Afro’s & public school’s.

Whenever I walk into a room, the one thing strangers & friends will look at is my hair. I’m a black man who makes the conscious effort to grow an afro. My relationship with my hair goes far back to me being a chubby baby with the kinkiest hair. Needless to say, this relationship soured the moment I joined a school following the national curriculum.  My hair became a contentious issue amongst the authority figures.  20 years later, I have made the conscious decision to  reflect on why grown men and women hate(d) my hair.

For years I speculated why cutting hair in schools was stressed upon by authorities. Now, having read Faucalt’s Discipline and Punish along with Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt, I have finally arrived at an answer : Control.

Foucault argues that it is the “small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion” which compounded to form systems of control.  On reading Colonising Egypt, Mitchell built on this idea and argued that colonialism strived to instill militaristic discipline within structures present in everyday life like homesteads and schools.  And thus, my tumultuous tussle with “discipline” begins.

Why necessarily does the concept of discipline relate to my hair?  I remember having to stand at the field according to class columns whilst the teachers prowled the aisles looking for those with hair. To my knowledge,  there was never a time an Arab, Asian or Caucasian person was dragged out of the line because of their hair. Each time, it was the black student with the slightest afro that was dragged to the barber who mercilessly cut their hair. Sometimes, they would take it upon themselves to deliver punishment. And so it was usual to see “educators” cutting through students hair with scissors before slapping them senseless with the entire school as the audience.  This all being done in the name of “discipline”.

The justification for this was the usual “their hair is shabby” and “men shouldn’t grow hair” or in the case of the girls “they’re spending too much time on their hair and not studying”.  Centuries of indoctrination by the British colonisers have encouraged us to overlook the racist and  misogynistic subtext within such language.  By looking at the sentences, we see that they are implying that: A)  Black hair is not professional/smart, B) That there is a set idea of what a black man should look like and C) That men know better about what women capacities are. In short, I think the “justifications” presented are merely colonial remnants that should frankly not not exist anymore.

The equation of hair with “discipline” has direct ties to colonial beliefs of their racial supremacy.  The fact that the growing of one’s hair implies that they are somehow less intelligent is a telltale sign of the absorption of eugenic beliefs into our structures.  One need  not mention the lists of academics, leaders, economists and artists that have sported the afro.  I for one have never understood the fear that the colonialists had for our hair. On reading the works of Mithcell and Faucalt, I have come to realize that this fear stems from the fact that refusing to cut ones hair shatters the illusion of control.  In Kenya, this fear was properly used by the Mau Mau fighters who ensured that they kept and wore their hair long as they rebelled against the British and white settlers. It is seen in in  iconic photos of the Black Panthers sporting their afros.  It is black people everywhere saying that we are choosing to reclaim control of our bodies.

Thus despite years of internalized hatred of blackness, I choose to  sport my afro with pride.

Dr. Cornel West, a legend with an afro