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EveryHairstyle

Style capital, South Africa

Johannesburg

South Africa's biggest city, where hair was once used in racial classification and is now a scene of braiders, doeks and debate.

Johannesburg is South Africa's largest city and a centre of its hair trade, from braiding salons in the inner city run by stylists from across Africa to the barbers of Soweto. Hair has had a painful history here: under apartheid, officials sometimes used a 'pencil test' on hair to decide a person's racial classification. Today the doek, the headwrap, is worn with pride.

Hair under apartheid

The Population Registration Act of 1950 classified every South African by race, and the classification decided where a person could live, study and work. In disputed cases officials were known to slide a pencil into a person's hair: if it stayed in place, the hair was judged tightly curled and the person could be classed as Black or Coloured. The test is remembered as a symbol of how arbitrary and humiliating the system was.

Doeks, braids and schools

The doek, a tied headwrap, is worn across South Africa for church, celebrations and daily life, and social media 'doek days' have made it a fashion statement. Inner-city salons offer braids, weaves and locs. In 2016 students at Pretoria High School for Girls, an hour from Johannesburg, protested against rules on afros and braids, and the protest led many schools to review their codes, with debate between those defending uniform rules and those calling them discriminatory.

Hairstyles of Johannesburg

Head tieThe doek worn across South AfricaAfroAt the centre of the 2016 school hair protestsBox braidsA staple of the inner-city salonsDreadlocksWorn widely, and debated in school codes

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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