Meet The Queen Of The Dark

This lady is popularly known as the "monarch of the night," or “Queen Of The Dark”, currently holds the title of the most captivating young woman on the planet.

Nyakim Gatwech has lived a lifetime of 31 years(age as of the time of publishing). Her mother fled from a war-torn South Sudan while pregnant.
Then, she was born at a refugee camp on January 27, 1993, in Ethiopia. She later lived at another camp in Kenya for nine years before immigrating to the US in Buffalo, New York at the age 14.

After a time, Nyakim later moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Although she has never been to South Sudan, Nyakim considers herself to be South Sudanese.

She considered a modeling career after taking part in a fashion show at St. Cloud State University. She has appeared in promotional posters for the 2017 film Jigsaw.

At the age of 27, Nyakim established herself as an exceptional model.

During all her formative years of life, Nyakim endured incessant mockery and body shaming due to her unconventional appearance.

Jeffrey Lieberman(a US well recognized Clinician and a Chair of Columbia University’s psychiatry department) once retweeted a picture of Nyakim pretending to read a newspaper while perched on a hotel bed.

The photo was taken during a photo session she did with Nyakim four years earlier (at the time this piece was made).
“Years back,” she says, “this thing would have really affected me.”

She has also observed white people ogling her as if she were some kind of modern-day Hottentot Venus, an African female curiosity.

On top of the ridicule she faced for not speaking English, the racists comments about her skin tone were relentless.

“I would sit down in the classroom, and the students in front and behind me would get up and go, like I had some kind of disease or I smelled or my clothing wasn’t clean,” she recalls.

“And some of these were other Black kids, to be quite frank with you. They were literally social distancing from me.”

Some of the most uncomfortable moments, Nyakim recalls, came when the classroom lights went down for the projector; when she raised her hand, a classmate would think nothing of asking the teacher: “Can you even see her?”

Lol, that’s so funny to me.

The bullying pushed Nyakim to consider suicide and weigh whether to bleach her skin – something her older sister was already doing.

“She was like, ‘Here are the products, but I think it’s not going to solve anything for you,’” Nyakim recalls.

“As you get older and into your career, there’s still gonna be people who say something about your skin color. You’ve got to work on loving yourself and not letting these people’s words affect you.”, she acknowledged.

So the family initiated a routine of daily affirmations and remembering the risks their mother took to bring them this far.

And when the racist and colorist taunts finally became insufferable, the family pulled up stakes for the Minneapolis area, where they found instant community among the area’s east African expats.

Once her self-confidence had recovered, Nyakim started to reconsider a career in modeling while binge-watching America’s Next Top Model after school.

“When I saw Tyra Banks, I was like, ‘Wow, if she can do it, I can do it too,’” she says. “But that was before I realized that my skin tone is not really accepted like that in this industry.”

In her determination to join the ranks of Alek Wek, Duckie Thot and other world-renowned dark-skinned models, Nyakim makes her own breaks.

However, what was once a source of derision has transformed into a divine blessing.
Just to consider, while working in between jobs as a Minneapolis daycare teacher, at a Buffalo in New York Panera Bread, and pursuing a degree in her education decades back, Nyakim collaborated with photographer friends to produce her own photoshoots, posting her favorite snaps to Instagram.

It was through the following cultivated there, that she came to be known as “Queen Of The Dark” – a nickname that probably led to the Guinness record claim that's taking on a life of its own.


She later did research concerning: Colorism & Complexion.
The result; her independent research into colorism sparked the idea for a shoot made up of Black women across the skin tone spectrum.

It was an out-take of her sitting next to a fair-skinned model during a set re-staging that properly launched her career and led to her booking work – not that it stopped her hustle.

“For my first three big campaigns, I was the one pretending to be my manager,” says Nyakim. Unsure of what to charge for the work, she Googled possible rates.

Still, the fact that model agencies hold fast to their blinkered views when it comes to rostering Black models is a continuing source of frustration.

Nyakim who attended Black Lives Matter rallies in the Twin Cities after Floyd’s killing, stated something she noticed:
“When an agency already has that Sudanese dark-skinned model, they will just continue to work with her, it’s not a sort of diversity. Why can there only be one?”

Still on her modeling journey, ridicule still continues.

As a model on colorism in Instagram,
she confirms; ‘My skin tone is not really accepted’.

On the other side of the media, in a prominent psychiatrist’s racist tweet, Nyakim has built a career in the face of industry prejudice.

“Would he call his wife or his daughter a freak of nature?” wonders Nyakim Gatwech, the 31-year-old model, targeted in a racism scandal that shook an Ivy League university.

“His words are not just affecting me, but dark-skinned girls in general, dark-skinned girls who go to Columbia too or even a dark-skinned girl who is wishing to go there. It can affect them in a way that none of us can imagine – especially coming from a psychiatrist.”

Jeffrey Lieberman has ranked among the US’s foremost clinicians for more than two decades. As the longtime chair of Columbia University’s psychiatry department, he was especially respected for his research and published discoveries about schizophrenia.

But February 2022, the former president of the American Psychiatric Association became known for something else.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Lieberman retweeted a photo of Nyakim and described her as a “freak of nature”; this was after the original post used the pronoun in reference to the woman while making the false claim that she was listed in the Guinness book for having the world’s darkest skin.

The fallout for Lieberman was swift.
Within days he was suspended from his post at Columbia, stripped of his psychiatrist-in-chief position at Columbia University Irving Medical Center/NewYork-Presbyterian hospital and asked to resign as director of the New York state psychiatric institute – a post that paid him almost $250,000.

In addition to widespread condemnation online, Lieberman faced scorn from his many collaborators in New York’s elite medical community.

“He’s a destructive personality who has done a great deal of damage, who is only now being held accountable after decades of impunity,’’ one former colleague told the City.


In an email to university cohorts, Lieberman wrote:
“An apology from me to the Black community, to women and to all of you is not enough.”

Before his tweet and his Twitter account vanished, the model, Nyakim Gatwech, made sure to take a screenshot for posterity.

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Having experienced the sting of ridicule firsthand, Nyakim now embraces her dark skin, which has propelled her to become a highly sought-after model.

She hasn’t let the derisive comments deter her from pursuing a career as a fashion model, even as she risks being exposed to even more cutting prejudice in an industry famous for it.

And while many industry stakeholders were quick to align themselves with the George Floyd-born antiracism movement while promising greater inclusion, Black fashion models still struggle to break through, which is way much less compared to earning their fair share.

All the while, the same issues of cultural appropriation and racist gaffes remain.

Gatwech’s social media ascent has continued, but she has yet to land a deal with a major modeling agency.
“There hasn’t been an opportunity where a brand was like; ‘We want to put you on the cover of a magazine...’,” says Nyakim, who splits time between New York and LA. “At least not yet. I’m still believing in God’s plan.”

Today, she stands as one of the most renowned and well-compensated celebrities worldwide, thanks to her unique beauty.

Her striking features have garnered her a massive online following on Instagram, where enthusiasts can discover more of her captivating photographs.


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Reference:
1. “My-Skin-Tone-Is…”
2. Meet-The-Darkest…
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