hilitehead

African tribal coiffures are just about the most interesting hair designs I have ever seen. Its extraordinary to evidence how the decorative aesthetic and design elements of these ethnic coiffures adapt and transition into that of contemporary African American hair culture we see today.

I found an interesting text about the domestication of hair in African cultures in context to affects of globalization by Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Deborah Durham, and Jude D. Fokwang. The article gives an intriguing outlook and an in-depth critique about the modernized consciousness surrounding African hair:

“Hair is an apt subject for the study of globalisation and the uneven engagements in it of Africa. Globalization presupposes an intensification of consciousness of the world as a single space and within that space of material flows and interdependence. Entering the global village, African women have not only capitulated to the lure of the west as a sign of modernity, they have also sought to domesticate modernity and locate Africa within the global space. Whether protesting western domination, or celebrating Africa’s contributions to the global village, women in Cameroon, as elsewhere in Africa, have reinvented African (and diaspora African) styles. Braids, rastas, corn rows, gondron, and bananes – all of these are the results of imaginative responses to styles that fashion the consumer herself into a new image. These styles are conspicuously different from the western hair and yet are clearly modern, for the ways that they are entered into the choices presented in a broad space of stylistic options and for the ways in which women who opt for them do so as an act of self-definition and self-invention. Modern African hairstyle should be seen as more than a conventional hybridity of forms of cultural expression and should be appreciated as not so much a marriage of global and local influences but as the offspring of the same marriage.” (Identity, Culture and Politics Volume 3, Number 2, December 2002)

(Images via Nowaygirl.com)