How I Got Radicalized
When Disney’s First ‘African’ Princess Looked Nothing Like Me
As a child, I loved Disney princesses. As an adult, my concern goes beyond the problematic stereotypes
Welcome to “How I Got Radicalized,” a series from GEN that tells the story of a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.
In the fall of 1998, as my big sister’s 15th birthday approached, we both huddled in excitement on the moss-green carpet of our home, watching cable TV as we awaited our mother’s return from a neighboring town. We lived in Bauchi, a city in northern Nigeria, and Mum had gone on a several-day trip to Jos, about two hours away. It was an unspoken family tradition for our parents to return from out-of-town trips bearing small gifts, like movies that had not yet joined the collection curated at our local Video Mars, a popular rent-a-video chain in northern Nigeria. Once Mum arrived home and we’d impatiently unpacked the bounty of fruit and vegetables bought at various markets along the Jos-Bauchi highway, she presented her offering: Disney’s Hercules on VHS. We watched it at least five or six times over the next couple of days.
This entire scenario played out multiple times during our childhood. We’d anxiously await…
