From nobody Sat Feb 1 17:13:35 2003
From: Charles R Spinner <cspinner@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.zimbabwe,soc.culture.african,soc.culture.african.american
Subject: M A L A I K A
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 00:09:12 -0800
Message-ID: <nf8v2v8rr594htb95dqqq0mbpaqqaedt64@4ax.com>
Miss Malaika http://www.africasia.com/newafrican/na.php?ID=126
Diasporan wins Miss Malaika
By Baffour Ankomah, NewAfrican, 22 January 2003
Morgan Chitty, a 22-year-old African-American student majoring in African Studies and Politics, won a closely contested Miss Malaika pageant beamed from Harare on 14 December to an estimated 300 million people in 30 countries across the world.
Nothing is simple in Zimbabwe nowadays. To paraphrase the information minister, Jonathan Moyo, some Zimbabweans—few but vocal—have become so negative and cynical that all hell would break lose were they to learn that the Devil was coming to Zimbabwe. They would protest and claim that Zimbabwe does not deserve that honour.
Nothing could be nearer to the truth! Two years ago, Ernest Coovi
Adjovi, the indubitable African pioneer in the entertainment
field
(Moyo's words) started the Miss Malaika pageant as a
counter to the Miss World contest that had for years overlooked the
distinctive beauty of the African woman.
(Adjovi, from Benin, is also the creator of the Kora [music] Awards, his answer to the Grammy Awards which, again, pretend that there is no musical talent in Africa).
Five years of thinking went into Miss Malaika before the maiden show was held in 2001, because Adjovi did not want it to be just another beauty pageant. It had to be different and special.
Malaika is the Swahili word for angel. Thus Miss Malaika was conceived
as the beauty of African origin
. The motivating factor was to
get something that united Africa and its Diaspora—the hundreds
of millions of people of African descent living outside the continent.
It was a noble idea, and so Adjovi adopted three broad principles as
the objectives
of Miss Malaika: the pageant was
(a)
to unite Africa and its Diaspora;(b)
to provide women of African origin with the opportunity to recognise the potential of their physical and inner beauty, not judged on Western standards and criteria; and(c)
to serve as a platform for raising issues that are relevant to the creation of a healthy society and for the improvement of the lives of women.
These objectives were published and contestants and sponsors are made aware of them.
Also well known is the position
of the pageant: Miss Malaika
is a unique pageant that promotes African beauty as seen through the
eyes of the African people, a pageant that strives to recognise inner
beauty with a great emphasis on intellectual ability.
There is the rub.