Hair has power in many different ways. To this day, in African and Afro-diasporic cultures people remain hesitant about their hair falling into a stranger’s hands. My stepfather was not a great guy and we’ll say no more; nonetheless, through him I was exposed to a lot of Guyanese and Trini beliefs (I have a Trini connection via my mother as well, who was born on the island and spent the first fourteen years of her life there until her Irish parents returned to Ireland). Among these I remember strongly the belief that, if somebody had access to your hair—from a comb, for instance—they could do witchcraft or obeah on you. These ideas have their antecedents in earlier African cultures, whereby a person’s hair was considered so potent that possession of it could confer certain power over said person. Recently, at a hair and material cultures event I attended at Goldsmiths, University of London, I was reminded of this, when the nonblack attendees shared cuttings of human hair with little hesitation. I had kept a bag of my relaxed hair that I cut off when I “big chopped.”* I brought this in to illustrate my presentation but realized that, unlike my peers, there was no way I could pass it around the assembled group of strangers.
Many other taboos that dictate the behavior and beliefs surrounding hair can be found throughout the hairdressing cultures of Africa. Among the Yoruba, these included the idea that a hairdresser must not eat while working on a client; otherwise, the client will get dandruff. A stylist must not wash their hands immediately prior to or following a session; if they did, the partings would not be well structured: irun e ko ni didi (hair that does not part well); the reverse of this—irun e o ni yin owo (hair that does part well)—is a compliment demonstrating that neat partings were considered a criterion for beautiful hair.
More significantly, as hairdressing moved away from being a practice that was carried out in an exchange economy by an intimate and well-trusted individual to something one paid a stranger to do, a taboo developed that forbade bartering, something that is usually a mainstay of Yoruba culture. Accordingly, a client must not under any circumstances bargain with the hairstylist about the price of the style: A kii na eleda eni (One does not bargain for one’s destiny).
The explanation for this taboo’s potency has to do with the centrality of the ori (the head) and, by extension, the hair in Yoruba metaphysics. Like the Mende, in Yoruba society hair that is left uncared for is anathema. In Yoruba, the phrase for “dreadlocks” in adult hair is irun were. This translates as “insane person’s hairdo.” In the Yoruba world, each human being has a personal ori. This spiritual head, or ori inu, is responsible for an individual’s fate, and this is preordained before birth. Because the physical head, or ori ode, houses the spiritual head, the maintenance and grooming of hair are seen as acts of spiritual significance.
Yoruba cosmology, which governs all socio-political relations, is organized into three tiers. The preeminent is Oludumare, or the Supreme Being. So great is Oludumare that human beings (the third tier) cannot interact with Oludumare directly. Mediating between humanity and Oludumare there exists a pantheon of intermediaries known as the orisha. Individual orisha have certain abilities and are charged with particular areas of responsibility. One of the most powerful of these orisha is the goddess of love and fertility, Oshun, who is associated with the Oshun River and fresh waters more generally. Oshun is understood to be the primary and most skillful hairdresser in Yoruba mythology. A well-known oriki, or poem of praise, introduces her thus:
Oshun, embodiment of grace and beauty,
The preeminent hair plaiter with the coral-beaded comb
Given the importance hair is granted by means of its association with an individual’s spiritual well-being, Oshun’s relationship to hairdressing is no coincidence. In fact, in Yoruba culture, hair is of such significance that the earth itself is sometimes personified as a woman having her hair combed with farming hoes. Because hair is associated with spiritual well-being, no price is too high to pay for your hair. This was a savvy ruse created by hairstylists to avoid having to argue with clients and, ultimately, to make more cash.
Every February 2 on the northeast coast of Brazil, the descendants of millions of enslaved Africans—from the Ga-Adangbe, Yoruba, Igbo, Fon, Ashanti, Ewe, Mandinka—look back out across the sea toward Mbundu and Bakongo and pray to another powerful orisha, Yemanja, the “Queen of the Sea.” As well as connecting the diaspora, water also connects the land of the living to the land of the ancestors. The orisha Olokun (who, like a number of orisha, transcends gender) is associated with the deep sea, heralding the way for the spirits that are passing into ancestorship.
Both salt water and fresh water are symbolically powerful in many African traditions. For the Mende of Sierra Leone, the water deity Tingoi is renowned for her beautiful hair. Extra caution will be taken to prevent a little girl with especially long hair from drowning because it is believed that such a girl would be particularly attractive to the water people, who may mistake her for one of their own and desire her to join them.
The Mende have a powerful female-only society known as the Sande; its male counterpart is Poro. These are key institutions within the community, and both require lengthy initiations before entry is granted. According to Mende custom, the water people crown female visitors to their underwater domain with extraordinarily beautiful hairstyles. Boone explains that during the extensive Sande initiation ceremonies “the girls are believed to reside underwater. When they are ready to re-join the community, they rise from the waters, displaying magnificent hairstyles more dazzling than any that could be done by human hands.”23 Their hair is a beautiful demonstration of an engagement with the divine.
If we seek to decolonize, it is imperative that we explore how African people understood themselves and their own cultures, to gain a clearer understanding that is not warped through the biases of colonial documentation. In her study of the important Yoruba oral tradition oriki, the anthropologist Karin Barber explains that through attending to what people say (or produce themselves) we learn how people constitute their society. Hair is an embodied visual language and can be understood as one of these indigenous “texts”; another would be the bata drum that mimics the tonality of the Yoruba language.
Understanding these can “lead to the heart of a community’s own conception of self: without which, any description of social structure or process will remain purely external.”24 Barber investigates the role of oriki in Yoruba reckonings of time and culturally significant events:
At the time of their composition each oriki refers to the here and now. They encapsulate whatever is noteworthy in contemporary experience . . . but because they are valued they are preserved, and transmitted for decades—even centuries. Oriki are valued all the more for coming from the past, and bringing with them something of its accumulated capabilities, the attributes of earlier powers.
Oriki—much like the hairstyles we can observe from Africa across the Atlantic—“can thus be a thread that leads back into an otherwise irrecoverable social history.”
A single performance often contains items composed as much as 200 years apart . . . the items from different historical moments are not usually arranged in chronological order, nor are the most ancient units separated from the newest ones. They might be performed in virtually any order and combination. This is not because a chronological ordering is beyond the scope of oriki performers—the oriki of all the successive Obas (Yoruba kings) of Okuku and those of the successive holders of the most senior chiefly title are performed in order—but because oriki performances usually aim at something else.