Marianne Merten What is one to think when an eight-year-old girl appears on stage during a beauty pageant dressed in see-through lace and a black G-string?
Are her ambitions the same as those of the young women of the Miss World or Miss South Africa competitions who no doubt will always profess to want to save the world with their flashing smiles and tresses? Or is it a case of girls being told from an early age that their bodies, smiles and sexuality can secure a better future?
It is Saturday night and about 50 hopefuls, aged from six to their late teens, take to strutting their stuff in the Miss Manenberg competition. The girls are preened hair teased and sprayed into sculptured beehives or tumbling curls beautified by make-up and dressed to the nines. Steps are rehearsed: across the stage, along the front, a stop and a bit of eye contact and a large smile before the judges. Hips are swaying, heads held high.
Manenberg is one of the toughest neighbourhoods on the Cape Flats. Gangsters dominate the poverty-stricken area where unemployment is estimated at more than 70%. Teenage pregnancy is common, as is jack-rolling: the abduction and rape of young women and girls either as part of a gang-initiation ritual or as revenge because a male relative failed to perform a favour for a gang or join a gang.
But for one night these girls are queens. Their proud mothers sit in old tracksuits or jeans and T-shirts with their hair under doekies or in curlers in the audience, shouting encouragement and ordering their offspring to smile, smile, smile.
Old shoes are reinvigorated with sequins for the formal-wear appearance. Clearly, many of the younger girls wear new jeans and funky T-shirts for the casual section. Evening dresses have been crafted from pieces of sequinned material or from an elder sister’s dress.
White lace is the definite favourite in the evening section among the very young. Figure-revealing Jennifer Lopez-type dresses or a skimpy top and full-length skirt combo held together with chains in all the right places dominate the evening wear for the older girls. Some of them have already revealed most in the casual section with hot pants and boob tubes la American gangster rap music video extras.
I am one of the judges called in at the last minute. My fellow arbiters of beauty are a woman priest and a photographer. We take our duties seriously, conscious of the prying eyes of any mother particularly keen that her daughter should win. After all, we joked earlier, there may be trouble from the audience if we make the wrong choices. Rumour is that this happened before.
There is to be a Miss Personality, two princesses and a queen for each of the four age categories: four to six, seven to nine, 10 to 12, and older. Walk, dress and personality (read smile) are the three marks on the basis of which the girls are ranked.
I’m not sure how the other judges arrive at their scores. But the girl who has the guts to walk on stage in a plain denim dress as formal wear and still smile her fellow competitors wore satin, lace and sequins with the occasional set of matching gloves got one of the highest scores for personality from me. And I have to admit I find it disturbing, and accordingly deduct points, when an eight-year-old shakes her (non-existent) breasts underneath a skimpy lace dress. In spite of the obvious pains someone has taken to pile loops and loops of hair into a daring triangular creation, it looks out of place on a nine-year-old.
What becomes clear that night is that the girls already know their smiles, their bodies and the way they use it will bring results: peer approval, social standing or maybe a better boyfriend.
As the evening progresses the music becomes louder and louder. Later we find out the DJ and his friends are having a private party with a few quarts in the sound box upstairs regardless of the twirls below. The audience does not mind the pageant turning into a disco either: it is Saturday night and there are few safe places to go to in Manenberg.
After 10pm the young men arrive. When the 12 and older age group takes to the stage, cat whistles and calls are heard over the music as the guys check out the girls. Younger siblings, tired of sitting on hard plastic chairs, move towards the stage to dance to the music and shout encouragement to their favourites.
As the evening ends past midnight and everyone files out of the community hall, one mother turns around and says: “Good choices!” And I find myself hoping that at least some of the girls will take the confidence they showed on stage beyond the evening’s glamour.