the ministry of cultural affairs
African Beauty
- PHOTOGRAPHY: JEAN-FIDÈLE E. ANANOU / THE REPUBLIC.
the ministry of cultural affairs
African Beauty
- PHOTOGRAPHY: JEAN-FIDÈLE E. ANANOU / THE REPUBLIC.
The first time YellowSisi, one of Nigeria’s foremost natural hair gurus, came into my consciousness was when I realized my natural hair could actually grow; immense growth wasn’t something only attainable by the African American influencers I gawked at on social media, for whom I had attributed it to something in the weather or their phenotypic makeup. It was 2016, I was in my second year of A Levels at my sixth form college in Lagos and one of my three new roommates, Amoni, had a mane of natural hair that could most accurately be described as a showstopper. I would watch Amoni stand in front of the mirror and go through her regimen, comprising the use of oils whose sweet aromas consumed the whole room. She would be gentle, meticulous, skilled, a huge contrast to the way I was with my own natural hair: harsh, brash and painfully unskilled.
I had transitioned from relaxed hair to natural hair for the second time over a year before. The first time was inspired by my immediate elder sister, who had suddenly come back from school in the UK with a gorgeous Afro. But I didn’t know how to care for my transitioning hair and the combined chaos of my two textures—relaxed and natural—made my eldest sister convince me to relax it back so that it could look presentable. Then, I decided to go again, convincing myself that I would take care of the hair better. And I did, but not nearly as much as Amoni, whom I would soon learn was the daughter of Kelechi Yibo-Koko, better known as YellowSisi, the owner of one of Lagos’s most prominent natural hair salons. I learned what I could from observing Amoni and, sometimes, running to ask her questions like my personal Natural Hair Google. Then I followed YellowSisi’s Instagram page and digested her regular doses of hair care nuggets. I always say that I went natural in 2015, but I didn’t start growing my hair till 2017, and that growth journey would not have been possible without YellowSisi and her daughter.
A MOTHER’S LOVE
Seven years later, I sat across from YellowSisi and shared this tale with her, showering her with praises for changing my story—dare I say, life. She was clad in a colourful, bedazzled Ankara top paired with jeans, and her two-strand twists were wound into an updo. We sat in the YellowSisi two-storey building, which was not just a hair salon, but a complex for the nurturing of African beauty, comprising a section for selling Ankara clothes, a makeup studio and two separate sections for styling natural hair. Nestled in Lekki Phase One, the complex was animated, with colourful graffiti right from the compound’s entrance, the building interior’s yellow walls, and pieces of furniture that were covered in African print.
It became abundantly clear to me that YellowSisi was not just a natural hair salon owner, but someone who wholeheartedly championed the philosophy of natural hair—authentic Africanness. ‘If you go through my page, you can’t hear any foreign music. Because I’m like, let’s do it right. If we’re going to embrace our culture, let’s embrace it in all its totality,’ she passionately told me. But it wasn’t always about the philosophy for YellowSisi. In fact, Yibo-Koko’s foray into the world of natural hair was borne out of her love for her daughter. She said:
I was on a bus in the UK and I saw a girl with two-strand twists. I was very curious, so I asked her what extensions she used on her hair. But she said it was actually her hair and I couldn’t believe it. I mean, what do you mean it’s your hair? I only believed her when she unravelled one twist, and I was blown away. I probed further about what products she had used to achieve this style, but she just said that her hair wasn’t relaxed and she used shea butter to twist it together. I found it very interesting because relaxing Amoni’s hair was a nightmare. I wasn’t even thinking of myself then, because I had relatively good, relaxed hair. But Amoni’s hair wasn’t growing very well and she cried a lot anytime I relaxed her hair, even when I used relaxers with no lye in them.
That lone encounter (circa 2010) plunged Yibo-Koko into two years of research. She read any book she could find about natural hair care, rummaged through YouTube videos and even visited Jamaican salons in the UK to learn their techniques for handling natural hair. Then she finally took the plunge and started transitioning, dumping relaxers in favour of a journey that she ultimately felt would be necessary for her daughter’s well-being. When she got tired of handling two hair textures, she did the Big Chop, cutting off the old relaxed hair and leaving behind only the new growth of natural hair. This bold decision coincided with her family’s move back to Port Harcourt, Nigeria. There, she continued the journey until she mastered caring for her hair, enough to get unending questions about it from other women at her church. Then, after two to three years of being natural, she cut Amoni’s relaxed hair off too.
The sheer amount of attention she got from women around her convinced Yibo-Koko to go into the business of natural hair and, thus, YellowSisi was born. She would travel abroad to buy products for natural hair so she could sell them back home at church events, pop-up exhibitions and even online. On 1 November 2014, after months of styling numerous church members’ hair for free, she launched YellowSisi Natural Hair Lounge in Agip, Port Harcourt. According to YellowSisi, hers was the first exclusive natural hair salon in Port Harcourt. About a year later, Tolu Adeniyi, a telecommunications professional, visited the salon for her Big Chop, after coming to the realization that she could not truly achieve healthy hair with the continued use of relaxers. Adeniyi did not know it yet, but less than two years later, she would open Ibadan’s first exclusive natural hair salon, Frollicles Natural Hair Studio.
AN EXPERT COMPANION
In January 2016, Adeniyi moved to Ibadan to head the zonal business operations for Airtel Nigeria. She continued the natural hair journey for both herself and her daughter, but her search for natural hair-friendly salons in the city of brown roofs proved futile. Instead, the workers at every salon she visited encouraged her to relax herself and her daughter’s hair, so she swore off salons and decided to take their haircare and styling into her own hands. However, Adeniyi would constantly be stopped in her tracks by strangers who were curious about her hair. She told me:
People would ask me who did my hair, and I would say I did it myself. They would also ask where I got my products from. It kept happening again and again. A lot of people genuinely wanted to know what to do with their hair, but some of them weren’t very internet savvy and didn’t know how to check out blogs for information [like I had]. They preferred having someone they could meet to put them through, so I was like, okay, there’s a market for this thing. I didn’t come to Ibadan planning to start a business at all, but when that opportunity presented itself, I thought, okay, let’s meet the needs of these people.
Adeniyi travelled to Lagos to study at the feet of Kemi Lewis, the founder of KL’s Natural Beauty Bar, ‘Nigeria’s pioneer natural hair salon’. For two weeks, Adeniyi learnt the tricks of the trade from Lewis and her salon manager. Then Adeniyi travelled back home to begin the arduous task of finding hairstylists to hire and train, arduous because most of these hairstylists came with so-called bad habits that they had to unlearn. ‘They, like many people, felt that natural hair was tough and could withstand any mismanagement, not realizing it’s actually the most fragile hair type because of its structure,’ Adeniyi shared.
On 9 September 2017, Frollicles Natural Hair Studio opened on Awolowo Avenue, Bodija, Ibadan. One of Ibadan’s more affluent neighbourhoods, Bodija served as a prime location as it was home to the demographic for whom affordability would not be a problem. Bodija is also just a ten-minute drive from the University of Ibadan (UI), where hundreds of female students were already jumping on the natural hair trend. Additionally, the neighbourhood was in proximity to Adeniyi’s office, so she could keep tabs on her business whilst still thriving in her primary job.
Frollicles was the first natural hair salon I visited in Nigeria. Before then, I frequented regular salons where hairstylists would comb my hair like they were hellbent on bringing it to submission. My hair would fall out in tufts so that any growth I may have had would easily be lost with a simple salon visit. So, at a point, I started combing my hair myself at salons, before I dumped regular salons altogether and took my hairstyling into my hands. When I visited Frollicles, at the recommendation of a friend who was a UI student, I learnt what it meant for my hair to be treated with unadulterated love and care by someone other than myself. The stylists were gentle and thorough, following the processes that Adeniyi had brilliantly put in place. Frollicles’ services were definitely more expensive than regular hair salons, as I would learn was generally the case with natural hair salons, but the experience was well worth it. On 1 July 2024, after six years and ten months of serving the Ibadan natural hair community, Frollicles Natural Hair Studio announced its closure, a decision that was brought about by Adeniyi’s relocation from Ibadan.
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A CHILDHOOD DREAM
By 2022, Frollicles was my go-to whenever I travelled to Ibadan to visit my parents, but I needed a natural hair haven in Lagos too, the city where I now lived and worked. I asked a ‘naturalista’—a portmanteau of ‘natural’ and ‘sista’—who lived close to me where she made her hair and she mentioned Ujinni’s Hair Clinique in Ketu. The stellar service I got on that first visit to Ujinni’s was enough to keep me a loyal customer for two years, till date. But aside from the hairstylists’ service, one thing that has kept me glued to Ujinni’s chairs is the warmth of its founder, Ufuoma Ejiniwebi. On almost every visit, I see her in her element, walking around and smilingly checking in with clients to see if their needs are being met. A certified holistic and clinical trichologist, she beams the most when she is educating curious clients on the science of natural hair.
Nine years ago, Ejiniwebi left a thriving, but unfulfilling, career in the banking sector to pursue her passion, haircare. Her decision, though seemingly rash, was actually more than two decades in the making. Ejiniwebi’s love for hair began during her teenage years in the 1990s when she would help out at her mother’s salon. Ejiniwebi learnt how to relax hair and do Jheri curls, the common hairstyles at the time. Even after she enrolled at the University of Benin to study Accounting in 1994, she kept on with styling her schoolmates’ hair. In 1996, her older sister came back from Japan and introduced her to a new trend: sewing in weave extensions, or ‘weave-ons’ as Nigerians call it. After mastering that technique, Ejiniwebi’s services were even higher in demand on campus. However, when she bagged her degree two years later, opening a hair salon, while all her classmates pursued careers in the corporate world, was not a welcome option.
It took Ejiniwebi 17 years and a truckload of courage to finally pursue her childhood dream in 2015, even if it meant she had to start from scratch by taking an eight-month-long course at Nature’s Gentle Touch Hair Institute in Victoria Island, Lagos. Although Ejiniwebi had nearly a decade under her belt in hairstyling experience, she felt she needed something to set her salon apart from the rest and she realized learning about natural hair care at the institute was the way to go. During the programme, she interned at three salons, within the purview of the institute, and learnt basic trichology, opening her eyes to how little she actually knew about hair itself. ‘Growing up, nobody would tell you, “Oh, this is how hair behaves. When it behaves like this, that means you have to use this or use that,”’ Ejiniwebi told me. ‘So what really intrigued me first was the science of hair, and the science of hair wasn’t using chemicals [like relaxers]. It was the science of hair on the natural, kinky hair itself.’
Ejiniwebi spent most of 2015 transitioning from relaxed hair and applying the principles she learnt in the classroom to her own hair. By February 2016, she had graduated from the hair institute and become a master of her own hair. Not too long after, she began the process of scouting for a prime location. At the time, Ejiniwebi only found five salons in Lagos that either tended exclusively to natural hair or were natural hair-friendly: KL’s Natural Beauty Bar, YellowSisi Natural Hair Salon (YellowSisi had moved to Lagos earlier that year), TasalaHQ Hair and Beauty, and Nature’s Gentle Touch were all sprawled across the Island, while O’Naturals Beauty in Ogudu appeared to be the only natural hair salon serving the Lagos Mainland. Thus, Ejiniwebi decided to launch Ujinni’s Hair Clinique in Ikosi-Ketu, with the intention of serving the Magodo Phase II-Ketu axis.
The maiden iteration of Ujinni’s, a small space with only a couple of styling chairs, opened on 6 August 2016 and, by 2020, Ejiniwebi launched another branch in Olowora, another neighbourhood on the Lagos Mainland, to serve as her trichology clinic. There, she could treat clients who suffered from alopecia and various forms of scalp issues, gradually helping them to build back their self-esteem. Later on, the Ketu branch physically expanded later on and could house a private clinic section. Today, the Olowora branch is purely a salon that caters to clients in the Magodo Phase I-Berger axis.
Aside from the day-to-day running of the two salons, Ejiniwebi devotes her time to the ‘education of natural hair’: teaching Nigerian women to prioritize hair health over styling and to appreciate their curls in all their glory. Ejiniwebi passionately asserted:
I see some people who say they cannot do this natural hair thing and I ask them one question: this is the same hair that grows out of your head every moment and you want to tell me you cannot deal with what comes out of your body? God did not make a mistake making you an African, so be positive and deal with it.
Nonetheless, she attributed the world’s increased acceptance of Black natural hair to the labour of the African American community. Indeed, this community laid the foundation for the contemporary global natural hair movement, but not until decades after they created the relaxed hair movement.
BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL
The abolition of slavery in the US in 1865 was surely not the end of the roaring racism that African Americans faced in the US. African Americans struggled to find their place in society, and they realized one way of increasing their chances was to look less like themselves and more like the people supposedly at the top. Kinky hair was undeniably Negro, but it was also one aspect of their negritude that could easily be toned down. Ergo, hair straightening. Pressing combs (or hot combs) became a mainstay amongst Black folk from the 1880s, especially as popularized by Madam C.J. Walker, a Black beauty magnate who was the first female self-made millionaire in America.
The following century, Garrett A. Morgan, a Black businessman from Kentucky, invented the first hair relaxers. In 1905, Morgan accidentally discovered that a liquid (containing a corrosive chemical called lye) which he had been using to service his sewing machines, could also be used to straighten hair. He tested the liquid on his dog’s hair and then his own hair, and it worked. Recognizing a golden business opportunity, he made the liquid into a refining cream and by 1913, he had begun to market it under G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Company. However, according to the New York Times, the use of chemical straighteners did not become an explosive movement until the 1950s, when a chemist from Chicago, George E. Johnson, invented a more effective formula, still maintaining the inclusion of lye (sodium hydroxide). In 1957, Johnson, alongside his wife, Joan, launched the highly successful Ultra Sheen Hair Relaxer under the Johnson Products Company. Subsequently, several other hair relaxer brands sprung up, most notably Dark & Lovely, and PCJ.
The 1950s also saw the invention of sew-in weaves, patented as ‘ HairWeeve’, by a Louisiana-born Black woman named Christina Jenkins. Jenkins travelled around the US and other parts of the world to teach Black women the technique of attaching weaves to a cornrow base on the scalp. The use of straight weaves and relaxers continued to thrive in the African American community for decades, as it afforded them the chance to have ‘good hair’, the word ‘good’ being synonymous with straight, Eurocentric and socially acceptable. Wearing good hair allowed Black women to get better jobs and get into otherwise inaccessible spaces. In TV commercials, relaxers were marketed with buzzwords like ‘soft’, ‘silky’, ‘luxurious’ and ‘sheen’. By the mid-1980s, many brands started producing ‘no-lye’ relaxers, since lye was associated with intense scalp burns, ushering in the use of buzzwords like ‘healthy’, ‘gentle’ and ‘conditioning’ in relaxer marketing. The no-lye formula replaced sodium hydroxide with the milder calcium hydroxide or lithium hydroxide.
While most of Black America had embraced the use of relaxers, the ‘Black Power’ movement of the 1960s saw the emergence of a crop of African Americans who resisted white supremacy with their hair. While fighting for Black civil rights, renowned activists like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver wore their humongous Afros as a political statement and a symbol of Black pride, influencing many other women to do the same. However, the concurrent ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement took on a more cultural approach to resistance as it sought to dispel the notion that Black people’s natural features, including kinky hair, were less desirable than those of their white counterparts. In January 1962, Kwame Braithwaite, an African-American photojournalist, put together a fashion show that catalysed the Black is Beautiful movement. The revolutionary show, titled ‘Naturally ‘62: The Original African Coiffure and Fashion Extravaganza Designed to Restore Our Racial Pride & Standards’ featured local activists turned models (a group called Grandassa Models) arrayed in Afro-inspired clothes and jewellery while flaunting their natural hair, deep chocolate skin and full-figured bodies. Braithwaite, his brother Elombe Brathe and the Grandassa Models essentially made the ‘Black is Beautiful’ statement part of Black pop culture by using the slogan on their programme flyers and other ephemera. Soon enough, the statement was so widely used that it wasn’t even directly tied to them anymore.
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THE CREAMY CRACK
Still, the use of relaxers had spread beyond the US and become a sensation amongst Black folk across the globe. It is not clear when hair relaxers came into Nigeria, but from my conversations with several Nigerian women in their 50s and 60s, it appears that relaxing hair had become a trend in the country by the late 1970s/early 1980s. Revlon and TCB seemed to dominate the market, as they were the most frequently mentioned brands. While social acceptability was the primary motivating factor for straightening hair in the US, Nigerians straightened theirs primarily for better manageability—which is still largely the case today. According to my mother, those who couldn’t afford to buy relaxers used hot irons instead. They would place the iron clamp or comb on a stove until it was red-hot, then they would wrap a cloth around the handle of the tool and use it to stretch the hair, which would have been lined with petroleum jelly. A 54-year-old Lagos-based entrepreneur, who asked to be identified as Mrs O, also mentioned the use of local soda mixes which were ‘cheaper but deadly.’ Temitope Sonuga, a 56-year-old lawyer also based in Lagos, shared that before she started using relaxers in her teens, she used a product called Wellastrate which slightly straightened her hair and lasted for one to two months. Initially, relaxers, especially the less harmful no-lye relaxers, were only accessible to people of a certain economic class, but with time, they grew to become essential for the average Nigerian woman.
Meanwhile, back in the US, the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement, particularly with regard to natural hair, seemed to resurrect in the 2000s. The second wave of the movement was characterized by the growing popularity of natural haircare brands like Cantu Beauty and Shea Moisture, natural hair blogs and YouTube channels with thriving naturalista communities, and empowering songs like India Arie’s I Am Not My Hair. In 2009, Chris Rock, an African American comedian and actor, released Good Hair, an award-winning documentary that furthered the conversation around Black hair culture—though it failed to offer a critical analysis on the subject. Americanah, the 2013 novel by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, does a better job at capturing the essence of the 2000s American natural hair movement, from the viewpoint of a Nigerian immigrant named Ifemelu. I know a number of Nigerian naturalistas who were inspired by the fictional Ifemelu’s natural hair journey.
The natural hair movement has continued to gain ground since then, but I would argue that the third wave began in the late 2010s when reports of the harmful effects of relaxers started to spring up. The medical community began to link the prolonged use of relaxers to health complications like pre-term birth, infertility, breast cancer, uterine leiomyomata (fibroids) and uterine cancer. The latter health complication was revealed in a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) study published in October 2022. The study, conducted on 33,497 US women aged 35-74 over a period of eleven years, revealed that women who reported frequent use of hair straightening products like relaxers were more than twice as likely to go on to develop uterine cancer compared to those who did not use such products. Consequently, according to a Reuters report, thousands of African American women sued relaxer-producing companies like L’Oreal and Revlon between October 2022 and November 2023. In response, the companies claimed that the NIH study was flawed as ‘the science does not support a causal link.’
In 2015, Adanna Ifeoma Egwuatu, a Nigerian life counsellor and business consultant, was waiting to give birth to her second daughter in the US when she was advised by her doctor to cut down on her relaxer usage for the sake of her baby’s health. She then decided to trade relaxers for texturizers, a supposedly milder alternative. However, a scarring experience quickly prompted her to research the ingredients in both relaxers and texturizers, causing her to discover reports about the products’ links to the aforementioned medical conditions. She told me:
I was shattered, I was broken, because it wasn’t about me anymore. I think that was when the burden came and I would say it came from God because I lost my sleep, I lost my peace, and I was like, people are going to die, people are dying, people are getting sick. I need to forfeit my comfort and my personal dreams and do something about this.
This God-given burden led Adanna—as she prefers to be called—to start Photizo Life Foundation, an organization committed to raising awareness about the toxic chemicals in hair and beauty products, in January 2016. Upon her return to Nigeria, she put together a team to start the foundation’s first project, the African Hair Summit, where African hair-related issues could be discussed on a large scale. She opened the summit up to other Africans since, ‘calling it just Nigerian would have been selfish when our sisters and their families can also benefit from this across the continent.’ The wildly successful inaugural event was held in June 2016 at Sheraton Hotels, Abuja. When COVID struck in 2020, the summit became a virtual event and has maintained that format since then. I was privileged to attend the 2024 edition on 30 June via Zoom, which had nearly 300 people from all over Africa and even the Caribbean in attendance—attendees were asked to indicate where they were joining from in the chat box. The 90-minute pre-recorded show featured a panel discussion on haircare, styling tutorials, a particularly endearing talk by South African natural hair influencer, Ivone Numbi; an insightful talk about building a sustainable beauty business by Lewis of KL’s Natural Beauty Bar, spoken word poetry and even a fashion show. The show also included vox pop interviews wherein Adanna hit the streets to ask both men and women their perceptions about natural hair. One of the interviewees maintained that relaxed hair was equally good as natural hair until Adanna politely informed her of the health risks associated with relaxers; then, she decided there and then to let go of relaxers.
Adanna, through Photizo Life Foundation, also launched the Afro Hair Culture & Beauty Festival in 2019. ‘The summit was always very professional,’ Adanna explained to me. ‘We had the panels and all those other things in place, but we wanted to give it a different dimension where after you’ve gotten the information on African hair and the health benefits of keeping your natural hair, we then bring people from all cultures to celebrate our hairstyles, our diversity and uniqueness.’ The festival, which is reminiscent of Braithwaite’s ‘Naturally’ fashion shows, has been held at hotels in Lagos and Abuja since then. Another one of the foundation’s initiatives is the Natural Hair Community for Africa on WhatsApp, which was only launched in April 2024 but already has over 1,000 members. The community is a safe space where Black women from Africa and beyond can seek tips on haircare and styling, market their hair-related products and services, and also discuss the thrills, trials and triumphs of being a naturalista. Adanna Ifeoma Egwuatu went from being someone who could not do without relaxing her hair every two weeks, to someone who influences thousands of African women to let go of ‘the creamy crack’ and embrace their African beauty.
A LONG WAY TO GO
The Nigerian natural hair community has grown tremendously since what I would call its infancy stage in the early to mid-2010s. At the time, sporting natural hair was a hot new trend that seemed to mostly have been adopted by Nigerians who had caught the fire while living in the West. One such person was Somkele Iyamah Idhalama who, after bagging a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from McMaster University in Canada, returned to Nigeria to pursue an acting career. Fed up with relaxers and curious about natural hair, Idhalama had chopped off her relaxed hair during her university days. After realizing her natural hair was actually manageable and that she liked the way it looked, she happily decided to stick to it. However, her budding head of natural hair was initially met with some hostility in Nollywood, and instantly swept under wigs during her acting auditions. Natural hair was still largely considered unfashionable. ‘Growing up in Nigeria, if you had natural hair, you were either part of the Deeper Life church or SU (Scripture Union); they don’t wear earrings, they’re not fashionable and they wear natural hair,’ Idhalama mused.
With time though, natural hair became cool enough to be featured on screen. More celebrities, as well as everyday Nigerians, started sporting natural hair in the form of two-strand twists, elaborate updos or even just as Afros. The business side of the movement has also seen immense growth. When YellowSisi started her salon in Port Harcourt in 2014, her shelf was dominated by foreign haircare brands but now she says that she only uses a couple of non-Nigerian brands on her clients. Indigenous formulators like Natural Nigerian and Aby Naturals now hold a significant market share, and more formulators of organic hair products made from locally sourced ingredients are popping up day by day. Events like Afro Hair Culture & Beauty Festival and Natural Kinks Festival, where many of these indigenous brands are platformed, pull in massive crowds year after year. We’ve also seen the growing popularity of textured wigs and ponytails, with a brand called Be Natural Girl, formerly Natural Girl Wigs, at its helm. There has been progress, but not as much as it could be.
Natural hair, and certain Afrocentric hairstyles, are still largely deemed inappropriate in corporate spaces. Even a top executive like Dupe Olusola, the managing director and chief executive officer of Transcorp Hotels PLC, grappled with the decision to wear her hair in cornrows for fear of looking ‘razz’ or unsophisticated. In October 2023, a viral video in which Nigerian preacher, Olabisi Adamu, painted natural hair as unattractive sparked a lot of outrage on X (formerly known as Twitter). ‘Who natural hair help? Natural hair is not selling market! When you marry, you can off [sic] your wig because you have entered…But before you enter, don’t be caught unfresh [sic],’ Adamu charged. Two months later, there was another viral video in which former reality TV star, Khloe Oluwabusayo Abiri, alluded to the idea that natural hair was not glamorous enough to wear to major events. Abiri added that she had her natural hair under her wig but would only wear it on more ordinary occasions. This ties into Adeniyi of Frollicle’s observation:
I look forward to more people wearing their natural hair out, because many naturalistas hide their hair under wigs. If you check ten people wearing wigs, seven of them probably have natural hair underneath, but they are not confident or comfortable enough to let it out and let the hair breathe. We need to accept that this is how the hair is, this is the nature of the hair and roll with it. But that mindset, that sleek or straight is all that’s beautiful has been ingrained.
This is not to speak against wearing wigs, because they are a protective style, after all. But when the wigs stay on all year round, and Nigerian women break the bank to buy weaves unethically sourced from Asian heads, it begs for some introspection. Even though natural hair has seen more representation in Nollywood, the archetype of the powerful or attractive woman is still largely a woman who wears these so-called luxury weaves/wigs. YellowSisi cites Kate Henshaw, Yvonne Jegede and Beverly Naya as Nollywood actresses who have been radical about on-screen natural hair representation and have even brought the salon in for consultation and styling on some projects. However, she adds that there’s only so much these women can do when a director insists on a certain look.
Before she moved back to Canada in 2017, Idhalama had tried to improve the representation of natural hair in Nollywood by wearing her hair out to red carpet events and in movies because according to her, ‘you won’t see beauty in a lot of things if it’s not represented at the most prestigious or opulent places.’ Idhalama believes that the inadequate representation of natural hair in Nigerian entertainment can also be tied to Western media as they largely dictate what we consider valuable. In Hollywood, Black women wearing their natural hair is still not the norm, especially in formal settings, and so that has seeped into Nollywood as well. She said:
We’ve boxed our hair looking a certain way to being in a certain kind of environment and that’s why when you’re doing a movie because you want to sell, you’re not going to put something that doesn’t appear as attractive to the audience…The problem is if we don’t show what our natural hair without chemical processing looks like in that environment, the media will not portray it and if they don’t portray it, people won’t think that it is to be expected in that environment. I think it’s both feeding each other and if you have the power to tell stories, you have the power to be on stage and you’re influential, you should do something about it.
Indeed, influential figures should do what they can to ensure that Black hair, the way it grows out of our scalps, is not seen as unattractive or less than. However, the responsibility also lies with us everyday Nigerians, to be resolute about representing our kinky hair in spaces that have proven to be unwelcoming, to practise defiance until what is seen as abnormal becomes the new normal. This essay is not an attempt at proselytization, a charged call for all Nigerian women to transition to natural hair, but a call for questioning. Questioning the roots of our perceptions towards Black hair, be it natural or relaxed, and moving forward with the benefit of enlightenment⎈
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