We Cannot Blame Nigerian Women for Bleaching Their Skin Until We Reckon With What We Taught Them Their Skin Means

In March 2025, the BBC reported the story of Fatima, a 32-year-old mother in Kano, northern Nigeria, whose name was changed to protect her identity. She used skin-lightening creams on all six of her children, aged two to sixteen. One daughter now covers her face when she goes out to hide her burns. Another has a pale circle around her eyes and whitish scars on her lips and knees. Her toddler has weeping wounds that are taking a long time to heal. Fatima says her actions will haunt her forever.
But before we judge her, we need to ask one question: why did she do it?
Her answer should stop us cold. "My sister gave birth to light-skinned children, but my children are darker skinned. I noticed that my mother favours my sister's children over mine due to their skin tone and it hurt my feelings a lot."
She was not vain nor reckless. She was a mother watching her own children be loved less by their grandmother because of the colour of their skin. And she did the only thing the society around her had taught her to do. She tried to fix their skin.
The burns and scars that followed are the most visible part of this story. They are not the most important part.
We are the most important part.
Not Fatima. Not the supermarket that sold her unregulated creams without a prescription. Not even the bleaching industry, as culpable as it is. The most important part of this story is the grandmother who looked at two sets of grandchildren and found the darker ones less worthy of her warmth. The most important part is the culture that taught her that was a reasonable thing to feel. That culture is us, and we have been building it for generations.
We built it every time we told little girls not to play in the sun so they would not get dark, as though darkness were a defect to be prevented. We built it in the unspoken hierarchies of family homes, where lighter-skinned children received more compliments, more attention, more everything. We built it in Nollywood, which for decades cast light-skinned women as the romantic leads and darker women as the ones nobody chose. We built it in music videos that presented a particular kind of beauty—light smooth, Eurocentric — and called it desirable, aspirational, loveable. We built a world where Fatima's logic made complete sense. And then we are horrified by her choices.
This is what researchers call internalized colourism.
It is the process by which people absorb the colour hierarchies of their society so deeply and so early that those hierarchies stop feeling like hierarchies at all. They feel like truth and preference. They feel like a mother wanting the best for her children.
Drawing on the work of scholars like Margaret Hunter and Jemima Pierre, we understand that colourism is not a matter of personal vanity, it is a rational response to a system that rewards lighter skin with better treatment in marriage, employment, and social life. As I argued in my 2025 essay in The Republic, Nigeria's skin-bleaching epidemic reflects the intertwined legacies of colonialism, global beauty standards, and capitalist structures. The drive to bleach one's skin does not begin with a product, it begins with a culture that teaches people, from childhood, that their dark skin is a disadvantage.
Nigeria leads all of Africa in skin-whitening product use. According to the World Health Organization, 77% of Nigerian women use these products regularly. An Abuja dermatologist quoted in the same BBC report estimated that 80% of the women she has encountered have bleached their children, or plan to. Some were bleached themselves as babies, so they are simply continuing what was done to them.
There is also a profound failure of education woven into this crisis.
Many women bleaching their children do not fully understand what they are applying. The market for skin-lightening products in Nigeria is flooded with unregulated creams containing mercury, high concentrations of hydroquinone, and corticosteroids. These are substances that deliver short-term lightening and long-term, sometimes irreversible, harm. The women buying them are not reckless, rather, they are uninformed, in a marketplace that profits from keeping them that way. In 2023, NAFDAC declared a state of emergency on skin bleaching. Markets are being raided. Borders are being monitored. And yet, as one NAFDAC director admitted to the BBC, illegal ingredients often arrive in unlabelled containers that cannot be identified without laboratory testing.
Regulation matters. But regulation alone cannot fix a demand that is being driven by something far deeper than product availability. You do not solve a crisis of self-rejection with a product ban.
I am not asking us to excuse the harm.
The harm to Fatima's six children is real, permanent for some, and devastating. The harm to millions of Nigerian women navigating the physical consequences of unregulated products is real. The harm to children growing up learning that the skin they were born in is a problem to be corrected. That harm is perhaps the deepest and most lasting of all. I am asking us to locate the harm correctly.
The bleaching cream is not the beginning of this story. The beginning of this story is a grandmother who loved her lighter-skinned grandchildren more. The beginning is every music video, every casting decision, every careless comment about a dark child staying out of the sun. The beginning is a culture that has been teaching its own people, for a very long time, that they were born in the wrong skin.
Until we are willing to look honestly at that, until we are prepared to examine not just what Fatima did, but what we did to Fatima, we are not serious about solving this. We are only serious about our discomfort with the evidence of it.
Fatima is not the villain of this story. She is its most visible victim. She was handed a set of beliefs about dark skin before she was old enough to question them, and she acted on those beliefs with the resources available to her. The scars on her children's bodies are the physical record of everything we taught her. It is time we took responsibility for the lesson.