![Who taught you to hate your [dark] skin?](https://i0.wp.com/thisisafrica.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Ajuma-Nasenyana-760-x-500.jpg?resize=760%2C456&ssl=1)
Skin-lightening/bleaching is a problem, but it’s only a sign of much deeper inter-related issues: self-hatred, a race-based identity crisis, and the internalisation of Western-created cultural ideas that are inimical to the mental health of black people.
Politics and Society The Coca-Colonisation of African culture
African recording artists have as much right as anyone to borrow influences from anywhere in the world, but when we celebrate those who have succumbed to the Coca-colonisation of African culture, what are we celebrating?
Lifestyle Twerk: booty-dancing a white privilege?
You ain’t down if you ain’t got the twerk. But why do white girls win cred for twerking while black girls get called “ghetto”, among other things? A case of white privilege?
Lifestyle Sex, Nollywood and Nigerian hypocrisy
If you’re one of Nollywood’s millions of fans around the world, you can’t fail to have read one of the sensational headlines in the blogosphere and Nigerian media earlier this year: “Nollywood now producing blue films”, “From Nollywood to Pornllywood”.
African identities The long trip home: What it’s like to move back to Africa
When you are really ready to live in Africa you take a step back, listen and learn from those who know a whole lot more than you do about the place you call home.
Politics and Society Why African parents can’t talk about sex
Do you recall watching a movie with your parents, talking and laughing, when suddenly a sex scene comes on which seems to drag on forever? That awkward silence as everyone tries to find the remote control, ashamed to be in the presence of such a scene.
Lifestyle Single by choice: the modern African woman
Contrary to the common complaint, there are lots of eligible and available men in Africa for today’s young, modern, educated African women. So why can’t some young women find their match? There’s something else going on.
Lifestyle Binyavanga: Africa’s bankrupt middle-class
African’s middle-class – along with a huge development industry – is setting the terms of the continent’s “development”, but the central idea seems to be ‘let’s turn Africa into Europe.’ A blistering critique by Caine Prize-awarded author Binyavanga Wainaina.
Politics and Society Why do well-travelled Nigerians defend mediocrity at home?
Why do some of these “exposed” Nigerians rush to rationalize, defend or excuse their country’s mediocrity and ghastly performance? Writer Okey Ndibe talks low expectations for Nigeria and calling out bad leadership