Nigeria Content Online

I am going to stick my bald head out on this one…

“Price of Hair
extensions to increase” read the headline right next to the photograph
of a “glorious” mane of multi-toned synthetic tresses. I thought to
myself, e never do for this fake hair?

Time was when a man
with a toupee was the source of much mirth between female friends. I
know some pretty ribald jokes about pulling that furry animal off his
shiny pate. But you can’t crack those with your girlfriends anymore.

I challenge you,
dear reader, to stand in any public arena and take a count of the
number of women wearing their own hair; if you get two in ten that’s
high.

You arrive at a
function anywhere, multiracial citadel like Johannesburg, or bang in
the middle of Sandgrouse market Lagos and every woman has long silken
tresses, pony tailed, pageboy bobbed, curled, twirled, blow dried or
crimped. The colours run the gamut from blond to beetroot.

This has gone way
beyond the wigs of the sixties. A beloved late Aunt of mine wore hers,
as was the fashion then, with the glossy black curls forming a nest for
her head tie. With her elaborate jewelry, (Boulos no less) lace blouse
and intricately worked george wrapper, handbag and matching shoes, she
was the very pink of fashion.

However, the first
thing she would do when she arrived at our house would be to whip the
whole thing off her sweating head. “Kam wepu dis artifission,” she
would declare.

You can’t just
fling it off anymore. The fake hair is woven between the natural braids
or glued, so that it stays conveniently attached until it is due for a
change. Now due is the operative word here. These days when you see a
woman suddenly land a dangerous slap on her head you know the devil of
an itch is buried deep beneath the ‘hair.’

Weaves and
attachments are one up on chemically straightening (relaxing) the hair;
that was so eighties. Note, that relaxing is a much more friendly
expression than straightening and was in turn an advancement on the hot
combs of the fifties that effectively fried the hair in order to tame
the tight curls.

But maintenance was
a mission. You had to go for regular retouching of the roots at a
salon, and many women went to bed with hairnets and rollers to save
their styles. I used to wonder how men felt about sleeping with all
this hardware. It served to confirm the fact that fashion with its
often draconian rules has very little to do with convenience.

And so to the
present when even sweet five-year-old darlings have mastered that quick
toss of the head to flick their long hair off their faces and all women
regardless of race can commune at the same salon.

Let me illustrate
again the draconian nature of fashion. My grandmother would complain
constantly about my shorn head, telling me I looked like a prisoner and
not even a female one at that. For thirty years my mother regularly
reacted with the same astonished inquiry whenever I had a haircut as if
it was something completely out of the blue for me.

African Americans
have this unending debate about “good hair” which is not nappy or
crinkly but presumably straight and fixable: like Caucasian hair.

Gone are the days
of black consciousness in the United States and in South Africa where
wearing your hair in its natural form, was a political statement. In
Nigeria we just followed fashion, our roots were not in question were
they?

The January 2009
edition of the South African Marie Claire magazine has in its debate
column the topic, “Is wearing a weave selling out”. It is notable that
the two women who spar off are black and both have at one time or other
worn their hair natural and used relaxers and weaves. Many white women
also wear weaves, and perm, (read relax) their hair and change the
colour as they please. But the editors of this white oriented magazine
in the new multiracial South Africa like to keep it simple. In South
Africa when magazines similar to Marie Claire publish articles on hair
they are kind enough to distinguish between styles that suit “ethnic
hair” (this would not be good hair in American parlance) and those that
suit, well, just hair.

I listened to an
acquaintance in Johannesburg explain why she had gone back to braiding
her hair the African way. At work one day her white co-workers who had
never paid her that kind of attention before, greeted her with warm
compliments about her new relaxed hairstyle: that was when she realised
that she looked good to them, once she looked like them.

The vogue among
white women for African style braids lasted about a minute in the
eighties and was confined mainly to Bo Derek, the actress who wore the
style in a forgettable movie called ‘10″.

Fashion and politics, they both change with the seasons anyway. Very
few black women who wear fake straight hair, see it as a betrayal of
their heritage. It’s just about looking good and it is astonishing how
global this concept has become. Whether this is good or bad is another
can of hairspray altogether.