Our reigning Miss SA, Lalela Mswane, wears a heavy crown.
With this year’s Miss Universe pageant taking place in Israel next month, which has become famed for its apartheid crimes against the people of Palestine, Mswane was sent messages by two organisations in solidarity with Palestine to pull out of the competition, which fell on deaf ears.
To make matters worse, Miss SA chief executive Stephanie Weil cited a number of reasons why Mswane deserved to compete for the crown. One of those was that Mswane often dealt with bullying as a child and would not succumb to it now.
While the women behind each pageant they enter are portrayed as ambassadors of their nations, their roles are not expected to cross the line between looking and saying beautiful things.
Take the entrants of Miss Lebanon and Miss Israel in 2006 and 2015 who received immense backlash for just being photographed together owing to the Lebanon war of 2006.
Plenty of pageant hopefuls and queens have also had their crowns taken away from them for racial slurs, but if we rewind to when countries applauded racism it would have earned them the title.
Pageants at large don’t seem to be a ground where young women are given opportunities but are instead lambs led to the slaughterhouse of other people’s backward ideas of beauty and grace.
Another example is the BBC documentary Secrets of America: Extreme Beauty Queens. We meet Venezuelan pageant director Osmel Sousa who terrorises future beauty queens to nip and tuck themselves into his idea of what makes the perfect beauty queen.
On the flip side, the women who enter are often looking to enrich their family’s lives. No-one is there to raise their country’s flag and end the world’s problems. They are not going broke to change themselves to be ambassadors of Venezuela, they are doing it for the hungry stomachs back at home.
So, when Weil says their business is not one for politics, she reflects the ideals held by Miss SA. The world has been deluded into believing that pageant queens are meant to play this role.
This is the same organisation that pretends to be diverse because they’ve given two women who aren’t a beauty ideal the crown and even dabbled in including trans women in their contest, though they have not done anything to actually make the world a better place for her.
Which also questions the validity of Mswane’s role in the statement issued – is she really of the belief that she is being bullied out of competing in a country whose political climate mirrors that of the country she calls home?
Mswane and Weil are from two very opposite worlds. Apartheid and its end benefits Weil to this day, while Mswane still suffers the adverse discrimination, exclusion and prejudice attributed to the long and overbearing history colonialism and apartheid come with.
I couldn’t help but wonder about the contractual obligations Miss SA title-holders are put under. SA is a country that has constantly sidestepped racial conversations while wearing the rainbow nation stole of reparations.
The liberal and well-behaved idea of not being too political is often to the benefit of those who still suckle the buxom breasts of a backward law. We, as a country of astronomical plights, no longer need Miss SA. They are actually the ones who need us. They need to be perceived as the custodians of Mandela’s legacy – a liberal legacy that has long died.
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