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Black women’s hair: A political battlefield

11 September 2020 | Story Nombulelo Shange | Photo Pexels

Hair_web read more — Women also grow their hair, but often wear headscarves or weave their hair into hat-like structures

Opinion article by Nombulelo Shange, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of the Free State

The recent TRESemmé Clicks advert portraying black women’s natural hair as ‘dull’ and ‘damaged’, has brought up the hair politics that black women battle with every day. Our hair is still policed in the workplace, schools, and many other social spaces we find ourselves in. In 2016, young black girls protested Pretoria High School’s racist hair policies that banned natural hair. My own high school experience was no different; my school banned dreadlocks out of concern that we used mud to mould our hair and the mud would stain our white shirts and make us look untidy. No amount of convincing would make the school rethink its policies, so your options were to straighten your hair with harmful chemicals or hide it with extensions.

Not shocked, but angry

Personally, I am not shocked by the TRESemmé advert. I expect nothing less from whiteness and an economic system built on the oppression of black people. But I am still angry that this has happened again, especially in such an overtly violent manner. I am angry over the timing – the only time we have in the year to openly and comfortably celebrate Africanness has been tainted. I am angry that whiteness does not rest, not even in Heritage Month. Reading social media comments on the matter, my anger turned to disappointment, as some black men felt confused by our outrage because our role models are women such as Khanyi Mbau, who often wears her hair straight, long, and blonde. They pit the two struggles against each other; natural hair versus wigs/relaxed hair and did not miss the opportunity to share what their preferences are. When they did this, to me they were no different than the TRESemmé advert; they just traded the Western view for a male view and further reinforced the idea that black women are ugly. They turned wigs, a harmless form of expression, into a debate as to whether women with natural hair are more beautiful than ‘fake’ women with wigs. They missed the point. The point is that we want to wear our hair the way we want, without fear of external factors such as workplaces and schools that will label us as unprofessional or messy for having natural hair. We also do not need the criticism that comes from black men who question our Africanness or genuineness when we wear wigs.

The hair politics of black women’s is long, complex, and contradictory – on the one hand, revolutionary theorist Bantu Biko problematises black women’s positionality in societal beauty standards. He states:

They (black women) use lightening creams, they use straightening devices for their hair and so on. They sort of believe, I think, that their natural state which is a black state is not synonymous with beauty and beauty can only be approximated by them if the skin is made as light as possible and the lips are made as red as possible, and their nails are made as pink as possible and so on.

Black women historically made to feel ugly

It cannot be denied that black women have historically been made to feel ugly, with those who are considered beautiful being those whose appearance resembles whiteness. So, for a long time, black women were forced to wear their hair straight, do their makeup in ways that bring them closer to whiteness, and perform many other Western beauty practices reinforced by popular culture and society as a whole. The contradiction is that we have a long cultural history preceding colonialism of adorning ourselves with ‘extensions’, colouring our hair, beautifying our skin.

Even today, older, married Shembe women still practice an old beauty routine that also symbolises status and social position in society. They grow their hair long, dye it a reddish colour, stretch it so that it looks straight and can be pulled fair enough to be woven into a hat-like structure that almost resembles inkehli, a traditional Zulu hat. It was also not uncommon for African women to use shells, feathers, animal hair, etc., to add length to their hair. I would argue that modern-day wigs are an evolution of these old cultural practices.

The way wigs were forced on us so that we fit Western standards of beauty was problematic, but black women have transformed this practice and made it their own in ways not that different from how black Americans reclaimed the ‘N’ word. Our hair only becomes a political battleground when we are forced to choose how we wear it or are made to explain why we wear it one way over another. Black women have the right to wear their hair any way they want, without having their beauty questioned by whiteness or black men and society. I hope that the next time (unfortunately, there will be a next time) whiteness questions our beauty in the way that TRESemmé did, black men will come to our defence instead of perpetuating the false narrative that one type of black women is more beautiful than the other.

News Archive

Dialogue between Science and Society series looks at forgiveness and reconciliation

2013-03-24

Taking part in the discussion on forgiveness and living reconciliation, were from left: Olga Macingwane, a survivor of the Worcester bombing of 1993; Dr Juliet Rogers, a Scholar on Remorse from the University of Melbourne in Australia and Dr Deon Snyman, Chairperson of the Worcester Hope and Reconciliation Process.
Photo: Mandi Bezuidenhout
24 March 2013

How do you, as a mother who lost her only daughter, forgive the man who claimed responsibility for the attack that killed her? How do you forget his crime while travelling with him across the world?

These were some of the questions posed to Jeanette Fourie at a Dialogue between Science and Society series on forgiveness and living reconciliation. Jeanette, whose daughter Lyndi was killed in an attack on the Heidelberg Pub in Cape Town in 1993, was one of three people telling their stories of forgiveness while dealing with traumatic experiences.

Sitting next to Letlapa Mphahlele, the man who owned up to the attack that killed her daughter, Jeanette spoke about their story of forgiveness traveling the world together, spreading the message of forgiveness and conciliation.

"Don't ever think you can forget, because that’s not possible. What you do with the pain is to find peace, and that's what forgiveness does. Forgiveness allows you to stop all the dialogue in your head on why he did it. You don't forget, you confront it and you deal with it."

Letlapa, Director of Operations of Apla, the military wing of the PAC at the time of Lyndi's death, spoke about dealing with the response to his crime. "Sometimes you wish that you were not forgiven, because now you have the great burden of proving that you are worthy of forgiveness."

Also telling her story of forgiveness was Olga Macingwane, a survivor of the Worcester bombing of 1993 in which four people were killed and sixty-seven others injured. Four people were sent to prison. In 2009 Olga met one of the perpetrators, Stefaans Coetzee, and what came out of that meeting, is her story.

"When I met Stefaans I was very angry, but when you sit down with somebody and listen to him or her, you find out what the reasons were that made him or her do something. I can say that I forgave him."

Facilitating the conversation, Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Senior Research Professor on Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation, said the seminar was meant to get in touch with the truth that forgiveness is possible.

"Before we had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa, the experts always said that forgiveness was not possible in these stories of the past. And then the TRC came into life as a response to mass atrocities. For the first time in the history of these traumatic experiences, of political traumas, we witness something that we have never seen. Even us on the TRC, although it was framed as reconciliation, we never imagined there would actually be stories of forgiveness emerging out of that process, and then we witness that this too is possible."

Others who took part in the two-hour-long seminar, were Dr Juliet Rogers, a Scholar on Remorse from the University of Melbourne in Australia and Dr Deon Snyman, Chairperson of the Worcester Hope and Reconciliation Process. They spoke about the dynamics behind the processes of engagement between victims/ survivors and perpetrators.

The Dialogue between Science and Society series was co-hosted by the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice.

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