How I Learned To Love My Natural Hair
Photo via Nadia Macharia
By Debra Olum
The resurgence of Black Lives Matter has made way for long overdue conversations surrounding race to finally start to happen in a more raw and confronting way. This is just a small silver lining of change in a dark and difficult time. And one aspect of black culture that has for years been at the centre of this fight, consistently demonized and racialized, is our hair.
For years, black men and women have had to do mental gymnastics and go above and beyond to try to conform to the white standards of beauty. We were led to believe that it was “the norm” because being our authentic selves was always met with discrimination. Our hair was deemed untidy, unprofessional. Because it's not “just hair” to us.
When I was about 12 years old, after years of social conditioning and months of begging and nagging, my mum finally allowed me to chemically relax my hair.
Growing up in a Nairobi, a capital city, and going to an international school meant that I was constantly surrounded by people from different backgrounds, different nationalities and different races.
This was an incredible way to grow up and it taught me about various cultures in a way that I probably wouldn't have experienced otherwise. However, I realised that being around groups of white girls all the time skewed my ideals when it came to beauty.
It's no secret that white people hold the mainstream standard of beauty (thanks colonization) and because there was very little representation of black women wearing their natural hair out and what representation there was always seemed negative, it started to rub off on me.
I can only speak for myself, but my decision to relax my hair was made largely because I wanted to fit in. Fit in with all my white friends with their long straight hair that blew in the wind while mine stayed put. Fit in with all my black friends who were also starting to straighten their hair and fit in with what I was seeing in magazines and on TV, which for the most part, was just white girls.
While for some black women, relaxing their hair is really one of the only ways to deal with their hair with minimal damage or breakage, I relaxed my hair because everyone else was doing it and I wanted to adhere to the standard of beauty that I was constantly fed through mainstream media.
About 11 years ago, my mum decided to get dreadlocks and start her natural hair journey and about five years ago, I did the same. When I say getting dreadlocks is a journey, I really mean it's a journey.
My hair was relaxed which is not the ideal texture for locs and I had to wait a few months for my natural hair to grow out before I could cut my ratty relaxed ends off and start my locs. Once that was done I finally got them, but it took about a year for them to look "normal" and it took a further three years (coupled with a lot of TLC) for my hair to get healthy again. I had been putting excessive heat and chemicals on it for almost 10 years and my hair was not happy.
But in the meantime, I had to untangle my mind, unlearn a lot of unhealthy sentiments about black hair and then learn how to love my natural hair and take care of it properly.
It's been an experience and a half but it's taught me a lot. A lot about how my hair works and a lot about loving the skin I'm in (or at least the hair I'm in). Now that my hair is rid of all the chemicals and is pretty much in it's natural state, it is healthier than it has ever been and I never look back.
Over the past few years I've had the pleasure of watching as the natural hair movement has swept across the world. Seeing black women wear their afro's, have their dreadlocks out, dye their beautiful kinky hair all the colours of the rainbow and wear their cornrows with so much pride makes me happy.
Having the freedom to decide how you want your hair to look is a form of self expression, same as the clothes you choose to put on or the tattoos and piercings you get and the right to self expression should be something that needs to be protected and celebrated.
I hope the days of being told we look too unprofessional for the workplace because of our hair while white women roam the halls freely with mussy buns are over. The days of little black girls putting crazy chemicals and using heat to straighten their hair so they can look more like white girls. Africans were not meant to have straight hair - we have curly, kinky, beautifully dense and versatile hair and we were all created different from each other for a reason.
For decades we have been told our hair is untidy, disgusting & unattractive and we have unfortunately carried that way of thinking with us from generation to generation - we love a bit of intergenerational trauma. Our hair is beautiful and we deserve to feel happiness and pride when we look in the mirror – regardless of race or hair.