The 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.

The real mystery about this tragedy is why the pageant’s organizers were so 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.

The contest needed to show that it was not actually as racially discriminatory as it appears to be. Never mind that no black African had ever won the contest before last year, and never mind that only one of the nine judges—the one from India—hailed from a country other than Britain and its white settler colonies. The contest supposedly demonstrated its impartiality last year by selecting Agbani Darego, Miss Nigeria, to be the first black African Miss World in the contest’s 50-year history. (Two previous African winners had been white South Africans, and one other had been an Arab Egyptian.)

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.

But the organizers’ irresponsible decision to hold this contest in Nigeria, a country already tense with conflict between Muslims and Christians, probably would not have gone forward if the Nigerian federal government hadn’t also been so bent on proving itself in the eyes of the world. Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria sees itself as the preeminent power in Africa, which is an accurate appraisal as long as we ignore South Africa. In only its third year of democracy, however, the country still has a lot to prove before it is ready to take on a permanent spot on the Security Council or even host the World Cup.

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.

Twelve of Nigeria’s northern states have recently adopted Sharia Law—the traditional Islamic law, which prescribes harsh punishments for adultery and non-marital sex; these laws have created serious problems for non-Muslim Nigerians who happen to live within the jurisdiction of Sharia. But instead of resolving the complicated question about whether Nigeria will be ruled by religious or secular law, the Nigerian federal government has decided to sidestep the problem.

When beauty queens from nine nations threatened to boycott the contest because of the death-by-stoning sentence passed on Amina Lawal, who had a child outside of wedlock, the federal government did whatever fancy dance it could to appease their concerns without offending the local, Islamic government. It was determined to pull off this pageant, so instead of abrogating the rule of Sharia, the government found it more expedient to make an ad hoc decree. The woman would not be stoned, it assured the beauty contestants, and this was convincing enough that all of them decided to attend. Again, never mind that Lawal’s last appeal was turned down, or that her lawyers are still concerned about her death sentence. The Nigerian government pretended that everything would turn out all right in this case and the beauty contestants played along.

But it is this game of make-believe that created the whole Miss World mess. The pageant’s organizers and the Nigerian government were both involved in a great fantasy that the pageant would work fine in Nigeria, ignoring a lot of facts and a lot of common sense. Nigeria’s large Muslim population would not act its part in this charade. It was not ready to accept an international beauty pageant, which one Islamic leader poetically described as a “parade of nudity.” When the riots began last week, the fantasy finally collapsed.

Only after days of rioting and the removal of the contest did the pageant organizers and the Nigerian government finally learn their lesson. While smiling and pretending everything is fine might be a good way to win a beauty contest, it is no way to deal with real people and real politics.

Jonathan P. Abel ’05 is a history concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.