On only her second visit to Nigeria, Chidimma Adetshina won that country’s Miss Universe beauty pageant.
Ms. Adetshina was crowned on Saturday in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, just weeks after she was forced to withdraw from the Miss Universe pageant in South Africa, the country of her birth, when public scrutiny of her Nigerian heritage triggered a national debate about nationality, immigration and ultimately xenophobia.
“I think I really do embody the spirit of perseverance and resilience,” Ms. Adetshina said on her social media account after her victory, a sash draped on her shoulder, a crown glittering on her head. Later, in an interview with the BBC’s Nigerian Pidgin outlet, her composure collapsed when she was asked about her experiences.
“Only now, it’s starting to cloud me, and affect me,” she said, dabbing tears. Along with her duties as Nigeria’s representative to the Miss Universe pageant, she would seek therapy, she added.
While beauty pageants have long been derided as archaic and out of step with contemporary feminism, they remain popular. If anything, global competitions have become a source of national pride. South Africa crowned a deaf woman for the first time this year, and there has been at least one transgender contestant.
A contestant with Nigerian heritage, though, proved too much for some.
Ms. Adetshina, 23, made it to the finals of the Miss South Africa pageant, a reinvention of the traditional pageant that now resembles a reality television show. That was when her identity overshadowed her beauty. Ms. Adetshina was born in South Africa’s historic Soweto township to a Nigerian father and a South African mother who also has Mozambican ancestry.
The scrutiny became so intense that South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs opened an investigation that ultimately accused her mother of committing identity fraud.
“An innocent South African mother, whose identity may have been stolen as part of the fraud committed by Adetshina’s mother, suffered as a result because” she could not register her child’s birth, the ministry said in a statement on Aug. 7. The authorities said they planned to pursue criminal charges, but that Ms. Adetshina was exempt because “she was an infant at the time when the activities took place in 2001.”
Days before the pageant, Ms. Adetshina withdrew, citing the safety of herself and her family. That was when organizers of the Miss Universe Nigeria pageant invited her to Lagos. She represented her father’s homeland, Taraba state in eastern Nigeria, even though she said in a post-pageant interview that she had never been there before and had only traveled to Lagos once. Still, she garnered enough public votes to qualify for the final.
Maurice Sokari, an entrepreneur from Lagos, said he voted for Ms. Adetshina because he had been drawn to her story of different African identities. “I feel like her winning broke a lot of narratives,” he said.
Okolo Miracle Obiechina, a fashion stylist who also voted for her, said: “It was crucial for me to see Chidinma win, especially after she endured xenophobic South Africans. It baffles me that in 2024 Black people are still hating each other.”
Even in Nigeria, her multinational heritage has raised questions about whether she is the right person to represent that country at the global competition in Mexico in November. Some questioned why she was allowed to enter the competition at such a late stage. Others asked whether her victory was part of the rivalry between Africa’s two largest economies — Nigeria and South Africa.
“She’s not been to Nigeria in 20 years,” Blessings Mosugu, a television host and journalist, said on Jasiri, a talk show.
“Does she even know where Taraba state is?” asked the other host, Tolulope Adeluru-Balogun.
In South Africa, Ms. Adetshina’s hybrid identity had opened a decades-long wound, in a country where Black South Africans sometimes regard migrants from the continent as “economic combatants,” against whom they must compete for already meager resources, said Sisonke Msimang, a South African author and essayist.
South Africa has a complicated relationship with the continent, particularly beyond southern Africa, Ms. Msimang said. Apartheid’s ideology of racial segregation used the notion of an uncivilized African to oppress Black South Africans, and to instill a deep-seated fear of the countries and peoples that lay to the north of South Africa.
In post-apartheid South Africa, this animosity has at times led to sporadic riots and brutal mob violence. Politicians have also repeatedly used anti-immigrant rhetoric as a dog whistle. One party, the Patriotic Alliance, whose leader, Gayton McKenzie, has become the minister of sports, arts and culture in a coalition government, asked a court to force organizers to disqualify Ms. Adetshina.
In many ways, she represents an increasing number of young Africans whose identities defy borders, Ms. Msimang said. She is also of a generation of South Africans born after apartheid, who have seem determined to defy the past.
“If South Africa allowed itself to be cosmopolitan, rather than shrank back in fear about what it means to be a melting pot, we would be able to accept all of who she is and celebrate it,” Ms. Msimang said.
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