Karl Peters must have smiled in hell where he burns. This is exactly how he envisioned us: broken people who hate their language, despise their color, loathe their hair, and seek validation from white people. Our black hair, once a symbol of pride and identity, is now viewed with disdain as we seek validation from white people.
My teacher called me a hooligan for wearing my hair in a fade as he withheld his exam until I shaved it. Predictably, after a brief history of how long he’s been bald, he laid out all the professional benefits of keeping my hair short, neat, and combed. And then he said, and I quote, “Short, neat, and combed is African culture.” Such profanity!
The audacity with which he said it could not mask the sheer stupidity of that sentence. Standing here with authority was a man unfamiliar with his story, a broken man with inferiority complex issues—the type of black man Karl Peters hoped we’d be when he was done with us.
In pre-colonial Africa, Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps note in their book Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America that African societies fashioned their hair for more than just style. Throughout the continent, a person’s hairstyle had social significance as it could tell much about who and where they came from.
The authors explain that braids and other intricate styles were historically worn to signify marital status, age, religion, wealth, and rank in society. A single look at Marvel’s Black Panther should show you that. In the film, the characters’ hair demonstrates their hierarchy in society. The queen and elder women wear elaborate dreadlocks, while the warriors are bald. Lupita Nyong’o’s character, Nakia, wears Bantu knots, while Shuri (Letitia Wright) wears braids.
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Byrd notes that hair is basically a sort of social security number. It can tell you everything about a person. If a woman’s hair was thick, long, and neat, it symbolized that she would bear healthy children, and if a person were in mourning, they would pay little attention to their hair or shave it altogether.
Among the Himba from Namibia, teenage girls, to symbolize entry to puberty, wore and still wear braid strands or dreadlocked hair that hangs over their faces, while young women ready to get married tie their locks to reveal their faces. Unmarried men wear a single braid but cover their heads, never to reveal them in public once married, just like their married women and new mothers.
Young Fulani girls have carried their family’s silver coins and amber in their braids, Hamar women have worn thin ochre dreadlocks on their hair, Wodaabe women have decorated their hair with cowrie shells, and the Yoruba have braided their hair to send messages to the gods. All these traditions have been passed down through generations.
Perhaps the most important part of this was the bonding during hairdressing. As it could take hours, sometimes days, to create these artful, meaningful designs, hair styling was an important social ritual for bonding and passing down knowledge. Modern salon culture mimics that ambience in her gossiping and soundtrack.
When colonialism and the intercontinental slave trade arrived, the entire dynamics of hair and beauty changed. One of the first things colonialists and slave traders did was shave off their captives’ heads. Particularly dehumanizing as it severs ties between a people and their culture, this served to center European beauty standards. As every feature, contrary to what blue-eyed blondes had, was dehumanized, our hair was portrayed as unsightly, ungodly, and untameable by Christian missionaries. We were expected to adjust and chase the ‘godly’ hair that Europeans had.
Those shipped off-continent lost recipes to maintain their hair and faced similar stereotypes based on their texture. Lighter-skinned, straighter-haired slaves were favoured and selected for more desirable positions in the house, while those with oily hair and dark skin were assigned harder manual work. Proximity to whiteness meant better treatment, just like it means now.
For those of us who stayed, restrictions and rules bind us from wearing our hair per culture. A ‘no hair’ policy sought uniformity and cleanliness and to end distractions for the attention we created by establishing acceptable hairstyles.
Our hair, once majestic, was deemed unprofessional, nappy, kinky, and criminalized all over the public sphere—from schools, government, workplaces, and even in churches. The sexualization of black bodies played a huge role in enacting such a policy.
According to Europeans, African men were primal beasts who could not control their sexual urges, so cutting a woman’s hair was meant to diminish African women’s desirability to men, which in turn would minimize their womanhood and shrink their sexuality.
Under such conditions, we found ourselves chasing the straight-hair dream. Some people, specifically women, went to great lengths to straighten their hair using dangerous chemicals that would sometimes damage their skin. This ‘good hair’ and ‘bad hair’ mentality was then passed down generations as colonialism thrived. By the time we became independent, most people’s perception of hair revolved around Eurocentric views, so a severe case of inferiority complex persisted.
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Now governing ourselves, desperate for rather more pressing issues, we failed to accept that we lostn’t only political freedom. Our religion, beauty, food, and some of our culture were also colonized. We were supposed to decolonize them, but clearly, we didn’t do a good job. Already compelled by our way of life, that ‘no hair’ policy progressed in free Africa along with other Eurocentric standards.
In schools, both black boys and girls were to cut all hair for uniformity and cleanliness. The same acceptable haircuts were also used in workplaces and churches. And the same bleaching and straightening methods persist.
At our young ages, our heads are styled as per the state—any deviation is proof of immorality. Only when one is self-dependent can they style their head as they like. What’s concerning, however, is that white, Arab, and mixed-race people in those same schools and workplaces wear their hair the way they want.
Such cases are rampant across Africa but not unique to the continent. Even in the Americas and Europe, black people still face discrimination in all areas of life for their hair. The same tales of children denied graduation certificates for simply having dreads haunt the transatlantic triangle.
The same tales of people with black hair discriminated against or denied jobs for their hair arise now and then. The same tales of black girls being shaved off to differentiate them from mixed girls in integrated schools still live. The same old stereotypical projections of black people still exist on TV. The problem, you see, is not cleanliness or uniformity; the problem, in essence, has always been our blackness.
Unlike the cowardly response to my teacher (I am bald now), some rebellions and initiatives have fought to reclaim our hair. Kids in South Africa have rebelled against the stigma, creatives in Uganda have launched the Salooni project, California has passed the CROWN Act after immense pressure, Puerto Rico has passed a similar bill, and many more have sued their workplaces for discrimination.
Although all these show a positive trend, they are not nearly enough. What we need is a complete policy overhaul, one that allows kids to grow their hair from childhood. Don’t worry about cleanliness; it’s just a racist dog whistle. We had recipes to keep our hair, and we can have them again.
Even as whiteness keeps a center on the beauty discourse, we need not chase it. Especially not here at home. Here, all our hair is nappy, all our hair is ungodly, and all our hair is untameable. We need only look back, back before Karl Peters arrived, back when our gods were black, back before the inferiority complex kicked in.
It’s very liberating piece