African Hair Styles

African hair sculpture is what they call it and Africa and to them it is an art. Africans hardly ever leave their hair or their body plain or in the book, it says "natural" state. It says that they spend a lot of time and energy on grooming and self-admiration. Sounds like it's the same way there as it is here because I love to "groom." Ha ha. Anyway, it says they spend a lot of time on their hair and looks but special attention to their hair. The "art" of hairdressing was practiced mostly for women and male hairdressers can hardly be found. The book says that the skill of hairdressing has been handed down from generation to generation and requires artistry, manual dexterity, and patience because many of their styles are elaborate and time-consuming. For most African women hair is a medium for creative self-expression.

Now their hair is styled for many different reasons. In some parts of Africa, hairstyles help to determine age, in others ceremonial occasions are marked by special styles. The design and construction of hair depends on different factors, some hair styles may need sisal, clay, the bark of trees, or cloth pads; in other cases it could involve intricate knitting, braiding, and threading of the hair. The most complex styles can take up to several hours and sometimes even days. That's true here also and we got it from them. The slave master's wife's would watch the women braid the kids and each other's hair and would want their hair to be the same as theirs because the styles were so beautiful. Anyway, they found that you could find complex styles only in the interior of the continent where people still live "primitive" and they have time for all that stuff. In urban areas, the styles are simpler where they have adopted western styles.

OK, if you draw a line running from Dakar, Senegal in the west and to Khartoum, Sudan in the east you will see that to the north of the line live the light-skinned, straight-haired Hamites and Semites of North Africa. These would have been the so called "house slaves" or could even be passed of as being white in some cases. Around the dividing line, the people would have been brown-skinned and would have had curly hair because of Semite or Hamite intermixtures. They were in the middle of everything, they were not house slaves and not in the field just there, but doing work nonetheless. South of the line live the dark-skinned, kinky-haired members of the black race. Each region has it's own traditional styles, and each group of people has it's own code of aesthetics, which distinguishes it among the multitude of ethnic groups in Africa.

Hieroglyphs and sculptures illustrate the attention Africans have paid to their hair for thousands of years. Some of the earliest Nok and Benin busts from Nigeria show intricate hairstyles. Men and women from all levels of society wore their hair to indicate their place of birth, material status, occupation and wealth. Religious vows, significant events, and symbols could be represented in braid work. In addition to creating a great do, the stylist also transmitted cultural values.

Flamboyant hair sculptures are in the evidence today in African cultural groups. Women from diverse areas of the continent have a common technique of wrapping a section of hair with thick thread from the scalp to the hair ends, which can be made to stand up straight or can be worn down, framing the face. The wrapped sections of hair can be coiled and attached to each other with more thread, yielding very intricate creations suited for special occasions.

Stylistic considerations have become blurred across the boundaries of geography, ethnicity, gender, and time, but contemporary African-inspired hairstyles continue to demonstrate techniques and aesthetics from ancient times. This art survived the middle Passage, the time when slave trading was in full force. Braiding and hair wrapping have been practiced in their most basic forms for as long as there have been African-Americans,