Singer Dice Ailes berated online for using Sarah Baartman for his Music Artwork, he responds (Screenshot)
Shasha Damilola Alesh simply known as Dice Ailes is being criticized by his fans and Twitter users for using the picture of Sarah Baartman as art cover for his new song.
Sarah Baartman was one of many Khoi women who were visited by European scientists and coerced into undressing and displaying themselves to satisfy Europeans’ perverse curiosities.
These scientists carried back with them the image of these women as primitive and sexually insatiable.
This misconception has managed to trickle right down to the mouth-breathing creep at the bar who leers at us with suggestive confessions of “never having been with a black girl before,’’ then adopts this picture of our sexuality as primal, serving to further dehumanize and assign us the role of entertainer.
Yesterday, Dice Ailes came through with a brand new banger, “Ginika“ which serves as his second output for the year, following the collaboration with Falz on the highly accepted record ‘Alakori‘.
It wasn’t long after the release when Twitter users started calling him out for using Sarah Baartman in the art for the track. They termed his action as “insensitive”.
See reactions below:
Reacting to the trolls, Dice Ailes who signed a record deal with Chocolate City in 2014 wrote:
The artwork of my new song Ginika featured an artist’s impression of Sarah Baartman, a South African woman born in the 1700s who was taken to Europe on false pretences and paraded around shows with crowds invited to look at her bum. Till today, she is considered by many as the epitome of colonial exploitation and racism, of the ridicule and commodification of black people by an elite. But for me I see a woman who is the embodiment of African beauty; a beautiful and brave woman whose story has been told only from the perspective of her experience.
For years, we have continued to accept as taboo certain conversations we should have about our “Africanness” and taken to heart foreign narratives about what are acceptable norms and forms of beauty. From our hair to our clothes and bodies, we are being conditioned to consider what is ours as unusual. I think that puts the story of our heritage and experience in the hands of foreigners and does nothing to help us celebrate what makes us unique. Sarah Baartman was a beautiful, voluptuous and true African woman and for me that is the story I will tell.
I am an African (my parents are from Ghana and Nigeria) who is aware of how popular culture has been used to demean and exploit Africans, so if you find my use of the image offending, That wasn’t the intention. It was not my intention to ridicule this beautiful woman, but to celebrate her through my music.
To make us have this conversations we are now having and for young people like me to read about her, celebrate her and own their identities. Not an identity forced upon us by colonialists.
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