Religion, Aesthetics, the Politics of Hair in Contemporary Ghana
by Genevieve Nrenzah
Traditional and social media alike have recently taken up questions of acceptable hair practice for Ghanaian youth after a brilliant Rastafarian student was turned down for admission to Achimota secondary school where he had been chosen based on merit. Achimota is an A-list public school located in Accra. When he arrived at the school to begin the admissions process, school authorities informed him that he wouldn't be admitted due to his roughly fourteen-inch hair length. Following a fierce public outcry, the school insisted that he cut his hair short before being accepted. Compounding matters, Caucasian students with long hair attend Achimota with no problems. The black student’s dreadlocks were no less long and flowing than the Caucasian students’, so many questioned whether this Rastafarian student was being discriminated against because of his religion. The question raises essential issues surrounding the meaning of African hair. This short essay assesses the significance of African hair—both on the continent and for Africans in the diaspora—and contends that African hair serves as a decolonising tool in today's context.
African Hairstyles
Africans' involuntary and voluntary participation and involvement in world events such as colonialism and slavery introduced European and Western acculturation. In this instance, the European body and hair became the status quo for defining the beauty of a person. For Africans to belong, they had to alter their unacceptable kinky hair to look like that of the Westerner or European, revealing the triumph of Eurocentric dominance in the ideology of beauty. African people, especially women, faced the difficult decision of either conforming to these oppressive beauty standards or continuing to embrace their kinky hair, which was seen as unkempt and socially unacceptable. “The conformity to this ideology tends to lead to the invisibility of African hair,” writes Toks Oyedemi. “This creates an existential threat of a potential cultural and social extinction of Black natural hair as artificiality becomes natural in the social construction of beautiful hair among black women.” Cheryl Thompson stresses that:
For young black girls, hair is not just something to play with; it is laden with messages; it has the power to dictate how others treat you, and in turn, how you feel about yourself…. Hair in 1976 spoke to racial identity politics as well as bonding between African American women. Its style could lead to acceptance or rejection from certain groups and social classes, and its styling could provide the possibility of a career.
According to Jean Daniels, black minds were colonized through television. Black people are socialized to meekly accept white supremacist ideas. Uncritical black viewers were indoctrinated by passively absorbing the ideals of the dominant white society through the medium. It follows then that TV and other related portrayals of hair and bodies were accepted, even though meanings differ contextually. For instance, in those American and European spaces, hair frequently serves aesthetic and beauty purposes in contrast to its meaning to Africans both on the African continent and globally for whom, with its shades of different kinky, curly, and dreadlocked textures, African natural hair represents a cherished part of the body. The human head and the crown are what connect one person to another. In Africa, a person's hairstyle expresses their background, status and social location, and who they are. The dreadlock continues to be an expression of a sacred cultural and spiritual symbol, particularly worn by religious leaders—indigenous priests and priestesses, herbalists, and special children such as ntoba, who torment their mother by dying, being reborn, and then dying again. The dying cycle is stopped by “dreading” the child. In this and other ways, hair symbolizes power and strength that connects to the spiritual world.
In the diaspora, African natural hair (Afro) became a symbol of resistance to all forms of domination imposed on Africans, in addition to its connections with African spirituality and royalty (including Rastafarian movements). Hair, as a vehicle of expression of African spirituality, blends religious and political action. As M. Kuumba and Femi Ajanaku put it, “Dreadlocks, as contemporary hair aesthetics, can be considered an example of culturally contextualized everyday resistance.” Apart from its religio-political stand, African natural hair essentially represents a lifestyle, a movement, a sort of cultural reversal rooted in emancipatory Pan-Africanism. Above all, it represents a decolonial tool. To cite one of the respondents to my fieldwork:
I have never felt more liberated in my entire forty-seven years on earth than today. Using chemicals to straighten my hair was like a punishment. It felt then compulsory, like some invisible police watching and supervising that you do it right and all the time. Wearing my natural hair now makes me feel so free in all of my being. I feel confident and proud of my person, my race, and hair as part of my identity. I could say as a person that I am decolonized.
An exciting development worth noting is that after being held ransom by the Western dictates of beauty using harsh treatments and chemicals to get the much-desired bone straight, silky hair, today’s African girls and women are rocking their natural hair with confidence.
To conclude, whether African hair is worn for religious or aesthetic sake in current times, the pictures and data suggest that people of African descent in the diaspora wear natural, kinky hair as a symbolic accompaniment to oppositional collective identities associated with the African liberation/Black Power movements. Its spread among African liberationists, womanists, and radical artists of African descent reflects counter hegemonic politics. From a new social movement African hair, especially the dreadlock, occupies three main dimensions of collective identity formation: boundary demarcation, consciousness, and negotiation, but it is also a sense of cultural pride for people connecting to their African roots and acting in defiance of the acceptable Eurocentric order.
Dr. Genevieve Nrenzah is a Research Fellow in the Religion and Philosophy Section of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. Her research and teaching interest include Africa's diverse indigenous religious beliefs and ceremonies and their extensions in the African Diasporas, Abrahamic religions, Religion and Economics, Sound/Music in Indigenous religions and Christianity, Sacred Spaces, Sexuality, Religion, and Human rights, Neo feminism in Ghana and Religion, Oil and the Beach Front. She is an editorial member of the Contemporary Journal of African Studies, Institute of African Studies, Editorial review board member for the The journal of Black Women and Religious Cultures and Editorial Advisory Board member for the Journal of Religion in Africa. She has professional affiliations with African Studies Association of Africa, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Missionswissenschaft, American Academy of Religions, Golden key International Honour Society and International Association for the History of Religions.