"Good" Hair is OVERRATED
- SphiweC Mavhungu
- May 10, 2023
- 3 min read
In today’s society, hair is still a sensitive topic for black people. There are catego
ries whereby if your hair looks or feels a certain way, it constitutes “good”. Although this has been a phenomenon in the United States of America by the black community, it has managed to permeate black communities in Africa and the Caribbean. We can see this through the hair chart. Although it is clear that this is a remnant of white supremacist ideologies, it is something the global black community is fighting against despite the internalised antiblackness and texturism.
I have experienced this as well, in South Africa, a country you’d expect to take pride in being black and having black hair. South Africa has a history of racism during the Apartheid system and things such as the “pencil test” were introduced. With such a strong history of marginalising black hair, it is time we talk about the marginalisation that continues within the black community as a whole.
Growing up as a child with long hair showed me the reality of black people and having preconceived ideas about black hair which seeped into my subconscious and as a result, I began internalising those ideas. These ideas were: if you had long and soft hair, you won a genetic jackpot, and you had mixed ancestry one way or another. A great example of this was the articles comparing Blue Ivy Carter and North West. Because I have what we call 4B hair, it means that I have a looser curl pattern compared to someone with 4C hair, so I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been asked if I was mixed with something or if I was partly coloured. For some reason, it fascinated people I didn’t even know. Some would ask what I used on my hair for it to become “that way”, and I would tell them what I used for my hair but they would not get the results they were hoping for. Some hairdressers at Black hair salons would offer to do my hair for free just to touch my hair.
I noticed that this was not just a problem in South Africa. It was a global problem. I started watching a lot of YouTube videos that confronted this problem. A lot of African American men, mainly rappers, put women with “good hair” or racially ambiguous women with long loose curls while calling black women “bald”, referring to a stereotype that black women cannot grow long hair. This caused a lot of outrage on the internet and more people started talking about their experiences with hair discrimination as well as the privilege that came with hair that is not coarse or 4C. In South Africa, people with short, thick, and coarse hair began having an inferiority complex which led to a large demand for relaxers.
When I transitioned to locs, I noticed that the loc community had problems of their own as well. Locs are seen mainly as a spiritual journey in the Caribbean and the US, however, many reasons follow as well. In South Africa, it is the length of locs that matters, not the health. Before I decided to transition to locs, I thought that locs were just a low-maintenance hairstyle and I did not have to comb my hair anymore. That remains true, however, I discovered that a certain texture of locs was put on a pedestal. My locs are fuzzy, thick, and healthy, and I did not think anything of it until a loctician commented on my locs saying that they were the best locs he had seen in his life. My boyfriend’s mom’s friend asked if I could sell my dreadlocks to her once I cut them because “they are the only dreadlocks I would buy. They are so beautiful!” I’ve also heard that my locs look like that of an African American which shows that African American people are the standard for South Africans when it comes to hair. I think there is a lot of unlearning and learning we have to do as black people in South Africa and move towards learning to love and glamourise our own hair and not that in proximity to whiteness.
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