The first ridiculous thing I learned about leaving home was that a haircut could cost the same as my groceries.
Not nice groceries either. Struggling-international-student groceries. The kind where you stand in the aisle comparing two brands of rice and choose the one that insults your bank account less. Back in Ghana, a haircut was ordinary. Routine. Small money. A thing you did the way you breathed, without thinking about the economics of breath. In Australia, one haircut cost almost ten times what I used to pay. I remember standing there doing the silent arithmetic you do when you’re broke, converting currencies in your head like a prayer, hoping the numbers will rearrange themselves if you stare long enough.
They don’t.
But this essay is not really about money. It is about something money accidentally reveals: that the rituals we consider small are often the ones carrying the most weight. And for Black people, across continents, across centuries, hair has never been small. It has been a battleground, a love letter, a political speech, a family archive, a source of shame manufactured by others and pride reclaimed by ourselves. Frantz Fanon wrote about the colonised body as a site where history is stored without permission. Hair is where you can see that storage most clearly. Every texture, every style, every choice to cut or grow or loc or shave carries inside it a conversation with power, whether you intended to have that conversation or not.
• • •
Let me start with the hands.
There is something that rarely gets spoken about in the literature of Black masculinity, and it is this: the barbershop may be one of the only places where Black men are touched with tenderness by another man, and neither party has to name it as such. The barber tilts your head. He holds your chin. He turns your face toward the light. He runs his thumb along your hairline to check his work. These are intimate gestures dressed in the language of commerce, a transaction that permits closeness without the vulnerability of admitting you needed it.
I did not understand this when I was young. I only understood that sitting in his chair felt different from sitting in other chairs.
And for most of my life, I didn’t “have barbers”. I had my barbers . Three or four across years, maybe, but really it was one guy who mattered. A small kiosk. His shop was a small kiosk near the edge of the neighbourhood. Tin roof. A cracked mirror that made everyone look slightly slimmer, or slightly haunted, depending on the light. I was fairly certain he smoked weed, the shop had that sweet residual haze that clung to things, the kind adults pretend not to notice. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I trusted him. And trust, when it comes to Black hair, is not a casual word. It is an entire epistemology.
Kobena Mercer once argued that Black hairstyles are not merely aesthetic choices but “critical responses to the experience of oppression and dispossession.” I think he was right, but I also think the argument can be made more tenderly. The haircut is not always a manifesto. Sometimes it is simply the desire to look like the version of yourself you are becoming. In your teenage years, that desire is almost unbearable. You are still building your face. Still negotiating your identity with your reflection. Your parents want a low cut so you don’t have to return every three weeks, because money is money, and in my family, savings were treated as a moral instruction, a spiritual discipline passed down with the same gravity as proverbs. But you want a shape. A line. Something that says I know who I am , even when you don’t.
So you find the person who can translate that feeling into a cut.
• • •
With him, my barber, my real one, it was never just business. We talked football. We argued about players with the seriousness other people reserve for politics and theology. I knew his siblings. I knew the low-key dramas of his household, the rumours about his partner, the small comedies and crises that form the background music of any neighbourhood anywhere. He knew mine. He knew my name, my moods, the version of me I was trying on that month. When I sat in that chair, I didn’t have to explain myself. The clippers would start and the conversation would simply continue from where it left off last time.
That kind of continuity is rarer than people think. In a world that constantly demands you narrate yourself, at borders, in classrooms, on forms, in job interviews, at parties where someone leans in and asks where are you really from? , there is profound relief in a space where you are already known. The barbershop offers that. Not because the barber has read your CV, but because he has watched you change over months and years, one trim at a time, and he holds that quiet record without making a fuss about it.
This is what I mean when I say the barbershop is an archive. Not of documents. Of personhood .
• • •
Earlier than that, when my sister and I were children, my father would sometimes pay a young man in the area to cut our hair. I didn’t understand it at the time. The cuts weren’t always great. Sometimes we’d look at each other afterwards and silently agree not to discuss it.
But now I see what he was doing.
He was redistributing. Not in the language of economics textbooks, but in the grammar of the neighbourhood. Paying a young man. Letting him practise his craft on willing heads. Putting money in a pocket that might otherwise be empty that week. It was care, dressed up as something ordinary. And in communities where formal employment is a privilege rather than a guarantee, this is how economies actually work, not through policy documents, but through the barber chair, the seamstress’s table, the woman selling groundnuts in a basin balanced on her head. Ubuntu, I am because we are , is not an abstraction in these settings. It is the operating system.
My father was running that programme. He just never called it that.
• • •
Then I left.
And the new country taught me the price of “ordinary.”
There is a term that should exist but doesn’t, for the specific surcharge that Black people pay to maintain their hair in predominantly white societies. It is not just a financial cost, though it is that, dramatically so. It is the cost of explanation. The cost of searching. The cost of sitting in a chair and realising, from the way the barber picks up his tools, that your hair is unfamiliar territory to him. That your head has become a lesson. That you are about to be somebody’s first experiment.
In the beginning, I tried to be clever. A friend encouraged me to cut my own hair. It sounded reasonable in that way that broke ideas often do, practical on paper, disastrous in the mirror. I bought clippers, watched tutorial videos made by people with steadier hands and better spatial reasoning than me, and stood in the bathroom thinking, how hard can it be?
Hard. It can be very hard.
Cutting your own hair is not haircutting. It is an act of desperate geometry, arms raised at impossible angles, a mirror that only reveals one hemisphere at a time, the slow dawning realisation that symmetry is a professional skill and not, as you’d assumed, a birthright. You are a carpenter whose wood is his own head and who must go outside afterwards and act like nothing happened.
I quit that experiment quickly.
Then I found the wholesale barber at the mall. Ten dollars. You get a ticket, you sit, you don’t talk too much, and you receive a cut that is efficient, clean, and fast. For most people, that is enough.
But I am not most people. I am a Black man who cares about his hair, even when I pretend I don’t. And the cut did not settle into me. It sat on my head without conviction. It looked like something that had happened to me, not something that belonged to me. There is a difference, and if you know, you know.
• • •
Here is what I missed, broken down into its components, though it was never experienced as components but as a single indivisible feeling:
The sharpness around the edges. The careful, almost surgical attention to the hairline, because in Black barbering, the hairline is a signature. It is where craft becomes art. It is the difference between a haircut and a haircut . And then the moment, the thing I didn’t know I would miss until it was gone, the harsh sting of spirit on the freshly trimmed edges. That quick, bright pain that tells your whole nervous system: yes, you’re fresh now. Yes, you’re ready.
And the music. I haven’t said enough about the music.
Every barbershop has a soundtrack, and the soundtrack is a cultural GPS. Back home, it might be highlife drifting from a phone speaker propped against a tin wall, Daddy Lumba’s voice doing that thing it does, turning the whole afternoon into something bittersweet and golden. Or hiplife, heavier, younger, carrying the rhythms of a generation rewriting the rules. In a Sudanese barber’s shop in the city, it was Arabic pop, melodic and warm, filling a room where men sat quietly and let the music do the talking. In the Serbian barber’s chair, it was turbo-folk or sometimes just football commentary, which is its own kind of music if you listen right. In Nigerian shops, Afrobeats, Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, pulsing at that exact frequency that makes your head nod even when you’re trying to keep still for the clippers.
The playlist is never accidental. It is a declaration: this is who we are in this room. It establishes the tempo of the visit, the mood of the conversation, the emotional register of the space. Quincy Troupe once wrote about jazz as “the sound of surprise,” and I think the barbershop playlist operates similarly, it creates an atmosphere where unexpected intimacies become possible. You confess things to music you wouldn’t confess to silence.
• • •
Over the years, I have had my hair cut by Nigerians, Congolese, Sudanese, Iraqis, Samoans, Australians, Serbians, Chinese, Indians, Tanzanians. Each shop had its own language, its own interior grammar. The posters on the wall, the arrangement of products, the greeting customs, the way they touch your head, some with the confidence of long practice, others with the tentative curiosity of first encounter.
A Pacific Islander barber was the best I found for a long time. He understood without instruction. No lengthy explanation. No reference photos. He simply knew what Black hair needed, the patience, the pressure, the particular respect that coarser textures demand. There was relief in that. The kind of relief that comes not from luxury but from the absence of having to perform your own legibility.
Then a Serbian barber. Forty-five minutes sometimes, talking football the entire way through. His country and mine had met on the world stage, and mine had won. That match lives in collective memory the way certain songs do, not because it changed material conditions, but because it proved something about standing in the same room as anyone. Sankofa , the Akan principle of reaching back to move forward, works in football too. You carry your history onto the pitch. You carry your people’s gaze. With him, we talked about that, about players and leagues, about the way football makes strangers feel familiar. The clippers did their work. The conversation did something else entirely. It was building a bridge between two men from different continents who discovered, in a rented chair, that they shared the same religion: the beautiful game.
• • •
Something people don’t discuss enough: the vulnerability of the first haircut with a new barber.
You walk in. You scan the room the way you’d scan any unfamiliar territory, assessing risk, reading signs, calculating odds. You study how he holds the clippers. You listen to how he talks. You examine the posters, the cleanliness of the combs, the way other customers look when they stand up from the chair. Are they pleased? Are they performing pleasure? Is there relief in their eyes or resignation?
Then you sit down, and you are exposed.
This is not a metaphor. You are physically handing your appearance to another person. If it goes wrong, it is not just “bad hair.” It is your face. It is your confidence. It is how you move through the world for the next two weeks. For Black men, whose hair texture is already politicised by history, marked as “unkempt” or “unprofessional” or simply illegible by systems designed around straight hair, a bad cut doesn’t just look wrong. It feels like a small defeat. One more negotiation you lost.
And when the barber says, casually, honestly, without malice, “I haven’t cut Black African hair before”, something shifts in the room. Because in that moment your head has become terra incognita. Your hair, an unfamiliar material. Your body, a site of someone else’s learning. You sit there thinking: Do I educate him? Do I leave? Do I risk it? Do I smile and act relaxed while my body is rigid with the tension of being somebody’s first?
These moments are not dramatic in the way newspapers understand drama. They don’t trend. They don’t generate hashtags. But they accumulate. They form a quiet sediment in the body, and over years, that sediment teaches you something about the difference between belonging and being tolerated .
• • •
One barber in Ghana saw me wearing glasses and started calling me “Doctor.” This was years before any title became real, before the PhD, before the postcode changed. It was just a nickname, playful and slightly serious at the same time, the way nicknames work in that culture. Like a joke carrying a prophecy inside it. Like the community had already decided what you were going to become and was simply waiting for you to catch up.
Six years later, I returned. Same place. Same shop. Same man. The street outside had the same rhythm, hawkers, gospel music leaking from a speaker somewhere, the call-and-response of daily commerce. Nothing had changed, and everything had. Because I had.
His shop had recently flooded. You could see it in the details, the lower part of the wall stained darker where water had sat for days, the smell that still lingered, damp wood and old mud, the kind of odour that doesn’t leave easily. Some posters had peeled at the corners. A few items were raised off the ground, as though the shop had learned to live with water as a recurring possibility. In that part of the world, floods don’t just damage buildings. They damage routines. They interrupt the small systems that keep daily life coherent. You don’t just lose objects. You lose momentum.
And yet he was there. Cutting hair again, the same way. As if the flood had been an inconvenience, not a verdict.
The cut itself was not special, if I’m honest. But I was glad to be there. Because what I was really returning to was not the haircut. It was the continuity. The proof that some things can remain stable while you become someone else entirely. In a diasporic life, where home is always partly a memory and partly a negotiation, that kind of proof is worth more than a clean fade.
• • •
Let me try to say something that might sound strange: Black hair is a text.
Not a metaphorical text. A literal one. It encodes history. The kinky, coily, tightly curled textures that grow from African scalps have been, at various points in history, legislated against, chemically altered, mocked, fetishised, and forcibly cut. The Tignon Laws in eighteenth-century Louisiana required Black women to cover their hair, not out of modesty, but to suppress the visual power of Black beauty. Enslaved Africans used cornrow patterns to map escape routes, embedding geography into the grammar of their braids. In apartheid South Africa, the “pencil test”, whether a pencil slid through your hair or stayed, could determine your racial classification, your rights, the entire trajectory of your life.
Hair was never just hair.
And the barbershop, by extension, was never just a shop. It was a counter-institution. In the United States, the Black barbershop emerged as one of the few Black-owned, Black-operated public spaces during and after slavery, a place where news circulated, where political consciousness was sharpened, where men could speak freely in a world that policed their speech everywhere else. James Baldwin knew this. So did Malcolm X, who before his conversion cut hair in a Harlem shop and understood the barbershop as a university without walls.
In West Africa, the dynamic is different but the depth is the same. The barbershop is a node in the neighbourhood’s nervous system. It is where young men learn to talk to each other without the performance of toughness. Where the radio plays and the commentary becomes collective, everyone shouting at the same referee, united briefly by the injustice of a bad call. Where an older man might casually offer advice that changes the direction of a younger man’s week, or month, or life, and neither of them would call it mentorship. They’d call it conversation.
This is what I mean when I say the barbershop is a concept . Not just a location. A concept. A technology of care that Black communities have built and rebuilt across every geography we’ve been scattered to. From Accra to Brixton, from Lagos to Bed-Stuy, from Kumasi to Footscray, the barbershop reconstitutes itself, adapts its language, adjusts its playlist, but keeps its essential function: making people feel known.
• • •
At some point I tried growing my hair out. Dreadlocks. I don’t fully know why I started. Boredom, perhaps. A quiet rebellion. Maybe I wanted to stop negotiating barbers for a while, to step outside the cycle of search-and-trust that migration had made so exhausting. But dreadlocks are not an escape from labour; they are a different kind of labour. The maintenance, the re-twisting, the patience required to let your hair do what it will do in its own time, it demands a relationship with your body that I wasn’t ready for. Eventually, I asked a friend to cut them.
What I learned from that experiment is that every choice about Black hair is a choice about how much of yourself you are willing to explain to the world. Short hair is legible, safe, “professional”, a word that has historically meant non-threatening to whiteness . Long hair, locs, afros, these require explanation, or at least the willingness to be looked at differently. Even the decision to stop explaining is a decision. Even silence about your hair is a statement about your hair.
• • •
Hair was never a top priority for me, at least that’s the story I told myself. But I noticed something living in the West. Friends, white, Indian, East Asian, would ask, “What haircut are you getting?” as though hair were a planned event with categories and options to discuss calmly over coffee. I used to find this funny. Where I grew up, you don’t always talk about “what hair.” You cut your hair. You keep moving. The conversation is in the doing, not the deliberating.
Later, when I could afford it, when the PhD had opened certain doors and closed certain excuses, I sat in nicer chairs, in shops that smelled of sandalwood rather than spirit, where someone offered me a beer as though I had joined a club. And the cut was technically correct. The edges were clean. The fade was smooth. But something was still missing. The service was polished; the feeling was absent. Like eating a meal that ticks every nutritional box but doesn’t taste like anyone’s kitchen.
What was missing, I think, was not skill. It was recognition. The kind of recognition that doesn’t come from a mood board or a consultation form but from a shared body of knowledge, a barber who understands not just the mechanics of your hair but its cultural context. Who knows that the fade is not merely a gradient but a tradition. Who understands that the lineup is not decoration but declaration. Who does not need you to translate yourself before he begins.
• • •
So I do not romanticise the tin-roof kiosk. It was not perfect. The chair was uncomfortable. The mirror lied. The barber almost certainly smoked weed. Life was not poetic.
But it was mine.
And when the clippers ran along my scalp, and that last sharp sting hit the edges, it did not just mean I looked fresh. It meant I was still connected to something that knew me before I had language for what I needed. That mattered more than I ever expected, until I left and had to learn it the hard way, one awkward cut at a time, in countries where my hair was a question mark.
In the end, the haircut becomes a small map of migration. You can trace your movement across the earth through the people who cut your hair. Each shop is a checkpoint. Each barber, a temporary witness to the person you were that month. Each first haircut, a gamble. Each good haircut, a homecoming.
The barbershop is a mirror, not just for your face, but for culture, for trust, for how community actually works when you strip away the policy language and get down to hands and heads and the smell of spirit on freshly trimmed edges. In diaspora, you carry that mirror with you, but the reflection changes depending on who is holding the glass.
I have been held by many hands now. Some careful, some clumsy, some curious, some kind. Each pair taught me something about where I was and who I was becoming.
Not because hair is everything.
But because the smallest rituals carry the largest pieces of belonging. And belonging, for those of us whose ancestors were scattered and whose bodies remain political, is never ordinary, even when it looks like nothing more than a man sitting in a chair, waiting for the clippers to start, while the music plays and the conversation picks up right where it left off.