Shaved Heads and Hidden Curls: Growing Up As a Black Girl in Nigeria.

Even in Africa, Being Black Is a Battle.

Months ago, I came across an article about a South African girl, Zulaikha Patel, who won a case on the matter of being allowed to wear her afro hair in school. When I saw it, I was happy of course. I went through the comments, and someone said, “How is this even possible in Africa?” Then I realized it was actually bizarre she had to fight for that right in the first place, it’s bizarre that that was how I grew up, how we grew up in the first place and no one saw anything wrong with it.

It’s been over five years since I had to conform to the rules of the secondary school system in Nigeria, and I hate to say it, but I forgot how frustrating it was. Because my hair was kinky, because I was African, and Nigerian, and Black—and in my Black, African, and Nigerian country—I could not let my hair out. It always had to be braided or threaded, and it was unacceptable for it to be braided with braiding hair. Some of the schools I went to even had uniform styles that they would dictate for us to wear—always—such as cornrows, to prevent styling and manipulation for the women. And they would be styles that severely restricted any form of self-expression when it came to our hair.

Now, you may be thinking, “Rules are rules, right? They just want everything to be orderly.” Let me blow your mind. Anytime we had an international or non-dual citizen student—more specifically of a different race—you know what, let me double down. Anytime we had someone biracial who was Black and another race, or even just Black with a looser curl pattern, they did not have to follow the rules.

Now, let me preface: having international students in your secondary school was rare. I grew up in Abuja—it’s our capital—so it has the potential to attract international students. Not necessarily British or American, just non-Nigerian students.

My female Asian classmates could put their hair up in a ponytail, use barrettes and such. The biracial students could have their curls fall freely, and they would still be within the rules of the school’s dress code. But if your hair was 4b or 4c, under no circumstance could your hair be out. It had to be braided. And certain braid styles like box braids—without braiding hair—were not permitted in some of the schools I went to because it was said to be inappropriate or a “distraction to the girls.” If we were too focused on our vanity, we wouldn’t focus on academic success. What in the tarnation was going on? The craziest part of it all is that we saw nothing wrong with this.

If you think this sounds bad, I’m about to make you more uncomfortable. At the young age of 9, me and the majority of the girls who started secondary school with me had to shave our heads. I said shave. Clean. Not trim—clean cut. It didn’t hurt—physically, but it was “necessary” so that we wouldn’t become so obsessed with our vanity that we’d forget the reason we were going to boarding school in the first place. It was psychologically damaging to be Frank. I felt so ugly for so long and some schools, particularly christian schools, won’t let you in unless you were shaven, at least for your first year—like mine. At an age where one is supposed to encourage young girls to feel confident in themselves, looks and all; Nigeria’s daughters were told to suppress their beauty in order to be useful. What do you think that does to a child’s mind?

I had noticed in Nigeria, whenever there was someone who was of a different race—particularly white, but more specifically white non-Africans—or any race, really, and they visited for a conference or we were on an excursion to a facility or summit and they were present with Black Africans, there was always a level of preferential treatment given to them.

Even our grandmothers, and the aunties of our mothers, encouraged bleaching and being fair-skinned. That was seen as the best. They encouraged any of the children they could send abroad to marry “white”, so their children could be mixed—as if lighter was better. Most dolls we got white. Colonization had ended, and yet we still wore suits and pinafores to school, with socks and suede shoes—only wearing native attire to church or on special occasions.

Now, there is nothing wrong with marrying outside your race, but they would say it as if it was a flavor of person and that was plain disrespectful to all races and ethnicities involved.

I’m not claiming that the Nigerian people want to be any other race. If you know anything about Nigerians, we are overtly proud of our heritage. Too loud sometimes but as we should. The thing is, I’ve had the suspicion that we feel we need to be a hybrid of some sort—a mixture of something other than Afrocentric, even in the way we talk. God forbid all we possess are the same features of our ancestors. Because why else would they think there’s something wrong with my afro being out, kinked up. With my imagined curl pattern (my hair like a metal sponge but I love it)—they’d think it unkempt. And yet they don’t look at the girl with looser curls or no curls at all—with her hair out and blowing in the wind—as unkempt.

My thought process, now looking back is: Why do you hate what I look like? Is it because I look like you? Why don’t you like what you look like? Why don’t you like yourself?

I’ve never—never—thought that being Black was anything less than beautiful. I loved my skin then, and I love it now. The older I get, the more I realize that maybe it’s because my mother reminded me of how beautiful I was. Because I saw my dark-skinned sisters and aunties all around me feeling their best and having their husbands treat them like queens. Maybe I had a narrow escape—because even till now, some of my lovely country people still think the same way, and they are not willing to change. Being Black—even in Africa—sometimes na war. But we move.

The thing is, this has nothing to do with the rest of the world—but Nigeria. There comes a time when we need to shift the narrative from “this is what they did” to “this is what we need to do to fix what they did.” I understand the damage that has been drilled into the psyche of some of the Nigerian people on this topic. I haven’t eaten today so please spare me in the comments.

Things like this cause young Black African girls to believe something is wrong with them, or that their hair is dirty and unkempt. Boys also can’t keep their hair. And locs are stigmatized—in Africa, in Nigeria. I think a lot about when Malcolm X asked, “Who told you to hate yourself?” How did we get so comfortable?

Even beyond hair—which I feel is the perfect example of this—the things we wear, what we view as proper and professional. I was shocked to my boots when my younger brother told me that they were teaching him history in school—because all they taught us was civic education. And that was everything after colonization. This is a good correlation as to why tribes in the same country dislike themselves. We know very little about each other and more about the people who colonized us. And the little we know is 89.64% prejudice.

When did being Black, being African, become too much for where we came from? The colonizers are physically dead and gone, but see how they live rent-free in your heads—influencing the way you talk, the way you view your people, the way you view yourself.

It’s just so sad.