This is the part of the story that doesn’t make it on to the press releases of our favorite brands.
Africa is the gift that keeps on giving. African and Afro-diasporic cultures continue to be presented as lesser, as primitive and underdeveloped, while the systematic extraction of their resources—physical, cultural, and material—continues on at a merry pace. This is the missing context in conversations about cultural appropriation. Stay woke.
6
Ancient Futures: Math, Mapping, Braiding, Encoding
Everything you have been taught about Africa is a lie, a story designed to justify the continent’s exploitation. African classical sophistication is not acknowledged. African culture and its descendants are not lauded—rather they are dismissed as barbaric at worst, or ghetto at best. Meanwhile, we are taught that certain European art forms, often far less ancient yet far more dated, are what constitute the canon. Traditional African hairstyles are subject to this treatment.
While each braided hairstyle is ephemeral, the enduring repetition and popularity of certain styles and methods suggests a relationship with the infinite. Since Aristotle, European mathematicians had disregarded the concept of infinity as basically too much of a head fuck to contend with. Yet Africans have been casually repping it throughout their design culture for centuries.
The story of indigenous African technology and its spiritual and philosophical orientations is little known. Unpicking the braid reveals much more than we might ever imagine. To this day, there exists an agenda that perpetuates the idea that Africans could barely produce mud huts, let alone grasp technological innovation. Technology is not really a concept we associate with traditional Africa, and tech certainly isn’t the first image conjured up when we speak of hairstyling.
Yet proof of advanced astronomy, mathematical plotting, indigenous calculation systems, geometry, and scaling can be found throughout the continent. Africa is home to mathematical bodies of knowledge so vital they provide the bedrock of modern computing. From sculpture to architecture, spiritual belief, and divination systems—and, perhaps even more surprisingly, hairstyles—math is everywhere. Through African hairstyles we can observe beauty standards and aesthetics, spiritual devotion, values, and ethics, and even, quite literally, maps from slavery to freedom.
When I was researching my PhD, I spoke to many young men who shared memories of their schooldays. These included stories of being excluded from school activities because they wore their hair in what the schools deemed to be gang-affiliated styles. I have experienced this type of discrimination myself. There is a dramatic alteration in the way I am treated when my hair is cornrowed—kolese, in particular, seems to quicken white heart rates. When you’ve lived your life fixed under the gaze of whiteness, you become keenly sensitive to its attentions, to its shifts and sensibilities. The culture of denial, the incessant But surely nots, the repeated accusations that You’re just imagining it, the But what about . . . ?s ring frequently in your ears.
But it can be explicit, too, and for me, wearing cornrows seems to trigger racists. Rocking the rows, I might be trailed around stores, have accusations of shoplifting lobbed at me, or indeed the word “nigger” screamed at me from passing vehicles. All of these are relatively recent experiences, occurring over the last seven or eight years, provoked, it seems, by my hairstyle. More recently, things seem to have shifted a little and the adoption of these styles by fashion alongside the boom in braid bars, where white women pay inflated prices for simple black hairstyles given new names, appears to have reduced the vitriol provoked. Although, I imagine, were I dark-skinned or male it might be another story. Yet even to this day it’s just as likely to present itself as a white associate expressing surprise that I can “look thuggish” so easily. And not long ago a mixed-race acquaintance, socialized in a white environment, the type that just wants to “fit in,” expressed alarm when I said I was going to cornrow my child’s hair. “Oh, no, don’t!” she cried. “It’s just so stereotypical.”
Yes, I suppose it is stereotypical, in that it is how black people style their hair. This response made me consider the ways in which blackness is always marked. Stereotypical things that some white people do—socializing with babies and small children in bars and pubs—are not universal cultural norms. Or the staunch refusal to adequately season chicken. But these things are not seen as representative of “white” culture. They are not racialized; instead, they are understood as normal, the standard from which everybody else deviates.
The attitude expressed by my not-yet-woke buddy is common. I’m intimate with the attempt to avoid behaviors that will mark you out or signpost your blackness, even when the denial of them is suffocating. It is a tendency at the crux of the psychosis of assimilation. It’s the same mentality that meant teenage Emma would have rather died than have gelled her babyhairs.
BLACK PEOPLE COUNT
I don’t know what your memories of learning math at school are, but for me, even thinking about it now leaves me sick with anxiety. Math was not for me! Or so I believed. Early on, I had missed out on some fundamental building blocks, and without that foundation, it was at first hard and then impossible to keep up. Yet when I think about math now, its alchemic possibilities appear endless. Formulas to unlock the secrets of the universe. It is dizzying, exciting stuff. Sadly, this dormant interest was not piqued as a child. Boredom, frustration, and a sense of my own inadequacy characterized my relationship to math.
When it comes to math, the African, Arab, and Chinese mathematical systems are largely ignored and the origins are located with the Greeks. At the same time, other potent stereotypes of black people are advanced, and these have traveled far and wide. Even off out there in the far reaches of Europe, on a lil ole speck in the Atlantic Ocean, reductive imported ideas of blackness loomed large in the Irish imagination.
While Ireland itself has been a victim of colonialism, this is far from the entire story. Much less attention has been afforded to the multiple ways in which many Irish were complicit in the same processes that caused so much suffering to its own people.
The relationship between Ireland and the US is long-standing and complex. There is generally little awareness of the process through which the Irish and other European immigrants became white in the New World—at times an uneasy, but ultimately successful, journey of inclusion in the “white race,” with all its attendant material advantages. Nonetheless, the active racism necessary to attain and maintain the whiteness of Irish Americans did not foreclose the solidarity that emerged between Irish revolutionaries and Pan-Africanists, both seeking to liberate themselves from oppressive imperialist regimes.
It was with much excitement that I discovered that W. E. B. Du Bois held the famed Irish humanitarian and revolutionary Roger Casement in high esteem, and that for the decade after his execution for his involvement in the 1916 Easter Rising,* both Casement himself and the Rising became potent symbols of anti-imperialist politics among black radicals in Harlem. Likewise Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican Pan-Africanist, added a green stripe to his Universal Negro Improvement Association uniform to represent solidarity with the Irish struggle for freedom, while writers of the Harlem Renaissance saw Irish nationalist writers like W. B. Yeats as inspiration when it came to producing liberatory poetic and literary work, concerned with the expression of subjugated national identities; pretty generous, given the historical treatment of black Americans by Irish Americans.*