Interview with Mulanitoje

INTERVIEW WITH MULAN ITOJE.

MODEL & FOUNDER OF SPRING MELANIN.

For those who may not know, you could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Hi my name is Mulan, I recently set up an event, a well being event called spring melanin for the purpose of Dark skinned women. Specifically for Dark skinned women to attend. The purpose is for nurturing healing conversation and relaxation. A bit more background about myself, I graduated with a law degree, went into modelling and since I’ve been in the industry for about eight years I’ve done creative direction, art direction, management, PR & marketing so from dabbling in the industry I decided to set up an agency and also put together this event call Spring Melanin

As a dark skinned black woman do you feel your experience in the world is different when compared to others?

Definitely, I think my experience is (obviously as an individual there’s a lot of things to consider) my shade in particular especially with modelling made my experience a lot different from my other friends who were white or mixed race or light skinned. I remember a casting director said to me “oh your features are very commercial but your skin is so dark” and I was just like “What does that mean? What do you mean my features are commercial but my skin is dark” How do they not go together in that sense? How can my skin not be commercial but if you look in the media you will know from the lack of representation that it obviously isn’t considered commercial but I’m here! So yeah my experience has been very different

What is Spring Melanin & who is it for?

Spring melanin is a well being day event it starts at 12pm and finishes at 6pm the first half is relaxation, meditation, conversation, self-care workshops, spirituality, tarot readings, massages, manicurist, so its very much about relaxing the mind as well as the body so that you can be far more open and vulnerable. The second half is about panel talks, industry talks. So the first theme was about womb health and we had someone who has their own organisation for womb health come in and give a talk about the different types of issues that you can have with your womb and hormones and those types of invisible illnesses which a lot of people like to pretend don’t exist because they can’t see them but the people who suffer from them are suffering in silence so I needed to bring some awareness to that. The second talk we had was about life coaching and giving each other tips on how to self-motivate and how to get yourself up and out of bed everyday especially as dark skin women who face a lot of oppression and just being at the butt of everyone’s jokes, being undervalued & underpaid so its mostly about uplifting and empowering young women like myself who have existed in a world that acts as if we don’t exist and has a lot of negative connotations attached to our skin tone/shade. We close with an act, so like a performance artist and for the launch we had an amazing spoken word artist called Dylema “Do you let every man adapt” and she’s very much about women’s empowerment, empowerment poems and her spoken word is incredible. It brought a very nice close to Spring Melanin and there will be more Spring Melanin

every other month, its an event for dark skinned women to discuss different issues in regards to existing in a world like this.

Where would you like to see Spring Melanin go from here?

I want spring melanin to be international, I think it’s needed everywhere in the world. It happens across borders. It happens not only in Africa and the Caribbean which a lot of people think it only happens there, it happens in Brazil, it also happens in Asia. There are a lot of dark skin asian people, dark skin hispanic people who you don’t think exist because you’ve never seen them until you travel into the country and see them so I would love to have Spring Melanin in all these types of places to empower these people and allow them to feel confidence to be in the centre, be in the spotlight they deserve to be.

Which creatives would you like to collaborate with?

I would love to collaborate with anyone who’s all about women’s empowerment, intersectional feminism, people who understand the nuances within the black community, within black women, racism, colourism, shades. I would like to collaborate with artists and businesses who have the same ethos as me and spring melanin. We’ve also got so much to learn from each other that I would like to gain a lot by collaborating because I’m not perfect and no one is. Working with new people who have the same kind of ethics, that’s what I want.