Onidiri School of Theory and Practice of Hair Weaving and Braiding : A School of International Hairstyling Inspired by Toyin Falola's Chapter on the Philosophical Significance of Yoruba Female Hairystyes in his Decolonizing African Knowledge
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge''
A presentation from the website of the Onidiri School of Theory and Practice of Hair Weaving and Braiding of a program of study inspired by Toyin Falola's chapter on the philosophical significance of Yoruba female hairstyles in Decolonising African Knowledge ( 2022). Examples of interpretations of a wide variety of hairstyles from various cultures, drawn from the website, are interspersed with descriptions of the course evident on the site.
I praise the Goddess in the body of the form of the dancing Bhairava, playful like a streak of lightning in a sky dark with clouds, hair spilling like the waters of the dark Yamuna, the rough sea, stretching towards the Milky Way, the river of stars.
Lines combining the lyricism of Kashmiri Hindu thinker Abhinavagupta from his Tantraloka, an image from the Hindu poem Soundaryalahari, Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty and a verbal picture from Japanese writer Matsuo Basho, in evoking the controlled splendour of the hairstyle of the girl in the picture above, complementing the robust glow of her features.
Image Source: Pinterest via CurlyCraze
the name of this hairstyle, shown on an African-American man, is adapted from hairstyles worn by Chinese Shaolin monks. It is used by the monks to symbolize the cultivation, concentration and direction in the human mind and body, of ch'i, a ''universal life force given shape by [ human] consciousness,'' a primary goal of their martial arts training. ( The definition of ch'i given here is by Paul Wildish in The Big Book of Chi, Thorsons, 20000, x).
''Before action, ch'i. Inside action, ch'i. After action, ch'i. Without ch'i, nothing'' is a fundamental tenet of the Shaolin monks.
The flow of hair from the head down to the body is called ''the journey of the dragon'', visualizing ch'i as an immense force flowing from the concentration of physical and cosmic energy in the head and to the rest of the body and back to the head in a wave like motion.
The monks visualize this pattern on their heads, meditating on it in silence, as a means of attuning to these energy flows in their bodies, flows of which the hair patterns are described as a map. ''From beauty, understanding, into beauty, dissolving,'' is a maxim of the school, suggesting the relationship between beauty, represented by the elegance of the graceful hairstyles, and the ideas they project.
"Ìdogba (balance of composition), Gígún (aspect ratio/length), and Jíjora (relative mimesis), Dogba, balance in size and length, generating finesse, symmetry, and visual appeal", Falola's description of ''aesthetics of canonical Yorùbá art'' in Decolonizing African Knowledge, are incidentally valid for describing the lyrical symmetry of this hairstyle, in which beauty facilitates understanding by embodying ideas.
Image source: natalystyles1 on Instagram
The top of the head
plays a primary role in some schools of Hinduism, correlative with the significance of the head in Yoruba philosophy, itself conjunctive with the role of
the head in human biology.
In this example, above, of hair styling sported by an
African-American man, the top of the head is foregrounded as the nucleus of a
star, evocative of a concentration of power, ablaze with inward fires radiating
externally as it weaves patterns within cosmic space, an image suggested by
Western esoteric philosopher Aleister Crowley's maxim of human creativity and
individuality, ''every man and woman is a star.''
This idea is incidentally amplified by the Yoruba understanding of each form in existence as a unique configuration of àṣẹ, pervasive life force distinctively embodied by each entity, as stated in Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, a creative power moving in many channels yet dramatized in terms of ''every one and his own'' as Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe describes a similar idea from Igbo thought in ''The Igbo World and its Art.''
A similar conception is depicted by John Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy as unifying classical African thought, an understanding reverberating from Placide Tempel's pioneering account of a similar concept in Bantu Philosophy.
The circular braiding of the hair around the star structure, the entire pattern enhanced by being coloured bright green, different from the rest of the hair, gives the pattern the look of a votive space, a shrine, resonating in terms of universal cosmological associations of the circle.
This conjunction in turn invites correlations with Falola's description of the act of hair weaving, of constructing a crown for the head, the primary centre of self, symbol of the self in its individual, social and spiritual identity as perceived in Yoruba thought.
He depicts it as a sacred process, ''an act of labor, surrender, and sacrifice'' in which the subject whose hair is being woven surrenders themselves in stillness to the process, sacrificing time and the reflex to move, to the labour of the Onidiri, the hair artist, a transformative process in which nature and culture converge.
''[Human-made] beliefs, orientations, and institutions [interact ] with natural elements, such as landscape, flora, atmosphere, and fauna,'' thereby generating a microcosmos, an image of the universe concentrated in the ''assemblage of fine protein strands'' on the top of the head, as Falola's remarks in Decolonizing African Knowledge may be quoted and adapted.
Image source: "Cornrows Mens Hairstyle: How to Get and Style" at Mens Haircuts
That flow of hair, O spouse of Shiva, which looks like the sparkling waters of the great Yamuna, a glorious thing at your domed head, O mother, appears to those of pure insight, as if the river of heaven were flowing from your crown, hanging in space, a curtain for your magnificent back, touching earth in veneration.
Text adapted from the Hindu classic, Soundaryalahari, the Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty.
Image: Hair by Hali Beauty on Pinterest
The one and a half
year course at
the Onidiri School of Theory and Practice of Hair Weaving and Braiding
involves the practice of weaving and braiding hair and
the study of the possible meanings of the various styles constructed. These
meanings may be shown in the names by which particular hair styles
are known as well as by other ideas associated with them.
The complex waterways of a delta may be seen as suggested by this magnificent
style. It may be perceived as evoking meandering waterways, aquatic channels, suggesting ''inexhaustible
sea, immense water, roaring eddy of sea shells, vibrations from the deep,'' adapting Yoruba
poetry celebrating Earth as mother of all, as quoted by Babatunde Lawal on Yoruba cosmology in The
Gelede Spectacle,.
The cranium of the brother on whose head that style
is woven thus becomes emblematic of the terrestrial globe, its waterways the
complex of nerves shaping his brain, the flesh of his brain akin to the flesh of Earth, the
soft planet of brain pulsing with thought and sensing, a
brain within which emerges a grey plunge in pools of silence, a supplicant crying ''naked
I stand, out of the depths my cry give ear, dark waters of the
beginning,'' integrating Wole Soyinka's Idanre and A
Shuttle in the Crypt and Christopher Okigbo's Labyrinths.
The
permutations of the delta as pictured by the follicle networks mapping the skull of the person wearing the hairstyle may thereby evoke dynamisms of thought
integrated and transcended through silence, through momentary
withdrawal from the fever of existence, enabling the self both to come to peace
with itself and to transcend itself, the self forgotten through the
immersion that emerges from the fibres of pacified nerves, where for a brief
time, the cage that binds most people to the limitations that contribute to
constituting the individual self are melted and the depths of being can be
experienced in gratuitous grace.
Image source : the_chass_effect on Instagram
The students' interpretive powers are developed through extensive exposure to the arts and humanities, the social sciences and the sciences.
This is done through reading, visits to museums and other cultural centres. Such centres include markets, where students will be encouraged to cultivate sensitivity to patterns of colour and dynamism. They will spend time with natural formations, wild and human made, to facilitate growth in appreciation of nature's creativity and of human creativity in harmony with nature.
Students will visit a spectrum of locatons from artists' studios to mechanics' workshops, locations where various kinds of creativity take place. They will also be guided through the theory and practice of various meditation systems as facilitating creativity.
Student and staff learning is further empowered by the school's physical library of millions of volumes covering all subjects, complemented by subscriptions to leading online databases, facilities also acessible remotely from anywhere in the world, along with free Internet access on campus for students using their own devices and the school's several dedicated computing spaces.
"One person's labyrinth is another person's complexio
simplicatio, another individual's complex simplicity'' declares Guilianno
Rossi, founder of the Yoga of Hair, a discipline and philosophy inspired
by the vitality of hair as expressing the quickening of life.
She describes
the various possibilities of the shaping of hair, a unity of nature and
culture, as imaginatively mirroring the myriad
ways in which existence, from inanimate forms to life's biographical
expressions, may be constructed.
In her Yoga of Hair, a vast compendium of pictures of hairstyles from around the world enriched by elaborate commentary, she perceives the twisting unity of such a pattern as it crowns the head in a coil of black hair, as with the Black woman's hair above, styled by Sephora Jones, as akin to the fecundative void, beyond the reach of the probing mind as the ebony potency endlessly generates being and becoming in its multifarious possibilities.
Each strand of hair, Rossi states, embodies the genetic imprint of humanity
enfolded in the genetic identity of the person whose hair it is, an individual
structure which yet coheres with the genetic matrix unique to humanity, in
humanity's association with existence as a whole.
''In each follicle, cosmos,'' she sums up, referencing the roots from which hair grows in urging meditation on a strand of
hair as well as on complex hairstyles in the light of these ideas, generating
libraries of association correlating the One and the Many, the Myriad and the
Unified.
Image source: Hairstyle by Sephora Jones in ''Fall in Love with the Shuku Hairstyles'' by Koumba in Hairstyles of the World blog
The centre of the world, where knowledge exists in its purest form, where all human experience is built into a system of mirrors for viewing and reflecting on social life in terms of intersecting streams of light, a series of reflections receding into an infinite distance, taking deep learning, knowledge, and expertise to observe, read, and interpret.
Text slightly adapted from Akinwumi Ogundiran, The Yoruba : A New History, 2020, 129. The image of where the day breaks comes from Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, 2014. Both texts are referring to the Yoruba city of Ife, pre-eminent in Yoruba spiritual and cognitive culture.
This example of an infinity braid is shaped as a spiral, akin to motifs inspired by a symbol from Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi visual art meaning journey, but also suggesting the sun and eternity, as described at the website of the Inscribing Meaning exhibition at the Smithsonian.
These styles are derived from Adrian Tetrenika's book Visions at the End of Time, in which he describes himself as perceiving three female figures who braid the course of human lives through the patterns of their hair, within the unsurveyable magnitude of worlds upon worlds and systems upon systems, the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation, a vision resonant with the Norse image of three women at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree that is the cosmos, weaving the threads of human life on their looms, and with German philosopher Immanuel Kant on infinity in his Critique of Practical Reason, speaking in the same lines on cosmic motion, from ''unsurveyable magnitude'' to ''periodic motion,'' represented in Tetrenika's vision.
Image source: Another Braid
The serpent rises from her place at the bottom of the spine to unite with her husband at the crown of the head, echoes from Hinduism suggested by the sinuous majesty of these elegant twists of hair and braided flows. This pattern may bring to mind Hindu ideas of the human being as a network of energy, energy visualized as concentrated in a coil at the bottom of the spine, from where it may rise to the top of the head to merge with energy entering the body from the universe, igniting awareness of the unity of self and cosmos.
Image source: ''Cornrow Braids Hairstyles : Their Rich History, Tutorials & Types''
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Black Beauty Bombshells
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Joseph Eze is one of the world's great evocators of female power, doing this significantly through the suggestive force of hair, dramatic hair styles at times suggesting arcane possibilities, as in this example, in which the dense intricacy of hair styling becomes both a construct around the self of the wearer of the hair and a forest of a kind within which they dwell and within which they are concealed, emerging partially to the puzzled gaze.
Image: Isi Òwú Silhouettes No. 11 by Joseph Eze on Pinterest
Magnificent radiations from a cranial centre. Patterns of energy are evoked at the biological core of the self as serpentine coils, suggestive of the dynamism of embodied creative powers, constellate around the visual nucleus of these configurations.
Image source: Mens Hairstyles Now at Pinterest
A spring? An oasis when hope is gone and the tongue is glued to its roots? As wine? No, not wine, not even wine after years of deprivation can compare with the smell and feel of a quarto sheet of paper in its inviolate purity.
As a much junior sibling then who one loves dearly, loves to see in fine prints and little silver earrings, as a little sister dressed for communion, fragile and vulnerable, holier than the mother of Christ and more adorable. But it was not one sheet alone, it was hundreds.
…
But I have not yet described the beauty of a quarto sliver of purity. As a vast expanse of shore after days of shipwreck when one is sole survivor? Perhaps.
But then, the flotsam existence must have lasted so long as to create doubts in this wretch’s mind of his human identity. He must have regressed through the earliest amoebic origins of man, identified himself with the various oceanic mutations and been washed ashore, a mere ectoplasm needing the reassurance of his imprint on the sands.
Yes, yes, I think we approach a barely adequate metaphor. But the smell of this virgin ream did not belong to any such adult experience. It belonged purely to childhood - the fresh baking smells in a bakery, the sweetness of a heap of mown grass after rain, lemon leaves and grandmother opening her tin of snuff. The feel was the first taste of adolescent lips.
From Wole Soyinka, The Man Died. Spectrum, 1988, 282-3
" Oruko, ori, eyan' ,'Name, head, person', 'I
am my name but what more am I?'' is the name of this hairstyle worn
by Busayo Michelle Olupona, as shown on her Facebook page.
The multiple dynamisms of the hair as it rises from the scalp in various
directions, towering into a crown on top of the head, suggests the
self as a constellation of possibilities in dialogue with social identity.
These possibilities of identity are embodied in Yoruba
conception of the head and of hair. The head is perceived as symbolic of the self's ultimate possibilities. Hair is seen as evoking the bond between the self's ultimate possibilities
and the biological and social contexts of life on earth.
Streams of water from the head of Shiva
the apexical point
that is Mount Kailash
where the creator and destroyer of worlds is seated in meditation.
Streams dividing and rejoining
The great ocean that animates existence
The fountain's rushing flow that waters all being
The deathless spring of which is hidden.
Its origin, since it has none, none knows
but all origin from it arises.
Its depth none can sound
No ford to cross it can be found
In the depths of night.
(Salutations to Christian mystic St. John of the Cross who gifts us with those lines about the river that waters all being in his "Song of the Soul that is Glad to Know God by Faith,'' here conjoined with the Hindu image of the great river Ganges issuing from the head of Shiva.
Image source: ''Amazing Braid Hairstyles for Men'' by Sonal Triveldi at purplle.com
this style is called, integrating associations of the
chameleon from different African cultures. The motif was first developed
by the Ghanaian forest mystic Nana Kofi as a way of recalling her vocation in
trying to blend with the forest as a chameleon blends with its environment.
Through such harmony, reached through contemplation of the ecosystemic complexity of the forest while physically exploring it, viewing it from outside or visualizing it in imagination, she aspired to attune herself with the ''heart of the
forest'', the palpitating life force manifest in the fecundity of nature, from
a leaf to a tree to a forest to the stars and beyond these material forms to possibilities beyond
imagination.
''Tendrils of power, crouched in space, linking me to all'' is how she describes this aesthetic, evoking the elegant spatial elevation of the
style, shaping hair into an aerial arabesque, a dynamic architectural form in
which space and volume intertwine, twisting to let in light and air into a house in motion in space, the tensile strength of hair and its tenderness
coalescing in creating grandeur. The style percolated through emulators of
her vision to general use in secular contexts exemplified by its famous wearing by Vera Adu Amani at the 2015 Chaleworth Art Festival.
Information source: Tendrils of
Power: Symbolism in the Thought and Praxis of Nana Kofi by Ato Boateng, 2020.
Image from Nnedi Okorafor on Pinterest
An intricate network of dark hair, akin to the deepest, darkest centre of the forest where Yoruba deity Orunmila encountered the imposing naked woman in the depths of night, as she testified to the entity that carries its offspring in its stomach, the spatial configuration that brings all warm blooded living things that move, into existence, where ultimate possibility emerges in the complexity of cells, of bone and flesh, of body and brain, of the two legged creature who speaks, whose languages shape the world, a creature growing in that generative space for nine months, the owner of the space bringing it forth alive into the light of day in the flow of blood that testifies to the link between the world of primal origins and the world of Earth.
Image source: "30 Photos That Prove Bantu Knots are a Wearable Style"
by Chinwe at BGLH Marketplace
Text adapted from
"Orunmila and the Imposing, Naked Woman:Engaging With the Arcane Feminine in the Context of Yoruba Iyami Aje Spirituality,''
by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju at USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group
Glorious, Delicate, Regal
Image source unrecovered
Image source: Picture by @NeecMontage, courtesy of Bisayo Olupona at
''This Brooklyn-Based Designer Is Making Waves With a Centuries-Old African Hairstyle,'' Vogue
The dragon slumbers. Its magnificent coils at rest. Omnidirectional waves of power, thick ropes writhing upon beds of energy, robust braids in dynamic repose atop carefully woven carpets of hair, juxtaposed with slender streams of black in generating a nexus of dimensions, a confluence of possibilities.
Image source: Definitive Guide to Trending Braided Hairstyles for Black Women in 2022
A coruscation of power, a numinous cloud, a density of the intangible,
an ''invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and
fascination,'' ( Websters on the numinous) juxtaposed with delicate beauty, akin to Thomas Coburn's
climbing of Kenya's Oldoinyo Lengai, the Mountain of God:
''What I am most haunted by [ is the memory of ] "the smell of sulphur, seeping out of wide cracks in the
earth-and the sounds, as of storm surf crashing on a beach, the sounds of
black molten rock hurling itself up from thirty miles below the
earth's surface, crashing against the underside of the most active cone,
spurting up into the air, flowing across the crater floor. There was
for me an unprecedented sense of being in the physical presence of the raw
energy that produced the universe.''
From Thomas B. Coburn, “Climbing the Mountain of God,’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1995, Vol. 63, No. 1, 135.
Image source: Pinterest
Their throne outside of place, outside of time.
To talk about them makes me feel uneasy.
They’re called the Mothers!
They are deities
You mortal men know nothing of, whose name
We loathe to utter. You will need
To dig down deep, so deep, to come on them.
.....
A glowing tripod, when you see it, means
You’ve reached the bottommost, deepest depth of things.
By the light it casts you’ll see the Mothers,
Sitting, standing some, or walking others,
As it may be. Formation, transformation—
The eternal mind in eternal self- conversation.
Surrounded by the forms of all things possible,
They see schemata only, you are invisible.
From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Trans by Martin Greenberg, Yale, 2014. 226, 228
When the assembly of hairs was complete,
They took over the head.
When the assembly of hairs on the beard was complete,
They became ojontagiri.
When the clumping of trees was complete,
They became forests.
When the eruwa grasses were completely assembled,
They became savannah.
The agbon, when they assembled completely,
They uphold the roofing of a house.
When the ita assembled completely,
They covered the face of the Earth.
'Dew pour lightly, pour lightly,
Dew pour heavily, pour heavily,
Dew pour heavily so that you may pour lightly.'
Thus Ifa was consulted for Olofin Otete
Who would pour myriads of existence down upon the Earth.
On the day he was to receive the ado of existence
From the hands of Olodumare;
On the day, he was to release
Existences on the Earth.
One particle of dust became
A basketful measure of dust.
A basketful measure of soil became the earthcrust.
In asuwa forms, purposive unity of being, all things descended upon the Earth activated by purpose..
All goodness together formed an asuwa.
Alasuwada, the author of the purposive unity of existence, it is You I call
To send all goodness to me.
Extract with two interpretive interpolations, from ''Asuwada'', Yoruba oral poem, chanted at the founding of a community, among other contexts, quoted in Akinsola Akiwowo's ''Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry, '' International Sociology, Vol. 1. No. 4, 1986, 343-358.
Fact and fiction, verifiable fact and extrapolative possibilities, actual and fictional book references, are correlated in this essay.
''On the Philosophical Significance of Hair and its Artistic Shaping:Theoretical Indications in the Chapter on Philosophies of Hair and Hairstyles in Relation to Yoruba Thought in Toyin Falola's Decolonizing African Knowledge:Autoethnography and African Epistemologies: Close Reading 1,'' 2022