Colonialism imposed racial categories on Kenya. The British divided people into racial groups: Europeans, Asians (primarily Indians), and Africans. Each group occupied a different position in the colonial hierarchy. Europeans ruled. Asians occupied a middle position as merchants and clerks. Africans were subordinate.
These categories were not natural or inevitable. Before colonialism, Kenyans identified by clan, by kingdom, by language, by religion. Racial classification was a colonial invention that imposed a new framework of identity and hierarchy.
Independence did not erase these categories. The racial hierarchy was officially abolished, but the internalization of colonial racial thinking persisted. Light skin came to be valued more than dark skin. Hair texture that approximated European texture was seen as more beautiful. Facial features that approximated European features were preferred. The internalization of "European" as the beauty standard meant that Africans evaluated their own bodies and the bodies of others through a lens of racial hierarchy that colonialism had created.
Colorism in Kenya, the preference for lighter skin, is a direct legacy of colonialism. It reflects the internalization of the message that European bodies were superior and African bodies were inferior. This preference is not universal but it is persistent, particularly among the educated urban elite.
The postcolonial body is the site where colonial hierarchy is reproduced daily. A Kenyan woman with light skin and straight hair is more likely to be considered beautiful than a woman with dark skin and tightly coiled hair, not because of any objective reality but because of the colonial racial hierarchy that is reproduced in consciousness, in media, in assumptions about beauty and worth.
Decolonizing the body means rejecting the beauty standards that colonialism imposed, reclaiming African bodies as worthy and beautiful, undoing the internalization of European supremacy. This is slow work and it has barely begun in Kenya.
See Also
- Colorism
- The Education Arms Race
- Urbanisation and Identity
- Language Hierarchies Kenya
- The Patriarchy Inheritance