When Agbani Darego, an 18-year-old Nigerian computer science student, became the first black African woman to win the Miss World title a year ago in Sun City, South Africa, her achievement did not garner significant media attention outside the gossip columns and glamour-driven tabloids. It was, nonetheless, an achievement.
When the Miss World pageant was launched by Eric Morley in London in 1951, the contest had a firm view as to the qualities its ideal woman needed to possess: she would be white, tall and have an hour-glass figure; and her main ambition would be to devote herself to making her husband (yet to be acquired, of course) happy. Devotion to the children of the world was an objective which hopefuls honed to cliché in the 1970s.
And so the leap to a day when a new Miss World was chosen from a sub-Saharan African nation, in an apartheid-free South Africa, was a large one indeed. At the moment of her "coronation", Ms Darego was heard to say "black is beautiful". At that moment, the Miss World organisers must surely have felt that this globalisation of their essentially frivolous, though not overtly harmful, contest had proved to be the key success factor in their struggle to see off their feminist objectors. The onward march of the contest would be celebrated a year later in the winner's capital city - Abuja. However, the forces that have been unleashed in Nigeria are of an altogether more brutal, destructive and ferocious nature than any opposition the contest has generated to date.
A number of contestants have withdrawn in protest at the proposed stoning to death of Ms Amina Lawal, a 31-year-old woman convicted under Islamic law of bearing a child out of wedlock. Their commendable action underscores the vast cultural gulf that already exists between Christian and Muslim communities in the (mainly Muslim) northern part of the country. The contest, to be staged in Abuja next month, has become the focal point of that very deep division. The recent phase of rioting was sparked when a newspaper, by way of underlining its view that the contest was essentially harmless, suggested the Prophet Muhammad would have been happy to marry one of the contestants. Its offices were burnt to the ground next day and over 100 people have died since, with rioting now spread to the capital.
Miss World may have embraced black Africa. As yet, however, the feeling is not wholly reciprocated.