“FANTA! THE FIRST AFRICAN WHOSE NUDE PICTURES WENT VIRAL!”
#: The hashtag symbol in the digital age has cemented itself as a movement to bring light to specific social issues and injustices often linked to human rights and equality. It galvanises online communities to raise awareness, advocate for change, and inspire knowledge around overlooked or misinformed issues. If you share this article with a friend, kindly use the hashtag #JusticeForFanta in her memory. For every Fanta, every me, and every you, misrepresented because of the colour of our skin and African origin.
Viziers: High ranking advisors to the King (the Mansa) in Timbuktu.
Dearest Irreverent Readers!
Gather close! This is going to be short but, unfortunately, not as sweet… Adama, a bean spiller from Timbuktu, has shared a tale with us that is so puzzling, unseemly, and wild that it will leave you clutching your silk and satin shawls in disbelief.
Many, many, many sunsets ago, a pack of strangely pale visitors lumbered into the beloved Timbuktu city. They were a strange sight to behold, with their peculiar habit of naming themselves with multiple names per man. ‘So and so and so and so the third.’… How odd? What a primitive way to track a lineage…. What appeared expansive was actually rigid. When Bintou, a heavily pregnant royal scribe, asked them to introduce themselves, they insisted that they were ‘so and so and so and so, plus numerals.’ This level of inferiority was so disturbing that she had to cleanse herself with incense to rid her and her unborn baby of their spirits of confusion. Didn’t they know who they were? Why did they require as many names to remind themselves who they were?
Dearest reader, hold your horses and camels before I describe their clothing. If one can call such gravelly, bland abominations, ‘clothing.’ Even back then, Adama and the rest of our brothers and sisters in Timbuktu were draped in the finest dyed cotton, spun to perfection, with embroidered silks and milky-threaded robes fit for royalty. Yet, these visitors named with all the names and numerals in the cabinet arrived in stiff, unprocessed fabric that lacked taste and comfort. A prominent tailor in Timbuktu who snatched a prominent vizier from his first wife (who Adama insisted we leave unnamed, but we all know) took one look at the visitors’ clothing and fainted in her husband’s arms on the spot. Her collapse could have been because the clothing was disastrous or because she wanted to add insult to injury to her husband’s ex-wife, who was also in attendance, and a vizier, too ( also, who Adama insisted we left unnamed, but again, we all know who). That aside, today’s drama isn’t about yesteryear’s unnamed tailors, viziers, and their spouses; today’s drama is about a princess named ‘Kadidia’ and how her aide ‘Fanta’s’ nudes leaked.
“Have they been banished from civilisation?” Princess Kadidia’s nose was upturned, and she surveilled the state of the visitors. “And why don’t they bathe?”
“Is this some kind of self-imposed punishment?” Boubacar, Kadidia’s brother, straightened his golden, velvet robe. His angular face was questioning.
“What are they? These visitors with endless numbers of names per man as well as with numerals; what do they do?” Princess Kadidia sipped grape juice from a golden chalice.
“Scholars,” Adama, the visitor’s guide, translated and bowed. “They are scholars who have journeyed to Africa to research in our extensive libraries. From here, they will visit scholars in Egypt.”
“Scholars???” An unbridled laughter erupted from the pit of Princess Kadidia’s stomach. “They can kick off in the children’s section,” she pointed towards one of her aides to lead them to the library, “Wait!” her hand raised and stacked golden bracelets jingled, “They can use our libraries on one condition that they offer one piece of their clothing for my aide Fanta to wear so she can describe to me what it feels like to be wrapped in such primitive textile. I am fascinated by the ways of these cavemen who claim to be scholars.”
The visitors obliged with Princess Kadidia’s request willingly and hastily… And that was the end of that, so everyone thought! While those lost, poorly dressed travelers seemed harmless enough, they were wolves in sheep’s clothing, almost literally.
Many, many, many sunrises later, Princess Kadidia sat back in her sprawling silk sheets and cotton gifted to her by Merit, her dear friend and merchant from Egypt, and her mind twisted as to who and why anyone deemed a scholar would adorn such scruff. She wondered if they made it to Egypt okay and if their travels back to Europe were safe? Did they learn? Was their intellect augmented by their visit to our incomparable scholars? She hoped so… for their sake and the limited civilisation they displayed. She felt pity for them; maybe she would convince her father to send a team of tailors and gifts of textile to dignify their lands… only for her brother, Prince Boubacar, to barge into her chambers covered in dim candlelight. “Sister! Kadidia! Look! Traitors!” Within his palm was a parchment or paper that she soon realised was a picture of Fanta, bare, naked! “These uncivilised traitors took a picture of Fanta when she went into her quarters to wear their clothes and report back to us what they felt like!'” Kadidia’s eyes sliced and nose fumed, “You lie!”
“That’s not the worst part!’
“What is???”
“They write here in their newspaper that it was an act of ‘charity,’ that they were giving her their clothes because they found her naked and barefoot in Africa!”
“What?!”
Boubacar jeered, “Snakes!” and shifted his finely wrapped black turban.
“Us? Naked! Do they not know that we have been burying our dead in cloth for eons? Are they aware that we are the lands where our elders are mummified in cloth? What stupidity is this? From the Dye Pits of Kano to the Akwete cloth of the Igbo, to weaving in Senegambia, and the Bogolanfini, the mud cloth, raffia cloth in Kongo, and cotton and silks of Abyssinia! These mad people!”
“Fear not, my sister,” Boubacar patted Kadidia’s shoulder. “Adama is still alive and well, and I asked him, too, to take pictures of the visitors with numerals for their multiple names back then—pictures of them kneeling before us in their sackcloth.”
“He has the pictures?!” Kadidia clapped.
Boubacar nodded with his pulled mouth and nose, “He has them!”
“When shall we unleash them to the world?” Kadidia’s sultry voice escaped a mischievous smile.
“When the time is right, sister! When the brothers and sisters across Africa convene around one campfire and are finally prepared to listen to their real history, not the fiction and fancies of fraudsters who sneak into servant quarters because apart from propaganda, they don’t have much on offer…”
Rest assured, readers, Spilling The Beans will stay on top of this shocking development of the picture reveal. But, for now, let’s commit to never ever taking another look at Fanta’s nude photos. Boycott the propaganda against our very own! We know our own well-documented, rich history of textiles and our place in civilisation.
Should you encounter one of these pale visitors with numerals and endless names in your villages, please, for the love of elegance, send them to a tailor immediately on the house. For the love of scandal, take pictures of their sackcloth and them kneeling before your kings and queens for safekeeping. Keep these pictures close. Let’s wait for Prince Boubacar and Princess Kadidia’s call for reckoning. Do not take pictures of them nude; unlike them, we have integrity and report with dignity.
Until next time that Adama, our bean spiller, sends us word, remember to buy every cloth from the dye pits printed with #JusticeForFanta. Various colours are still in stock. Every cowrie shell goes towards raising funds to transport us to an exhibition of pictures of the pale visitors in sackcloth bowing to our kings and queens that we shall organise in Europe. The location and date of this momentous revelation are to be confirmed.
While ‘Spilling The Beans’ is here to bring you laughter, sometimes it brings you caution. There are people taking pictures of you right now, knowing you are clothed and claiming you are naked… They are so devious, like their tongues are charms that they have actually convinced some of us that we are naked, too. They no longer have to wait for you to be nude like Fanta in the privacy of her quarters. Instead, they are framing their narrative in inconspicuous ways. Beware!
Fear not, one scandalous tale at a time, our bean spillers will always bring truth to the lies…
Our day of truth will come.
Yours in Scandal,
The only anonymous bean spiller.
