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Astutely hirsute
John Matshikiza
August 01, 2005

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=246856&area=/columnist__john_matshikiza/

It seems that the venerable Mail & Guardian (well, at 20 years old, you’ve got to be able to claim the right to be a little venerable) was having a bad hair day last week.

In the middle of the paper there was an old photo of the founding granddaddies of the establishment, Anton Harber and Irwin Manoim, disguised respectively as Elvis Presley and Art Garfunkel.

At least Manoim, who had been tasked to write a pocket history of the paper on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, had the grace to allow a photo of how he really looks now to appear at the top of the article. No one could accuse him of trying to glide over the truth of what the years have done and have those Garfunkel bangs airbrushed back in place by the hard-working and generally harassed photographic department. He appears as himself. And in a wonderfully written, wry, informative article, he also speaks as himself.

And thank goodness both he and Harber had the sense of humour to let their old, rock star/revolutionary images be included in the piece. Lest we forget.

Robert Mugabe is perpetually having a bad hair day, and the media, including the M&G, are continually guilty of letting him get away with it. From time to time the incipient threads of grey appear at the edge of his hairline, while the rest of his head seems to be covered in an ever-youthful mat of jet black -- although this sometimes gives way when the black dye starts to fade and make him look more like a redhead edging towards brunette. The great mogul of the north, however, is far too vain to allow this state of affairs to prevail for too long. Apparently there is a team of well-paid, skilled Italian barbers and Shangaan sangomas at hand on a daily basis to pounce on any sign of ageing appearing on Mugabe’s head.

But the media continue to play along with the charade, rather than ignoring the man and his vanity.

The most startling example of this paper’s succumbing to its own bad hair day was the series of no less than five pictures, all taken from roughly the same angle, of Wole Soyinka’s hair.

It is hard to know where to lay the finger of blame. I know Wole reasonably well, and can well imagine him telling the foolhardy photographer to take his hair the way it is or get lost. No top shots. No interesting, intimate angles on what the hair does when it falls away towards the back of the great Nobel laureate’s head. The man wears his hair that way because that’s the way he wants it to come across.

And the way his hair comes across is the way that he, in turn, wants to come across.

It was hard to tell, from the tenor of the interview, exactly what it was that Soyinka wanted to come across as. Maybe the interviewer was intimidated by all that hair. You walk into a room in a fancy hotel expecting to meet a hero of African literature, and instead you are greeted by a fuzz of white hair that is going all over the place for no particular purpose. And a beard that is resolutely doing the same thing. How do you penetrate all of that?

My colleague and erstwhile Youth Day editor, Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya, did the only thing he could. He lost his bottle, and lost the thread of what he was there to do at the same time, and instead stammered out the first question the way I am sure he never intended it to be.

The theme was supposed to be "What is the meaning of Nelson Mandela" — a topic Soyinka, among other eminent African academics, had been invited to pontificate on to an elite audience of South Africans on the occasion of the great man’s 87th birthday. (Madiba, meanwhile, was off watching the rugby with his wife.)

Trying to keep himself together, Moya allowed his keen journalistic mind to drift into other territory. "What is the meaning of Wole Soyinka?" he found himself asking.

What was probably going on in his head was, "What is the meaning of all that hair?" But because he never asked the question directly, he found himself dismissed with an answer from the mighty laureate that told us nothing about anything. Least of all about the hair.

It was left to the readership to interpret that for ourselves, guided, as I say, by a series of photographs of Soyinka’s hair that would supposedly speak for itself. Only it told us nothing, except that the man is presumably particularly vain about how his hair comes across — just like Robert Mugabe. Or, indeed, Bobby Charlton, who popularised the famous cross-cranial flop while playing football for Manchester United and England in the 1960s.

The theory used to be that it was women who stressed themselves about how their hair came across in the public eye. Of course this has never been exclusively true. Why did men specialise in elaborate, shoulder-length wigs at all the royal European courts in the Elizabethan era and beyond? Why did it become so fashionable to wear hats, inside and outside the house, in the South African townships in the 1950s? Why did the Afro wig, and the Dixy Peach straightener before it, take both men and women in the black world by storm in the mid-20th century? To hide the dreadful secrets about your personality hidden in the way you handle, or fail to handle, the God-given carpet of your natural hair.

The M&G, true to its venerable history, has done us a service by making us look, even unintentionally, at this issue of hair over the past week. I feel, however, that there should have been a clear editorial commentary on this occasion to alert both myself and the general public as to what this has all been about. Just so we know.

*John Matshikiza is a columnist with the Mail & Guardian (SA)

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