This story was published in our November 2014 issue. Words by Zanele Kumalo.
Image from Rex Features
My mom would call us, one by one, my three sisters and me. Always on a late Sunday afternoon; it began the dreaded countdown to the start of the school week. We would have to cross our legs and sit patiently between her knees as she twisted our Afros into tightly plaited crowns that would have to stay in place until the following Friday. So tight that similar styles are called ‘the black woman’s Botox’.
I use the word ‘Afro’ but for me it wasn’t a style, even on the days when it stood as free as a dandelion. My parents, uncles and grandparents had versions of varying heights (or lengths, if you like), which meant they were commonplace in my tiny world. In my mind it wasn’t a political statement. And it certainly wasn’t part of a fashion trend. It was just the way our hair grows: up and outwards.
When my sisters and I reached our teens and felt entitled to make our own grooming decisions, desperate to liberate ourselves from the torturous ritual of styling, our Afros signalled a somewhat doomed rebellion. We’d expertly pick them to perfection by breakfast, but our school hats would leave a moat in our halos before the first bell for ‘morning assembly’ rang. The hat wasn’t the only challenge, however. The long car ride to the convent school (45 minutes to an hour depending on traffic) would present an opportunity to sleep off the early wake-up call, but napping or even leaning back on comfortable headrests meant flattening one side of your hairdo into an asymmetri-fro. Neither style update was a good look.
An Afro is hardly ever low-maintenance. You cannot wake up and go. That’s just one of the many things Simon Doonan’s misguided ode to the Afro, published in Slate, got wrong about the do. He cooed that, ‘liberated from the costly and time-consuming burden of trying to make their hair resemble that of white folk, black chicks – and dudes – had found the perfect marriage of style and practicality’. In fact, An afro requires as much (albeit different) care as any other style black women wear – whether it’s braids, cornrows, dreads or weaves. (Even so, a style is not about how you care for your hair, rather how you cut, colour and shape it. Why is there a difference between a pixie cut and a bob and no distinction between Solange’s bouffant and Viola Davis’s crop? Both are referred to as Afros.) The idea that any hairstyle besides the Afro is an attempt to look whiter is also often false. Professor Anitra Nettleton, curator of ‘Doing Hair: Art and Hair In Africa’ at the Wits Art Museum this year, agrees. Sponsored by iconic hair-care brand Black Like Me, the exhibition was a showcase of the cultural, economic, political and social significance of hair. Nettleton says, ‘Africans have historically straightened, braided, knotted, sculpted, coloured, grown, cut, shaved and otherwise manipulated their hair over millennia (as is reflected in many of the ancient arts of Africa) … but there is a lot of criticism of what are perceived (often erroneously) to be non-African practices of hairdressing from those with decolonisation on their minds’.
Decolonisation is largely what the Black Power, Black Consciousness and Black Is Beautiful movements started to advance in the late ’60s, using the Afro to dispel the idea that black people’s natural facial features, skin colour and hair were ugly. One of their aims was to liberate blackness and beauty standards from white subjugation. In South Africa, the Afro faced a more systemic affront with the pencil test. The Population Registration Act introduced in 1950 employed this insidious method to help identify and divide races into groups. If a pencil was stuck in your hair and did not slip out, it meant that it was Afro-textured and you had failed the test, classifying you as black and a second-class citizen.
Around the world, influential black women – including Ipi Tombi’s lead singer Margaret Singana, Diana Ross, model Marsha Hunt, political activist and Black Panther supporter Angela Davis, actress and Blaxploitation movie star Pam Grier, as well as musician and activist Nina Simone – defied a system that told them their natural hair was a disgrace. The idea that they were resisting was not only expressed by white people, but was even subscribed to by other black people, trickling down to the matter of a finding a suitable partner: a promotional feature in a 1971 edition of Drum magazine splashed the headline: ‘If you want a man get a wig’.
Poet, performer and feminist Lebo Mashile notes in her Tumblr that, when it comes to what is considered beautiful, little has changed. If you look at the sought-after magazine covers and global beauty endorsements, there’s almost no chance a woman with an Afro will be looking back. Unless you count covers specifically focused on ‘a celebration of the return of the Afro’ or the natural hair movement, Lupita Nyong’o for Lancôme is the only one who springs to mind. Mashile does laud South Africa over the US in one respect though. She says there are many women in South Africa heading up banks and companies who wear a short, natural hairstyle. ‘That’s exciting’, she says. ‘You definitely would not find that in the US, it does not happen. By the time you reach that level in [the US], you’d have relaxed your hair, or you have a weave.’ I too once felt a similar pressure to lose my newsroom Afro as my career as a beauty editor started to take off. But according to a post on Blackgirlwithlonghair.com, based on Victoria Sherrow’s Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, my Afro would never have been met with much encouragement, even in pre-colonial Africa where ‘Afro-textured hairstyles were used to define status and identity,’ including age, wealth, marital status, and religion. ‘Hair grooming was considered a very important, intimate and spiritual part of one’s overall wellness,’ the entry continues. ‘Dense, thick and neatly groomed hair was something highly … admired. Afros at this time were not the norm and were avoided, as they indicated filthiness, mourning, and/or mental instability.’
Centuries later, Slate’s Doonan rejects any alternatives to an Afro, describing ‘$2 000 weaves, time-consuming blowouts, and scalp-searing chemical processing [as] infinitely less desirable, and yet, African-Americans have largely turned their backs on the [style]’. He misses an important point; that the availability of human hair extensions, wigs, relaxing kits, flat irons, blowdryers and the hot combs of Madam CJ Walker, the US’s first female and self-made millionaire, give black women more versatility compared with more elementary methods of styling hair.
Recently, the natural hair movement has helped to re-popularise the Afro. Reporting for The Washington Post, Danielle Douglas says the ‘sales of chemical straighteners, for instance, tumbled 12,4 per cent between 2009 and 2011, according to market research firm Mintel. The number of black women who say they no longer relax their hair climbed to 36 per cent last year, a 10 percent hike from 2010.’ The relaxer backlash has also seen a new wave of hair policing, with black women who continue to wear weaves and relax their hair regarded as sellouts and ‘un-black’ or ‘un-African’, as musician Hugh Masekela has been quoted as saying. Nettleton is not surprised that hair is still a divisive issue, as ‘it is one of the means all societies use to attempt to control people and that people use as a sign of rebellion or non-conformity’. Whether in a racial, gender or religious context, hair is used to draw the line; armies make their recruits bare their scalps, in school, ponytails and bobs are acceptable for girls, rarely ever for boys, Jewish and Muslim women have to cover their hair.
The founder of Black Like Me, Herman Mashaba, says he is convinced that the Afro will dominate the market again. ‘We just need someone influential to drive the process again.’ So far US musician Solange Knowles has proved to be one of the drivers, along with stylist Julia Sarr-Jamois and singers Macy Gray and Erykah Badu and, locally, politician Phumzile Mlambo-Ncuga. Another catalyst has been the movement towards more conscious consumption. Local stylist Siki Msuseni, who wears an Afro, both a natural one and a wig, identifies with the crusade. She no longer thinks of it as a social or political question, rather that it’s about being aware of the things that we do to our bodies: ‘Black women are starting to realise the dangers of hair chemicals and more of us are getting educated about our hair’s health,’ she says. ‘It’s led women to work with what they have and wear their hair in the most natural form possible’.
After years of relaxing my locks, I did my ‘big chop’ late last year and am in the process of growing my Afro out. No doubt I’ll be profiled for it, and my intentions crudely interpreted, but my motivations are multiple and my own. Mainly, I have the same attitude I did as a young girl, before politics, cultural and societal pressures became a louder voice than my self-made identity.
It’s an attitude I share with the late, great singer and activist Miriam Makeba. Once married to Stokely Carmichael, a Trinidadian-American Black Power activist, Makeba famously said about her Afro, ‘I see other black women imitate my style, which is no style at all, but just letting our hair be itself. They call it the Afro Look.’