Who Taught You to See Yourself That Way? What African Ancestral Traditions Have Always Known About Beauty

HEALTH & WELLNESS

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Who Taught You What Beautiful Means?

Beauty is described as subjective — a matter of individual taste, cultural variation, personal preference. And there is truth in that. But it is not the whole truth. Because while tastes vary, the hierarchy of beauty in most Western-influenced societies does not. Lighter skin. Straighter hair. Narrower features. Smaller bodies. These are not neutral aesthetic preferences. They are the residue of a specific history — one that decided, through law and violence and media and medicine, which bodies were desirable and which were not.

Colonialism did not only take land. It took mirrors. It installed in colonized people the habit of seeing themselves through the eyes of the colonizer — and finding themselves insufficient. This is why the question “what is beauty?” is not a philosophical abstraction for Black and brown communities. It is a political question. A health question. A question with generational consequences for how children grow up understanding their own worth.

Before we can answer what beauty is, we have to ask: who taught us to see it the way we do? And what did they need us to believe?

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What African Traditions Understood About Beauty

Across African cultures — from the Akan of Ghana to the Zulu of Southern Africa to the Hausa of Northern Nigeria — beauty was never reduced to physical features. It was understood as something that moved through a person, something expressed in how they carried themselves and how they treated others. The Swahili concept of uzuri encompasses beauty, goodness, and moral excellence in a single word. You cannot be truly beautiful in the uzuri sense while living without integrity. The Yoruba concept of ewa — often translated as beauty — is equally about inner radiance, the quality that makes a person’s presence felt before they speak.

In many West African communities, beauty was also explicitly communal. A woman who cared for the elderly was beautiful. A man who showed up for his community in crisis was beautiful. The elder who held wisdom gently, the young person who listened well, the mother who fed other people’s children — these were understood as expressions of beauty that physical appearance alone could never confer or revoke. This is not a metaphor. These communities organized their social recognition of beauty around character, not features.

This does not mean African traditions had no aesthetic sense. They did — vibrant, diverse, sophisticated, expressed in textile, body art, architecture, music, and movement. But aesthetic beauty was understood as one dimension of a larger whole, not the whole itself. And it was never measured against a single external standard. Each community held its own sense of what was beautiful, rooted in its own values and cosmology.

“You cannot be truly beautiful in the uzuri sense while living without integrity. African traditions understood beauty as something that moved through a person — not something stamped on their face.”

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The Wound That Beauty Standards Create

The research on beauty standards and mental health is consistent: when the dominant beauty ideal does not reflect your body, the psychological cost is real. Studies document higher rates of body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, depression, and anxiety in communities whose features, skin tones, and body types fall outside the mainstream ideal. For Black women specifically, the data shows a lifelong negotiation between external standards that exclude them and internal resources — including ancestral identity, community belonging, and spiritual grounding — that resist that exclusion.

This is not a superficial problem. Beauty standards shape what people eat, how they move, what they spend, what procedures they undergo, how they feel about aging, how they raise their daughters, and what they allow themselves to take up space for. The internalization of a beauty standard that was designed to exclude you is a public health issue. It is a community wellbeing issue. It belongs in the same conversation as the other legacies of colonialism that Ubuntu Village names directly.

Healing from that wound is not primarily about self-esteem practices or affirmations — though those have value. It is about reconnecting with a framework of worth that was never dependent on the colonizer’s approval. That framework already exists. It lives in the traditions that survived the Middle Passage, in the grandmothers who told their granddaughters they were beautiful in a language that meant something different than what the television said, in the communities that looked at their own people and saw beauty that no external standard had authorized them to see.

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What Ubuntu Says About Beauty

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A person is a person through other persons. In Ubuntu philosophy, who you are is not separable from how you relate. This has direct implications for beauty. If personhood is relational — if what makes you fully human is the quality of your connection to others — then beauty, too, must be relational. It must be something expressed in relationship, not something you possess independently and display.

This reframes the question entirely. Not: do I meet the standard? But: how do I show up? Not: does my face match the ideal? But: does my presence make people feel seen? Not: what do I look like? But: what do I leave behind when I leave the room?

This is the standard our ancestors applied. It does not dismiss physical appearance — people across all cultures have celebrated physical beauty and felt its pull. But it refuses to let physical appearance be the primary measure. And it insists that beauty is something you can grow into, something that deepens with time and care and community investment, not something that peaks in youth and declines from there.

• ‣ Character — how you treat people who cannot do anything for you.
• ‣ Presence — the quality of attention you bring to the people in front of you.
• ‣ Integrity — whether what you say and what you do belong to the same person.
• ‣ Generosity — how freely you give what you have, especially when it costs you something.
• ‣ Rootedness — knowing where you come from, and honoring it in how you live.

“Beauty that deepens with time, that grows through loss, that multiplies when shared — this is what our ancestors were pointing to. This is the standard that was never dependent on anyone else’s approval.”

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Reclaiming the Mirror

Reclaiming an ancestral understanding of beauty is not about rejecting aesthetics or pretending that appearance doesn’t matter in the world as it actually is. It matters — and the discrimination that follows from it (in hiring, housing, healthcare, policing, media) is real and documented. We do not help anyone by pretending otherwise.

What we can do is refuse to let the colonizer’s mirror be the only mirror. We can hold, alongside the reality of how the world currently operates, a different set of eyes — ones that see what our grandmothers saw when they looked at us. Ones that can recognize beauty in a dark body, a broad nose, natural hair, thick legs, aging skin, a face that carries its history.

At Ubuntu Village, this is part of what we mean when we talk about ancestral wellness. The work of reconnecting people to the frameworks their communities carried before colonialism installed a different set of values. Not as nostalgia. As medicine. The mirror your ancestors used is still available. The question is whether you are willing to look into it.

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References

• ‣ Psychology Today — The Psychology of Beauty
• ‣ Taylor & Francis — Body Image and Beauty Standards Among Black Women
• ‣ Britannica — Yoruba People: Culture and Cosmology
• ‣ Africa Today — Colonial Legacies and Body Image in African Communities

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Related Reading

• ‣ The Importance of Self-Love and Care
• ‣ How Colonialism Continues to Shape Global Health Policy
• ‣ Reparations and Healing as a Public Health Argument
• ‣ From a Soul Level: The Bigger Picture

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