Fashion
Top 10 Hair Salons(Namibia)
The Rise Of The Afrocentric Hair-Salons
23/03/2020
Fashion
# The Rise Of The Afrocentric Hair-Salons
Composed By: Francois Boois (opens new window)@Facebook
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All the characters in this article prefer to remain anonymous all the names are made-up by the author to protect the characters,businesses and products.
Not much seems unusual about Latoya and Tuyepo Shipondokas storefront in a tidy Market off Independence Avenue in Soweto, Katutura, a neighborhood where every block seems to have its own African hair-braiding salon. Posters of African women with long, sleek hair fill the window. Round jars of shea butter belly up to slender boxes of hair dye on the shelves. Wigs perch on mannequin heads. What makes Black Girls Divine Beauty Supply and Salon’s visitors do a double-take is the skin color of the proprietors. “I go, ‘Look at all the faces on the boxes,’ ” said Latoya Shipondoka, recalling other shopkeepers’ and customers’ surprise when they realize she is not an employee, but the owner. “Who should be owning these stores?”
The Shipondoka sisters’ is one small shop in a multibillion-dollar industry, centered on something that is both a point of pride and a political flash point for black women: their hair. But the Shipondokas are among only a few hundred black owners of the roughly 800 stores that sell hair products like relaxers, curl creams, wigs and hair weaves to black women, not just in Windhoek but across the country. The vast majority have Chinese-Namibian owners, a phenomenon dating back to the 1990's that has stoked tensions between black consumers and Chinese businesspeople over what some black people see as one ethnic group profiting from, yet shutting out, another.
A growing awareness of this imbalance has spurred more black people to hang out their own shingles. The people producing the products have changed, too: As “going natural” — abandoning artificially smoothed hair in favor of naturally textured curls and braids — has become more popular and the Internet has expanded, black entrepreneurs, most of them women, are claiming a bigger share of the shelves in women’s medicine cabinets. “We’re aware of where our dollars are going, we’re aware of the power of our dollars, we’re aware of the cultural significance of the way that we choose to wear our hair,” said Patricia, the co-founder of Afrohair, a popular natural-hair blog. “There’s been a lot of taking back the power, and a lot of that is from the Internet.”
Dozens of bloggers flock to industry shows to test new products, review them for their readers and spread the word on social media. Hundreds of thousands of women watch natural hairstyle tutorials on YouTube. Maria Nepempe, which she has marketed through her YouTube videos, is among the most successful of the homegrown brands. Still, nothing beats brick-and-mortar stores for convenience, and the chance to touch and sniff the creams, which has prompted groups like the Kayek Beauty Supply Institute, in Windhoek, to start training blacks to open their own stores.
A 2006 South African documentary about Chinese’ dominance of the industry spurred some black women to join boycotts of Chinese-owned stores. The Film has chronicled one case in Pretoria, in which a black store owner was accused of setting fire to a nearby Chinese-owned store. Chinese immigrants began entering the African hair business in the 1990s, when wigs were among China's top exports. Hair-care retail was not much of a leap.
And competition was scant: Until midcentury, many black women bought products from door-to-door saleswomen. Few stores were devoted to hair products. Discam flight closed many white-owned storefronts, clearing the way for Chinese shops. “A lot of people think these people were taking it away from black owners, but that’s not the case said one of the experts on the subject who chose to remain anonymous. “They were creating new businesses,” she said. “And they were doing it in places where nobody else wanted to open a store.” A saying among Chinese immigrants has it that “whoever picks you up at the airport is the one who will give you a job,” whether in beauty supplies or in other Chinese-dominated businesses like gadget or cellphone stores.
That proved true for Tony Xi, 45, who owns a Beauty Supply on Independence Avenue in Soweto, Katutura. Like many other Chinese shopkeepers, he got his start in the industry working for a friend’s store after moving to the Namibia. He saved up to open his own store around four years ago: The dream of Success, Mr. Xi called it. He explained the Chinese connection to the industry simply: “Most wholesalers are Chinese. They can speak Mandarin; I can speak Mandarin.” (As labor costs rose in China, wig production moved to Vietnam and settled more recently elsewhere in Asia, where labor is cheap. China still own many manufacturers.) Chang Li, the publisher of Angel Times, an industry publication written in both Chinese and English, said he was shocked by the simmering anger directed at Chinese owners, many of whom turned to the business after they were shut out of traditional career paths because of the language barrier. He argued in a Angel Times column in March that the competition between Chinese-run stores had driven down prices for black consumers. “Despite many challenges, Chinese-Namibians opened their businesses in the heart of African communities and made available quality beauty-related products at low prices,” he wrote. “It does not make any sense to treat these hardworking Chinese-Namibian business owners as a band of criminals.” Black people running their own stores say that securing accounts with the major Chinese wholesalers can be tough, because they require retailers to buy in bulk to qualify for discounts. For first-time Chinese owners, who can join forces with established owners or split costs with other retailers, the way is often smoother, not the least because the wholesalers sometimes offer easier terms to other Chinese. Outside Windhoek, Selma Ulenga is opening her second beauty supply store catering to black women in an area where black-owned businesses like hers are scarce, part of what she calls a movement to “take the power back from people who made you powerless.” She found that she would have to order 10,000 berets to qualify for a 50 percent discount and free shipping — an impossible deal, given that she might sell 100 berets in a year. As a result, she said, customers may complain that “our products can be a quarter more, or even 15 Namibian Dollars or 30 a dollar, than the Chinese stores, and they don’t really understand why.” Other black proprietors face complaints about not stocking enough products. But younger, natural-haired black consumers — “naturalistas,” as some call them — are more aware than ever of where their dollars go, and what goes in their hair.
They are women like Cornelia Uiras, 23, a nursing student in Swakopmund, who spends up to a few hours a day scrolling through Instagram, watching YouTube videos and reading reviews to learn about new products and styles, and then trying them herself. Her hair can cost her as much as N$120 a month. “You have your cellphone bill, you have your gotv bill and then you have to buy your hair products,” she said on a recent afternoon outside the Hair Shop on Jan Jonker Street in Downtown Windhoek, where mannequin faces peered alluringly from behind their curtains of false hair in a dozen styles and colors. “Mel” wore a swoop of blond-streaked strands, “Dev” a coppery-red bob; platinum-blond ringlets cascaded down “Kell's” shoulders.
Ms. Angula's newest acquisition: Curls “crème brule” whipped curl cream. “I take a lot of pride in my hair,” she said. “If my hair doesn’t look nice, I don’t feel like I’m pretty.” In Southern Namibia, Ms. Hendricks of Aloe Naturals recently made the biggest announcement of her career to her nearly 1000 YouTube subscribers: Her line of organic hair creams, oils and conditioners for black women, products she had cooked up in her kitchen, was hitting the shelves of Target stores. Ms.Hendricks, 37, started her business with N$10000 as a college student, marketing her products on Whatsapp and selling them on Facebook. Now her videos can draw as many as 2,000 views from fans. “They want to know, who’s the face behind the brand?” she said. “Are you able to relate to my hair, are you able to relate to my struggles and to my journey of being natural?” Most of all, she said, she loves hearing from women who notice her photo on Aloe bottles. They tell her that they tell their children: “Someone that looks like you makes that product.”
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