Word: pageants
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...Nigerian debut of the Miss World beauty pageant was already on its way to becoming the Nigerian nightmare when an inflammatory editorial was published last week in a Nigerian paper. Its suggestion that the Prophet Muhammad would have married a Miss World contestant had he seen the contest did not help to ease the tensions swirling around the controversial pageant. Of course no one knew that it would lead to three days of religious rioting and more than 100 deaths, but this result cannot be too surprising...
...committed to imposing the contest on Nigeria in the first place. Of all the times and places to hold the Miss World competition, Nigeria during Ramadan must be the worst combination. With a recent history of religious violence, Nigeria is an odd country to host the Miss World pageant. Its large and influential Islamic population, much of which lives under Islamic Law, considers the public exhibition of women to be an obscenity. But despite the offensive and insulting effects of the pageant, the Miss World organizers were set on holding it in Nigeria because it fit their agenda...
With Darego selected, the organizers followed the contest’s tradition of holding the next year’s finals in the winner’s home country. On some level it was a noble decision to pretend that Nigeria was capable of hosting a beauty pageant just like any other stable country. But there was also a very selfish aspect to this choice. The organizers were so determined to improve the pageant’s reputation that they were willing to endanger the safety of the contestants and the Nigerian people...
This beauty pageant was a chance for the government to show its progress from a year ago when 2,000 people were killed in religiously motivated fighting in the capital. In the past three years, more than 10,000 deaths have been attributed to the transition to democracy. These are obvious and fundamental problems in Nigerian society, but the government has attempted to gloss over them...
...they are moribund. The dying wasps were too obvious a reflection on mortality, as obscene as the contorted bodies in a painting by Hieronymous Bosch. I didn’t turn back; instead, frightened into solemnity, I walked on with the self-conscious gravity of a miscast Christmas pageant Madonna. And after a while, climbing the ridges and looking into the effaced faces of all those grieving angels, I thought: Death is not so fearsome, after all; I have been inured to it. I am changed...