How to Care For and Manage African American Black Wooly Hair

Using Shea Butter and African Black Soap for Natural Hair Styles

For the longest I wore my hair very short and in a natural African American hair style. I can remember when the Geri (jheri) curl came out, how ecstatic I was ‘cause it allowed me to keep my hair short. With that little jheri curl perm in it, all my hair care worries were gone. 

Soon came movies like “Coming to America” starring Eddie Murphy, and the jheri curl family which was portrayed in the film shed new light on just how messy the jheri curl really was.

Yeah… if nothing else you could be assured that your hair was well moisturized with the style, but soon the jheri curl faded into the annals of history as black folk were dropping it like a bag of fertilizer. (Feel free to tell Shaneka that the jheri curl is gone next time you see her—I’d tell her myself, but as you know the woman is a whole lot bigger’n me)J.

And after that style left, I reverted to your basic short natural hair style, occasionally even dabbling into using a straightening comb or a relaxer or perm for the sheer (temporary) manageability that they afforded.

But basically I pretty much wore a short natural hair style for a number of years prior to going to live in West Africa. When I got to Ghana, I found that it was so cheap to have extensions and braids put in my hair, so for the 15 months that I stayed over there I started wearing just extensions.

When “hair day” would arrive, I would start out early in the morning, and it would take about 4 or 5 hours for 4 or 5 women to hook me up with the tiny braided extensions. Sometimes I paid as much as $20 for the hair do. Those were the days that I did not feel much like negotiating. I knew I was being overcharged because I was what the locals called an “abruni”. Never mind that I was a black American. Over there, only the American part mattered because there was the assumption of a deep pocket. Nevermind too that I was a religious volunteer and didn’t have a job. But that’s another story.

Of course my hair grew long, but when I came back to the States, one of the first things I did was to cut the braids out. The thing I didn’t like about having hair extensions was that I really couldn’t wash my hair as often as I wanted. And you may know how the scalp starts to itch after you’ve had the braids in—eeh… Yeah, extensions were ok when the water supply was in question, but now that I was back in the land of plenty, there was no shortage of this commodity.

So I immediately went back to a very short all natural hair style. I guess, about two years ago, I made the decision that I would let my hair grow. Now don’t ask me why I made that decision. Because I knew all too well that black hair in its natural state, when you let it grow, is very hard to manage and care for. But you know it was the beginning of what I now affectionately call my midlife crises and I wanted to do something different. And so I started to let my hair grow and immediately started to seek out products that I could use that would aid in this process. And by the word “aid” I meant having products that would help me to manage my all natural hair style better.

If you have ever had (or felt) true African hair, you know that it is wooly and if you use the wrong type of shampoo, it is also course and hard and extremely difficult to manage (i.e. comb). And so I started researching. At one point I went to a Black Heritage Festival held at a mall on the west end of Atlanta, and there I saw this very tall sister who had dreads down to her knees, literally, and asked her what products she used for her hair because when you are talking hair that long, you know you’ve gotta have some kind of system in place to manage it, otherwise it would not get that long (you’d cut it all off!). And of course she turned me on to shea butter. So I got involved with shea butter and put together a little website on it. I did a little more research and started to look at black soap because I was reading a lot about that product too.

So, just how do you manage wooly, nappy, all natural African American black hair styles?

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