White and White discover that these abhorrent documents reveal not only the details nobody else bothered to record, but that in eighteenth-century British mainland colonies at least, slaveholders seem to have allowed African Americans to style their hair as they pleased.19 Hair culture represented a rare space in which there was a temporary lapse from the regulatory procedures controlling every aspect of black life.
Eighteenth-century advertisements for runaway slaves were unique in supplying information about a miscreant’s name, age, skin color, likely destination and clothing . . . They also, and very frequently, described the escaped slave’s hair. What is striking about such descriptions is the great variety of hairstyles included. We learn from them that some slaves wore their hair long and bushy on top and that others cut it short, or combed and parted it neatly, or shaved it at the back or at the front, or trimmed it to a roll. An African American’s hair might be closely cropped on the crown but left long elsewhere.”20
A Masai moran (warrior) styling another moran ’s hair in the traditional Masai style.
From Esi Sagay, African Hairstyles: Styles of Yesterday and Today (Heinemann, 1983)
White and White argue that the appearance of long, bushy, and/or unkempt hair in the New World might have stemmed from violent restrictions on both the time and the tools that the enslaved had to do their hair but that this cannot account for the whole story.
Obviously, blacks were not supposed to be proud of their hair, as they or their ancestors had been in Africa; any suggestion that they were would have sharply challenged complacent white cultural assumptions. In this context, hair worn long and bushy, an arrangement that emphasized, even flaunted, its distinctive texture, may have been, in some cases, an affirmation of difference and even of defiance, an attempt to revalorize a biological characteristic that white racism had sought to devalue. The same comment could be applied to long, bushy beards, which, as eighteenth-century runaway advertisements show, many male slaves possessed.21
Cameroonian men creating a hairdo for an annual dance.
From Roy Sieber and Frank Herreman, Hair in African Art and Culture (Museum of African Art, NY/Prestel, 2000)
Occasionally, white people’s descriptions hint at such meanings. The “owner” of the Maryland runaway Bazil notes that his slave possessed “woolly hair, in which he takes great pride,” and that Walton, a Virginia runaway, “commonly combed [his hair] very high.” Ned, a South Carolina slave carpenter, possessed “a large bushy head of hair, which he wears remarkably high.” These examples might well be read as declarations of pride in their hair. “Similarly, if Bacchus’s master was prepared to acknowledge that his slave possessed ‘a fine suit of wool,’ it is possible that Bacchus himself may have shared the same assessment.”22
While Masai men had long, ornate and intricate hairstyles, Masai women favored shaved heads anointed with red ochre and oils.
From Roy Sieber and Frank Herreman, Hair in African Art and Culture (Museum of African Art, NY/Prestel, 2000)
By the nineteenth century, the hairstyles described were far more muted and conformist. We can only speculate on the reasons, but by this point, the pride that was once displayed in defiant hairstyles was gone.
Children of the chief at Toulépleu in the Ivory Coast, c. 1938.
From Roy Sieber and Frank Herreman, Hair in African Art and Culture (Museum of African Art, NY/Prestel, 2000)
BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL II
Those eighteenth-century slaves subverted expectations of what they were supposed to think was attractive, showcasing the very feature they were conditioned to feel ashamed of. So is this the solution? Flip the script?
We are told black African features are ugly.
We contest it.
We insist they are BEAUTIFUL.
Say it loud,
Say it proud,
Black. IS. Beautiful.
It sounds empowering. It sounds positive. In many ways, it is, but it cannot be an end goal. Visual beauty is not as straightforwardly benign as we are led to believe. The Black is Beautiful cultural movement of the 1960s ran in parallel with the Black Power movement. It involved an explicit rejection of the Eurocentric beauty ideal that denigrated black features while elevating the straight hair and blue eyes of Europeans. Black is Beautiful sought to counteract the narrative that African features are inherently ugly. Instead it reclaimed and celebrated the physical features of black people, encouraging them not to straighten their hair or bleach their skin.
Our society places a huge emphasis on physical beauty. It teaches us that this is a natural consequence of the sense of sight and that beauty is a universal norm.
This is not necessarily accurate. I am not suggesting that African cultures did not place any importance on beauty. We have seen how people enjoyed and celebrated rituals of beautification and how hair operated as a powerful visual language. But there are major distinctions. Most striking is that the idea of physical beauty as an abstract entity untethered from context existing on its own was perhaps not meaningful in the same way it is today.
In The Invention of Women, Oyèrók Oyěwùmí distinguishes between the Eurocentric worldview and the Yoruba “world-sense.” The author argues that “the differentiation of human bodies in terms of sex, skin color, and cranium size” (a system that has served black people, and black women particularly, so poorly) “is a testament to the powers attributed to ‘seeing.’”23
We hear a lot about the male gaze, but the very concept of “the gaze” requires further scrutiny. The gaze itself is the invitation to differentiate bodies first and foremost based on visible features.
Reality is always only a culturally specific arrangement that we have been conditioned to perceive. Other realities exist. And some of these have privileged senses beyond that of sight.
Different approaches to comprehending reality . . . suggest epistemological differences between societies.
Relative to Yoruba society . . . the body has an exaggerated presence in the Western conceptualization of society.
The term “worldview,” which is used in the West to sum up the cultural logic of society, captures the West’s privileging of the visual. It is Eurocentric to use it to describe cultures that privilege other senses.24
Oyěwùmí suggests “world-sense” as a more meaningful way to describe cultures that place less emphasis on the visual, or those which do not understand what they see as a standalone way of ascribing value or worth. Our so-called natural tendency to judge a book by its cover and to be entirely influenced by the way someone or something looks is not universal.
BEAUTY BECOMES COMPETITIVE
Talking about the Ashanti, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that it is not typical within an indigenous African worldview to isolate a purely aesthetic dimension. Fe, which is an Ashanti Twi word for someone or something beautiful, is also used in the evaluation of social behavior. A child who misbehaves is told that what they are doing is not fe. Our European cultural tendency to see something from a single aspect—“its fineness,” “its beauty”—and to isolate this dimension, represents a movement away from the wholeness of vision that existed in many African cultures. Appiah explains that viewing something as beautiful as the only important way of assessing it would be puzzling to indigenous thinkers. Hair art and other artifacts of adornment allow us to “appreciate the subtle interplay of the sociological and the aesthetic.”25 To look at physical beauty entirely isolated from any context made little sense. Beauty was more contextual, and value judgments of what was beautiful couldn’t be made in an entirely superficial way. As other senses were privileged as much as sight, there was no need for the old adage about not judging a book by its cover: it was already a given! The beauty standards that emerged from such a worldview were subsequently very different; less standardized, less homogenized, and more inclusive. As stated, among the Yoruba a person would not be considered attractive or not based on anything as arbitrary as height or complexion. A short person who was attractive might be described as a kúrú yë jó (one who is short and perfectly elegant when dancing), but equally they might be ènìyàn kúkurú bìlíísì (a short devil). While an arched foot was considered a thing of great beauty for a woman, not having an arch was not enough to preclude one from beauty. Those with lighter complexions were not perceived as more beautiful than those who were darker. Both light and dark skin could be attractive but equally both could be unattractive. Even smallpox scars might be deemed beautiful, on the right person: eni-sàsá-sojú-e-lewà-ferefere (a person whose facial beauty is enhanced by smallpox spots).26