Conflicting Tensions in Decolonising Proscribed Afrocentric Hair Beauty Culture Standards in Ghanaian Senior High Schools

International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation (IJRSI) | Volume VIII, Issue III, March 2021 | ISSN 2321–2705

Conflicting Tensions in Decolonising Proscribed Afrocentric Hair Beauty Culture Standards in Ghanaian Senior High Schools

Osuanyi Quaicoo Essel
Fashion & Textiles Education Unit, Department of Art Education, University of Education, Winneba (Ghana)

Abstract: Africans have suffered stigmatisation and discrimination at the hands of the colonialists. The hair of the Black African has been negatively labelled as reclusive, elusive and shrinking kinks by the colonialists. This mentality of the colonialists equally manifested in Ghanaian colonial schools established by the early missionaries and the colonialists’ governments. They bastardised and proscribed some Afrocentric hairstyles and beauty culture practices in schools in the name of good grooming and hygiene. This negative remnant of mental enslavement and the colonial legacy of anti-Afrocentric hairstyles in Ghanaian schools lingers on and is still perpetuated by some Ghanaian school authorities in Senior High Schools in contemporary times. In the effort to decolonise the bastadised and proscribed Afrocentric hairstyle practices in Ghanaian schools, this article explored the contradictions and or conflicting tensions in the process. The study found that the Ghanaian public schools proscribe Afrocentric hairstyles with no substantial scientific evidence that wearing afro and rasta inhibits the acquisition of creative and innovative thinking, and academic performance or progress of the students. Neither have the schools established from their arguments that wearing Afrocentric hairstyles negatively impacts on the socio-moral and cultural wellbeing of the Ghanaian society or indigenous culture.It recommends that the Ghana Education Service and the Conference of Heads of Assisted Senior High Schools (CHASS) must work together to review the hair policies for students, so that it will not be a bottleneck for students to have access to education, which is their fundamental right enshrined in the 1992 constitution.

Keywords: Afrocentric hairstyle, Beauty culture, Decolonising, Ghanaian schools, Stigmatisation

I. INTRODUCTION

Africans, including Ghanaians, had their peculiar way of life long before they encountered the colonialists. They had a robust governance structure (kinship system), laws and standards of beauty inherent in their beauty culture practices. The African society was orderly organised to the extent that there were minimal deviants. They had built no prisons for offenders, rather, their sense of communalistic living and religious practices shaped their modest way of life. Based on their customary laws and taboos, offenders atoned for their wrongdoings through rites and rituals which were enough corrective measures. In some cases, the corrective stigma associated with particular wrongdoing was enough deterrent to possible offenders. For example, someone who stole a bunch of plantains was made to carry the plantain on the head,

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