When I interviewed Rema for his Rolling Stone recent cover story in February, he was excited about his new single, “Baby (Is It A Crime).” It had just dropped hours before. “I just had the biggest debut in my career,” he told me of the song that earned nearly 3 million streams on its first day and over 27.2 million since. Its official music video is a dreamy romance between Rema and model, photographer, and creative director Halimotu Shokunbi, who he handpicked to star alongside him, she says. “Rema is a great creative,” says Shokunbi, who met him as a fan through a mutual friend before being hired to shoot him behind-the-scenes at landmark events like his headlining show at London’s O2 Arena and his set at Wireless Festival.
“He picked my hair color, the outfits. He likes to know what’s going on from the top to the bottom,” she says. “If he don’t like it, it ain’t happening.” Shokunbi, bubbly and confident, says Rema wanted someone who could shine on camera. “He’s like, ‘I want you to act,’” she recalls. “‘I want you to give me everything.’ I was like, ‘Baby, you don’t got to say no more.’” She was previously cast in Adekunle Gold’s “Something Different” music video as well. When “Baby (Is It a Crime)” came out, Shokunbi had prepared herself for far different critiques than she received. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, they’re going to say we’re dating.’ I’m thinking they’re going to say I slept my way to the top.” (She and Rema have never been romantic, she insists.)
Instead, as she watched the video premiere with YouTube’s live chat feature, she saw people insinuate that she was or looked transgender as an insult (which it shouldn’t be, since trans women are human, worthy of respect, and have set trends in beauty and fashion). People likened her to James Brown, a Nigerian drag queen. When she went on Twitter, she saw more taunts, like one that said she looked like she had HIV. “People were like, ‘Rema needs to stop picking ugly Black bitches for his video,’” she tells me. She estimates that more than half of the comments she saw about herself across TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter were negative. “It could be the algorithm just fucking with me,” she wonders.
But what seemed clear to her was that those who attacked her took aim at her complexion, slimness in the age of (sometimes surgically enhanced) curve-appeal, and bold features, like her gapped teeth. That kind of dismissal is something she’s experienced all her life, especially in the modeling industry. “I dont think im ugly, I’m bad,” Shokunbi tells me. “But as a dark-skinned woman, people like to play with our experiences and make it seem like, ‘Oh, well maybe they just didn’t like you, or maybe it was a bad day for them, or maybe you just didn’t work hard enough for that job.’ And not the fact that I’m simply just a dark-skinned woman and people don’t like the fact that I’m dark-skinned.’”
This discrimination, known as colorism, is prevalent globally, rooted in the white supremacist colonialism integral to anti-Black racism today. It also causes intra-communal strife among Black people. Africa, where the World Health Organization has deemed skin bleaching a dangerous and common phenomenon, is no exception.
“Shit, it goes way back to slavery,” Shokunbi says, thinking of her position as both a Nigerian-American and a Black woman raised near Houston, Texas. “Dark-skinned people were seen as the outside people doing all the nitty gritty work, and the light-skinned slaves were inside of the house and seen as very precious, the ones the master slept with. It’s been translated into today and forever.”
Shokunbi was made to feel ashamed of her skin at a young age. “They used to call me burnt biscuit, dark chocolate, after midnight. Someone called me a Smurf because ‘I was so Black, I could turn blue.’ In school, kids used to turn the lights off and they’d be like, ‘Oh my God, look at Halima’s floating smile.’ I’d be walking in all black for orchestra and they’d be like, ‘There’s a ghost!’ I used to get called everything under the sun.” Her own family mocked her, including her mom, who is light-skinned. “She didn’t know what she was doing until I got older,” Shokunbi says. “She’s like, ‘Halima, you’re so Black. You have to go sit inside. Why are you so Black?’ My little brother’s making fun of me too.”
Other Black women, like two of her teachers, helped Shokunbi eventually see herself as beautiful as she grew up, gushing over her skin. She became so sure of herself she pursued modeling, but she found there were even more people looking to tear her down there. “Being a dark-skinned woman in general is hard, but in front of the camera is even harder,” she says. “In the industry, I definitely feel like a diversity hire a lot of the time, like, ‘Okay, we need to fill a space for a dark-skinned girl.’” She says she’s often been boxed into a particular look, too. “All your favorite dark-skinned models are bald or have cornrows,” she generalizes, “Because we have to play into this slave mentality of the White man feeling like they saved us from something. The whole fresh-off-the-boat, they-look-like-they-just-came-from-Africa – that’s the realm that they like to keep the dark-skinned models in. That’s something that I’ve been fighting against for years. That’s why I wear so many wigs and do so many different things.”
Her worst experiences came working in Milan in 2019. “It was more fetishization than adoration,” she says of jobs in a city where she remembers being inexplicably turned away from restaurants (she suspects because she’s Black). She came back to the U.S. after a shoot in Milan where she was the only Black model and only one made to radically change her hair. The company spent hours dyeing her dark, short cut blonde, only to decide to make it purple on a whim then sent her to a crude neighborhood salon to have it dyed black after, she says. “I left and there was black dye on my ears, on my edges, and my neck.”
These experiences led Shokunbi to do more work behind the camera. She now runs 268 Studios with three other African women. They do video, photo, and event production, public relations, branding, and social media marketing. Still, colorism manages to touch that work too. “My friend Catia, who’s the lightest person in our group, has realized the reaction we get in meetings from men. We have to use her light-skinned privilege. We’d be like, ‘Girl, they like you more. Go ahead and talk to them,’” explaining how their points will be ignored until Catia reiterates them. “She’s an ally.”
As far as she knows, neither Rema nor most of his camp knew the online cruelty was happening after “Baby (Is It a Crime)” went live (Rema didn’t respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment). She says Rema’s creative director, Richie Igunma, was the only person she told. “Richie only found it out because some girl made a reenactment of me dancing [in the video]. I reposted that because I thought it was funny.” Richie thought that was meant to be cruel. “He was like, ‘Bro, what the fuck?’ I’m like, ‘No, this is actually probably the nicest thing someone has said about me for the video.’” After she told him about the attacks, he reassured her of how beautiful she is.
Shokunbi notes that as far as she can tell, all the hate she received came from Black people, and she sees it as a sort of self-hatred among them. “I know your mother’s dark-skinned. You’re dark-skinned. Your siblings are dark-skinned. Your aunties and uncles are dark-skinned. How would you feel if they were in a video and people were making fun of them being ‘Black bitches?’ I just feel like a lot of that stuff was just internalized.”
Loosies: In lighter news, here’s some of the Afropop songs I’m excited about right now:
Lagos in Paris, “Mali Spirit”: This upbeat electronic track from burgeoning trio Lagos in Paris is exactly the type of music I do my best work to, all deep house basslines, mandingo guitars, and soothing vocals that feel like home.
Joeboy, “Taxi Driver”: “You’re the weapon fashioned against me” Joeboy says in his mournful new single. Heartbreak tracks aren’t always my jam, but his pain is so palpable and poetic here, it got me.
Steel Banglez feat. AP Dhillon and Omah Lay, “Never Let You Go”: British producer Steel Banglez fuses Afrobeats, R&B, and Punjabi music in his new EP One Day It Will All Make Sense, bringing together Indo-Canadian vocalist AP Dhillon and Rolling Stone Future 25-er Omah Lay for a sexy and somber ode to devotion.
“Made in Africa” is a monthly column by Rolling Stone staff writer Mankaprr Conteh that celebrates and interrogates the lives, concerns, and innovations of African musicians from their vantage point.
