The eye of the beholder, it turns out, isn’t the easiest of standards. The beholder can be so…complicated.
I found myself in Butare last Friday night, home of the National University of Rwanda, which was home, on that night, to Miss Campus–Rwanda’s version of Miss America. Pretty literally: the winner of the contest, who is sashed as the rather-more-indigenous-sounding Miss Nyampinga, represents Rwanda in international beauty pageants.
This is a serious affair. People lined up outside the university auditorium three and four hours ahead of time, literally banging the doors down to get inside and take a seat. In the upper deck of the auditorium (and part of the lower), they sat two to an uncomfortable plastic chair. On the main floor, they packed the aisles, three across and dozens deep. Had anyone been angry, or happy, enough to rush the stage with followers in tow, I’d be writing about a stampede, assuming I’d survived it.
Eight girls competed, all but two of them so skinny I wanted to take them aside and force-feed them. They appeared in puffs of smoke that made the judges cough and wheeze, and they strutted across a stage that had been ribboned with red fabric to make a runway. They wore casual wear–jeans and t-shirts, most of them with US-brand logos–and traditional dresses and evening gowns and…yes…swimsuits. Albeit with knee-length wraps tied tightly around their (practically non-existent) hips. None of these clothes were theirs; the organizers had provided everything the women wore, but without attention to things like skin coloring or shoe size. The woman whowon in the end thought she’d ruined her shot after losing her balance in her high-heeled gold shoes, which were too big for her. She tried to protest, she told me, but the organizers said, “No, no, you’re beautiful, just go!” She did, and tripped on stage.
As in the States, they had to answer questions. Back home, pageant judges ask lamely open-ended questions that it’s almost impossible to sound stupid answering, provided you string together sounds that technically make English words. (Almost. We all remember dear, sad Miss South Carolina.) Not so here. Half of these were trivia questions, and the set-up was, to ears tuned to a different culture, harsh.
For instance: “As a contender for the Miss, you are supposed to be informed about current affairs. What international nickname has His Excellency President Paul Kagame earned for his tremendous hard work to bring investment to Rwanda?” The girl on the other end of this question (asked in English) looked a little stupefied. The judge assured her, “It’s in many international newspapers and magazines.” She had no idea–and neither did I.
“I am not informed,” she said graciously.
“Would you like me to inform you?” he asked (See? Harsh!). She nodded.
“Chairman of Rwanda, Inc.” She thanked him, but kept needling. “This is used all over, including in Time and Newsweek.” (Um, it is? For the record, a well-calibrated google search turned up nothing on this.)
In a moment that might shame most Americans, however, the entire crowd booed and hissed when another girl named the wrong person as the minister of the East African Community (I’m not sure the official title of the post). They thought inexcusable that she named the current minister’s predecessor.
To me, the most interesting part of this whole shenanigan was the obvious question: What’s the standard of beauty in Rwanda? So I wandered the room, in the hours before the program, asking people, “What makes a woman in Rwanda beautiful?”
“She has to be tall,” everyone said.
“She cannot be fat,” everyone said.
“She is intelligent. She is kind. She takes care of her parents and helps her family,” the girls told me.
“She has hips,” the boys said.
Which made me a little sad, later on. When they named the second runner up, the Rwandan guy behind me let out a disappointed howl. “You wanted her to win?” I asked. “YES!” he said. “You think she is the most beautiful?” I asked. “No, no, no,” he insisted. “The most beautiful for Rwanda is that one–those hips! But this winner will compete internationally.” And internationally, you just need someone a little…skinnier.
Which is actually, technically, true. There’s some mystery set of international beauty standards I haven’t found my way to yet, but which apparently exist in the world of objective, written-down things, standards which cover international beauty contests. Standards which, if the winners of international beauty contests are any indication, demand women look a lot like the ones in Hollywood. Tall. Thin (if you allow the understatement). Vacant helps.
Americans have been rallying against the unrealistic standard of beauty in our country for a long time, and rightly. It takes so many American women years to learn to appreciate their bodies, or at least not to loathe them. Everybody knows about our national anorexia-bulimia problem. Not something you’d like to see wished on a nation that has no tradition of beauty pageants.
But there’s something more insidious about the idea of “international standards of beauty” here in Rwanda The standard the world’s beauty queens set isn’t all that far removed from a different standard applied here a hundred years ago, one brought by anthropologists and codified by Belgian colonists. It’s part of something called the Hamitic myth, a notion the first white travelers in this part of the world literally made up: They decided the Tutsi, who looked more European (“more Caucasoid” the Hamitic literature says), could not be from here. They had to be from somewhere outside, somewhere more advanced and somehow civilized. Somewhere like Ethiopia, the ancient cradle of civilization.
Yes, that must be it.
And so the anthropologists, and then the Belgians, said that the Tutsi were tall, slender people with big eyes and thin noses. Hutu were, well, not. These are things they “measured” with their eugenic science the same way the Nazis sized up their own civilians to decide who, physiologically, was probably a Jew.
It’s no wonder, then, that no one wants to get specific to the last part of the answer to, “What makes Rwandan women beautiful?”
“They have to have a nice face,” people say.
“What makes a nice face?” I ask.
“It’s hard to describe,” everyone says.
So I decide to do a little journalism. To push it.
“Big eyes?” I ask one guy.
“Yes, sure.”
“Big lips?” I ask. He says nothing.
“Small lips?” I say.
“Maybe. A small smile.”
“A small nose?”
He stops.
“No. No noses. You know what happened here in 1994? The first thing they looked at to tell Hutu from Tutsi was the nose. We don’t talk about noses here.”
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