Hair

About a month before I was ready to get on the plane and head to Africa I shaved my head and stopped shaving my face. I did this for a few reasons but I think the main reason was more simple than the reason I told everyone: I did it because I could. I knew that for the next few months it would not matter how I looked. I was going to have no boss, no professors, no girlfriends, no need to keep my hair and beard neat. So, I let it grow.

About two weeks into the trip after a lot of talk Caroline and I decided to give ourselves a haircut. We were in a small beach village where hippos wandered the streets at night. Sitting around listening to music with about 10 other people we decided bring out the buzzers we had bought earlier in the day. I ran to the car in a torrential down pour to retrieve them from the trunk (3 hours later when we returned to the car we saw I had left the trunk wide open). We asked for volunteers to cut our hair and an English bloke named Mike who was working behind the bar stepped up to the plate.

I did not really know what I wanted to do with my hair or beard but I said I wanted it to look ¨crazy¨. Everyone sitting around wrote down their ideas on a piece of paper and we drew from a hat. It was to be a mohawk for my head and a fu-man-chew for the beard. Caroline started off with a mohawk as well and then shaved it all off.

I fell instantly in love with my new style. It was fun. It was something wild and outrageous and it did not matter. Well, in Africa it did not matter, and that brings me to the purpose of this entry. We had two weeks left in South Africa (including a short trip to Lesotho) before we headed up to Namibia. During those two weeks I did not get one comment nor one weird look. And for those of you who saw me upon my return... I looked awfully strange (see pictures below). The first comment I received was when we were crossing the border from South Africa to Namibia. The South African border guard asked me for my drivers license and passport which I handed over gracefully. She studied my picture and my face for a while and then she broke into a huge smile. She returned my documents and told me she loved my new style.

The next two weeks we traveled through Namibia and did not receive another comment nor sidewards glance - not too surprising however, we were traversing dirt roads through the most uninhabited country in all of Africa. After Namibia the road brought us to Botswana where things started to get interesting. In order to reach Botswana we had to drive south from the Caprivi strip through a Nature Reserve full of wild animals. It seems now that in the people´s minds, for the rest of the trip, I was one of those wild animals.

After crossing the border our first stop was a grocery store to put some kind of food in our bellies. It just so happened that we arrived on the grand opening of the grocery store. It was the first of its kind for, at the least, 100 kilometers. People had come from all over to see the newest addition. As we walked into the store everyone s eyes shifted to me. Unlike Thailand, where Thai people will never stare at another person, everyone stared and laughed. It was not so much that they were laughing at me... well, actually they probably were. But not in a malicious way. Little kids would stare and point, teenagers would slap me five, or pat me on the back, and girls would giggle and pass me furtive glances. -at this point my mohawk was about 3 inches long in the middle and shaved on the side. Each of the 3 parts of my fu-man-chew was extended from my chin about 2 inches.- The grocery store was interesting. When we got back to the car we laughed, empty handed because the grocery store was barely stocked, and marvelled about how things had changed since the first month.

We continued our journey to Maun which is the staging point for heading into the magical Okavango Delta. As in most of the rest of our travels through Africa, when we arrived in Maun we were the only white people around. The -tourist town- as it was described was nothing more than a reasonably large village that was falling apart- or had already fallen apart. The houses were made of beer cans and mud. You could tell that at one point someone had attempted to put pavement on the streets but were not too successful. We pulled in to a parking lot, parked the car, and got out to walk around. As we walked through the parking lot we could see people from far away looking at us. It became comical when we got to the crowded sidewalk. I walked ahead of Caroline and weaved through the people. Everyone, literally everyone, was staring at me with a huge smile on their face. People were laughing and poking their friends who were already staring. Girls in buses were yelling out of the window. Caroline had the best view of all walking a few steps behind me. She described it as if my hair and beard were a magnet pulling everyones eyes to my hair. As she walked behind me it was like a wave of people following me through the town.

This general reaction occurred throughout Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. While crossing back into Zimbabwe from Zambia I had an interesting interaction with the border guard. After trying for 20 minutes to get the border guard to let us into his country for free he asked me the name of my haircut. He said he wanted to have the barber give him the same haircut and beard. He gave me a piece of paper and had me write it down.

My nickname among most people we met in these three countries turned into -Mr. T-. I would be walking down the street and people would yell, -hey Mr. T- It was pretty amusing. People would tell me how much I looked like Mr T and I would usually respond, -yeah but he is more tan than I am-. No one ever seemed to get the joke.

As soon as we crossed back into South Africa people stopped commenting on my hair style. The different reactions to my hair style say something about the different cultures. I still had one more country to go to and that was my native country, the USA.

After being back in the US for a week or so I had a wedding to go to. After the wedding we were at a bar having a drink. I was sitting down outside by myself when a guy came and sat down next to me. He started talking to me and then he said to me -

Im a skinhead, do you know what that is.

I was blindsided by his comment and did not know what to say so I responded with a grunt that I did not know.

Do you know who the Nazis were
Yes I responded
Well, I am a current day Nazi

I could not believe what had just happened. I was ashamed that someone would mistake me for a Nazi. I have not really told anyone abut that conversation because I was too embarrassed. Needless to say, the next day I shaved my mohawk and my fu-man-chu. It is interesting, I traveled all throughout Africa and was greeted with smiles by my hairstyle and then when I get back to my own country it was seen has a symbol of hatred. Reactions to my hairstyle definitely say something about different cultures.