Shes not the first and she wont be the last: the articulate, whimsical, incisive Milisuthando Bongela weighs in on hair. Thanks Pervaiz Khan for sending me this transcript: Some people have asked that I post what I spoke about last night at the opening of the exhibition that is currently on at the Wits Art Museum called Doing Hair: Art and Hair in Africa, which opened last night and will end on the 2nd of November. Seethis post for details. Here is the speech: Good evening, Thank you to the Wits Art Museum for the opportunity to address you tonight. The only reason I am here is because I suspect somebody in the team really likes my hairstyle. I understand :-) I like it because it was like wearing a permanent hat this winter. 8 months ago, after unconsciously wearing my hair natural and in braids for 12 years, I decided I wanted to relax my hair. I told a friend of mine my plans and after explaining to him the reasons why, he looked at me and simply said ‘’No you’re not’’. And so began an argument that had me making grand statements like ‘’you’re being essentialist’’ and him retorting with the same 7 words over and over: ‘’don’t let the system get you too’’. He won! I didn’t relax my hair but I was not satisfied with being bullied into the decision, so I did some reading. What system is this I wondered? Over the next 8 months, I was to discover the fundamental relationship between Hair and Identity, Hair and Language, Hair and Politics and the reason we are all here tonight, Hair and Art. Journeying into the meaning of Contemporary African Hair as a Cultural Practice has literally changed my life. In the last 8 months, I have interviewed sociologists, anthropologists, salon owners, MA Students, regular women, I’ve read countless texts, watched YouTube videos on hair, listened to music about hair and looked at books dedicated to the subject of hair. My interest is African hair because I feel that it is the most political, and as a result of exploring the reasons why it is political, it has made me conscious of my race, gender and my place in the world and inspired a film project about this. My research, which is not nearly at its end, has had me asking questions like where is black cultural politics at the moment? Is it at a psychologically healthy state of mind? Guided by the work of Art Historian and Writer, Professor Kobena Mercer, this research seeks to know whether black cultural practice is an expression of the self or is it an adherence to social norms? If you look at the social norms today in Africa and the places where Africans live in South America, North America and Europe, the social norms in those spaces regarding beauty and aesthetics are determined by the economically powerful race group and class which the Africans do not belong to. Since the beginning of the 19th Century, as European colonization was getting on its marks, ready to race around the world in the conquest for physical and human resources, the black body has been under duress from head to toe. While Belgium’s Second King Leopold was cutting off the hands and punching holes and putting locks into the mouths of the baCongo, the British missionaries were putting the Mfengu Xhosa in clothing and church uniforms to distinguish them from the uncivilized natives. The Khoi San had already been hunted like animals across the Cape and Madamme CJ Walker, the first black female millionaire in America, was less than two decades away from creating the black hair straightening cosmetics brand that would launch the intersection of hair, politics and the black body. But we can’t start history in the middle, where does our hair history come from? The catalogue that comes with this exhibition is profoundly informative on the subject of hair and art and how male and female Africans have historically used both materials in the physical, spiritual and economic realms of their lives. In my research, I wanted to find out what makes the raw material that is hair so special in our culture. Why is black African hair the only hair that looks the way it does when compared to other ethnic groups? And how has this texture survived through time and evolution? I came across some research that suggests that the reason why European and Northern Hemisphere ethnic groups have long straight hair versus the short curly hair of Africans, is because during the Ice Age, the people who had migrated from Africa to the North and were stuck in the 10 000 year Ice Age, evolved to grow long straight hair to protect the main arteries located at the back of the neck, those take messages from the brain to the rest of the body, so that their necks wouldn’t freeze to death. Their noses became narrower to let less cold air in so that their brains wouldn’t freeze. On the contrary, the people on the hot continent of Africa have shorter curlier hair because they didn’t need the back of their necks protected, they needed them cooled from the heat. And their noses are wider to allow more air into their nostrils to cool their bodies. Since I am addressing a group where there might be paleontologists and geneticists in our midst, I stand corrected. But it got me thinking, my hair grows up, not down. Why do I want to chemically straighten my hair just so that I can look cute for two weeks? Who decided that this was a cute in the first place? Trying to answer those two questions and not starting a war of words has been challenging. Hair has been known to break up marriages in the North of Joburg. Asking these questions has allowed me to meet a new version of myself, my nick name is Mili no longer short for Milisuthando, but for Militant! Because this year I became a member of the Hair Police.The term Hair Police has become synonymous with people, like my friend, who believe that Africans should actively make conscious choices when it comes to their hairstyles – hairstyles should not damage your skin and hairline, and they certainly should not add to the denigration of the image of black people – an image that has been historically assaulted because of the two things that make it what it is – the skin and the hair. The link between skin colour and hair texture is inextricable and global. In India, people with lighter skin and long straight hair are perceived to be wealthier because historically, wealthy Indians didn’t work outside in the heat so their light skin was attributed to sitting inside. During slavery in America, the House slave and the Field slave were distinguished by skin colour and texure, the former being perceived as better than the latter because he or she was mixed with the most valuable blood – white blood, whose genes would produce lighter skin and longer, softer hair. While it is good and even necessary to have exhibitions that look at African hairstyles from a historical context, we should be careful not to overlook the fact that unique and intricate African hair styling as a cultural practice, is almost dead, hence it is in these kinds of spaces today. It is dead because something killed it. For the last 300 years, industrialization, imperialism and capitalism, have developed a global value system that made and continues to make European, Western and White Values – from how we dress, the languages we speak, the food we eat, the architecture we live under, and what we think is beautiful – the default standard. In the complex process of globalization, unfortunately, the African, who has the most unique type of hair in the world, has been taught to hate her hair. Her treatment of it is to straighten nature’s mistake with chemicals so often, that it becomes abnormal to let it grow up the way it is designed to. It has become normal to wear the hair of Brazilians and Peruvians and call that human hair while the hair that grows out of her scalp is called Kaffir hare, Kroes hare, Peppercorns, Steel Wool, Nappy Hairand other derogatory terms that refer to ”wild hair” that needs to be tamed. Even seemingly innocuous terms like Ethnic Hair or Natural are problematic because they other African hair. Everybody has an ethnicity, and everybody has natural hair – why can’t my hair the way it grows out of my scalp simply be called hair? It’s not our fault though, we are the children of Apartheid and Colonialism – systems that made the texture of black hair and the skin colour of black skin, an all encompassing problem. Light Skin and Straight Hair in this value system that we live in, still means that a person is perceived to be more beautiful, wealthy, neat, successful, smarter and belonging to better class. We cannot divorce what happened to the black image during the heyday of Slavery and the Pencil Test, to the fact that our most popular pop culture heroines are the ones with lighter skin who wear the hair of other races to add to this image of success. Doing hair is a cultural practice for all human beings. Indian women and White women for example also spend thousands of Rands enhancing the nature of their hair. In fact they also wear weaves. But the difference is that they still look Indian and they still look White when they put on their weaves. No beautiful black woman sitting in front of a mirror wants to look like a White person or a Chinese person when she buys her weave, not while black power and confidence in Africa is on the rise, I do not believe that. She simply wants to exercise the diversity that her hair texture allows her. But I wonder about the link between the history of black Africans in the last 600 years, the flow of capital to straight haired Europe, America and Asia and the fact that it is their hair that we are buying to replace our hair with, making them billions in the process. Is it really an independent choice when a black woman wears only weaves in a time where the global media, the makers of our cultural imagery, is controlled by people who have straight hair and light skin? My research on the politics of black hair has allowed me to transcend my simple membership of the Hair Police. In fact, I hope there are no Hair Police in the future. I’ve grown beyond questioning individual women for making stylistic choices of putting weaves in their hair or straightening it. The hair police should be more interested in questioning the system that makes Africans want to change the texture of their hair, the one that makes us think that it should grow down and not up. In an ideal world, where racism and cultural imperialism are not the currencies that rule our lives, anybody should be able to wear whatever hairstyle they want. But we are not there yet. As poet Lebo Mashile pointed out, other races put on Afro style wigs for ”fun” or when they are being silly. Africans wear straight weaves and wigs to be taken seriously. When we all wear each other’s hair for more balanced reasons, it won’t matter what hairstyle one wears. And so the struggle for mental liberation from slavery, colonialism and apartheid needs to continue in spaces like this. We need to expand on the examination of African hair and examine our modern cultural practices. Hair, like fashion, architecture and language evolves, but we need to ensure that our evolution doesn’t further entrench the inferiority complex that has beleaguered Africans in recent history. We should evolve, but we should not change the very essence of who we are. I want the children of 2080 to still see black women carrying luggage on their heads as if it ain’t no thing, because theirs is the only hair that allows that. We need to bring back better language when it comes to describing African hair. We need to retain the names of uniquely African hairstyles such as the Mushroom, iPop corn, iPineapple, iBanana, iGerman Cut, iTong Po and my favourite, the hair cut called Long Walk to Freedom and other names in Africa and the diaspora. We need to continue what the black hair revolution in America has done, by developing product for natural black hair and not only chemically straightened black hair. We need to use the Internet to mobilize and organize ourselves and stop blaming our unfortunate history for our current state of questionable cultural practices when it comes to hair. It is unlikely that this particular exhibition would be possible without the history and texture of African Hair. I am happy to be working in a city and a country that recognizes the necessity of this type of exhibition. Let us continue by writing books about hair like the voice of our generation, the inimitable Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, let us make songs and films and more art about our hair. Let us share the knowledge in these spaces with the people that need to hear it the most. The time has come for us to enjoy being conscious and African again, I say (excuse my language) let’s ride that shit out. Thank you Thank you to everyone who came to the opening and shout out to one reader Gwendolyn (spelling) who came up to me afterwords. Thanks to Lindi for taking the picture that I’ve posted, I will post more pics if I have them and hopefully find a recording. I must also say that there are two very influential people who have helped me shape my position on this matter, a man and a woman with whom I have had many conversations regarding the politics of black hair and I must acknowledge the role they continue to play in this conversation for me and others. They are Mathahle Stofile, the Beauty Editor of Marie Claire magazine and Siphiwe Mpye, whom I have learned a lot from as a colleague and a friend. Amandla!
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 06:53:40 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015