I have come to realise that what others see does not matter. Neither do the words that flow out of the streams of their saliva-filled mouths. I am everything. My father always calls me beautiful, and they hate to see that their insensitive and snide remarks do not affect me. My skin shines as bright as the fake smiles they throw at me when our eyes meet. But I cannot be deceived, for I know they are capable of all emotions except love.

I grew up in a small town in Kaduna, where every glance seemed like a judgment and every whisper carried the weight of condemnation. The neighborhood children would hurl nicknames at me, disguising cruelty as play. “Blacky!” they called, as though my skin were an insult. “Monkey girl,” they whispered in classrooms, thinking I couldn’t hear.

But my father’s voice always echoed louder in my heart. “Zara, you are the definition of beauty. Never let them tell you otherwise.”

It was his affirmation that stitched courage into my veins. When others mocked me for being “too dark,” he reminded me that my skin was the same shade as the rich earth that nourished our yams. When they said my lips were too full, he told me God carved them to speak power. And when I cried about the way people’s eyes lingered too long, he would say, “They stare because they cannot look away from glory.”

But strength is never without scars.

The older I grew, the more the world seemed to conspire against me. In secondary school, the teachers favored girls with lighter skin tones, even letting them lead assemblies while ignoring me when I raised my hand. Boys chose fair-skinned girls for Valentine’s gifts. I once overheard a classmate say, “Zara will be beautiful if she tones her skin a little.” The words stung, not because I believed them, but because they revealed how deeply Nigeria had inherited a twisted standard of beauty.

I built a fortress of indifference around me. Yet, even fortresses can crack.

At university in Lagos, the insults grew subtler but sharper. Friends would say, “You’re actually pretty for a dark girl.” Or they’d ask casually, “Don’t you use cream? Maybe you should.” I would smile, but inside I wondered if I was only pretending to be unaffected.

One day, during a campus fellowship, a girl I barely knew pulled me aside. “Zara,” she said, “be careful with your confidence. People say you’re arrogant. That you think you’re better than everyone else.”

For a moment, doubt crept in. Was I projecting arrogance when I walked with my shoulders high? When I refused to bow to their pity? That night, I stood in front of my mirror in the dim light of my hostel room. For the first time in years, I questioned whether my father’s words were enough.

And then came the twist - an incident that shifted everything.

It was during my final year. A multinational company visited the campus to recruit. They were searching for ambassadors to represent Nigeria in a pan-African campaign. I applied, not expecting much. On the day of the audition, the hall was filled with students who looked like they had stepped out of glossy magazines - light-skinned, polished, stylish.

I stood out, but not in the way they did. When it was my turn to introduce myself, I spoke with a voice steady but not loud. I said, “My name is Zara, and I am the daughter of the soil. I am the shade of the cocoa that sweetens the world, the color of the ground that feeds nations. My beauty is not accidental; it is an inheritance.”

First, there was silence. Then applause.

Two weeks later, I was called to the dean’s office. I had been chosen as one of the faces of the campaign. My picture, my dark skin glowing under natural sunlight, was plastered across billboards in Lagos, Abuja, and even Accra.

The same people who once mocked me sent messages: “Wow, you’re really inspiring!” Some even pretended to have always admired me. But I remembered their laughter, their whispers, their fake smiles. And I smiled, not out of bitterness, but out of knowledge.

Because the truth had been revealed: they had never hated me. They had hated that I refused to hate myself.

Back home in Kaduna, my father looked at one of the billboards and said, “Zara, didn’t I tell you? You are everything.” Tears blurred my vision, but this time they were not born of pain. They were a release, a washing away of years of buried hurt.

Now, whenever I walk through Lagos streets, I see little girls glance at me with wide eyes, tugging their mothers’ wrappers and whispering, “Mummy, see that dark aunty.” And when they smile, it is not fake. It is full of something my bullies never gave me, which is admiration.

I realize now that my soul had found a home in me long before the world caught up. My father’s words had been seeds, and they grew into roots too deep for hate to uproot.

The twist isn’t that I proved them wrong. It’s that I never needed to.

Because I am everything. And nothing they say will ever change that.