A bit about the first time I got my hair braided and why I'm so interested in Kenyatta market
By Natachi Onwuamaegbu

Carly Steyer
I remember the soreness.
It was two days of pulling and tugging, two days of inexperienced hands working their way through my kink, two days of the thickness of my hair fighting back. It was its first time being tamed, after all, and it didn’t want to go down without a fight.
It was the summer of 2013 and hundreds of thick box braids dotted my scalp – my fingers couldn’t meet around the mass of hair. My head was heavier than it ever had been. Seven packs of dyed Black plastic will do that. But – I had never felt more beautiful. Capable.
At that time, I didn’t know that taking two days to install medium box braids is practically unheard of. I didn’t know that outside of the U.S., two days turns into two hours. I didn’t know of hair braiding as a passed down tradition, a skill, a market, an opportunity for artistic expression and economic freedom. I didn’t know. All I knew is it took two days.
And I had to have it again.
I’m not going to spend this entry waxing and waning on the importance of box braids for Black women. There’s too much, so much, information available on the suffocating presence of western respectability standards. Those that force Black women to look for something, anything, to change the natural rise of our hair. Box braids are a way for hair to remain Black and lie flat. It’s a beautiful, messed up loophole – one that is often still policed – but in recent years braids have become more mainstream, more accepted.
Even in the states box braids aren’t meant to take two days. I realized that the second time I got my braids done. That time only took 10 hours.
Speed, true speed, didn’t enter my life until I was perched on my grandmother’s porch in a southern village in Nigeria. There, speed met me and took me by surprise. My father called his sister who called her “girls.” Said girls (shamefully) arrived to the porch first. Butt in chair, hands in hair, I was out of there in three hours. A miracle.
I’m also not going to spend this entry waxing and waning about the beauty of their movements, how fluid they worked together, speaking in a language I should understand but don’t, separating and stretching hair, pulling and piecing together chunks at a time. I couldn’t keep up. For now, just know hair braiding in Africa is something beautiful. That’s why I’m here, in Nairobi, trying to take apart how the hair braiding industry aids and hinders the women of Kenya. I’m starting with one market, Kenyatta Market, and talking to women about their lives – and how braiding feeds into it. It’s a personal subject for me, as I’m sure it is for many Black women. Hair is personal because it’s policed and scrutinized and torn apart – not just in the U.S. The arms of colonial rule have stretched deep into Africa and somehow made many ashamed of the natural.
“In pursuing this project, I hope to elevate the stories of both the African woman and the African hair braider.”
The project I hope to pursue is bigger than my own personal experiences with hair braiding – I plan on digging into strangers’ lives, taking their untold stories to new levels. I want to experiment with audio and visual storytelling along with my tried and true written work.
So, why Kenyatta?
Kenyatta Market is unlike anything I’ve experienced before, and yet looking into the culture here could be vital to understanding the unofficial marketplace culture happening globally. Young women grow up in the market, watching their mothers separate braiding hair, call to women, promise exorbitant prices before bartering and bartering. In shelters separated by thin walls of tin and mounds of fake hair, one person’s head is pulled in seven directions by women who barely move and braid faster than they speak. One woman is usually in charge, directing young and old women to waiting heads, finding hair colors, and negotiating prices.
Kenyatta market is a place for Kenyan women to find economic liberation -- young women can learn a marketable skill, support their families and their children. They can work while a baby is strapped to their back. But it’s also a place of economic entrapment -- employees are paid impossibly low wages under bosses with no legal responsibility. There’s no health care or job security, and when you grow up braiding, it’s all you know.
Next week, I dive in. I’m so excited to bring you all along with my journey as I experiment with different modes of storytelling and connecting. You can follow along with my work here, my National Geographic Field Notes blog, and on Instagram.
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