What is this craze for other people’s hair?
There are certain things we do, as a people, that go a long way to show how lowly we think of or about ourselves. As for the gradual loss of our various mother tongues, we can forgive ourselves by rationalising that the world has become a global village and, therefore, we need to be able to communicate unhindered. As far as language is concerned, I do wish we had one world language.
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The inability to immediately understand each other, I suppose, is one reason why we seem to be so suspicious of one another; we immediately feel more comfortable with others who speak our language, especially when we are away from home.
If I'm not mistaken, it is stated somewhere in the Bible that the multiplicity of languages came about as a punishment for man’s attempt to challenge God. God, in his infinite wisdom, therefore, decided to sow confusion among us and, as the cliché goes, the rest is history.
Physical bodily characteristics
As to why God made some people ‘white, ‘red’, ‘yellow, and ‘black’, there are all kinds of theories, most of which are wicked jokes. Seriously, I've no idea. Along with the different complexions of the various races are distinguishing hair types.
The ‘white’ ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ have long hairs that mostly hang over their shoulders. Africans have been blessed with short curly hairs. These hair types have evolved over millions of years, depending on both genes and the environment/climate. We have our type of hair because God gave it to us (genes) and also because of our climate/environment.
Changing hair styles
In the 70s, 80s and early 90s, black men and women were perming their hair to bring it closer to the whiteman’s.
Then we started changing the shapes of our noses. And to make the transformation complete, we bleached our skins to look white.
Currently, perming by men, nose reconstruction and bleaching appear to have subsided.
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However, our women have decided to go further by buying other people’s hair to fix onto their natural hair in order to look Caucasian. They have resorted to buying Brazilian, Peruvian, Mexican, Argentinian and Indian hair. Mind you, these hairs are not cheap.
More worrying is the fact that we are not 100 per cent certain the condition the people from whom these hairs were harvested were in. Could they be from corpses, or from people with some infectious diseases?
Granted that these hairs go through some ‘treatment’, is it not demeaning to our humanity to pretend to be who we are not? Let no one try to justify this by comparing these to clothes; after all, we are wearing western clothing. This is completely different. It is tantamount to telling God we are not happy with our ‘construction,’ so we wish to change our looks.
I was watching BBC TV earlier when they showed an Indian religious ceremony during which men, women and children have their hair completely shaved.
The symbolism of this hair-shaving is two-fold; having your burdens and sins shaved away. As you can imagine, this is a lot of hair (India’s population is over a billion).
In the same documentary, a smart businessman has formed RAJ International Hair Company and goes from house to house buying these hairs, which he treats, and EUREKA!
There is a ready market for him in Africa where the women are so ashamed of their own God-given hair that they would spend very scarce foreign exchange to buy hair extentions.
Challenge
I am throwing a challenge to our enlightened women, women of substance, women of influence and power to lead a crusade to reject non-African hair. They should be innovative in creating very nice styles from our natural hair.
They are role models to our young girls. If they are brave enough to do this publicly, one can only imagine the confidence that it will inspire in our young ones not to be ashamed of their natural looks.
Sometimes, it amazes me the speed with which we are ready to condemn certain practices from the West (homosexuality and other bad behaviour) and yet we are aptly trying hard to be like them.
Shame on us.