Now, Chika,

00:29thanks very much for making the time to speak to me. Now, first of all, one of the things that

00:33you're really focusing on as well is our traditional African hairstyles and also,

00:40you know, African aesthetics in comparison to the Western aesthetic. Pretty is nice,

00:46but why is it so important to you to go to such lengths to unpick where and what and who

00:53we find appealing? Thank you so much for that question. You know, this campaign,

00:59Decolonizing Beauty, it's more than just a buzzword. We've been hearing this word,

01:04decolonizing beauty, for some time now, but what we're really trying to do is to deepen the

01:08conversation. Who we find to be beautiful, it says a lot about who we are as a people.

01:14And as Africans, we do have this shared history of colonization and the legacy of colonization,

01:21it doesn't just impact us today, but we have to also remember that even after the colonization,

01:27after we received independence, there were still so many messages of what we should look like as

01:31Africans, what we should aspire to be like as Africans. So this movement really is an attempt

01:37to decolonize our minds, decolonize our concepts of what we want to aspire to be, because our

01:43aspirations speak deeply to who we are as a people. So part of this is about the way that

01:51people look, about what they find beautiful and how they present themselves, but

01:56your push also involves culture, it involves poetry, it involves filmmaking.

02:02How does all of this tie together when it comes to the idea of decolonizing

02:08contemporary African cultural perspectives and spaces?

02:14Exactly right. This campaign is multi-faceted, it is multi-dimensional, it involves multi-platforms.

02:21So as you mentioned, rightfully so, there is the poetry aspect, there is photography, there is

02:28film, video. So what we're asking for African creatives to do is to capture what it means to

02:37decolonize beauty. So we are encouraging African poets, African filmmakers, African dancers and

02:43performers to tell us what does this mean to you, how do you interpret this. So that's what we're

02:49doing with this campaign and of course it's rolling out throughout the entire year and it's

02:54an invitation for us to sit down as Africans and to reinterpret things. And how do you convey the

03:00reinterpretation? By writing a poem, by writing a song, by sending in photography and tell us what

03:06you think decolonizing beauty actually means. So we're asking for Africans themselves to do the

03:12interpretations and capture those interpretations into works of art. So in a way you're asking your

03:18own audience to create the meaning of the campaign itself. Exactly. But is it just for Africans? I

03:26mean who is this specifically for? I mean the issues of the fallout of colonization, it's

03:34a global one, it's not just specifically for indigenous Africans. That's correct, we are

03:41targeting the campaign in terms of producing the art to African creatives for sure. But the campaign

03:48itself, we take the art and we share it with the entire world because it is very much a universal

03:55topic, who you find beautiful. So we're speaking to Africans and we're speaking to those who do

04:01not identify as Africans because both audiences need to hear this message. You might be surprised

04:07to even wonder why Africans need to hear this message because many Africans have internalized

04:14ideas of westernization, you know, western forms of beauty. This has been internalized in African

04:21schools. You hear messages of what is beautiful. Beautiful looks like a European woman, beautiful

04:27looks like an American woman, beautiful does not look like an African male or female. So this is

04:33why Africans themselves need this campaign. And obviously for those who do not identify as Africans

04:39they need to know how deep this damage is and how it can be reversed. And it needs to be reversed by

04:45simply boosting conversations like this one. Thank you so much Chika for getting the conversation

04:51started and joining us here at Eye on Africa.

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