The Wonder of HAIR! From American protests in the Sixties to schoolgirls finding their voices in Pretoria

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For most whites, their long hair made them look rather like a whole tribe of people who rather resembled those popular pictures of wild-eyed Old Testament prophets. Meanwhile, young black people increasingly embraced the shape of the “Afro” – where one’s long hair was teased out into a kind of large, spherical orb of hair. Take a look, for example, at the picture of this writer as a young diplomat and his South African wife, back in 1977, after returning to the US from Johannesburg. Over the years, as we have come to wax nostalgic about an earlier age, we have come to call this image our Angela Davis/Jerry Rubin (the latter a key member of the “Chicago Seven” anti-Vietnam War defendants) moment in time.

Photo: The writer and his wife, circa 1977.

But the Afro had been preceded for years by short-cropped “ ‘do’s” or the application of all kinds of chemical hair treatments to straighten hair or give it a more subtle, “sophisticated” wave. In fact, the first female African-American dollar millionaire, Madame CJ Walker, made her fortune through the selling of hair treatment chemicals, patented heated combs, and a chain of hair salons to help African-American women “relax” and reshape their tighter curls. Such products – in America and abroad – still remain popular with many women. (Curiously, a famous F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, read by legions of high school students in the US, reverses the idea of long hair as liberating. In Bernice Bobs Her Hair, set during the Jazz Age, the supreme, subversive act of defiance is her cutting off of her long tresses – and those of her cousin – just for spite.)

But, by the 1960s, politically aware African-Americans (and fashion conscious ones as well) began to adopt a new style, the Afro. According to some scholars at least, its origins – at least in more modern times – may have been inspired by the popularity of a travelling circus group, The Circassian Beauties, in the US over a century ago. These women were supposedly (white) slaves liberated from the Ottoman sultan’s harem in the 19th century. The Afro may have gained its initial, modest traction in the years after the end of slavery in America but it was not a wide-scale fashion yet.

But then, in tandem with the civil rights revolution, the rise of black power ideological consciousness, a growing social and political militancy by blacks on college and university campuses, and even on heads of sympathetic but distinctly edgy characters in such films as Foxy Brown, the Afro began to take on a distinct political meaning and texture. And as a style it travelled around the world and became popular with inhabitants of many African states as well. (Concurrently, braiding and all those other elaborate hair sculpting treatments more indigenously from Africa began to make real headway in America – as fashion statements or expressions of solidarity with Africa.) Our own children had their own moments with braids as well, although the pain after washing them and allowing them to dry rather quickly encouraged a return to other forms of hair treatments like dyeing their hair purple.

And so all this draws us to the current uproar at Pretoria Girls High School where the school’s rules appear to have been used to rein in individual expressions of a nascent Africanist political consciousness on the part of teenaged, black, female high school students. The protest against those school rules about appearance, grooming, hairstyles and similar matters appears to have been sparked by the unwillingness of one student to dispense with – or severely rein in – a rather bountiful Afro, if the photos are to be believed. Almost immediately, her protest sparked a broader anger over all those school rules originating back in an earlier time. Her protest soon became a cause célèbre on the part of many people across the country as well, quickly provoking an intervention by the provincial head of education, as well as, eventually, a long-overdue and increasingly anguished rethink about the school rules, many of which dated back to the apartheid era. And, of course, this protest may also represent a deeper rejection of some previously dominant cultural values that so many black South Africans still must contend with in their daily lives. Things are still to be evolving out of this initial anger.

Hair seems to have carried a rich symbolic meaning for people through the ages – especially those who have felt themselves oppressed – and it has often been the way people have wordlessly displayed their anger and rage at their antagonists or oppressors. But along the way, through all these experiences, one thing has puzzled me for decades in my journey around the globe. And that is: why do so many young Japanese now dye their hair a rich chestnut brown colour? Is this an act of rebellion, a shucking off of the order of things in a country where 99.9% of all people have naturally occurring black hair – or is it simply a youthful fashion statement and an effort to demonstrate a kind of “mass individuality” against the crowds of people who seem to epitomise uniformity? DM