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Emma Dabiri’s hidden histories: The Harder They Fall
"The film doesn’t engage with one of the main drivers behind the violence," writes Emma Dabiri
The recent Netflix movie The Harder They Fall – a black western, a rarity in the genre – tells a story featuring real-life characters including Rufus Buck and Cherokee Bill. Westerns almost universally depict cowboys and outlaws as white men, yet historians estimate that about 25 per cent were in fact African-Americans – including some of the most accomplished. Set in an almost entirely black context and starring black actors such as Idris Elba and LaKeith Stanfield, the film doesn’t show the mixed ethnicity of the historical figures behind the main characters – many of whom had mixed African, European and Native American ancestry – nor the multi-“racial” society in which they lived. Read more | From slave to real Lone Ranger? The incredible life of black Wild West lawman Bass Reeves As such, the film doesn’t engage with one of the main drivers behind the violent rampage it references: the imminent absorption of Indian Territory into the ever-expanding US. In the summer of 1895, in the Indian Territory that would shortly become the state of Oklahoma, a group of five teenage boys engaged in a two-week bout of robbery, rape and murder. Their leader, Rufus Buck, was – like most of the gang – of mixed African and Creek Indian heritage. Their attacks appalled local white settlers, Native Americans and African-American freedmen alike. On the podcast: Historian Tony Warner discusses some of the real historical figures depicted in the Netflix western The Harder They Fall Historians argue that the undoubtedly chilling and brutal violence wasn’t entirely random. By 1895, white people outnumbered Native Americans in Indian Territory, and the US government was rapidly absorbing that land for white settlement. Buck apparently harboured fantasies that his gang’s violence would incite a Native American uprising that would overrun the white settlers and eventually reclaim the whole territory. The author Leonce Gaiter, who has written extensively about Rufus Buck, says that “His dream was impossible, and he used the same violence to achieve it that he saw all around him.” Read more | How wild was the Wild West? The real Cherokee Bill (given name Crawford Goldsby), another character in The Harder They Fall, was also of mixed ancestry. His father, from Alabama, was of mixed heritage, while his mother was a Cherokee Freedwoman (one of the African-Americans who had been enslaved by the Cherokee before and after the removal of those Native Americans to Indian Territory, and who were emancipated after the Civil War. Many, including Bill’s mother, were of mixed ancestry.) After a troubled and unstable childhood that included spells in the notoriously abusive Indian Boarding Schools – which operated on the principle: “Kill the Indian to save the man” – Goldsby graduated to a life of robbery and violent crime. The number of people he killed is uncertain, but estimates range from 7 to 13. Unlike in the movie, Rufus Buck and Cherokee Bill were never in the same gang, though they may have met at the Fort Smith Jail, just outside Indian Territory in Arkansas. They certainly met an almost identical fate: both were hanged for their crimes aged about 20. Read more | From the real Calamity Jane to ‘Madam Moustache’: pioneer women of the Wild West Gaiter writes that situating these characters in an overwhelmingly black context “may serve the film’s purposes, but it strips Buck of his backstory. Ditto for removing him from Indian Territory. Most significantly, the movie omits Buck’s stated mission – the cleansing of whites from Indian Territory,” Gaiter adds. “He had lived his life there, and… was reportedly fascinated by pulp pamphlet tales of black and Indian outlaws. The characters in these were ‘free’ to do as they pleased, and took no guff from anyone – critical to a youth attending a mission school that punished him for speaking his native Creek language. His very exposure to the white world drove Rufus Buck.” Films are not documentaries, and their purpose is obviously not historical accuracy. And, though based only loosely on “truth”, the movie has undoubtedly introduced to a much wider audience a chapter of history that is little known and rarely spoken about. This article was first published in the February 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Emma Dabiri’s hidden histories: Edgar Mittelholzer
“He dreamed a career that seemed impossible and made it a reality,” writes Emma Dabiri
Edgar Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist who should be remembered not just for the quality of his writing, but as the earliest recorded writer from the Caribbean to make his living from the profession. I studied Caribbean literature at university, yet I don’t recall his name coming up in my studies. In fact, I came across him quite by chance thanks to a reference to his eerie ghost story, My Bones and My Flute, in Adam Curtis’s recent documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head. As an avid reader of ghost stories, I was intrigued by this Caribbean writer as most of the canon has been written by European and Anglo-American authors. Race had a hugely formative influence on Mittelholzer’s life. Born in 1909 in what was then British Guiana, his father was of Swiss-German origin while his mother was from a light-skinned “multi-racial” family in Martinique. In a race-obsessed colonial context, the Mittelholzers had firmly established themselves as a “white” family, but their son – while still “light-skinned” – was the darkest, with features revealing him to be unmistakably of African descent. His presence was a source of deep shame for the family – a “momentous disappointment” for his father, in particular. “I was the Dark One at whom he was always frowning and barking,” wrote Mittelholzer. The pressures of repressive colonial society affected Mittelholzer profoundly. To the further disappointment of his father, the young boy retreated into reading and writing, becoming fixated on finding a London publisher for his work. Caribbean writing was dismissed at the time as a contradiction in the colonial metropolis, and Mittelholzer was subject to rejection after rejection, which likely compounded the rejection he experienced within his own family. He persisted. In 1938, he wrote Corentyne Thunder and at the end of that year received the positive response he had sought for so long. Seemingly plagued by bad luck, however, the outbreak of WW2 shut down any chance of immediate publication or even regular communication with his publisher. Corentyne Thunder was eventually published in 1941, but no sooner had the finished copies arrived in the warehouse than it was bombed, with only the handful of copies already sent to reviewers surviving. During this period, Mittelholzer relocated to Trinidad and worked for the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, before being discharged (for what would now likely be diagnosed as clinical depression). With prospects looking unpromising, he decided to emigrate to the UK, embarking on the voyage in 1948 accompanied by his first wife Roma Halfhide and their young daughter. For a while, it looked like things were on the up. Working as a typist at the British Council, he met Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s widower, whose imprint, Hogarth Press, published A Morning in the Office, Mittelholzer’s sharply observed social commentary dealing with class and colourism in a Trinidad office. When two more of his novels followed in 1951 and 1952, he was finally able to fulfil a lifelong dream of quitting his job to become a full-time writer. Read more | A West Indian immigrant in 1960s Britain: A real lonely Londoner In the next nine years, Mittelholzer published 13 books with Secker & Warburg. But finances remained precarious and he moved around a lot, traversing the Atlantic from Canada to Barbados with an un-rootedness that perhaps found its origins in his own. His marriage broke down and he remarried in 1960, this time to an English woman named Jacqueline Pointer. Increasingly poor mental health, paranoia, anxiety and depression, combined with racism he undoubtedly faced in the publishing industry and broader British society, took its toll. His work became increasingly mystical and right wing and his publisher soon cut ties with him, after which he struggled to find another. In his final novel, The Jilkington Drama, published posthumously, the main protagonist immolates himself to escape insanity. Mittelholzer himself met with a similar fate. On 5 May 1965, in a field in Surrey, the Caribbean’s first successful literary export drenched himself in petrol and lit a match. Mittelholzer’s troubled life and sad demise should not overshadow his contribution to literature. He was a keen observer of the complexities of the Caribbean colonial society, with a rare gift for rendering the region’s landscapes in prose infused with vitality, drama and magic. In a world with no blueprint for what he wanted to achieve, he dreamed of a career that seemed impossible, and made it reality. This article was first published in the Christmas 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine
Emma Dabiri's hidden histories: Augustus Merriman-Labor
“Merriman-Labor’s searing satire of the British was not well received”, writes Emma Dabiri
In 1904, an accomplished young Krio man from a middle-class family in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, set sail from the west African coast to London. Aged just 26, his aim was to make his mark on the literary world. Augustus Merriman-Labor had every reason to be optimistic. He was hard-working, gifted and successful, with a rising profile in his home country, and moving to London to take advantage of the opportunities the city afforded was a logical but brave next step. As scholar Danell Jones writes: “The Sierra Leone Weekly News had assured him that his colour would be no obstacle there,” and he could “go anywhere, wherever his merits... will take him”. The Krios have a fascinating history. In 1787, the Sierra Leone Resettlement saw 411 people “repatriated” to an area of land on the west African coast. Most were members of the black poor community in London; many were formerly enslaved people freed after fighting for the British in the American Revolutionary War, but who had ended up destitute. Attitudes towards black people shut down almost all opportunity and employment. Abolitionist Carl Bernhard Wadström felt that “it was necessary they should be sent somewhere, and be no longer suffered to infest the streets of London”. The Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor devised a novel solution: to persuade them to return to the continent of their ancestors, where many were accompanied by their white English wives and their children. After a first settlement was burned down in 1789 due to rising tensions between the new settlers and native people, its successor became known as Freetown. From 1792 to 1800 it was settled by Nova Scotian Settlers – freed slaves, black pioneers and Jamaican Maroons. The population was further expanded by “liberated Africans”: people who continued to be captured and sold after slavery was prohibited in 1807 but who were intercepted by the British navy and “repatriated” to Sierra Leone. These diverse groups would create what would become the Krios. In 1808, when British interests had shifted from slavery to colonialism, Sierra Leone became a crown colony. It wouldn’t achieve independence from Britain until 1961. Freetown in Augustus’s day had a bustling literary community which helped shape his dreams. With a play, lectures and a novella to his name, it was an 1898 essay portraying the colonial administration as arrogant and ignorant that made his reputation in his home nation. Nonetheless, as was the case with many instructed under the dictates of a colonial education, Merriman-Labor believed in the myth of the “mother country”: a maternal vision of Britain carefully crafted to convince colonial subjects that this little island was the seat of civilisation, a benevolent authority figure charged with their upkeep and protection. To travel there thus represented something of a symbolic and literal homecoming. The distance between the image of England sold in the colonies and the reality of life there, not least for an African colonial subject, would become the inspiration for much of Merriman-Labor’s later writing. While most is out of print and much of it lost, his 1909 Britons Through Negro Spectacleswas republished in 2018. It was decades, if not centuries ahead of its time: as Danell Jones puts it, it is “a blend of travelogue, reverse-ethnology and spoof of books by ill-informed ‘Africa experts’” that sees the narrator spend a day escorting a newly arrived African around Edwardian London. Merriman-Labor’s searing satire was not well received. The audacity of a young African man subverting the colonial order of African inferiority by taking on the role of ethnographic observer of white Europeans, and poking fun of the British while he did so, could not be tolerated. The book was met with condemnation, and its commercial failure resulted in his bankruptcy. Following overwork at a munitions factory, he died in the Lambeth workhouse infirmary in 1919. He was 42. Augustus was a remarkable man. He was punished dearly for challenging Edwardian attitudes to race, but as Jones writes: “In a world dominated by European empires, at a time when black people were considered inferior to white, an African man claimed his right to describe the world as he found it... Merriman-Labor looked at the greatest city in the greatest empire the world had even known and laughed.” This article was first published in the October 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine
Emma Dabiri's hidden histories: Anarcha Westcott
“Anarcha Westcott should be hailed as a ‘mother of gynaecology’”, writes Emma Dabiri
Anarcha Westcott was 17 years old when she gave birth. Although she is listed as a “mulatto” in the census, not a great deal is known about this enslaved woman’s life in Alabama. But she should be hailed – along with two other enslaved women named Lucy and Betsey – as one of the "mothers of gynaecology". Instead, we are much more familiar with the white, slave-owning "father of gynaecology", Dr J Marion Sims. Sims has not one, but three statues in his honour in the United States (although, in 2018, his Central Park monument was removed from view after public pressure). Largely erased from the narrative are the enslaved women he experimented on, women whose bodies provided the “resources” Sims needed for his research. It is through those experiments that his name entered the annals of the historical record. Yet he failed to record most of the enslaved women’s names, other than Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. It was on Anarcha that his experimentation was most frequently carried out, conducting more than 30 operations, with no pain relief. These led him to “successfully” perform his surgery (Anarcha never fully recovered), making Sims’ technique the first treatment for vesicovaginal fistula. He revolutionised gynaecological surgery, cementing the legacy that so preoccupied him. Enslaved women were bought to produce, and to reproduce. Yet, as is easy to imagine, being held in captivity and labour. Brutal conditions, inadequate diet and insufficient shelter meant that poor health was endemic among enslaved people. Many suffered from rickets, which affected bone development. It’s very likely that Anarcha had a severe case of rickets caused by abuse, neglect and malnutrition. This could result in conditions such as a deformed pelvis, making it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to give birth. In June 1845, Anarcha went into labour and spent three days desperately trying to give birth before the local physician, Sims, was called. This was not necessarily out of concern for Anarcha. Enslaved people only had “value” in so far as they could work, dead women couldn’t work, and obstructions to having children resulted in fewer workers. After a tortuous labour (which probably ended in a stillbirth), Anarcha’s body was ravaged. Her ordeal left her with tears in her vagina and rectum, a condition known as vesicovaginal fistula and rectovaginal fistula. In addition to unimaginable pain, it causes incontinence and Anarcha suffered uncontrollable bowel movements, which in turn led to further complications, including ulcers on her vulva and thighs. Given the location of these conditions and the squeamishness of male doctors in treating women, no cures existed, but Sims saw Anarcha as a prime “specimen” for his investigations. Sims was a man of ambition, who (according to JC Hallman, who has done extensive research on Anarcha) “settled on surgical innovation as the best path to a lucrative practice and a permanent legacy”. He subscribed to the common racist belief that African-Americans were both less intelligent than white people and less able to feel pain. These beliefs combined with his own ego to lead him to commit truly gruesome acts. For instance, convinced that “lock jaw” was caused by a mechanical issue, Sims used shoe making tools to pry enslaved children’s bones apart to “loosen” their skulls. Initially opposed to treating women’s reproductive health, stating that he “hated investigating the organs of the female pelvis”, Sims later had a change of heart. While treating a white seamstress who had dislocated her pelvis, he made an observation that he thought he could test on Anarcha and the other enslaved women, allowing him to make history. His experiments also facilitated the invention of the vaginal speculum, still in use today. Sims became an internationally lauded celebrity physician, performing on European empresses the techniques he had practised on enslaved women. And what of those women? Little is known, but a book on Anarcha's life, The Anarcha Quest: The Story of a Slave and a Surgeon, based on Hallman's research, is scheduled to be published next year. Hallman has also been part of the "More Up" campaign, which plans to erect a monument to Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey – long overdue recognition of the sacrifices made by the "mothers of gynaecology". This article was first published in the September 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine
Emma Dabiri’s hidden histories: William Cuffay
"William Cuffay's story is more relevant now than ever," writes Emma Dabiri
“Blackman” was how The Times sneeringly referred to him. Others were taken aback by his small stature. William Cuffay was 4ft 11ins and born with a deformed spine and shin bones. He was mild-mannered, already approaching old age when he first drew press attention. Yet the unassuming appearance of this leader of the London Chartists had little bearing on his fierce commitment to working-class rights or indeed his abilities as a rousing orator. Born in 1788 in Chatham in Kent, Cuffay was the son of a formerly enslaved ship’s cook from St Kitts and a white English woman. He was born at a time when black people in Britain were free but slavery was still an active institution in its colonies, and into a cultural climate in which black people were looked down upon. This was the reality for Cuffay, compounded by the deprivations experienced as a member of the English working class. He trained as a tailor, and developed a love of the trade that mirrored his intense dislike of both the aristocracy and industrialists. By 1819, Cuffay had established himself in Soho, but in 1834 was unemployed. He had gone on strike with fellow tradesmen, demanding better hours and increased pay. When the strike collapsed, he was blacklisted for failing to promise not to join a trade union. Cuffay went on to set up the Metropolitan Tailors’ Charter Association and joined the London Chartists, a movement committed to establishing political rights for working people. Based on the People’s Charter, it included six demands for reform – principally that every man over 21 should have the vote, at a time when scarcely a tenth had that right (and women were forbidden from voting entirely). By 1848, William was leader of the London branch. Meanwhile, mounting tensions erupted on 4 November 1839, when thousands of Chartists gathered in Newport. As they asserted their demands, a violent confrontation with the police ensued. Twenty-two people lost their lives and 21 more were charged with high treason. Three prominent leaders were condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Following a national petitioning campaign, to which Cuffay was central, the sentence was commuted to transportation to Australia for life. The last major Chartist demonstration took place on Kennington Common in 1848, and Cuffay again played a key role. For this, he was arrested for conspiring to “levy war against the queen” and tried at the Old Bailey. The press continued to lampoon him, taking every chance to remind readers that he was a “Negro”. Punch magazine ridiculed “that man of colour” married to a washerwoman, but Cuffay remained a poised and dignified figure. When he finally spoke he addressed the court with righteous contempt. “You have no right to sentence me,” he said. “Although the trial has lasted a long time, it has not been a fair trial... Everything has been done to raise a prejudice against me, and the press of this country – and I believe of other countries too – has done all in its power to smother me with ridicule. I ask no pity. I ask no mercy... “I always thought it would come to something like this. I am not anxious for martyrdom, but after what I have endured this week, I feel that I could bear any punishment proudly, even to the scaffold. This new Act of Parliament is disgraceful, and I am proud to be the first victim of it... Everything that was likely to do any good to the working classes was either thrown out or set aside, but a measure to restrain their liberties could be passed in a few hours. I have nothing more to say.” Cuffay and two comrades were sentenced to transportation for the “term of [their] natural lives”. Although he received a pardon in 1856, Cuffay chose to stay in Tasma- nia where his wife had joined him. He was unique among exiled veteran Chartists in that he continued his radical agitation, and was active in the successful amendment of the colony’s Masters and Servants Act, which improved the conditions endured by English, Irish and Scottish servants. Cuffay died a pauper in 1870. His grave was marked “in case friendly sympathisers should hereafter desire to place a memorial stone on the spot”. One-and-a-half centuries later, it is yet to be erected. Indeed, no memorials exist: not in London, Chatham or Tasmania. In the context of current global conversations about black lives, acknowledging the importance of the life of William Cuffay seems more timely now than ever. Emma Dabiri is an author and broadcaster, and teaching fellow at SOAS University of London. Her most recent book is What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition (Penguin, 2021) This article was first published in the August 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine
Emma Dabiri's Hidden Histories: Harriet Jacobs
"Jacobs’ writing transports readers to the world of Southern slavery," writes Emma Dabiri
“No matter what the slave girl looks like, if she’s dark, if she’s light, if she’s medium, if she’s at all attractive, if she has beauty it is a curse, because the master will be after her... Even the little child will learn that if God has bestowed beauty on her, it will prove her greatest curse. Slavery is a cage of obscene birds.” This quote, from Harriet Jacobs’ 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is emblematic of how her evocative style and relatable, contemporary voice transports readers to the intimate spaces of the world of Southern slavery. Yet for years, many people refused to believe that her book could be true, or that it could have been written by a woman of African descent. Indeed, the accepted academic opinion until the 1980s was that it was a fictional novel written by a white abolitionist. I came across Jacobs’ story by chance while researching advertisements about escaped slaves. Notices for women are not as common as those for men, and hers caught my eye: “$100 REWARD will be given for the apprehension and delivery of my Servant Girl HARRIET. She is a light mulatto, 21 years of age, about 5 feet 4 inches high.” Further digging revealed not only that Harriet eventually gained her freedom, but also that she became a tireless campaigner for black liberation. Her strength of will – which compelled this formerly enslaved woman to write herself into a historical record that would have gladly erased her – is apparent from a young age. As Harriet wrote: “My master had power and law on his side. I had a determined will. There is might in each.” In the hope of escaping the clutches of that master, Dr Norcom, young Harriet made a calculated gamble. At the age of 15 she met Samuel Tradwell Sawyer – a white lawyer aged around 30, from one of North Carolina’s wealthiest families – who took an interest in her. Harriet’s plan hinged on the fact that Sawyer was wealthier and more powerful than Norcom; she believed that if she had his baby, he might buy both her and her child. By the time she was 19, she had borne two children by Sawyer – yet they, too, were deemed to be Norcom’s “possessions”. Sawyer did eventually agree to buy the children. However, not only did Norcom refuse to grant their freedom, he also wanted revenge, and threatened to send the children to another plantation that was renowned for brutalising enslaved people. Harriet, terrified, suspected that Norcom might relent if she were out of the picture, so plotted her escape – though, with slave catchers out in full force, she knew that she was unlikely to get far. She made her way to the home of her grandmother, a member of the local free black community, and together they devised a plan: Harriet would hide in the crawl space in her grand- mother’s attic until an opportunity to escape arose. In the event, Harriet spent seven years in her crawlspace prison, which was less than 3 metres long, two and a half wide and just a metre high. She suffered terribly: her refuge was infested with rats and mice, and she was “restless for want of air”. The atmosphere was “so stifled that even mosquitoes would not condescend to buzz in it”. She suffered from psychotic episodes and almost went lame. Yet her sacrifice paid off. Norcom agreed to sell the children to Sawyer and, weeks later, they were sent to live with their grandmother – oblivious to the fact that their fugitive mother was just metres away, watching them grow up through a tiny hole she had bored through the floor. Harriet is an incredibly important figure. She was the first African-American woman to write a slave narrative at a time when it was a crime for black people to read or write. Moreover, Incidents is the only slave narrative that focuses on sexual exploitation during an era in which rape was used as a form of terror against enslaved women – and in which the courts upheld the principle that sexual assault of women of African descent was not a crime. Yet her account is still not as widely known as it should be. Importantly, it highlights the long history of people sometimes described today as “mixed race”, giving the lie to the idea that increased “race mixing” is somehow modern, or automatically leads to less-racist societies. Along with African-American novelist Harriet B Wilson, Jacobs’ book reclaimed the status of both “woman” and “mother” in a society that denied those identities to these women. I urge everyone to read it. Emma Dabiri is an author and broadcaster, and teaching fellow at SOAS University of London. Her most recent book is What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition (Penguin, 2021) This article was first published in the July 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine
"Afro-textured hair had no stigma before the dehumanisation of black people that emerged from slavery": Emma Dabiri discusses the changing perceptions of Afro-textured hair
Emma Dabiri talks to Matt Elton about her book, Don’t Touch My Hair, exploring how perceptions of Afro-textured hair fuelled historical prejudice, oppression, slavery and colonial attitudes
Matt Elton: Your new book covers a fascinating range of subjects. How would you describe it? Emma Dabiri: Ostensibly, it’s about black, Afro-textured hair and its history, politics and significance – but really it’s about a lot more than that. One of my friends described it as a kind of Trojan horse: something that presents itself as being about one thing, but which also kind of smuggles in a lot of other ideas. ME: What’s interesting about your book is that it considers hair as an artefact. You talk about societies in Africa, for instance, that use complex non-verbal languages including hairstyling. In what ways is it useful to view hair through this lens? ED: The texture of African hair means it’s incredibly versatile and lends itself to being shaped in a huge range of ways. Because this innate material was part of people’s lives and reality, cultures developed to suit that reality – and because this hair can do so much, a strong and lively hair culture emerged. Many of the cultures I explore in the book would traditionally be described as ‘oral’. There’s often an assumption that, when you speak of orality, you’re talking only about the verbal – but in most of those societies there would also have been a plethora of other sorts of language. For instance, Yoruba culture [of west Africa] uses the batá drum to mimic the tonality of the spoken language. And there are many visual languages, too, of which hair and hairstyling would have been a part. ME: You mention Yoruba culture. Does its folklore specifically reference hair? ED: There’s a genre in Yoruba called oriki, of which there are many different types, but the term can essentially be translated as ‘praise poems’. When a person is born, traditionally they would have their own oriki, which is a long name or song that reflects the conditions of their birth, their family background, their parents' aspirations for them, and so on. I looked at oriki of the orisha – Yoruba deities who act as intermediaries between the Supreme Being and humans. There’s a very powerful orisha, known as Oshun, who is the deity of the river and fresh water, luxury and pleasure, sexuality and fertility, and beauty and love. Her oriki talk about her being the primary hairdresser in Yoruba culture. Because she’s such an important figure, it makes sense that a lot of the creativity, innovation and beauty that comes from hairstyling can be associated with her. Listen | Emma Dabiri explains how the history of black hair reflects themes such as capitalism, slavery and colonialism ME: One of the big ideas you explore in your book is the way in which European settlers, when they first came to Africa, admired the cultures they found there – a reaction very different from that of later invaders and settlers. ED: There are accounts from the 17th and 18th centuries in which Portuguese and Dutch observers are staggered by the size and organisation of some of the cities they saw. Even in the early to mid-19th century, when the British ventured into the interior of Nigeria, they described how easy the journey was and how orderly and well-functioning the place was. For example, when [Scottish explorer] Hugh Clapperton travelled in the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo, in what’s now Nigeria, in the 1820s, his party travelled with ease and safety. He commended “regular government which could not have been supposed to exist amongst a people hitherto considered barbarians”. They were travelling through parts of the continent now seen today as dangerous and lawless. Yet in that period, when Africa was supposedly even more underdeveloped, things functioned a lot better than today. ME: And they often explicitly mentioned different hairstyles they saw on these journeys, didn’t they? ED: Yes. A lot of early western observers were struck by the ornate hairstyling culture and the diversity and creativity of hairstyles, because they hadn’t seen anything like it before. So there are quite a lot of descriptions of hair. The accounts of Alvise Cadamosto, a Venetian explorer who visited west Africa in 1455 and 1456 on behalf of Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator, include the oldest extant European references to African hair. Describing the Jalofs of the south side of the Senegal river, he wrote that: “Both sexes go bare-footed and uncovered, but weave their hair with beautiful tresses, which they tie in various knots.” ME: That ornate hairstyling is an interesting facet in those African cultures, because it can be a time-consuming process. In your book, you explore the ways in which that process led to time being seen in a different way from in western societies. ED: This is an important point, and I’ve dedicated a chapter to talking about time. There’s a pretty strongly held concept that caring for black hair in its natural state is too time-consuming, so people straighten their hair because that makes it more ‘manageable’ and less burdensome. That attitude was really interesting to me, because it seems to suggest that black hair is deviant in some way. What I think is actually going on, though, is that the society in which we live is underpinned by the logic of capitalism in which time has been repurposed for the maximisation of profit. So anything that isn’t seen as productive in that specific sense is seen as unnecessarily time-consuming or as a burden. I looked at how different African groups organised time before the imposition of wage labour, capitalism and colonialism. [Kenyan philosopher] John Mbiti said that “man is not a slave of time; instead, he ‘makes’ as much time as he wants” – the idea being that people have enough time for whatever they want to prioritise, including hairstyling. It’s only in a different system, created with different standards and norms, that hair and its management has been reimagined as burdensome. ME: Were traditional methods of hairstyling, such as braiding and twisting, ways for societies and communities to bond? ED: Definitely. Rather than being seen as a time-consuming burden, the hours spent in grooming and doing one another’s hair were seen as important social time during which information was exchanged and the bonds of a community strengthened. The physical proximity involved in hairstyling was important in developing intimacy between a parent and child or two members of that community, too. ME: What were some of the reasons why later colonisers of Africa came to regard hair in a less positive way? ED: There was a shift in attitudes that happened once slavery and, later, colonialism become the primary reasons Europeans were in the continent. The more complimentary descriptions were quite drastically replaced by far more negative ones, and the idea was introduced that Africans are incredibly idle and that they weren’t using their time productively – in other words, for the maximisation of profit. Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad: how one woman saved hundreds from hell Part of the justification for slavery and other oppressive systems of extraction was that African people were not seen as fully human. One of the ways in which this idea was advanced was that, unlike European people, Africans didn’t even have hair – they had wool, like livestock. Because they were seen as being like animals, that became one of the justifications for enslavement and for colonialism: it was a ‘civilising mission’, bringing the light of civilisation to this dark continent. ME: This view was hugely toxic. What is its legacy today? ED: Because these narratives were so powerful, because the power dynamic was so balanced in favour of white European norms, and because these norms were extracted from Africa and the Americas to other parts of the world, the idea developed that Afro-textured hair was inadequate, inferior and associated with a kind of non-humanity. These ideas were internalised, and hair began to be seen as deviant and problematic. That led to the birth of hair straightening and attempts to make African hair resemble European hair. ME: What techniques have people – perhaps even you – used to achieve this throughout the 20th and 21st centuries? ED: The first hot combs were in use by the early 20th century. The most permanent method, though, uses ‘relaxer’, in a process first invented around a century ago in the US. It’s a chemical process that deforms the elliptical shape of the hair, breaking it and making it straight, meaning that you can achieve a kind of facsimile of European hair. It was invented by Garrett Augustus Morgan in 1909, but popularised by hugely successful ‘hair capitalists’ including Annie Malone and Sarah Breedlove – known as Madam CJ Walker. These recently emancipated African-Americans, often women, became self-made millionaires through the production and marketing of hair relaxer. On Walker’s death in 1919, for instance, she was the wealthiest self-made woman in the United States. The real story of Madam CJ Walker: we caught up with Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles, to discover the real story behind the woman dubbed the wealthiest self-made woman in America Relaxer works – it completely transforms the way your hair looks – but there are associated costs. There are links between the chemicals involved and endocrine disruption, cancers and fertility issues. I relaxed my hair for almost 15 years, and I would always have chemical burns on my scalp. I didn’t really mind them, even though obviously they were painful, because in my mind they were evidence that my hair had become even straighter. ME: So the pressure you felt to look a particular way was so strong that you were happy to put up with burning your skin in order to achieve this look? ED: Yeah! It’s staggering, now, to think about the level of cognitive dissonance, but the way I saw it was as though I had a chronic malaise that required treatment – and this was the treatment. That’s how I imagined it. ME: Does this internalised dislike also extend to men? ED: These are definitely issues that affect men as well, but I think we associate it more with women because, until recently, there has been more of a culture of long hair being entwined with ideas about femininity and womanhood. I’ve spoken to men who have texturised their hair, using a type of relaxer that doesn’t make the hair bone straight but gives it a loosely curled look – because there’s also a hierarchy of the types of curly hair. White people often say to me: “Oh yeah, I’ve got curly hair – I understand where you’re coming from.” And I get it – prejudice against curly hair is definitely a thing – but it’s not actually stigmatised in the way that Afro-textured hair is. In the hierarchy of hair types, which comes from a western beauty standard, the most Afro-textured hair is the most reviled. The looser curl of many people with mixed ancestry is perceived as the beauty standard of black hair, and is more comparable to the type of curly hair that some white people have. Even though I’m mixed, my hair very much favours the African side of my heritage, so I don’t have those loose curls. David Olusoga: "Black history affects all of us – it is British history" ME: Can we trace all of this back to the experience of slavery? ED: Absolutely. There was no stigma associated with Afro-textured hair in the continent before the dehumanisation of black people that has its origins in the power relationship that emerged from European expansion and then slavery. ME: One of the most well-known ‘African’ hairstyles is, of course, the Afro. What is the history of that style, and to what extent is it truly African? ED: The Afro is indeed iconic, and is I think what a lot people would first think of when they think about natural Afro-textured hair. It’s achieved by leaving the hair to grow naturally from the head, unmanipulated – and it grows up and out rather than down. Because of the name ‘Afro’, and because it’s the way in which our hair grows out naturally, there’s an assumption that it’s the most ‘African’ style of hair dress. But women in Yoruba culture wouldn’t have ever really left their hair out in that way, because it would make it prone to dryness, tangling and breaking. Instead, it would typically have been moisturised, braided and twisted. So actually the Afro is, instead, more of a diaspora response to racism: a retaliation against the stigma associated with hair. The argument was that, if people were going to say black hair was ugly and ‘lesser than’, it was an act of defiance to showcase it in its full glory. That imperative wasn’t really there in precolonial west Africa, so people didn’t have to make that statement. It’s also important to remember that, when we look at the history of the Ashanti [of what is now Ghana] and Yoruba peoples, artifice was actually an aesthetic norm. Just ‘leaving’ your hair wasn’t really the beauty standard: what was considered beautiful was the skill of manipulating your hair into braids and so on. So, because it was a reaction to western culture, it can be argued that the Afro is situated more in the countercultures of European societies than in Africa itself – which is unexpected. ME: The Afro is a style that, in popular culture, is often associated specifically with the 1970s. Why is that the case, and what led to it subsequently diminishing as a cultural symbol? ED: The Afro was popularised by Black Power and, initially, the Black Panthers’ revolutionary anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist, socialist moment. But the hairstyle became increasingly commodified – and with its commodification, a lot of the political intent behind it diminished. Also, maybe the beauty standard had never really shifted. By the 1980s and the end of Black Power, straighter hair had re-emerged as the default, ‘normal’ style for black women – and men, too. The 80s saw the emergence of a range of different texturising treatments and hairstyles, such as the Jheri curl and the S curl, which resulted in a looser hair texture. It was only with the birth of what’s called the Natural Hair movement in the 2000s that people again started rejecting relaxer en masse and stopped straightening their hair. The difference between today and the Black Power period, though, is that a lot of people today are adamant that their decision not to straighten their hair isn’t primarily politically motivated. ME: It seems, though, that you think that hair is political in this context – and that there are ways in which people today can use it as a political symbol. ED: Well, I don’t want to argue that anyone should do anything. Black people’s bodies are so heavily policed anyway, I don’t want to take that further and say: ‘you should wear your hair this way and not that way’. Everybody has their own reasons and motivations for how they wear their hair, and there is so much creativity in black hairstyling culture and so many different types of hairstyles that you can choose from. But for me, personally, making the decision to stop relaxing my hair was political. I know that I was doing it because of the shame that I had associated with my hair texture, so I had to undo all of that and embrace that texture. I actively sought out other ways of grooming and maintaining it, and I now embrace a whole range of traditional braided hairstyles. ME: In your book you discuss cultural appropriation, which is an idea that’s attracted a lot of attention recently. How do the ideas we’ve been discussing interact with the ways in which black hairstyles are co-opted by people from other backgrounds? ED: We’ve seen several flashpoints – notably when white people, often white celebrities, have adopted traditional black hairstyles. If there was a level playing field between black people and white people, there wouldn’t be an issue – anyone should be able to style their hair any way they want to! – but when you look at the historical context, there isn’t a level playing field. Hairstyles for which a white celebrity would be celebrated and lauded in high fashion circles and in the media are the same styles that will cause black children to be excluded from schools or black employees to be told their hair is inappropriate for work. Discriminating against black people on the grounds of their hair has happened with such frequency that, earlier this year, such discrimination was recognised and declared illegal in New York City. The irony here is that there’s a disparity between the treatment of white people, who choose these hairstyles, and of black people, who actually need to use them because of the way in which they maintain their hair. And, again, the historical context is important: the relationship between Europe and Africa, and the descendants of Africans, over the past 500 years has been largely based on a process of extraction of resources for the benefit of western economies and cultures. So this kind of facsimile of ‘blackness’ that celebrities create or appropriate – which often makes them seem like edgy, hugely successful performers but for which black people are demonised – is part of that process of extraction. So although some people often want to dismiss claims of cultural appropriation as frivolous and silly and shallow, or say: ‘Oh, this book is just about hair, and hair’s really superficial’, those arguments betray an ignorance of the wider historical picture. ME: You write that “everything you’ve been taught about Africa is a lie”, and that it’s a story designed to justify the continent’s continuing exploitation. How does the story of hair fit within that, and how would you like this book to change people’s impression of its significance? ED: More than just changing people’s attitudes towards the significance of hair, I want them to reassess the ways they think about things such as cultural appropriation, precolonial African societies, and present-day African society and culture. The quotation that you referenced in your question is taken from the final chapter of my book, in which I look at the relationship between braided hair and fractal mathematics, which was used in urban planning in Africa (for example, in the vast walled compound of Benin City) as well as in hairstyles such as the braided pattern known in Yoruba as ipako elede. The African continent has a lively mathematical history that we never really hear about, because it doesn’t fit the established narrative of African primitivism. We hear stereotypes of black people excelling at physical activities – in athletics, for instance, or sports more generally – but we don’t really hear about their successes in what are seen as intellectual or cerebral traditions. So I want to encourage a deeper understanding of African history, of which hair is just a part. ME: Are there recent, positive cultural images of black hair that you would like to highlight? ED: It’s not even necessarily about positive representations – it’s about any representations at all. The kind of textured hair that I have was something that had to be hidden or transformed, and you were never going to see a main protagonist on the big screen with that type of hair. So, as well as celebrating it, we need to just normalise it and present it simply as ordinary hair that grows from ordinary people’s heads. And we are, increasingly, seeing that portrayed across various media. The 2018 Marvel [superhero] film Black Panther was one of the most significant moments in this story, but even on television series such as [US comedy-drama] Atlanta, it’s now quite ordinary to see some of the rituals of black hairdressing or hairstyling. So we are now seeing women tying headscarves, opening their twists in the morning, or taking off their wigs – historical rituals that you just wouldn’t have seen before, made normal. Emma Dabiri is a social historian, writer and broadcaster, and a teaching fellow at SOAS University of London. Her new book is Don’t Touch My Hair (Allen Lane, 2019) This article was taken from issue 17 of BBC World Histories magazine
Emma Dabiri explains how the history of black hair reflects themes such as capitalism, slavery and colonialism
Historian and broadcaster Emma Dabiri explains how the history of black hair reflects broad themes of capitalism, slavery, colonialism and more.
Tom Young and Emma Dabiri explore how Africa’s past has affected its present in a discussion prompted by the themes of Tom’s new book, Neither Devil Nor Child
Historians Tom Young and Emma Dabiri explore how Africa’s past has affected its present in a discussion prompted by the themes of Tom’s new book, Neither Devil Nor Child: How Western Attitudes Are Harming Africa.