On Monday 7 September, EFF leader Julius Malema asked security guards and police not to intervene with EFF members when they entered the Mall of Africa to protest outside a store of the retail group Clicks. Clicks was advertising hair products by TRESemmé online with images of white women, which depicted shiny, glossy hair, and images of black women with hair labelled dry, damaged and frizzy.

On the same day, the protests went national and became a topic of discussion across the country. With consumers now turning to online shopping, products, along with the accompanying fine print, are being scrutinised more than ever; this racism is now coming into your home.

TRESemmé is not the only company that has this practice as key to its selling strategy; make-up and beauty companies have used this strategy created by racism and sexism upon black women consumers for decades. I use the term ‘black’ as all-inclusive within the South African context.

On a similar note: On 25 April 2019, the BBC ran the story of Dom Apollon, a 45-year-old man who works for a non-profit racial awareness organisation who had taken to Twitter to express how, for the first time after cutting his hand, he was able to use a plaster (Band-Aid in the US and Canada) that matched his skin tone. Within the first day he received 96,000 comments, including one by Mister Star Wars himself, John Boyega, who noted that when he cut himself on film sets the make-up artists painted the plaster to match his skin tone.

The black child left confused by the “flesh” colour crayon now has a range to choose from. And since 2019, little ballerinas can purchase different shades of “bronze” ballet pumps in the UK. Make-up companies until the late 1980s made foundation that did not even consider the varied skin tones of black women and, what is referred to in the US and Canada, as women of colour, and yet referred to shaded foundations and blushers as “normal”, thus asserting that if your skin colour did not match what they sold as normal, there was something wrong with you.

TRESemmé, (from the French word trés-aimé, meaning “well loved”) as a brand, was first manufactured in 1947 by the Godefroy Manufacturing Company in New York; the brand was named after the haircare expert Edna L Emme, who is credited as a cosmetologist and the founder of the National Hairdressers and Cosmetologists’ Association, a then all-white association in the US, that has only encouraged diversity in their membership in the past few decades. 

In the early 1900s, shampoo companies only considered women of European heritage as their customers – black women did not feature as possible consumers. The TRESemmé advert today uses the same message as their competitors of the 1960s, even as the Afro blossomed among women in the Black Panther movement in the US, as worn by Kathleen Cleaver and Angela Davis, who publicly announced: “Black is Beautiful.”

In the 1960s, products for black women were mainly hair straighteners called “relaxers”, as though your hair, like you, was angry or aggressive and needed to be relaxed in order to be considered normal. The term ‘normal’ still features prominently in the language of cosmetic companies, hinting at the psychological and mental state of the person who needs to purchase the product.

While I am not suggesting that all black women go through any of the stages I discuss in this article, the TRESemmé message is clear:

• It provides you with an image that you identify with;
• This image suggests that your hair is the way it is because of your heritage;
• You are racialised, you are deemed unfortunate;
•  You’re a consumer, you have buying power, and want to buy the glossy hair; and
• Through your buying power you can move closer to the image that you admire – the image of the white woman.

This is the process of thinking that generates the action in order to get the ultimate look, and one that the black woman is expected to pay for. The process is as follows: identification, recognition, realisation, the arousal of interest, shaming and responsibility, consumer consciousness then back to disappointment when the product fails, self-doubt and self-hatred.

If you’re a black woman, advertising of the kind used by TRESemmé operates on the basis that you have internalised the racism that has been inflicted upon you. The TRESemmé advert digs into that internalised racism, often unspoken, that lies within the unconscious, by offering visual images of what you experience daily. Black women are then offered an opportunity to buy out of that racialised experience into another.

Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, was born in Vienna and moved to the US with his family when he was a young boy. His uncle teased him about not reading his books and that he would find everything for his work in public relations by reading his uncle’s work on the unconscious. After taking up the challenge, Bernays, who had a contract with a tobacco company and had promised that his campaigns would bring them great profit, tapped into what he perceived as the insecurity of white women in the US who he believed wanted to see themselves as feminists.

In 1929 he devised a campaign by branding cigarettes as feminist, calling cigarettes “torches of freedom”, and encouraged white women to carry packets of cigarettes in the garters of their stockings as they marched. As the women walked, their skirts showed the forbidden masculinised item – the pack of cigarettes – which drew an analogy between them and the Statue of Liberty, a form of daring femininity with cigarettes in a garter belt, and that freedom could be attained by challenging men who smoked and saw cigarettes as powerful phallic symbols reserved for their pleasure, from which women were barred. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

But let us also take a quick look at the history of shampooing hair. The English word ‘shampoo’ originated in India, as a Hindi word, almost 400 years ago in the middle of the 1700s during the British colonial era. Indian men and women had been washing their bodies and their hair for centuries. By the 1700s, as they grew their empire, the English were ignorant not only of washing their hair but also of bathing; they did not have a food culture as sophisticated as the Indians either. The latter, as we know, was one of the incentives for colonisation as the colonised elevated the palate of the coloniser.

In the 15th century Queen Isabella of Spain declared that she had only bathed twice in her lifetime. Queen Elizabeth I declared that she bathed once a month and her successor, James VI, never bathed nor did he wash his hands before eating because he had an aversion to water. Queen Victoria bathed once a year on her birthday and certainly did not wash her hair.

It was common practice a few decades ago that the less fortunate in England bathed once a week, with the father, mother, then oldest entering the bath in that order, and the baby left for last. This meant that when the baby was bathed, the water would be a muddy colour, hence the expression, “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water”.

Africans, Greeks, Asians, the Japanese, the South and Central American indigenous cultures as well as South Pacific and Islander people bathed by pouring water and scented plants and oils over their bodies and hair to cleanse themselves. They understood the elements and the world their bodies lived in and did not need colonisation to understand how to be human.

Today in the year 2020, with decolonisation as part of our national imperative, and part of our approach to teaching and learning, it is in keeping that the masses question and interrogate what we are sold and at what price – whether as people who make up the majority in our country, we are still being duped into believing that our hair needs to be relaxed, and that it is damaged.

Every child growing up in this country needs to understand that racism is everywhere, and choosing to buy items with which to bathe and cleanse is still riddled with the same racist assumptions made during the apartheid years and which we have to put a stop to. 

There is no time like the present. DM

Professor Rozena Maart is an academic in the School of Social Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her work examines the intersections between and among political philosophy, black consciousness, Derridean deconstruction and psychoanalysis, all of which address questions of race, gender and identity.