Not many triumph-over-adversity stories play out like the one of Somali-born US model Iman. That she has gone on to enjoy post-runway success attests to the resilience of a lady that made the best out of a hostile environment. On CNN’s African Voices last week, Iman gave viewers more than a peek into her rollercoaster ride to the catwalk.

The experiences gave her the fighting spirit to succeed and be able to plan for her future after the ramp. Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid was born [in 1955]. Her dad was the ambassador to Saudi Arabia but all that changed for Iman and her three siblings with a change of government that exiled her family.
 
“We only left with the clothes on our backs,” Iman reveals. Her family relocated to Tanzania while she went on to pursue a Political Science degree at the University of Nairobi in 1972. Back then the ravishing beauty was in a dilemma about how to pay for her tuition. Enter American photographer Peter Beard and Iman’s modelling journey was set to kick off.

“He found me walking on a Nairobi street one day and asked if I had ever been photographed,” Iman narrates.  To her, it was yet another of those prejudices whites hold about Africans; that she had never been in front of a camera. “I told him of course I had been photographed, by my parents,” she reveals. “No, I do not mean that sort of photography,” Beard told her.

When he promised to pay her, Iman obliged but only after exacting a hefty sum enough to cover the rest of her tuition. She made it to the US in 1975 but was quickly met with falsehoods and the unfair advantage white models have over their black counterparts. Apparently, Beard had told all that Iman was discovered in the jungle, herding goats and spoke no word of English.

“I told him [Beard] that I was not lost for him to discover me. In any case it was because of me that he became famous so who discovered who,” Iman says in a sarcastic tone. “I grew up in Somalia, I have never been to a jungle and I speak five languages,”

Iman explains. But she played along taking in all the backbiting that included industry players saying “oh she is not tall enough, oh she is a little fat” and all the nay saying. The most outrageous was when a critic said she was a white woman that had been dipped in chocolate. But Iman became an instant success in the fashion world thanks to her signature strut that had some liken to a jaguar’s prowl. She became a muse for many of the top designers including Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, and Yves Saint-Laurent – the latter once famously said, “My dream woman is Iman”.

Another hurdle she had to jump was one that required Black models to have their own makeup. “I remember going for shoots and the makeup people would ask if I had carried my own foundation yet the White models were never asked,” she says.
That led her to start her own line of cosmetics thereby guaranteeing her post-runway success that has led to the globally acclaimed Iman Cosmetics line that rakes in US$25m a year. For that, she has her Somali instinct for selling to thank.  
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