I am not my hair

ENTERTAINMENT/COLUMNIST | ESTHER NAMUGOJI

I had not thought about the politics of hair seriously until about two months ago when I started feeling fed up with my chemically treated hair. I wanted to start on a natural hair journey, but that would mean that at some point, I would have to cut most of my hair clean off.

But hair, in spite of all those feel good songs like India Arie's I am not my hair, is still a very touchy issue. A lot of our insecurities can be wound up together with our tightly coiled afro curls. I have heard people speculating why so and so cut off her hair, and it must be related to that other stressful situation she was going through. Some assume that she has fallen on hard times. There are those who think a Ugandan woman who goes for the big chop is planning to join elective politics - it does seem like sooner or later our women politicians do this.

Personally, I discovered that I had many stakeholders who felt strongly that I should not dare cut my hair. I got vehement protests from my household.  My daughters, I know, dream of having hair like mine, so I guess they would feel at a loss if I cut it off, but even my house help had strong views on the matter.

But none of them had ever seen me with short hair, were they afraid that I would look funny? I dug up a photo album of my school days for a looksee. Indeed, there was that big head and that short hair, though gloriously dark, did not look promising at all. I recalled all the effort it would take to keep it in check. There was that stiff plastic brush we called a scratcher (that word still makes me chuckle) that we scraped across our coils to tame them some. Fearsome stuff, I tell you.

I remembered the last term in Senior Six when we were anticipating a 9-month long vacation before joining the table of women at university. We were required to keep our hair to a maximum of one inch off our scalps, but most of us intended to start growing out our hair for the vacation when we would exercise our femininity in full. Hair - long hair - was going to be part of the plan, a sign that we were free at last from secondary school, with its physical and mental fences.

But the work involved was not pretty. It meant fitting a litany of hair oils and pomades into our shoestring budgets. It meant spending extra time before bed time twisting the hair into knots that were supposed to promote rapid growth and make it easier to comb in the morning. It meant three months of pat here, pat there, in order to look like you still had only one inch of hair, and avoiding any teachers that were known to be zealous about enforcing the rule. The end of that term felt like prison break simply because we could finally let our hair down, literally.

For many girls in Ugandan schools, growing their hair long and later relaxing it to make it more manageable, is a major coming of age ritual. I crossed it resolutely, and have never looked back until now.

Eventually I balked and subjected my hair to another chemical process, but immediately felt like a prisoner of my long, more manageable hair.

Now I am determined to be bolder next time. I will do the big chop, once I have several inches of natural growth. By year's end, me and the ‘scratcher' should be friends again. And if my head turns out to look more pentagonal than round, I can always pop on a wig, can't I?

Read more of Esther Namugoji's musings every week in Sunday Vision