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My cousin Piri and I were deliberating about what meat to buy when one of the Chinese men came over.
Speaking in sign language because he could not speak English, he asked if he could take a picture of me.
I was dressed in a long skirt and head scarf because I was coming back from the village.
I quickly worked out that getting a photo taken was not a big deal. This picture was probably going to grace a big billboard in China asking people to visit Africa.
The Chinese man took a couple of shots of me smiling. The man looked at the picture he had taken and shook his head showing me the picture. It was a very dark photo and all you could see were my eyes and teeth.
Piri took one quick glance at it and laughed so loud. Then the Chinese man adjusted the lighting on his camera and tried to get me to pose for another photo, this time closer to shelves full of maize meal.
I thanked him politely and indicated that the two photos he had taken were enough for that billboard in China. As the man walked away to join his group, Piri kept on laughing.
Then she said: “He should have taken a picture of me instead. I am lighter skinned and with this hair style, I am very good looking. But MaChina haangazvizive izvozvo.”
As we walked down the aisle of soaps and other beauty products, Piri picked a bar of soap and repeated an old advertisement that we used to repeat back in the village: “Look smarter and beautiful with Lux, sipo yerunako.”
She wiggled her bottom inside the jean skirt, patted her Brazilian hair wig and stopped at some more beauty products, fingering the creams and the hair products. She picked one tube and said the cream in there would make a dark skinned woman like me look like a coloured or a person of mixed race in no time at all.
“Sis, you should try it. Here.”
She handed me the tube. I shook my head.
“Tell me, how many women do you see with natural hair and dark skin in Zimbabwe today? Count them. There is hair everywhere and creams to make you lighter because for the women of Zimbabwe, it is now daylight. Kwayedza muZimbabwe.”
Piri proudly shook her head with the Brazilian hair flowing all over her shoulders. She turned and declared that ever since she got that hairstyle, men were very quick to spot and propose romantic love to her whether she was in a kombi or in a supermarket
The Brazilian weave is giving Piri too much confidence in herself. She was given this Brazilian human hair by the madam of the house in appreciation for two weeks of housework for a wealthy family. Madam had worn the hair for only four months and she was tired of the hairstyle.
Piri said she had seen the hair on madam’s head being looked after very well, the way you look after human hair because it is human hair. It was blow dried, styled, dyed, combed, conditioned, moisturised and washed with very expensive shampoos. Madam was pleased that someone was interested in wearing her old Brazilian hair.
After all, Brazilian human hair is more expensive than any other hair bought from the shaved heads of poor women in India, China, the Philippines or elsewhere.
The average Brazilian Front lace wig costs $500.
It is very soft and durable. If it is looked after very well, it can last for six months or even a year.
Piri even got the original packaging with the advertisement and instructions on how to look after the hair once it graces your African head.
The pamphlet inside read: “You get 100 percent Brazilian hair with the finest quality and it comes with cuticles intact arranged in the same direction, no matting or tangling. Genetic diversity and lifestyle factors of the hair donors ensure that this human hair is made of the utmost quality . . .”
Piri went to a hair dressing shop in Mbare and they made corn rows of her natural hair to create a foundation for the Brazilian human hair.
Normally, Piri is quite dark, like me and her hair is thick, curly and tight the way most African hair is like. Back in the village, we used to have our hair plaited in various styles with thread, making intricate patterns. Sometimes we had hair styled like horns, hair sticking out everywhere. You could see the clean scalp. On chisi day, the days we did not work in the fields, we spent the day plaiting hair.
It was intimate.
All secrets were told while plaiting women’s hair, lying on someone’s lap and getting your head combed, kukwenurwa, then washed with ruredzo, the vine-like plant with thorns and purple flowers. The hair was plaited when it was soft, smooth and black. Plaits in the village were beautiful and they cost nothing. You were praised for the way your natural hair and your body looked.
There was a time, long before independence when beauty in a woman was likened to nature. The descriptions of a woman and her intimate proximity to nature flows smoothly in the Shona language. The late renowned poet M. A. Hamutyinei wrote a poem about a beautiful woman called Vimbai.
It is titled, “Ndiye wandaireva” or “She is the one I talked about.” This poem does not easily translate into English: “Ndiye muteyazuva wedu, runji rusitengenguo. Ishwa inodyiwa nemambava, uso unjenjema. Nyenyedzi inotibikira nokufukidza jenaguru . . . Chigagairwa, tsvarakadenga, ruva romunakamwe. Vhudzi rake ruswiswi rwebani muchirimo.”
The poem compares Vimbai’s beauty with nature. Vimbai is a virgin, a tall and beautiful flower with hair like the green valley in the dry season. Vimbai is like the stars, the moon, the beautiful night insects (ishwa) which fly along together in love until they shed their wings and die. She has a bright face like the light, the stars that cover the bright moonlight.
But the poem does not end here. Hamutyinei then goes on to tell us Vimbai is not just the epitome of physical beauty: she is beautiful in her behaviour as well. Vimbai’s is full of respect. Ane tsika. She kneels and claps gently in respect to the elders. “Anoombera kamudedede kane rugurupiro.”
At St Columbus village school, we listened to our teacher Miss Rwodzi describe Vimbai’s beauty. We could almost see her. We wanted to be like Vimbai, beautiful, kind and natural. I dreamt that one day a man was going to describe my natural beauty while singing praise poetry of my totem. But when we moved to the city and the Diaspora, girls like Vimbai, the village beauty, stayed in the village.
The struggle to dress and look like European women started ever since the white man came. Back in our village, long before independence, I remember a woman called Matirasa. Matirasa defined modern beauty for us. For her, beauty was light or brown skin and a wig. Nothing less.
When Matirasa’s marriage failed, she left for Salisbury. They said over there, she changed from being a quiet village woman to a modern woman who dressed very much like a white woman.
Even though Matirasa could not speak English because she had very little education, once she goes to Salisbury, she quickly learnt to dress and behave like a white woman.
One day during the Christmas holidays, Matirasa brought home a gramophone to the village. She invited all the village children to her corrugated iron-roofed house. We sat on her verandah and she gave us tea and bread.
Matirasa wore a brassiere, lacy petticoats and a wide figure belt around her waistline. She had thick smooth legs, very dark in completion. But her face was very light, almost orange. Referring to her colour, people said women like her had “fanta face and coca-cola legs”.
She wore red lipstick and smelt nice. At Rhodes and Founders Day and Christmas time she came home. She always wore an Afro wig and sat there drinking bottled beer while we admired her new colourful soaps, surf, lux and Ambi and Butone skin-lightening creams.
Matirasa’s hair was nicely plaited with threads and she wore a wig on top.
Then she pinned it on with pins in case it fell off when she gets on the bus. Years later, when Matirasa retired from her commercial sex work in Harare she came back home.
Recently I saw her at a family ceremony and she was still elegant looking but skinny and old. She wore a thin head scarf on a bald head because hair no longer grows on her scalp. Her face has dark patches on the cheeks due to old age and the side-effects of the skin-lightening creams.
When reminded about her past, Matirasa laughs at herself now and says she used to belong to a group of women known as the modern girls, vasikana vechimanjemanje, who knew all the new fashions in town.
Then she sighs and says: “Fashion does not end. When you die, it will still be going because you can never catch up with it. Be yourself.”
We should thank our Indian, Brazilian and other donors for giving us their hair so we can look more like European women. We are buying goods we could easily do without.
But then again, if we do not adorn an expensive Brazilian weave, it means we are not as beautiful and our self-esteem and confidence suffer. In the process of appropriating so much Western perceptions of beauty, we have lost the language of describing and appreciating African beauty.
We are spending millions of dollars on making ourselves whiter. It is a multi-million-dollar industry managed mostly by non-Africans. We no longer know the scalps of our heads. Or rather, the scalp does not know the feel of sunshine.
Although that natural beauty that defines us as Zimbabweans is still here, we struggle daily as individuals to be our natural selves. Wigs and weaves now dominate our heads. Every now and then, you might spot two out of 10 women with natural short hair. European women would not look as natural if their hair was plaited the way we do ours.
They rarely copy us. And yet we copy them all the time. The marketing and advertisements tell us, in very subtle and sometimes blatant way, that to be beautiful is to look more Western.
Gradually, we are losing the essence of the African beauty because she is being commodified to sell beauty products identifying her with the look closer to that look of a white woman. As a result we struggle to use the qualities of nature to praise the physical beauty of a woman in poetic Shona, Ndebele, Tonga or Kalanga.
Sure, beauty is a personal and gender issue. But wait a moment, how often do you see women wearing wigs because human hair was glued on to their scalps over a period of time and then their hair cuticles were damaged permanently? Women should decide for themselves. But they need information to inform them of the side-effects of creams, glue and hair weaves.
When we started looking for lux, sipo yerunako, beauty was already linked to whiteness or European beauty. Nothing much has changed.
Thirty-three years after independence, we have created new images of beauty and womanhood based on the benchmark of European women’s concepts of beauty.
We continue to allow our bodies to be used or commodified for the marketing of skin and hair products that make us whiter or close to the European as the ideal woman.
As the natural beauty continues to disappear, we face the struggle to construct an African woman’s identity today. It is time we define the benchmark to measure our own beauty the way it was meant to be before the encroachment of Western ideals of beauty on our minds and bodies.
l Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations.
Online Reporter