The myths about how long black hair can or should be are as legion as the myths that natural hair is “dirty”. The misconception partly comes out of the concept of measurement. Natural African hair is curly and so to measure it, one would have to stretch out the coils. This is why limiting the growth of the hair by the width of cornrows or length of strands doesn’t make sense at all. One black person’s coiffure will look very short because of “shrinkage” and another black person’s locks will look very long because of a loose coil.
The notion that long black hair is or should be cut or trimmed to an “acceptable” length is ignorance masquerading as “neatness”. No two black people’s hair “grows out” the same.
Pretoria Girls High is not the first institution to try and police black people’s hair. In an article titled “When Black Hair Is Against the Rules”, the New York Times responded to hair regulations that had been published by the US Army on 31 March 2014. These prohibited twists, “matted” hair and multiple braids – all of which were read as references to natural African hair and hairstyles.
Conservative institutions – schools, militaries, corporations and so on – have the right to prescribe a dress code. However, these should not be based on partial knowledge where these institutions simply don’t do any research into what some of their prohibitions actually mean and instead rely on “common sense”.
Because when it comes to black hair, “common sense” is the least reliable tool for decision-making, since even black people are constantly changing their minds about what they want to do with their hair. As an expression of our culture, black hair is as malleable and plastic as our ideas about it.
To attempt to fix such expressions in rules and regulations is to deny black people what the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop called our “Promethean consciousness”. As black people, our hair is an expression of the infinite possibilities that emanate from this creative and daring consciousness.
By Hlonipha Mokoena. This article is reproduced from African Arguments
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