Last Saturday, 16 Face of Africa entrants went bopping down Adderley Street in homespun couture
Michelle Matthews
Face of Africa producer Jan Malan bustles about Bloomsbury’s, the luxury car dealers in Buitengragt Street, Cape Town. ”Tuck in your panty-lines, girls,” he warns the models perched on the Mercedes convertibles, their black satin pants riding down their narrow hips.
Some girls chatter and giggle. Eva Ndachi (Kenya) is excited about scoring a seat on the only white car; Norchene Cherif, the bubbly Tunisian, captures the camera and pouts and flirts; Imen Merghni (Tunisia) warbles happily; and Kabula Nugurusi (Tanzania) laughs and laughs, showing off her gap-toothed smile.
Most of the girls are still quite self- effacing and just wait patiently. One or two of the models are already developing the smug, bored look of professionals. The low, lustrous vehicles start slinking out the showroom, slow enough so that the male models carrying banners bearing the name of each contestant can keep step.
The procession makes three turns down Adderley Street. On the first trip the models are heckled by the vituperative flower sellers. The second time round, one industrious seller has pulled apart a bunch of her best long-stemmed red roses and hands one to each gorgeous girl. ”Ag, siestog! [Oh, shame],” she cackles to the blushing Assata Diabate, a shy, striking girl from Mali. By the third round the sellers are waving and laughing and the models are blowing them kisses.
Suraya Dhalakama, Mozambique’s representative, slips on her Dolce & Gabbana glasses and stretches in the sunshine. Burundi’s Liliane Kanyamuneza smiles and waves and Semehar Aferwerki from Eritrea adjusts a shoestring strap. The girls are far from home, but the skies are clear, the Mercs are purring and the locals are gawping.
”Hey girls, here’s the boy!” chirps a wizened fruit vendor eating from a R2 bag of grapes. ”Grapes?” he holds out the packet. The propositioned girl gives a dismissive smile. ”Diet grapes!” he yells hopefully after her. A group of emaciated street kids skip alongside the truck carrying speakers pumping out African grooves, turning cartwheels and begging money off the photographer. A little Muslim woman shouts gleefully through a loudhailer, ”Move your bodies, girls. Move, move!” Workers at a butchery, in white aprons and hairnets, watch from a doorway; the waitresses at BJ’s line up excitedly along the Adderley Street window; a sidewalk nut seller tallies up her merchandise, pointedly oblivious. A teenager hands a man a flyer advertising the pageant. ”What’s this? Give me a job,” he spits.
The Face of Africa is a glamorous game. It’s also a tough one. ”It was awful,” a friend who attended the regional finals in Zanzibar told me. ”The girls who didn’t make it just cried and cried. They’d lost their chance to escape.”
Yet it cannot be said that the competition, as much as it uses the ”shy beauty from war-torn so-and-so” as a PR device, does no good. The organisers’ aim to change international opinion of Africa as a continent with nothing to offer the fashion world is sincere. The Saturday- morning parade, with 16 top-class black models wearing local designs and bopping to a pan-African soundtrack, certainly succeeded in giving dusty Africa some gloss. And they are putting time and resources into scouring the continent for top faces and designers – a gruelling task most international agencies aren’t up to.
So which girl is going to scoop the $150E000 Elite modelling contract on Saturday night? Some of the models like Lara El Tanahy (Egypt), Ojy Egwuenu (Nigeria) and Semehar Aferwerki (Eritrea) are undeniably beautiful, but perhaps too pretty. Marion Ngako (Cameroon) and Kabula Nugurusi have refreshingly unique faces and our own Nombulelo Mazibuko from Gugulethu is breathtaking. What it comes down to, says Jeremy Briar, the M-Net Face of Africa publicity consultant, is that industry clich: the ”it” factor. ”I suppose it’s something like personality,” he says. ”It’s a quality that somehow just makes a difference.” We’ll have to wait till the night to find out exactly what that indefinable something is.
The Face of Africa finals will be screened on M-Net on April 15 from 5pm