fro.ever

Afro’d was birthed by two friends turned business partners, Nokhwezi Mfeka and Rebone Malotsha.

We make custom-made Afrocentric wigs for women of colour. Our business started in January 2017. We are both natural hair fanatics, we loved natural hair and have worn our hair natural for years, in different lengths and styles. We are also creatives at heart, so when the idea to make Afro wigs came to be, we both jumped in and started! We are now in our final year of study at Stellenbosch University towards becoming medical doctors.

The inspiration behind Afro’d was to see more women going natural for different reasons. For some going natural is revolutionary act and even a political stance, others do it fit and keep up with the trends, and some embrace it as a radical statement of self-love and refer to their natural hair as a crown.

But whatever reason people turned natural for, it all came down to one thing: more women were acknowledging that natural hair is beautiful, and we wanted to represent those women.

Wig making process:

The inside of an Afro’d wig

We make wigs from home and market them ourselves on social media. The process involves getting all the material we use for our hair to spending hours weaving it on to a weaving cap. We have different colours and sizes and make them according to the needs of the client. Our wigs are quite flexible, with a one-size-fits-all make. We courier nation wide.

Vision for Afro’d:

We’d like to see our wigs being the preferred style for women. We’d like to have our wigs in other markets, in retail stores in the future. We also plan to make Afro’d black dolls, we want kids to grow up knowing that being black is beautiful and there should be no need to change any of your beauty features to look beautiful or to fit in society.

The Afro’d ladies are Afro’d

Fro Ever was Afro’d

Thank you for stopping by my blog today. Remember to like, subscribe and love yourself one strand at a time. And today make sure you’re following my social media pages to make sure you don’t miss out on my Christmas giveaway.

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    Self love, one strand at a time

Aubrey Lewis (1970) defined the term Anxiety “as an emotional state, with the subjectively experienced quality of fear as a closely related emotion”, he further elaborates that the emotion experienced is unpleasant, out of proportion to the perceived threat, is future directed and the emotion experienced involves subjective aspects and manifest bodily disturbances. To me Anxiety is the company I…

Hey there lovelies For some of you it may be an initial welcome to my blog and my content (heyyyy) and for others it may be a welcome back (how you doin’??). Either way, thank you for stopping by and taking the time to read my post(s). Today I’ll be sharing things I wish I knew/ learnt when I was transitioning. I transitioned back in 2013/2014. Transitioning can be defined as letting go of…

Well I always grew up with the mindset that straight hair is beautiful and my “kroes” hair was ugly. As a young girl, I followed what society said and always had straight hair. Until last year, my hair was extremely “kroes” and I was getting sick and tired of relaxing my hair, having it constantly straight and damaged. I felt so ugly when my hair was “kroes” cause the environment I was raised in made me believe once my hair is straight, I’m beautiful. I decided to change that feeling cause at the end of the day, I want to love myself flaws and all, “kroes” hair and all.

In June 2016, I decided to do the big chop.

Many people close to me gave negative comments and it broke my self esteem. But I got over their comments and started loving myself so much, I realised I’m beautiful and don’t need anyone to tell me that, except my beautiful self.

Few months later, only using natural products and letting the fro grow. Teaching myself every day to love my natural, “kroes” hair and embrace it. Trying to show many young females out there with “kroes” hair that their hair is beautiful and they shouldn’t listen to society.

Terri-Ann also played a huge role in my natural hair story. Seeing her posts and her loving herself so much, gave me the kind of inspiration I needed to start this journey. I would recommend to any female, to go natural and love their “kroes” hair.

 I guess Kaylene’s hair is kroes because kroes rocks. Kroes is beautiful and if kroes hair is what grows naturally out of your head. There’s no way you can go wrong.

Thank you to the amazing Kaylene for sharing her hair story.

Remember to keep practicing self-love one strand at a time.

Every once in a while something cool happens to me. A couple of weeks ago my email inbox was blessed with an invitation to the Design Essentials SA bloggers and vloggers event in Cape Town. Boy oh boy was I excited. And my excitement was not in vain, I got to hang out with all the beautiful and inspiring ladies I always see on Instagram, get schooled on how to treat my hair by the ‘global texture…

Let me tell you guys  a little about Erin. I’m not going to lie, I spotted her hair first on campus. I was flabbergasted. Her crown was colossal and she wore it with a big smile on her face, which made asking her for hair story a tad easier for awkward ol’ me.

And now here we are.

Enjoy

  It all started as a kid actually, my first memory of hair is:

Why can’t I just have straight hair?

See the environment where I grew up created a mind-set of ‘straight hair or you are ugly’. It meant that I had to go through a whole day of doing hair every weekend to achieve the required sleek and silky look. The awful process; Wash hair, get it rolled in which took an hour, sit in sun to dry which took another two hours, find someone who is willing to blow out your hair and flat iron it which in total also takes about 2 hours. That added up to a total of 5 hours if lucky. I don’t miss one drop of that torture

  This hair torture started at age 4. Every time I got my hair done I developed a little bit more hatred towards it. It got so bad that I made my mom get me a GHD before they were even available in the country and eventually it got my dad driving 300km to the nearest hair salon that had Brazilian Blowouts available. My hair took a lot of time, money, effort and stress.

  Thinking back now I realise how big of an influence my peers and unimportant people’s opinions about me and my hair had on me. Ironically enough I grew up with a mom who rocked her natural hair with confidence. But hearing someone say, “Jy’t darem dik hare!!” broke me. It broke me because it was seen as the most negative thing ever.

  Eventually two of my cousins who are my role models went natural. This changed things for me. At this point of time I was in a different school and environment where nobody’s opinion affected me whatsoever. I started considering to change the way I looked at my hair. I started slowly by wearing my Brazilian Blowout treated hair naturally until I was sick of having two types of textures (kroes roots and straight ends). It was March 2014 somewhere in the AMs when I decided to take scissors and cut it all off, my first big chop. Every single straight strand of hair got chopped off without any second thoughts.

  One of my favourite quotes since that day is; “I was shy, but it came out in a big personality. My turning point was when I let my hair go naturally.” –Tracee Ellis Ross

When returning natural, it’s so much easier to do when you’re not doing it alone. Luckily for our budding South African Natural Hair Community, we’re not alone. There is immense support via social media groups serving as a platform to ask those questions that we’re dying to know. Like ‘girl, please tell me what products you use to get your fro so fly’.

So search for groups like ‘South African Naturals’, ‘Curlfriends_SA – Girls with Naturally Curly Hair’, ‘It’s All Natural’, ‘Cape Town Naturally’ or even for a group for your specific hair type. They’re all there (there are plenty of natural gal bloggers/vloggers too) and there’s so much to learn about our hair.

We can all emancipate ourselves like Erin did, teaching ourselves how to take care of the hair that grows out of our scalp is a darn good start and it certainly helps with the mission of loving yourself, one strand at a time.

Shout out to those of you who come back to my blog regularly. I see you. I appreciate you.

And second of all today I was supposed to do a post about different ways to style a TWA, seeing as though I went through my second big chop not too long ago. But the way my life is set up, this did not happen. So it was truly a godsend when the beaut that is Tshidi Green mailed me her hair story.

Tshidi Green, Miss Mamoledi Sundowns Western Cape 2016, was kind enough to share her hair story with me and with you. Infact this is far more than a hair story. This is a story about resilience, incredible strength and vulnerability.

So I do hope you enjoy.

If I had to describe my hair journey over the last year I would have to go with a the words “Tranquil but highly confused”.  An odd description, I must admit, but one which a very dear friend of mine used to describe my soul at some point in my life. I feel that it is only fitting to adapt this description of my state of being to the state of my hair as my hair, specifically over the last year, was a direct reflection of who I was, what I was going through and how I chose to cope with it during the various stages of the tremulous year we all refer to as 2016.

The story of the “Tranquil but Highly Confused” hair of Tshidi Green is therefore not a romanticised story of embracing the natural beauty of my hair but rather one of  a confused little girl trying to find peace within herself by claiming autonomy over her hair. A story far more complex than this post will account for but one which I will gladly delve in to over a cup of coffee if asked kindly to do so (which I probably won’t finish because I actually don’t like coffee).

I, like many others, very quickly realised that despite all my introspection and self-love Youtube binges 2016 was just not going to be my year. My extremely impulsive decision to dread my hair came early in 2016 after being emotionally and mentally battered and bruised, after having my entire being put under question and crying myself to sleep almost every night for weeks on end. After all of this and experiencing the very situations that make being a woman so painful and hard to bear I turned to the outlet which seemed to be the least self-destructive at the time, my hair. I realised that I needed something that would give me some form of strength and at the time getting my dreads was exactly that.

I, without hesitation, agreed to have my friend dread my hair knowing full well that she has never touched a crocheting needle in her life and was working solely on the tutorials posted on our trustworthy source, Youtube. I remember sitting in her room staring at myself in the mirror and thinking to myself “Tshidi….Tshidi, Tshidi, Tshidi, what are you doing? this looks horrible! ”  but feeling too proud and too determined to back out of my decision. I had committed to this and I was going to pull through and so I did.

I made my big reveal just over a month after getting the dreads and decided to add that extra pinch of salt by going completely blonde.

Naturally, the big transformation was not welcomed with open arms by most of my family, but with my new-found boost of self-confidence, self-assurance and strength I could not be bothered less. I was just doing me, for me and it really felt good!

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Knowing that I might be questioned on cultural appropriation I tried to keep well informed about the origins of dreadlocks and the symbolism of it and one of the pieces which resonated with me went as follows:

“Dreadlocks are more than just a symbolic statement of disregard for physical appearance. [They] hold that bodily, mental and spiritual energies mainly exit the body through the top of the head and the hair. If the hair is knotted, they believe, the energy remains within the hair and the body, keeping a person stronger and healthier” -www.knottyboy.com

Looking back now, my short-lived dreadlocks did exactly that or rather gave me the metaphorical sense of strength which I needed to ensure my improved mental health. I remember having long conversations with my family about my decision, them trying to decipher why I would give up my “beautiful hair” and theorising that I was merely trying to win brownie points from my black friends not understanding the full extent of what I was going thru and what having those dreads meant to me. Something which till this day I don’t think they fully grasp.

And so, 2016 continued, and though I would love to say it took a turn for the better post my “new hair, new me” transformation, it did not. It actually went worse, not because of my dreads, definitely not but because 2016 just wouldn’t give me the pleasure of it hey.  But, alas being the brave little independent woman that I am I soldiered on, flaunting my blonde locks one day at a time.

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Months past and eventually I was faced with the reality that 2016 simply wasn’t my battle to win and that even the bravest of soldiers can’t always save themselves from the heaviness of the world. My locks, and all the faux strength which it represented became too much for me and I decided to let go of it all and choose vulnerability. I realised that I was no longer being strong for myself but for everyone else and in doing that I was crumbling and would continue to fall. I decided to choose myself. I decided that only I knew what my happiness would look like and that I needed to start chasing that. I decided that if I was ever going to be the best version of me I needed to break away from the very thing that was preventing me from being exactly, my degree. I decided to put my degree on hold without ever consulting my parents (they still don’t know..). I took the time to breathe again. A decision which I wholeheartedly belief saved my life.

Again, I found myself staring at the mirror, this time with a pair of scissors in my hand and dreads neatly piled up on the floor, thinking “wow, Tshidi, what am I going to do with you?” but feeling overjoyed as I basked in the glory of the weight that was lifted off my shoulders.

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I think it is important to note that at no point throughout this entire process, even till this day as I write this post, did I actually love my hair itself or how I looked with it but I loved knowing that I was comfortable enough within myself and brave enough to take that step for myself. And despite how horrible I thought I looked and despite the many days I struggled to maintain my hair I was happy with my decision, a happiness that bubbled from within.

Seeing my hair come to life and learning to embrace and love everything which encompasses it is a constant reminder that amidst all the confusion I am completely at peace with who I am becoming.

 I’d just like to thank Tshidi for being so kind as to share her story.

And I’d like to thank you for reading.

Like, and comment if you have any suggestions for future posts or anything you’d like to see on this blog. And press follow to be updated on when I post.

Remember to love yourself, one strand at a time.