Hair! The Black world’s untouchable subject. Mention hair, and someone in the room is going to say, “Shut up! Stop trying to ruin my hair business?” That comment is often followed with you are just trying to tell Black women what to do, as if Black men don’t have the right to tell African women what to do. Then comes the excuses. Our hair is too hard to manage. You should try having to comb it when you have to rush out to work. It’s not professional. There are many more excuses out there. This article isn’t about the excuses because what should be clear to every African, at home and abroad, is that we have been conditioned to not like our hair. That is like being conditioned to not like your thumb. Can you imagine hiding your thumb and then going around the world buying the thumb of deceased people and wearing it in place of your thumb. This is a Brazilian thumb, oh mine is an Indonesian thumb. Look at it, isn’t it beautiful? Sounds ridiculous but that’s what we do with hair. For those of us who believe in God, the excuses and the way we treat our hair actually imply that God made a mistake, that God didn’t know what It was doing, when It created our hair.
When we talk about hair, it’s easy to assume that we are talking about a women’s issue. The hair issue among African people is actually a reflection of the Black man. Weak, cowardly, and ignorant men mean their women pay the price and African women are paying a heavy price in the hair department. What women consider beautiful, is what men have indicated they want. You will almost never find an East Indian woman with short hair because East Indian men like their women with long hair. White women do all kinds of things to make their breasts bigger, because that what their men like. In the white nation, breast implant surgery is a much more advanced science than a lot of medical fields and small breasts are not a medical condition. But white women want this operation to please white men. What is it the Black man wants? What is it African women, those at home and those aboard, will do to please Black men? Weak, cowardly men don’t want anything; they are too afraid to demand anything, too ashame to build a world that reflects them.
As the Black man has grown weaker and more oppressed that weakness reflects itself in the Black women’s beauty standard. The fact is, over the centuries African men wanted African women with and without hair. Everything from a baldhead to some of the most elaborate hair design you will ever find. When we were dragged from our homes by the enslaver Europeans, hair wasn’t an issue for Africans. We all had a full head of hair and African women while being held by the enslaver Europeans continued to wrap their heads. Look at a drawing of Nanny or Cecile and note the head wrap. Those women weren’t wrapping their hair to hide it; they wrapped it to protect it. In the same way the ancestors had done. Hair was not a beauty standard. Where did Black women learn that? It is almost the same as agreeing that eye color is a beauty standard. Black women’s beauty standards today are not based on who we are. Nanny and Cecile would have difficulty recognizing them and that is because of the weakness of the African man, those at home and those abroad. The last time Black women hair standard truly reflected our Africanness, what was the Black man doing?
There are no other people on the face of the earth with hair like the African. There are people with dark, black skin, but there are none with kinky hair. That fact alone should be enough for every African man to want a woman who could give his children that feature. Again, cowardly men don’t want anything, as Carter G. Woodson pointed out, Black men have been conditioned to take the path of least resistance. But there is something about our hair that no one has told us. Even though, the attacks on our hair would suggest that white supremacy knows it. God didn’t make a mistake when it put kinky hair on our head. God simply used the same method to create our hair as it did to create the universe. The mathematics that white supremacy claimed led to the big bang, is the same mathematics that leads to kinky hair. Instead of celebrating our god giving gift, we allowed people who consider us their enemies to convince us that it is a curse.
Hair is our untouchable subject, but here at AfriCalendar we have a lot to say about it, so we have given it its own column in our newsletter.