As Long as Our Girls Are Being Told How to Wear Their Hair at School, We Are Still Colonized

“As long as our little girls are being told how to wear their hair at public schools, we are still colonized.”

It sounds provocative. Maybe even dramatic, to someone who hasn’t lived it. But for millions of girls across Africa — in Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and beyond — this is not a metaphor. It is Monday morning.

The Rules Are Simple. And That’s the Problem.

Walk into most government schools across Sub-Saharan Africa and you will find a hair policy that has barely changed since the colonial era. The options presented to girls are, in most cases, exactly two:

Shave it all off. Or braid it into a prescribed number of cornrows — tight against the scalp, uniform and neat. Nothing in between.

No loose natural hair. No twists. No puffs. No wash-and-go. No Bantu knots. No creative expression of any kind. The hair that grows from a Black girl’s scalp in its natural state is, according to these institutions, unacceptable.

This is not a coincidence. This is design.

Where These Rules Come From

To understand hair policies in African schools today, you have to go back to what schools were originally designed to do under colonialism.

Missionary and colonial schools were not simply institutions of learning — they were instruments of assimilation. The goal was to produce Africans who could be useful to colonial administration: orderly, obedient, “presentable.” The erasure of African cultural identity was not a side effect. It was the curriculum.

Hair was one of the most visible and potent markers of that identity. Braiding patterns, head coverings, and natural styles carried meaning — of community, age, status, and ceremony. To strip that away was to strip away the self.

The rules that followed were not about hygiene or uniformity in any genuine sense. They were about establishing who had the right to define what “respectable” looked like. And the answer, under colonialism, was never the African child.

Decades later, independence has come and gone — but the hair policy largely remains. Many schools enforce it without questioning where it came from, or what it continues to signal.

The Deeper Cost: Girls Never Get to Know Their Own Hair

Here is the part that doesn’t get talked about enough.

A girl who spends her entire school career either with a shaved head or in four mandatory cornrows does not learn her hair. She cannot. The discovery process — figuring out your porosity, your shrinkage, what your hair does with moisture versus without it, what styles it holds, how it grows, what it likes — that process requires contact, experimentation, and time.

When schools remove that contact for years at a stretch, they are not just enforcing a dress code. They are engineering a disconnection between a girl and her own body.

She leaves school, or reaches an age where she’s finally allowed to “have” hair again, and finds herself staring at a stranger in the mirror. Not knowing where to start. Not knowing her curl pattern. Not knowing why her scalp itches, why her edges are thinning, why her hair breaks. She may not even know that her hair is beautiful.

This is not a small thing. Hair care is not vanity. It is self-knowledge. And it is something that should be every girl’s birthright.

The Physical Toll: What Tight, Mandatory Cornrows Actually Do

Beyond the psychological cost, there is a real, measurable physical one.

The cornrows mandated by school policies are not gentle styles. They are pulled tight — tight enough to last weeks without maintenance, because school schedules don’t accommodate regular restyling. For years, girls are walking around with their hairline under constant tension.

This is one of the primary causes of traction alopecia — hair loss at the hairline caused by prolonged pulling on the hair follicles. When cornrows are done too tightly and worn for extended periods without rest, the follicles weaken. If it goes on long enough, the damage becomes permanent: the follicle scars, and the hair simply stops growing back.

Across Africa, traction alopecia at the temples and nape is overwhelmingly common in adult women. Many carry the evidence of school years spent in styles they did not choose, worn at a tension that served an institution’s idea of “neat” — not their scalp’s capacity to withstand.

This is the price of being told, for years on end, exactly how to exist.

RELATED READING

Everything You Need to Know About Traction Alopecia Causes, early signs, how to fix it — and when it might be too late to reverse the damage at your hairline. Read the article →

But What About When School Ends?

The damage from years of school hair rules does not end when school ends. Women who grew up under these policies reach adulthood with two compounding challenges: they are starting their hair journey decades behind, and they are often starting it with hair that has already been compromised by years of tight styles and no care education.

The first challenge is catching up on knowledge — understanding moisture, scalp health, porosity, growth cycles — that peers who had more hair freedom may have learned naturally as teenagers.

The second challenge is addressing actual hair and scalp damage — thinning edges, scalp sensitivity, breakage — that stems directly from years of enforced styles without adequate maintenance.

Both are solvable. But they require intention, patience, and the willingness to start from scratch without shame. Because none of this is the woman’s fault. She was not given the opportunity to learn.

RELATED READING

How to Reset Your Hair After Protective Styles Whether it’s the end of school or the end of a long-term style, your hair needs an intentional reset. Here’s exactly how to do it. Read the article →

Reclaiming Your Hair Is an Act of Decolonization

We want to be clear: this is not about telling girls to rebel against school rules. It is about naming what those rules are, where they come from, and what they cost.

Because naming it is the first step.

The second step is making sure that every girl who comes out of that system — who was told for years that her natural hair was wrong, or had her freedom of expression reduced to two prescribed options — has access to the knowledge she was denied. Knowledge about her hair. About her scalp. About what her hair actually needs. About the fact that those prescribed cornrows were a policy, not a truth about who she is.

At Pressed, this is personal. We are a brand founded in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania — a city where government school girls walk around with shaved heads or four uniform cornrows, and where women in their twenties and thirties are often meeting their hair for the first time as adults.

Our mission has always been to educate. Not to sell products first and explain later, but to equip women with the knowledge that makes everything else possible. Because a woman who understands her hair cannot be made to feel like a stranger in it.

RELATED READING

“But You Don’t Understand My Hair Type” Hair type is real — but it’s not an exemption from scalp care. Understanding your hair starts with understanding the biology that applies to all of us. Read the article →

What You Can Do — Starting Now

If you spent years under school hair policies and are only now learning to reconnect with your hair, here is where to start:

Start with the scalp. Before anything else, scalp health is the foundation. A scalp that has spent years under tension and without regular care may need time to rebalance. Regular cleansing, scalp massage to stimulate blood flow, and a targeted scalp oil are the building blocks.

Don’t rush back into tight styles. When you finally have freedom, give your scalp and follicles time to recover before going back into anything that pulls.

Get curious about your hair. Notice how your hair responds to moisture. Pay attention to your curl pattern, your porosity, how much it shrinks when dry. This process of discovery was taken from you, but it is yours to reclaim.

Be patient with yourself. Hair knowledge takes time to build. There is no shame in not knowing things you were never taught.

Scalp Elixir Formulated with rosemary, pumpkin seed, and cold-pressed oils to stimulate blood flow, reduce inflammation, and support a healthy scalp environment. The foundation of your hair journey — wherever that journey starts. Shop Now →

The Bigger Picture

Hair policies in African schools are slowly being challenged. In South Africa, students and parents have fought back against policies that banned natural styles — particularly locs and afros — with some success. In Kenya, Tanzania, and elsewhere, the conversations are beginning.

But policies change slowly. And in the meantime, there are millions of girls sitting in classrooms right now with their hair constrained into styles they did not choose, learning — whether anyone intends this or not — that their natural self requires management, control, and approval before it can be acceptable in public.

As long as that is true, the work is not done. And as long as we are building a brand, we want it to be a place where girls who grew up in those classrooms can come as women and find the information and the permission they were never given: to know their hair, love it, and care for it — on their own terms.