It is not beauty until it is comprehensive

A week after Stella Nantumbwe was crowned the new Miss Uganda, many are still asking if she was the fairest of all. There is nothing that by definition is as relative as beauty. There was a time when to me the true definition of beauty was Nicole Parker! But one of my friends thought I was nuts.

Miss Uganda 2013 Stella Nantumbwe

"If I was to undress her and hold her in my arms, it would be like holding a skeleton," he said of the petite actress. To him, Mariam Ndagire was the epitome of real beauty: "Look at her eyes, the way she smiles, look at her lips and hips, her fullness... yamawe!"

 And that is where we get it wrong. We put beauty in a box by limiting it to physical stature. Does she have to have full hips and lips to be beautiful? Does "broomsticks" for legs disqualify her? Must she have eyes that shine to dispel the darkness Umeme likes to unleash?

That kind of beauty has been weighed and found wanting. An accident, childbirth, hard times, overeating, name it, can easily take it away. That is what the old men that were looking at their reflections in the river meant when they shook their wrinkled faces sadly and said all that is beautiful drifts away like the waters.

Thus beauty must be measured wholesomely. Everyone is born beautiful but those who stand out are those who nurture that inborn beauty till it is flowing effortlessly like a stream that never runs dry.

In her poem, "Phenomenal Woman" (1994), Maya Angelou captures this altogether beauty like never before. Her protagonist is not "cute or built to suit a fashion model's size" yet she irresistibly leaves the prettier women burning with envy while men swarm around her like bees around nectar. The poem enumerates that her beauty is not just in the span of her hips and the curl of her lips, but is more in her inner mystery, the fire in her eyes, the flash of her teeth, the joy in her feet, the sun of her smile, the grace of her style... "When you see me passing/ It ought to make you proud…"

This evidently is a woman who knows who she is, which helps her to radiate from inside out. This assurance and intelligence fires up her creativity and productivity - which combine to earn her the envy of other women, and the admiration of men. Her beauty is phenomenal because it is comprehensive.