There are many references to attention to detail in the hairdressing culture of the Wolof, Fuli, and Mandingo along the Senegal River, who “dress their hair which is short, very prettily, with grisgris (amulets), silver, leather, coral, copper etc.”25
John Thornton notes that
when Europeans first came into contact with western Africa in the late fifteenth century, they commented on the myriad hairstyles worn by the people they met. Various combinations of braids, plaits (often with shells, beads, or strips of material woven in), shaved areas, and areas cut to different lengths to make patterns adorned the heads of people, creating a stunning effect.26
In 1602 the Dutch explorer Pieter de Marees “published a plate . . . showing sixteen different hairstyles of various classes and genders in Benin alone.”27
Complimentary accounts are relatively profuse. It is apparent that, on the part of the European observers, there is no sense of African hair being ugly or inferior. Equally, the people themselves clearly have their own indigenous beauty standards. What the earlier accounts seem to show is that the project to deny and obscure African civilizations has not at this point begun. There was as yet no need to refuse the humanity of African people, because European economies had not yet become dependent on that narrative. At this stage, we see a world in which Africans can be perceived as human beings and, as such, their beauty can be acknowledged.
TIME IS MONEY AND MONEY IS TIME
Black hair culture provides a unique lens through which to re-examine what might be valuable from the African past and to assess the impact of an alien and destructive way of life on African people.
We’re all familiar with the old adage “Time is money and money is time,” but where did it come from? And if we stop to think about it, what does it really mean, and what does it reveal about the things our society values and those it disregards?
Once European objectives became characterized by the pursuit of enslavement and colonization, there was a dramatic shift in tone in descriptions of Africans. Colonization in the twentieth century produced a new and enduring European obsession with African “idleness.” The Prevention of Idleness: The Labour Circulars, published in South Africa in 1925, stated that
It is in the interests of the natives themselves for the young men to become wage earners, and not to remain idle in their reserves for a large part of the year.
The pamphlet goes on to make the case for the compulsory labor that the British colonial authorities were enforcing on black South Africans. The pamphlet acknowledges that compulsory labor is not beneficial, that it is in fact damaging to African people. Moreover, it is noted that compulsory labor serves “exclusively the interests of European settlers and private employers”: the group that insist on the government keeping the wages below subsistence level. Despite this explicit awareness about the losers and the beneficiaries of compulsory labor, it continued to be enforced.
This deleterious system is presented as superior to the “idleness” that the British claimed existed before it. This type of discourse can be identified as a precursor to today’s conversations about “development” on the African continent; a narrative that requires the pathologization of African cultures for its legitimacy. The real causes of poverty, those brought about under the policies of Structural Adjustments to Poverty Reduction Growth Facility (PRGF), an arm of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are obscured.* Instead, African countries are deemed to be failing due to their inherently deviant natures. This agenda is, in part, the explanation for the mendacity that characterizes the portrayal of the African past.
The deeply ingrained “truth” that black hair is too time-consuming,* does not make sense in an indigenous context. For the Yoruba, time was understood in relation to the task that had to be done. Until European forms of capitalism took root, time for most people was your own. The day began at sunrise and ended at twilight. Each compound had a sundial to measure the periods in between. When the sun was not visible, the amount of work done, or other cues from nature—the cries of birds or the behavior of certain animals—would provide the farmer with the information he needed.
The scholars Iyakemi Ribeiro and Amâncio Friaça describe the daily routine as made up of a mixture of labor activities, socializing, songs, and religious acts. The day was defined by tasks to be accomplished rather than by predetermined units of time.
The Yoruba operated according to a four-day week; the most popular god in a locality would mark the beginning of a week in that area. If we think about phrases like “time is money,” “saving time,” and “buying time,” it’s apparent that time in the Western sense has been reimagined as a commodity, which through purchase one “owns” or “possesses.” In African Religions and Philosophy, John Mbiti explains that in African cultures time was quite a different prospect, and as such was measured in different ways. It didn’t matter if a hunting month lasted twenty-five days or thirty-five: the event of the hunting itself was privileged above a prescribed unit of time. Mbiti describes Western time* as something that must be “utilized, sold or bought”; but in traditional African time, time has to be created or produced. In traditional African metaphysics, “Man is not a slave of time; instead he ‘makes’ as much time as he wants.”28
When time is not a commodity, not possessing the time to do your hair—especially where heavy emphasis was placed on well-presented, immaculately groomed hair—would be oxymoronic.
Black hair is not problematic or deviant. Depending on your way of life and your priorities, it is not even “time-consuming.” Certainly it grows the way it grows for a reason. The relatively sparse density of Afro hair, combined with its elastic helix shape, increases the circulation of cool air to the scalp and helps regulate body temperature. In addition, the dryness of Afro hair means that it remains springy, unlike hair with a straighter texture that becomes drenched in sweat, causing it to stick to the neck and forehead.29
The time it takes to do Afro hair is, quite frankly, the time that is required to do it. And it is in this fact that a very powerful truth is revealed. Our hair continues to be a space in which the fault lines between an imposed European system and black bodies’ resistance to that system are exposed and played out in real time. Our very bodies are positioned as seemingly at odds with the “British values” imposed by colonialism. As such they are subject to regulatory procedures.
The idea that nothing exists alone is a cornerstone of African thought. The importance of the relationships between things is emphasized in African metaphysics. In contrast, British consumer culture located value and worth in the desire for the consumption of things. Aspiring to the lifestyle necessary to acquire such things was the central principle of this new “civilization.”
The increasing monetization of African society, accompanied by the incentive to accumulate material objects for accumulation’s sake alone, was evidence of civilization. This example of the “Hottentots” of the Cape of Good Hope* is instructive:
English habits and English feelings seem to be rapidly gaining ground . . . The stores established at Bethelsdorp and at Theopolis must be extremely useful as, by the artificial wants they create, they excite the people to increased industry.30 [my italics]