Sign up. Sign in. I remember the moment when I first cut off my shoulder-length, chemically straightened hair to reveal the burgeoning Afro underneath. I was 20 years old and terrified. Would I still be beautiful? These were the worries in my head as the scissors snipped. The personal is indeed political, and the Afro demonstrates just how true that is.
The human body has always been a palette of meaning. Fashion and style flash identity outwards, telling others about status, belief systems, politics, and cultural affinities. Hair is a canvas upon which these questions play. Intense pressures, easily internalized, urge young black women to conform to mainstream standards of beauty. Multi-million dollar industries then grow up around these concepts, manipulating questions of self-worth and identity.
The thick, curly halo became a symbol of self-love and self-determination associated with celebrating African forms of beauty. Though the s and s saw the Afro diminish in popularity and frequency, the last ten years have seen natural hair in general β and the Afro more specifically β make a grassroots resurgence. In Ethiopia, there were two waves of the Afro. The movie Shaft In Africa , filmed mostly in Addis Ababa and starring Richard Roundtree, was hugely popular in the country, and also encouraged many to convert to the Afro.
But there was an older Afro love in Ethiopia as well. Kemekem is a word meaning freshly mown grass in Amharic, one of the main languages in Ethiopia. It is also a term for a beautiful, well-combed Afro β as well as the title of a traditional love song, which I interpreted for my album We Are Alive. The lyrics speak flirtatiously of wooing the man with the perfect Afro, of a relationship carried out in secret, and the deliciousness of that infatuation.
I chose to reinterpret this song, first of all because I love it. One can only sing what moves you from the heart. But I also deeply appreciate that this is a countryside tune, an indigenous ode to the Afro and the beauty that emanates from it. Africans have been loving and celebrating our natural hair since time immemorial, and here is a melody to prove it. A loose translation of the song:.
