People musn't believe that this hair business only touches women and girls. As a growing boy I had huge hang-ups about my hair, because it wasn't straight straight like X or Y's. My brother and cousin had their hair 'done' every weekend - wash and condition, rollers, hairdryer.

I tried it once, but I couldn't deal with the investment. This is roundabout the time of Saturday Night Fever, with that blowdry scene. But freestyle blowdrying didn't work with our hair.

Anyway, yeah, you grow up conscious about hair being judged. In the coloured community...

of course, everybody's anxious about whatever genetic surprises history has hidden in your bloodline, and when a child is born, the first question family members ask is: And the hair?

And Muslims with straight hair always had a certain kind of, I dunno, skepticism about...

the "asal" (background) of Muslims who didn't have straight hair, as if "kroes" hair signalled some distance from divinity - converts, rather than Muslim by birth. "Boesman", "hotnot" was a common slur straight-haired Muslim kids used. (cf. Joey Rasdien's experiences in Joburg).

As a teenager becoming politicised, listening to reggae, etc., I once challenged my parents about them always going on about our non-African roots - Welsh, my mom claimed; from my dad the obvious roots in Indonesia/Malaysia via slavery. What about our African roots, our Khoi...

and San roots. What African roots, they wanted to know. What about our hair, I asked, where does the kink come from. My parents looked at me as if I had ripped the very earth from under their feet. I mean, my father had to use *a lot* of brylcreme to keep his hair flat and,...

at the end of the day, his hair was marching home. Sy hare kom huistoe.

But we had a way of dealing with people who were prideful over straight hair: "Die hond kak oek hare."

My father's anger at my suggestions that we should also consider the *possibility* of African roots was an index of his racism, of course. It is the mark of someone being confronted by what they consider unholy (but he was a complex being, of course, as we all are). My overall...

point is that among a group of oppressed people such as the 'coloured' community in SA, the myriad gradations of hair texture played out along apartheid lines, yes, and for both girls and boys. Hair is/was invested with foundational identity material. Your sense of self...

rested on how other people, and you yourself, felt about your hair. Some people escaped the bullshit early and were proud of how they looked even if they fell on the bad side of the apartheid scale. I admired those boys.

For others, whether you've overcome the bullshit...

in adulthood or not, hair politics has left its mark deep in people's psyches. It's non-rational (note that I don't call it irrational), and you can't argue with the non-rational. The non-rational don't care for your logic. But because it's non-rational, don't be surprised...

at getting lashed when you stir in there. Our sense of self has a material base in our bodies; if people fuck with how we look, they're fucking with our sense of self. If we've struggled to build that entity in the face of humiliations based on how we look, then that sense...

then that sense of self is precarious, and set on a hair-trigger.