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Develop me: When black hair grabs more headlines than record-breaking Olympics performance

Columnists
The London 2012 Olympic Games curtain is almost coming down. So far, it has been a highly competitive event. Records have been broken and headlines made on and off the field. The disappearance of the Cameroonian team members, the sacking of an Olympian athlete after meeting his wife in a hotel and the usual doping […]

The London 2012 Olympic Games curtain is almost coming down. So far, it has been a highly competitive event. Records have been broken and headlines made on and off the field.

The disappearance of the Cameroonian team members, the sacking of an Olympian athlete after meeting his wife in a hotel and the usual doping cases were among the off-the-field headlines.

I don’t intend to write about sports today, but of course I don’t deny my addiction to games either.

I wish to discuss black hair, especially after the story of a 16-year-old American girl, Gabby Douglas dominated the headlines instead of her record-breaking performance.

Gabby is an America athlete, who western media prefer to describe as African-American, when we don’t hear about British-American, German-American or British-African.

Nevertheless, Gabby broke several records in the field of gymnastics by winning gold medals in both the individual and team all-around competitions.

That makes her the first black gymnast and first black woman in the history of Olympics history to become the individual all-around champion, and the first American gymnast to win gold in both the individual all-around and team competitions at the same Olympics.

She is also a member of the gold-winning US team at the 2011 World Championships.

For such an achievement for a 16-year-old girl, you would expect more headlines about her performance but alas, it was about her “unkempt” hair — yes, black hair.

It needed the intervention of her mother to call the media to order and remind them that Olympics are not a beauty contest.

“How ignorant is it of people to comment on her hair and she still has more competitions to go. Are you trying to ruin her self confidence?” she told some of the media outlets.

“She has to go out there and feel good about herself and if she feels good about herself on that floor, who are you to criticise her? What have you done to help contribute to her dream, that you felt it necessary to put it out there so that she could see it?”

Surprisingly, most of the stories were written by women persecuting another innocent young girl, who was just enjoying her life in sport.

This, however, raises interesting questions about black hair and the perceptions and pressures around the subject. A colleague once told me that you last see a woman’s actual hair at the age of 16 suggesting that what we see thereafter is artificial.

She went on to say hair defines beauty, identity and class and every woman wants to look beautiful. And for that women are willing to go the extreme lengths to maintain what they perceive to be a beautiful image.

This includes spending the whole day in a hair salon, pay up to $1 000 for a good weave in addition to regular visits for tightening, conditioning and washing. Hair becomes a major part of the family’s monthly budget.

That much of the good hair, as Chris Rock calls it in one of his documentaries, comes India where over 10 million poor women duped to donate their hair as religious sacrifice and is collected from the temple, free, then sold around the world, seems of less importance when it comes to beauty, I suppose. These free hair donations have contributed to a 15 billion black hair industry.

That the sodium hydroxide, the main ingredient in relaxers, can be actually dangerous to the skull is not of importance.

I am told the hair treatment process itself is a very painful experience which women are willing to endure in order to achieve this definition of beauty. Perhaps a number of questions need to be addressed.

Who and what defines one’s beauty? Is your beauty defined by society, partner, yourself or your work place?

Does it mean natural hair has lost its aura in defining beauty? And to what extent does hair define one’s career or vice-versa?

In the case of Gabby, the media do not seem contend with her performance unless she wears a preferred hairstyle.

There are so many myths and theories that dominate the black hair debate.

A common one is that the straighter the hair, the prettier the woman and therefore a woman wearing her natural hair is viewed as unkempt or unprofessional.

Another one is that people who are or were oppressed internalise the ideologies of their oppressors.

When it comes to what is defined as good hair and bad hair, the oppressed tend to emulate the concept of their oppressors, the slave masters.

In my view none of the above theories make sense. Historically, African women have always been treating their hair using locally available chemicals.

The women of the Himba nation in Namibia use a mixture of red soil and animal fat together with other ingredients from wild trees to treat their hair.

To say that treating hair is an emulation of the oppressor is to suggest that African nations did not have a sense of beauty before being oppressed. Therefore, hair treatment is not a foreign concept. And it is also not true that natural hair is unkempt or unprofessional.

There are women who keep it natural and still look very beautiful. But still, who defines women’s beauty?

Tapiwa Gomo is a development consultant based in Pretoria, South Africa