In the beginning, there was a strand of black hair coiling over a new brown baby’s crown. It was the first sprout of wonder, multiplying overtime into many other strands. This hair was an interlocutor of sorts, stringing this brown baby to roots buried deeply in black soil, with black blood, and watered by hopes as black as the skins which bore them. She grew up brown, brave, curious.

My hair was a shock of brown-black coils glistening in the sun. A[...] boy asked me if I was Senegalese. I looked him in the eye and said yes, I am... We are many. Evaleni, on We Are Many.

She grew up me.

I may be delusional to believe my hair is the start of a story. But look closely and you’ll see God knitting a people from its strands.

At sixteen, I dyed the tips brown. I was eager to explore my new sense of self. Even now, my hair is dusted with the traces of that rebellious act. It has become one with the black sheen of my roots, and in essence, the very fibre of this story’s existence. That is why, although people have tried to wash it off, my rebellion stays with me, a pigment as poignant as the colour of my skin. I learnt that my hair carries a similar stigma my people’s skins do. There is the startling need to tweak yourself to conform to a new identity or wear your hair differently.

I have faced it. Perhaps, you have too. 

I liken my people to my hair. They are as resilient as they are rebellious, unafraid of braving the knife of memory. My hair tangles as a sign of solidarity, coiling tightly against each other as if to say, we are one. We protect ourselves. It refuses to budge when I put a thin-toothed comb through it but folds when it comes in contact with water.

The latter could be because of its scars. The water washes it with ghosts and the salt from it peppers our wounds.

So sometimes, we recoil.

But we resist, still.

alteéverve started with a need to connect with Africans. I created it from my room at 17, head burrowed deep in research about my origin. Maybe I was drawn to do that by the black blood humming under my fingertips.

I don’t recall when my interest in Pan-Africanism began. I may have been seven or eight—it doesn’t matter. But I had read and heard, and knew that it was the dream of many to free Africa. In Maya Angelou’s Why The Caged Bird Sings, we are a bird, sitting in a cage, forlorn. Years have passed, and we sing still. We are many. We wear the same scars; manacles on our wrists and feet, across our backs; our heads bloated by the water we have been submerged with, in.

But our hair remains, even when shaved, in groups. They never isolate each other.

Once I walked into a phone store with my hair uncovered. I had recently loosened my braids, so my hair was a shock of brown-black coils glistening in the sun. An astonished boy asked if I was Senegalese. I looked him in the eyes and said yes, I am.

We are from a similar root.

We are a people.

We are many.  

#AMAKACreatorGrant

#ForAfricansByAfricans