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The struggle with many a rigid Logooli cultural practices

  The Logooli community is one of the deeply cultured societies – with near everything supposed to have been done as per custom – to allow another custom to follow. One example is that for a mature man (with a child or more) to be buried, there must be a house structure at home. Another is that a boy must be circumcised and nursed in father land. If maternal family decides to, the boy will have a hard time reconnecting with father people - a dent on his masculinity. There were two children who got burnt to death in a house in Nairobi. The single mother had left for night work. Elders were told that one of the children was Logooli. The other, the woman had sired with someone else. The Logooli family wanted to burry their little one and long discussed the do’s and don’ts. Of a man who died childless and the grave was placed as if he had died as a man with children. It should have been dug on the sides, the grave. A real thorn should have been thrust in his buttocks, his name go...
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Discrimination based on Hair.

I don’t have peace. I am the subject. As to how I got out of the house with this kind of hair is their problem. Am I slowly turning into a vagabond? My boss must be thinking about it. The first thing she did while greeting me was to throw a look of ‘I am concerned’ on my head. Fellow volunteers have been touching my hair; some saying it may be having lice or nits. Their words are followed by groans. I am not fitting.

Wisdom could have driven me to the barber and asked him a Jordan cut. Then I’d look good in the eyes of everyone. If my mama met me today she’ll think otherwise. I know what I should be doing- having my hair short and neat.
African hair (Africa as an identity) make us rather look shaggy than orderly. Or is that what we have conceived in our views? To be told how to do your hair is to be chosen what to wear. Not everyone agrees to it. Were it that humans were individually independent, some systems would not get hold of us. Uncombed kinky hair forms knots that we have been warn and taught that it is shaggy. To make locks is identified with thuggery. It is like religion- convinced to understand what we are not parcel of.

Women, who should be discussing this, were I a good boy is past the Matuta style to long synthetic or whatever outfits. How does it occur to you when it dawns that beauty is faked? News anchors lose admiration, do they? My ideal girl has an afro that is dyed or lines that run stylish on the head. Where did the black wool go to? It was good to round mama’s head when her hairstyle was weeks old.

Discrimination can occur on so many things. The easiest prejudice is on one’s external look. Hair is the first. If I do whatever I do with my head, what is wrong with you? Systems that would want to decide what time to report in office, what to wear, when and not how to do blablabla are the things I’d want to kick off my life come tomorrow morning. Of course there are cleaner and more responsible Rasta men that Jordan’s. Should we go to street for this?

Depending on age and lifestyle (not fashion) should we choose what best suits us. Life lived between the margins of other people’s choices and views are no better than slavery. Who knows, without astronomy genes that hair can propel you to some kind of knowing? There is a picture I carry taken a few days after my birth that shows long first hair that traditionally should be shaved by the grandmother. Dad was still planning for the son to meet its grandma. Does it happen nowadays?

There are men and women who have passionately shown the world that they are wonderfully made. Are you one?

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