She did it! 30 ‘dos in 30 days!

MyFroAndI 30 do’s in 30 days

Aisha, a Tanzanian but South African-based blogger at My Fro & I just completed her 30 Up-dos in 30 Days challenge. A tour de force indeed! I know hundreds of people (I’ve been watching the Facebook page likes going up daily) have been as inspired by this hair challenge as I have been. My personal favourite was Day 26. Not necessarily because it was the most funky or creative, but  because it was one of the simplest that can easily fix a bad hair day. You know, fake it til you make it.

Day 26 of the 30 ‘dos in 30 Days Challenge

In the run-up to the inaugural ZedHair Natural Hair Show scheduled for this weekend (Saturday 6th April in Lusaka), I have been feeling the pressure to make sure my natural hair was ‘representing’ more than usual. And so the whole of last week was one ‘out there’ style after another. Very uncharacteristic for me, but the My Fro & I challenge gave me the courage. I thought to myself, if she can do it, then so can I.

Another great thing is that you don’t have to have long hair to look forward to enjoying your natural hair. Granted, manipulating your hair daily is not ideal if your main goal is length, but for some people, they just want healthy hair and to have fun with it.

Last but not least, am I the only one stoked that this has put the natural hair scene in Africa on the map? Isn’t great to see an African blogger living in Africa without access to all the fancy products, leading the way? I went natural in December 2009 and I started documenting my journey through this blog in August 2010. I turned to the internet and to the US/UK for knowledge and information. I would not have gotten this far without The Natural Haven, Black Girl with Long Hair etc.

But I started ZedHair to tell the natural hair story from my African perspective as a Zambian living in Zambia for others in my country and beyond in the region. I had no idea there was an African blogging scene when I started. It gave me immense pride and pleasure to come across Kurly Kichana first of all and then Natural Nigerian and then others such as Good Hair Diaries, Fro Chic, Natural Toto and most recently, My Fro & I.

In my ‘real life’ as Masuka M., documenting and telling our own history and our own story in our own words as Africans from our perspective is one of my passions. I explain more in my tribute to Chinua Achebe. This may be stretching things from a simple hair challenge (actually, not so simple at all), but I feel the need to acknowledge and appreciate the deeper significance that I see from this whole 30 ‘Dos in 30 Days challenge.

This was a roundabout way of saying thank you to Aisha for doing this and for looking so fab in the pictures too. Africa is a beautiful continent and the backdrop in those pictures distracted me almost as much as the hair.

Mwane vulyemwane! Zikomo kwambiri! Asante sana!