That evening, too much luggage pulled me downwards, empty buses delayed coming, hunger twisted my intestines, and traffic thickened on the asphalt as Chadian nomad women, pressed to the sidewalk with children and withered belongings, tried to sell me powder for my hair. I gestured to my shaved head. No hair to be catered for. In hesitant English they claimed my hair would grow long and full, unwinding scarves to testify with their own luxuriant tresses. I slipped the mystery powder into my handbag, and promised to try it. At home, calculating the days before a Rapunzel transformation, I contemplated mixing the cocoa-colored cosmetic into my hair oils. That’s how the women said to use it. Somehow the powder did not find use, because in the ensuing days I was busy with more needful things and I moved somewhere else and forgot to take that handbag with me.
There are sepia photographs of my mother in the 1990s, her slender model figure wrapped in a loose, elegant dress and wearing her signature long curly-brown hair, newly removed from rollers after applying relaxers. She always looked like a young woman out of the fashion mags, with that dense, curly glory. With such hair, who would not have wanted her for marriage or to bear his children? The Afro hair carries such a multifaceted symbolism that, to be understood, to untangle the knotted roots, one must reach into African cosmology, spirituality, and the lived lives of African peoples in the pre-colonial era. In Yoruba mythology Osun was the first deity to use a comb, and she was also the first hairdresser.
In ancient Egypt wigs were prohibited for slaves but permitted for elites and royals, male and female. A young woman among the Wolof people of West Africa would shave her head partly to signal she was of marrying age. Warriors of the Maasai and Kikuyu tribes of East Africa are easily recognizable with their locked hair, a version of which the Akan people of Ghana reserve for priests. In the 20th century dreadlocks emerged as a huge part of Jamaican and Rastafarian culture. For Regina Jere-Malanda, author of Black Women’s Politically Correct Hair, an African’s hair and their identity are inseparable. Afro hair is often short, black or brown, harsh, stubborn, refusing to be tamed, unlike the Western kind, which is malleable, longer, with more colors in the spectrum. But I am not being totally accurate, because Chadian women have performed the Chébé ritual for a thousand years, using chébé powder, “the gift left up in the mountain by God,” to grow thick, lustrous hair that falls below the navel. And some of those women, that evening in the Nigerian city of Awka, had traveled through the Sahara, wet with dust and longing for home, to place the powder in my hands.
Gorgeous hair, gorgeous black hair as in the next photograph of a woman wearing a mask, is a shield: one hides behind the mass of it, or glories in the cloud of colors, textures, twists, and extensions they choose to wear. A girl’s eyes nearly hidden by her hair, as if it is all the armor she needs to navigate the world. Don’t we all feel a little safer as the species on our head grows, empowering us to plunge outdoors for others to see how swell we are? As I capture this photograph, I realize that black hair is a dominant, forceful beauty, relevant in its most unsorted, unplanned way. Compelling stillness. Commanding meaning.
On Christmas Eve in 2020 my brother returned home with color in his hair. He sneaked in through the backdoor, believing our mother would be asleep in the armchair but otherwise not wanting to interrupt her night reading. A psychotic rage overtook my mother when she glimpsed his bleached head, and she cried for him to dash back to the salon, if he didn’t want to experience her anger that night. Mediating, I inquired into both sides of the story: why my mother raged, why my brother defied her rage. Two months earlier, in October, Nigeria’s youth had spilled into the streets of major cities, protesting the unjust arrest and by the police of innocent young people. They were shot at, tear-gassed, and scores were arrested for staging weeks-long protests that made worldwide news headlines. Blood from the #EndSARS protests had not yet dried out, and the air was still too heavy with the defeat of a movement that had challenged the acts of policemen who suspected young men of internet fraud simply by considering their dreadlocks or colored hair. My mother wailed because, with that hair, my nineteen-year-old brother was an aluminum door away from being picked up by a police van. The salon, which sat atop a hill on the other side of the canal in our neighborhood, had closed for the night. My brother slipped into bed, without touching his dinner.
In Hair It Is: Examining the Experiences of Black Women with Natural Hair, Tabora A. Johnson says beauty is related to the transference of power. For millennia, people agreed that long hair held powerful connections to the unseen realm, a conduit for energy passing from the invisible to the natural. Igbo people believe that Umu Dada, children born with natural dreadlocks, most likely possess gifts of divination, prophecy, and healing. The short, matted, kinky, coarse, brittle, wooly, bouncy, irredeemable Afro hair has unique, powerful aesthetics. Its beauty alarms us, beholders and carriers alike, thus the need for some measure of containment. Sikh males are easily identifiable with the turban wound around an unshaved head (left untouched by any blade from birth) and touching an unshorn beard, while the females use a chunni, a long scarf, to cover the head. In Islamic communities it is honorable for a woman to wear the hijab to hide her beauty from all except her husband. The hair becomes a private part, grouped alongside breasts, vaginas, and armpits. Hijabs, scarves and turbans are all instruments of containment. And yet, for many Africans, hair itself is clothing, raiment.
The first white slavers’ reaction to seeing African hair summed up an Africa they were ignorant of: an expanse of diverse peoples lacking civilization, development, or systems of government. The European slavers, having understood the complex symbols of identity attached to black hair, shaved the heads of slaves newly arrived on American shores, to break their spirit, to unoriginate them, to leave them unclothed. African immigrants in America and Europe in the 50s and 60s were discriminated against not just for the color of their skin but also their hair. For a people with a painful history of enslavement and forcible removal from their homelands, we know quite well that the presence, absence, exposure, or enclosure of a person’s hair should be subject to the individual’s choice alone. The Yoruba adage “A kii di irun tabi ge irun leyin olori,” which testifies to the fact that one does not plait or cut a person’s hair without first seeking consent, affirms this. We Africans must not forget: we know the taste of freedom, even while it is a long way ahead. And when freedom is trapped behind bars, defiance becomes the next exit. A scene in Mustapha Enesi’s short story “Naked” shows Amina standing nude before her father. Here, nakedness refers to a Muslim woman taking off her hijab before a man who is not her husband, and doing so to assert that she would not be sold to Mallam Umar at fourteen. As Safiya Sinclair records in her essay Why I Finally Cut My Dreadlocks, keeping dreadlocks was never her decision but a father’s decree. Growing up in a Rastafaria household, she is warned fiercely never to touch, comb, or cut the burgeoning locks. The dreadlocks are a symbol of the fear of God, for they are perceived to connect the bearers to the deity. Submerged by unanswered questions and troubled by her sworn silence, she takes a pair of scissors and cuts her way to independence. Sinclair becomes Babylon to her father, but her action represents amazing grace to her mother and sisters, who also cut their dreadlocks.
This becomes even more complicated, as Rastas view their dreadlocks as a connection to Africa and a denouncement of the West, which they perceive as Babylon. Hair has always presented a complex route to gender identity. A strand of feminist thought disproves patriarchal beliefs on how long hair is a “symbol of opulent femininity, an image of exposure and vulnerability that draws out feelings of sexual attraction often allied with feelings of protection in men,” as noted by the British psychotherapist Heather Garbutt. To strengthen their stance, some women cut their hair short while others sport hairstyles that are not altogether as feminine as the patriarchy would want. Everyone is saying something with their hair, whether we accept it or not. Hair is resistance. My brother’s surprising haircut on Christmas Eve in 2020 was a political statement, even if the interpretation of what he did with his hair was not articulated.
A study of how people handle their hair teaches a lot about how to love. They may give themselves up, in a barber’s reclining chair, or on a stylist’s stool, utterly vulnerable to the worker’s skillfulness or the lack thereof. My mother began to lose her hair as I grew older, accumulating mine. The longer my hair grew, the shorter hers became, as if the genetic kinship would transform me into the woman she had been. When we visit the hairdresser together, she keeps talking about how unmanageable her hair has become: the shortness, the obstinate undergrowth defying relaxers, and everything opposite to my own hair experience. I feel sorry for her most of the time.
Loving is giving, and giving is losing, and sometimes love is nothing if not loss. Under a nomad’s tent, in the plains of Batha and Guéra, the age-old Chébé ritual begins. The older women treat the hair of the younger members of the tribe, fingers spreading from root to tips as they apply the powder with a blend of oils and butters. This is also an opportunity to trade community gossip, for laughs, to share cups of green tea. Here, the bonds between girls and their mothers thicken. Teenage girls drown in the beauty of their collective hairlengths. It’s an elaborate affair, a public homemade loving.
The biblical Samson, at first guarding the secret of his strength to nearly outlast Delilah’s persuasive spirit, finally reveals that he has important hair. Why does he tell her? Because love is a magnetic field that eventually breaks you open, leaving you vulnerable before the one you love. It is a terrible mistake in the ase of Samson, for his hair is effectively his life. Memory of your mother twisting our hair into cornrows as you snatch your child’s hair into tiny puffs is an intimate moment. You capture the moment on your iPhone, and perhaps store it in a secure folder on the cloud, away from rot and cyberattack. A girl in front of the dressing mirror who massages oils squeezed from nuts into her scalp is stimulating pleasure with herself. A person who slaps away an unsolicited touch to their hair is drawing a boundary. A young black woman traveling from Princeton to the less-elite Trenton to get her hair braided by women from Mali and Senegal, as in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, demonstrates the sweat we shed for love.
There is a trepidation that comes with hair loss, even if it’s after the arduous labor of combing. You hold the tufts in your hand and mourn the dead. That grieving, even for a brief moment, carries a depth nearly equal to losing a beloved. This is how I felt when, in April 2022, I realized I must cut my hair, thin shoulder-length tufts whose shelf life had expired and the breakage just would not stop. I settled in the barber’s adjustable chair, the barber’s black cape layering my black shirt, friends cooing up around me, getting ready to watch me mourn. First came the scissors, then the clippers. Detachment was how I allowed the full glory I inherited from my mother to fall, to let the clippers dissociate hair from body and separate the seemingly inseparable. In Kim Magowan’s Index of Body Parts, hair is listed as a dead element adhering to our living bodies, growing even after we die. Possessiveness does not allow one to accept the tangible death of the unliving thing that grows out of living bodies. The easiest way to grieve, or to not grieve, is to kickstart detachment.
To draw a distance between you and what is due to be lost, you must accept quickly that your hair, or the deceased, is not coming back, at least not in the way you knew them. Unless you do not care so deeply, notice how your hair is an extension of what’s happening in your selfhood. You erupt in a volcano of emotions, letting the magma of fury, excitement, jealousy or confusion settle in your hair. For Buddhists in Sri Lanka, long hair signifies unrestrained sexuality, tightly-knotted or partially shaved hair shows constrained sexuality, and a shaved head may mean celibacy. Iranian women went about publicly slashing through their hair with scissors in mourning relatives shot dead in anti-government protests. Among the Igbo, the Umuada, daughters born to or married into a particular clan, may surround a newly-minted widow and run a blade down her scalp until her head becomes exposed enough, as the belief goes, for her to feel the burden of grief: she has lost her husband, her head. The cancer patient receiving chemotherapy notably suffers hair loss. The aging man sees his hairline recede, presenting the permanent baldness that he almost certainly does not want. When a baby is born, the parents might use a clipper to remove the bloodied curly hair. When you are troubled by embarrassing Key Performance Indicators at work and a grumbling partner at home, you can leave your hair untethered, uncombed. And if you’re like me in depressing times, you would quietly enter the barber’s salon and ask him to take down the whole thing so you can breathe properly.
All human response to hair on a personal level subtly agrees with the Socratic aphorism: know thyself. Every part of the body has a purpose which, if unknown, will result in the loss of the true power that part possesses. Hair is human nature, animal nature. Despite the dearth of literature on this subject, African hair is worth philosophizing. How we do it is totally up to us. Look, the species on our head grows and grows. Mine shouts outwards, eager to experience the world with me. We style with beads or threads, straighten or lock our hair, strap on wigs and weave-ons, apply color, or come up with completely new styles. When we do this we are philosophizing, speaking important things with nature, communing with the dead parts of our being. ▪