I
wrote a piece recently, a tribute to the late veteran actress Bukky
Ajayi and the multi-instrumentalist OJB Jezreel, in which I raised a
number of issues, including how in Nollywood today, there is an
obsession with the whitening of skin, an anti-Negritude yellowing, what I
referred to as “the bleaching, chameleon crowd of Nollywood beauties.”
The various reactions to the piece conveniently ignored this subject;
two young ladies who felt that I was probing an unpopular theme drew my
attention to this. I was reminded that being light-skinned is now the
in-thing, indeed the socially acceptable norm, because there is now a
universalization of the concept of beauty and self-esteem.
