AFRO-SUTI/NYWELE

The Afro originated in the United States as a style worn by a tiny minority of cosmopolitan black women/men and developed as a prominent symbol of racial pride in the mid-1960s. Responding to the Afro’s grassroots popularity, the African American beauty culture industry mounted a largely successful effort to transform the style from political statement to fashion commodity. But the commodification of the Afro was not exclusively a cynical exploitation of a political symbol. Rather, the selling of the Afro often entailed a complex blending of ideals, goals, and motivations based, to varying degrees, on considerations of fashion, politics, and the bottom line. By Spartan photography Kenya