In this tradition, the craft of hairdressing, which is practiced by either sex, requires training with an experienced stylist. The young apprentices work only on children and on youngsters their own age; adults or children are worked on by other adults. The long styling session, lasting anywhere from several hours to several days, permits the stylist and the client to exchange private information, or to talk about the life of the village. A mother might instruct her marriageable daughter about her future role as a wife, and so on.38
GIFT EXCHANGES
Building on the work of the postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak, Joanne Sharpe proposed that “Western intellectuals relegate ‘other,’ non-Western (African, Asian, Middle Eastern) forms of knowing” and knowledge acquisition to the “margins of intellectual discourse” by dismissing them as myth or folklore.39 Yet if we peek beyond the confines of European intellectual discourse, if we listen to the subaltern* speak, we might be surprised. In extensive research on indigenous African mathematics, the American mathematician Ron Eglash describes the “egalitarian algorithms” that exist in African technologies. From here he makes an exciting proposal—generative justice—which offers an intriguing alternative to the distributive systems of both capitalism and state communism. While the name “generative justice” might be new, the concept is ancient, and we need look no further than African hair culture for examples of how it operates.
Those on the political left continue to advocate top-down distributive approaches to manage resources, but many of these approaches are played out. Eglash suggests that in the last thirty years or so, new forms of social justice have started to emerge, and these can be understood as bottom-up systems. The parallel that exists between bottom-up, socially just approaches and the more communally oriented, non-monetized or semi-monetized African societies is fascinating. Considering gift exchanges in African societies, Eglash explains:
Contemporary cases which draw on the idea of gift exchange include open source computing; where the . . . software of big corporations is replaced by code freely generated and distributed, or the food justice movement, or indeed the maker movement, which puts technologies such as 3D printing into the hands of lay people and also encompasses peer to peer distribution of music, art and other media, as well as grassroots activism for sexual diversity across the globe.40
The Divine Chocolate company makes for a creatively instructive case study. Many of you may be familiar with the Adrinka symbols used by the Akan of Ghana to represent the philosophies underpinning their traditional culture.
For example, the funtunfunefu below shows two crocodiles who share a single stomach. The symbol represents the fundamental gift-economy principle: “By feeding you, I feed myself.” In 1993, an animist priest, Nana Frimpong Abebrese, organized local cocoa farmers according to the principles integral to Adrinka philosophy: they would operate as a collective in which the common pool of resources would benefit the group. After receiving a loan from the UK fair trade company Kuapa Kokoo Ltd (the “good cocoa farmer”), Abebrese was able to provide twenty-two villages with weighing scales, tarpaulins, and other basic equipment. Her mission was to empower low-income farmers, increase women’s participation, and develop environmentally friendly cultivation of cocoa. In 1998, the UK-based chocolate company Divine Chocolate was launched, with the funtunfunefu and asase symbols celebrated on the packaging. Kuapa Kokoo has been a huge success, with 65,000 members in around 1,400 villages. Profits from their 44 percent ownership of Divine Chocolate are reinvested in village projects to provide water, health, and education, as well as to work against the practice of child labor and to adapt to climate change.41
Photograph: Len Garrison. Reproduced by kind permission of Black Cultural Archives
Rather than investing back into the communities and the environment it exploited, the colonial system established by the British required women to work in unfavorable conditions in the informal economy, in order to sustain their families. Extractive systems such as the form of capitalism that began in the colonial era cannot operate without these “generative processes,” such as women’s unacknowledged labor and the exploitation of the environment. Under capitalism, the cost of these generative forces remains invisible (until we experience a crisis like global warming and they can no longer be ignored).
SANKOFA*
Pliny the Elder said, “There is always something new out of Africa.” Thousands of years later, the Yoruba Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka urges us to remember the same: Africa “has indeed a history, and a present of surprises,” and these surprises not only “extend our concept of human creativity, but illuminate many conundrums of human existence and destination.”42 We can look to indigenous culture for innovative responses to contemporary issues.
African practices and beliefs may have been decimated, but some things, it would appear, are unvanquishable. Do not be fooled by the futuristic appearance of African hairstyles or misled by the fact that they remain at the cutting edge of fashion. Many of the hairstyles we are talking about are ancient.
Yoruba art “would stand comparison with anything which Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece and Rome, or Renaissance Europe had to offer.”43 In the 1950s, cave paintings dating back to 3,000 BCE discovered in the Tassili Plateau of the Sahara depicted women with neat cornrows. Many hairstyles of Ancient Egypt closely resemble those still found in sub-Saharan Africa today, and we can see traditional Yoruba hairstyles featured in art and sculpture that is more than 2,500 years old. If we observe the 2,000-year-old terra-cotta figures from the Nok civilization (an early Iron Age population found in the north of what is now Nigeria), we find them again. Recognizable hairstyles are also visible on artwork produced in the mighty precolonial state of Benin.
Unlike the bronzes, these styles aren’t going anywhere. In the 1960s the photographer and great chronicler of traditional Nigerian hairstyles J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere lamented that by the twentieth century many traditional hairstyles were being replaced by wigs emulating European hair. However, the US Black Pride movement of the 1960s and ’70s in many ways arrested this development. African returnees who had gone to American colleges returned home sporting the Afros that were a defining feature of black life in the US. I have photographs of my father and his siblings (who attended the HBCU Morehouse College in Atlanta) rocking their ’fros back in Nigeria in the 1970s.
Black British activists at FEPAC in Nigeria (1977) wearing “traditional” hairstyles.
My grandmother in Atlanta, around 1980, holding one of my cousins.
While weave might be dominant in Nigeria at the moment, nothing lasts forever. Indeed, today, even more so than in the 1970s, transatlantic exchanges are more about reconnection than rending apart, and the conversation around black hair is reaching a tipping point.
The images that flooded my Instagram feed in 2017 evoke memories of my childhood and my grandmother, who always wore traditional Yoruba braided hairstyles. As a wealthy, Western-educated Nigerian woman, I now read this as something of a radical act. It’s far more common to see women of her status attempting to distance themselves from these styles, which were associated with being “bush,” primitive and unsophisticated, a far cry from the European ideal so many still aspire to.