My persistent inquiries at Kinky’s in Braamfontein — a hair accessories shop that sells shampoo, hair braids and human hair extensions — were met with the riposte: “Why do you want to know, anyway? After all, you have an Afro.” This came from a fashionable Zulu-speaking shop assistant, pointing at my untidy mane.
It was similar to the response I encountered when I made my way into a Nigerian-owned Braamfontein hair salon to talk to women having their hair done. The shop I went to on De Korte Street felt distinctively female. There were more than 10 women in the shop. Entering, I felt a bit like a child barging into an assembly of African elders deliberating weighty matters. Down that street, ironically, in a tall building festooned in a Dark and Lovely glossy advert, is a shop that specialises in dreadlocks (this single building encapsulates two opposing hair philosophies).
Three women were busy undoing the young and chatty Fhumu Radzhadzhi’s braids. Her head was a messy tangle, her braids quickly coming apart as six hands expertly worked on her. I craned my neck to establish contact with my interviewee, but I couldn’t see much of her face, shielded from my gaze by one of the hairdressers. “It’s more convenient, much easier to maintain,” says Radzhadzhi. “You can just brush it, even in the car.
“It’s not like when you have your own hair,” she says, reflecting on why she has taken to artificial hair. “My natural hair breaks easily.” Radzhadzhi has never tried dreadlocks. She says they look untidy and, as she works for Liberty Life, she has to look “presentable”.
Seanokeng Nkooe, an intern at the Institute for Global Dialogue, relaxes her hair for convenience. In 2007 she tried to grow an Afro: “It was hard to maintain. There’s a lot of work that goes into an Afro.” When she tried dreadlocks, her mother wouldn’t countenance it. “My mother thinks dreadlocks are messy and that one has started smoking marijuana.” But dreadlocks still have a certain attraction for Nkooe: “It’s easier to style them”, unlike relaxed hair, which, although much easier to style, limits one either to a ponytail or plaits that are “always falling off”.
Radicals of left-wing hair politics consider relaxed hair just as contemptible as hair extensions. Not so for Nkooe. She considers hair extensions “fake” and finds relaxing her hair a compromise she can live with — after all, it’s her hair that’s being fried.
“A weave will feel unnatural,” she reckons. “I don’t think it’s for me. I would feel like somebody else. I don’t mind braids. It still feels like my hair, but with weave they [stylists] hide your hair and head. Nkooe says: “I am my hair,” playing on the lyrics of India Arie’s song, I am not my hair.
The Mail & Guardian also spoke to Lerato Nkoli, married mother of a two-year-old girl, who relaxes her hair and occasionally wears hairpieces. Normally she keeps the extensions for a month, although she would rather keep her hair relaxed. “I do hair extensions when I see that my hair is taking too much effort. Having your own hair means you have to take care of it — moisturisers and all that.” She hasn’t tried dreadlocks: “I don’t like them. I have heard some say that you aren’t taken seriously if you have dreadlocks,” she says. “Besides, dreadlocks don’t suit me. I have a small face.”
The fact that she doesn’t keep her hair natural doesn’t mean she’s unaware that it’s beautiful, she says, recalling the 1960s black is beautiful debates made popular by the Black Panthers. Nkoli then reels off the standard complaint that “natural hair is hard to manage”.
Jennifer Musangi, a fellow at Wits University’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), wears a rich, luxuriant crop of dreadlocks. For her, hair is political — small wonder she considers straight hair “part of the mainstream”. She points out that the reason some women stick to the mainstream template is because “you may have hair that’s completely unruly, hair that you can’t manage”.
Musangi hails from Kenya, where dreadlocks are detested. This is, in part, because in every generation, men and women wearing dreadlocks pop up to trouble Kenya’s peace. The Mau Mau were a dreadlocked guerrilla movement that fought British colonialists in the Fifties; the Mungiki are a secretive, criminal and religious sect whose members sport dreadlocks while they rob and terrorise Kenyans.
Against this background, Musangi’s choice was never an easy one. “In Kenya they will harass you,” she says. “They will even arrest you. In Kenya I won’t get a job looking like this.” For Musangi the decision to have dreadlocks was about not conforming. Her office is adorned with images of her dreadlocked heroes: Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and Tracy Chapman.
“I want to be different,” she says. “But at the same time I can’t keep my hair Afro. It’s expensive.” Indeed, I have had an Afro for about two years and it’s not cheap or easy.
She admits to being “bothered” when she sees “educated women whose hair is relaxed”. It is a feeling derived from the fact that a hairstyle in African society indicates something political, whether one is conscious of it or not.
“I have problems too with [black] women who wear blonde wigs,” Musangi says, adding new fire to an already raging argument. “Some business people have realised that there are black women who don’t like themselves.” For Musangi, this is clear proof that “you cannot separate hair from the larger issues of race and gender”.