If you have never experienced the burning feeling of hair relaxer or the unrelenting pain of newly braided hair, then you have no right saying anything about my hair.
But this has not stopped schools, my former high school included, and some workplaces from telling black women like me how to wear our hair and telling us what is and what is not “presentable”.
I found the rules at my school about how black girls could and could not wear their hair as a new form of the “pencil test”.
If you failed the test you did not fit in and were discriminated against.
Being black is difficult enough without having someone tell you to “tame” your hair.
I will never forget those Sunday mornings when my mother would prepare my sisters and I for school the next day.
As we attended a former Model C school, we had to fit in.
Washing and blowing hair that did not want to be tamed resulted in three teary-eyed girls by bed time; but hey, we would “fit in” at school the next day and we would dodge the verbal abuse or whatever punishment teachers saw fit for our hair being just that, our hair.
The rules at the high school I attended were very strict about how girls, particularly black girls had to wear their hair. Nothing seemed neat enough, if only they knew the pain and trouble you went through the night before.
If you have a weave on you were trying to be white and they would tell you which ones you could and could not have. If you had braids they had to be a certain length, shape, colour and size and God forbid you decided to have dreadlocks.
Those Sunday nights and school days left me somewhat traumatised and I decided to leave my hair in its natural form as soon as I had to chance to.
I now have an afro, which is not a hairstyle, but how nature intended my hair to be. I thought this would save me from comments I would have heard at school like, “it looks untidy” or “it is unprofessional” – I have never been more wrong.
The difference now is I don’t care what people say. This was a lot harder when I was just a pupil in primary and high school.
That is why I sympathise with the young girls at Pretoria High School for Girls.
Some of them have been enduring the abuse and discrimination since they started at the school.
I am glad they stood up for themselves. I wish I had the courage to stand up and say something when girls at my school would be pulled out from assemblies or classes and told to go home and could only return once they “fixed” their hair.
This eurocentric thinking that black hair is only beautiful when it has been straightened breaks my heart. How can you say that what nature created is not beautiful?
Combing out an afro hurts enough as it is, without the verbal abuse that comes with it .
Today I choose to wear an afro, occasionally in braids, not only as a statement about my blackness, but also because I find beauty in my blackness and everything that comes with it.
I wish all black women and men could do the same. I also wish that those who are not black could empathise and see the same beauty I see. Then maybe, just maybe, things will start to change.
* Yolisa Tswanya is a reporter at the Cape Argus.