Nigeria for beginners #005…Good Hair
Things you can’t make up in Nigeria…20 billion Naira going waka waka, an international school with an annual blackface festival and now a shop selling Asian Hair called ‘Good Hair’.
I’ve already written about the first two. Now let’s address the third, a new salon in Lagos called Good Hair specialising in distributing, selling and fixing weaves and hair extension made up with Caucasian hair types.
Now I get that we are psychologically battered as black people after centuries of being told all our distinctive features are inferior. But for a salon to go to the extent of exploiting this very loaded and painful term for profit is breathtakingly ignorant and/or cynical. My money is on both.
Good Hair was the title Chris Rock’s hilarious documentary Good Hair asking serious questions — exploring why black people feel so negatively about their own hair and the lengths they go to to hide or transform it, so is now avery well known within the African diaspora. The phrase, for those who really don’t know (judgemental side-eye) is African American in origin and has its roots in the dark history of transatlantic slavery, centuries of being taught racial inferiority that became internalised. You celebrated if you or your child had the ‘good hair’, hair like your masters. Straighter, longer, lighter in colour was more desirable and beautiful in the eyes of the oppressed. The more African you looked, the more inferior and uglier you were deemed to be. There is a whole hair and beauty industry built on the backs of African inferiority which involves transforming stereotypically ‘ugly’ African features into stereotypically ‘beautiful’ Caucasian features and no one is immune to it, least of all myself.
But inferiority is one thing, cynically profitting from it and perpetuating the misery simultaneously is quite another. The point of Chris Rock’s documentary was to raise awareness and to help black women see that they were impoverishing themselves physically, financiall and mentally in their obsession for straighter, longer, lighter.
People have choices. They wear false hair for all sorts of reasons. Been there, done that personally. My intent is not to shame individuals in their hair choices but I draw the line at being told by a retailer that my hair isn’t good enough. Lets be honest, if a non-black retailer started a range of products for black people called Good Hair we would be up in arms but why is it ok when we harm each other? It would be funny if it was coopting and somehow transforming the phrase ‘Good Hair’, but it isn’t. It’s merely a brand that sells weaves and extension and has as its lead image. Four African women, none of whom are showing hair specific to their phenotype. How is the underlying message funny or clever?
What’s typically Nigerian is that despite having their own good hair, light skinned thang (wearing improbably long straight weaves is a sign of beauty, status and wealth in a status and wealth obsessed society that idolises the Kardashians), most Nigerians who did not grow up in Western countries feeling the sting of racial discrimination do not really understand racial politics. When you protest, the response is usually a myopic ‘what‘s your own [it’s none of your business]?’ as if it’s not an issue that black women’s insecurity are viewed as just another lucrative African resource to be controlled and mined by (mostly) other races.
A recent BBC news item filmed in India titled ’How a human hair factory in India is helping Africa’, detailed how ‘joyful’ African women were for being able to disguise their afro hair with Asian people’s hair. Surely instead it should have been called how Africa is helping India, financing their society to the tune of billions with our self-hatred. Very little of the money we spend on this wondrous hair ends up in our own communities. Turns out our obsession with perceived aesthetic inequality reinforces our socio-economic inequality too. Who’d a thunk it?
Everyone should feel uncomfortable with a hair seller called Good Hair that promotes weaves and extensions to black women with afro hair. Whether you use weaves or not, the title of the salon and company is insulting telling you that since your own hair in its natural state is not good it is therefore bad and a problem that needs to be solved.
In the UK there was recently a protest against adverts which sought to promote a slim ’bikini’ body as an ideal. The adverts (on the London underground) were removed by a watchdog. What a pity we can’t similarly police our black communities for adverts and the promotion of products feeling on insecurity about our distinctly African features.
What the salon/weave seller Good Hair are doing is blithely dismissing the fact that we as brown skinned people with afro hair still have an uphill struggle not only to be recognised as beautiful by the mainstream but actually to have our very humanity acknowledged. It doesn’t merely ignore the struggle for racial equality and empowerment going on worldwide, it wipes its shoes all over it for profit.
