How I learned to love my natural hair miles away from home in Nigeria

Women 'fixing' their hair. (Reuters/Pilar Olivares)

I held my breath as the barber took his large scissors to my hair to administer the “big chop”. It was the evening of December 20, 2013, and I was cutting my hair for the first time in my life. I closed my eyes as the strands of relaxed hair grazed my face and fell. It was hair that I had spent twenty years tending to and grooming. Hair my mother had lost her patience with wrestling and combing, often spending hours to get it right, until she finally decided to put the “creamy crack” on it when I was four and that was that.

Since then I knew a round of heat applied through a white creamy relaxer would get me what was needed: straight and somewhat flippable hair. The kind of hair I saw on shampoo ads while growing up, with the horizontal sheen of light flowing down its droopy length. As the barber’s clipper outlined my scalp, I remembered Coco Chanel’s words, “A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.”

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