Last week, Quiin Abenakyo from Uganda was crowned Miss World Africa. A dinner invitation from Uganda’s leader of 32 years, Yoweri Museveni, duly followed.
Dining with popular people is his way of winning the support of Ugandans who, in the run-up to the next election, in 2021, are asking difficult questions about the country’s political future and are weary of a government that invests everything in cracking down on the opposition.
So, taking advantage of a rare moment of hope and unified celebration following Abenakyo’s win, Museveni tweeted about what he must have thought was a safe subject – her hair.
“Abenakyo is indeed a tall, beautiful Musoga girl. My only concern is that she was wearing Indian hair. I have encouraged her to keep her natural African hair. We must show African beauty in its natural form,” he wrote, instantly winning the support of many Ugandans who may disagree with his politics but could not argue with him on this.
At the Miss World pageant, Abenakyo had impressed the judges with her eloquence and commitment to helping teenage girls who drop out of school. Ugandans watched with pride as the Miss World Africa title was placed on her straight wig. For an African feminist like me, who believes it is about time the world stops being fixated on beauty standards built by and for white people, it was disturbing in a mild way, a bit like when a fly buzzes around your food. Certainly it was not surprising.
For a girl born and raised in Uganda, wearing a weave – or some sort of straight hair – is a matter of course. Most public and private Ugandan schools have a rule that no one is supposed to keep hair beyond half a centimetre. This rule is particularly cruel to girls because it is a culture where boys do not usually grow their hair. Growing out your natural hair in school will earn you rough scissors or a razor blade through your hair from the senior lady, a female teacher appointed to reinforce harmful stereotypes about the role of women.
Depending on the mood of the senior woman, scissors through your hair may not be punishment enough. For being so obstinate as to think your rough, coarse, African hair should grow long, you will be humiliated at the assembly. You may be told to kneel down under the punishment tree all day, or lashed. Students who refuse to comply are expelled. The only exception is if you are white, Asian or mixed race. Ugandan girls study alongside mostly Indian and mixed-race girls who have long hair. Schools justify this blatant discrimination by claiming that African hair is too rough and girls will be too distracted to study. No matter that African girls across the world are excelling even as they grow their hair.
All this racist education system does is create generations of Ugandan women who have been beaten into accepting that their hair is ugly and must be hidden. With the emerging natural hair movement, a lot of Ugandan women in their 20s and 30s have only just started wearing their hair natural – learning, as adults, to look after something that was alien to them for so long. Even then, they are receive a lot of flak for it. Comments about natural hair being unprofessional and shabby are commonplace.
Given all this, Museveni’s message to Abenakyo may have seemed to come from a well-meaning place. But it is hard to ignore the fact that the same Museveni who now claims to care about women appreciating their bodies folded his arms as parliament, in 2013, passed an anti-pornography law and his minister incited vigilante men to strip women on the streets.
Women in the police – which, like the education sector, relies heavily on financial support from UK, US and other western donors – are banned from wearing dreadlocks. Women in the civil service are not allowed to wear miniskirts. A woman who wears a dress deemed too short, makeup considered too much or nail polish that is too colourful risks losing her job.
Perhaps, instead of pretending to care about the African woman’s expression of beauty, Museveni and his wife, Janet Kataha, could try to actually care. To care about how the African woman is socialised from childhood through systematic discrimination and the policing of women’s bodies. Asking schools to stop discriminating against Ugandan girls in their own country and ordering them to respect girls’ right to grow their natural hair would be an important first step.
