Entrenched Coloniality? Colonial-Born Black Women, Hair and Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT In precolonial Africa, hair played an important role in how Africans conceptualised identity, beauty, status, spirituality and cultural pride. With the advent of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, African hair became the object of ridicule, racialisation and inferiority. The Eurocentric ideal of beauty became dominant in African women’s perception of ‘self’ and ‘identity’. For many women in apartheid South Africa, it became a way of acceptance into the European consciousness and to access social, cultural and economic privileges that colonialism and apartheid reserved for whiteness. Do the vestiges of colonial-apartheid and the Eurocentric constructs of beauty and identity persist among those who grew up and lived through apartheid now that South Africa is a free country? Through a theoretical lens of postcolonial discourse of race and identity, this study explores colonial-born Black women’s (aged 47 to 83) opinions about hair and identity in post-apartheid South Africa. It seems their perceptions remain fixed in the Eurocentric standard.