Back to The Root: Heritage and History

The first Europeans set foot upon the coast of West Africa in the 1440′s searching for gold.  What they found was a continent filled with well established, vibrant nations, each rich with their own traditions and customs. These were cultures in which hair played an important role.

According to Byrd and Tharps in Hair Story:  Untangling The Roots of Black Hair In America, hair to Africans in the early fifteenth century was far more than just aesthetics.  It was a means of communication so that at a glance one individual could distinguish a wealth of information about another, whether they were married, mourning, or of age for courtship, simply by observing their hairstyle.  Certain hairstyles were distinctive to particular tribes or nations.  Other styles spoke to an individual’s status in society.

In short, hair for the African was synonymous with his/her identity.

In the early 16th century, the cordial trading relationship between the Europeans and African nations took a sinister turn.  The machine of colonialism was growing and strengthening by the day, birthed by greed and ravenous for cheap labor to reap the natural resources from the lands the Europeans conquered. 

And thus, the Europeans turned their eyes once again to the shores of Africa but this time they were searching not for gold but for something even more profitable: the strong backs and able bodies of a people who possessed not only physical strength but the agricultural expertise to coax mind boggling wealth from the fertile soil of the colonies.

The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was born and one of the first things the slave traders did upon seizing these young men, women and children was shave their heads.  Suddenly these proud people found themselves stripped of family, community and culture and once their heads were shorn, even their most basic identity was taken from them.

This section of Braids, Beads, Truth will offer nuggets of the history of African hair and style.  Some might ask why it matters to look back, or even argue that the history of a peoples’ hair is the most frivolous of subjects.  I disagree.  I think there is something incredibly grounding and even healing in understanding one’s past, especially for a people against whom such gargantuan efforts have been taken to strip them from that very privilege.  It is even more important because so many negative images have been, and continue to be projected towards people of African descent concerning this most integral aspect of their identity as the children of the African diaspora.

I do not expect to write great historical works here.  I simply want to share with you little nuggets of truth.  My hope is that as we discover the rich history of African hair that we might share it with our children and there in that fertile ground their roots will grow deep.

 *My main source for this and future posts on this subject is the wonderful work of Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story:  Untangling the Roots of Black Hair In America.