Day 1- Imini yokuqhala

So I wore a head scarf and a long skirt today. It's funny how life changed from the moment I put them on. I personally felt extremely self conscious and kept adjusting my doek to look as presentable as possible. Remember, the world I live in is an extremely different one to the world that accepts and understands the meaning behind ukuhlonipha (giving respect) and where it originates from. So me delving into this historic yet over time changing practice, says a lot about where I'm from, what I consider as normal and where I'll be one day.

In the mirror I saw a young black Xhosa woman doing something before it's time. I started to think about how one day when I get married, whether it be to a Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho or any indigenous South African ethic group guy, this is what I'll have to do. Maybe not all the time, but when it is necessary ie. when visiting his traditional homestead (which are usually in the rural areas of our country). We must not forget that before urbanisation, the black people of South Africa lived in the "homelands" and seeing woman looking respectful traditional garmets was how t was meant to be. But with  urbanisation came the need for these garmets to become a bit more practical for the city life (hence the German print/ shweshwe print) became an expression of traditional clothing in a more modernised way.

My head is so scratchy already. Did you know that woman actually suffer from hair loss due to wearing head scrafs all the time? One's hair doesn't get to breathe. I've seen it!

It's not that the practice was introduced to make women feel and look unattractive, but it was rather a way to show how their role had switched from being a girl to being a wife, mother and daughter-in-law. It's a way of saying "she is taken" in a wordless manner. I must say it made me feel very unattractive and frumpy. Cape Town is extremely hot and my shorts would have made my day, but unfortunately, I had to look past that and acknowledge and accept what I choose to look into for 10 days.

I left res with a fake swag in my step, trying to look as though I was looking the way I looked for style reasons, but I quickly got snapped back to reality when I began to see many women dressed just as I was in the streets of Cape Town CBD. Initially, the intervention only meant that I would wear a head scarf for the 10 days, but I realised that there was more to the intervention than just covering my hair. This topic, I personally believe is made up of so many issues and discourses that I don't even have to research it in order to explain,discuss and learn to understand it simply because I've been surrounded by it my entire life.

A woman in Adderley Street, just as uMakoti. It was extremly difficult to take a picture of her. She could ubfortunately see I was looking at her.

Older woman dressed in a respectful manner. Once a woman gets married, also depending on the time they got married (so anytime before the 90's), dressing this way and never showing their heads becomes a part of their lives, even when their husband's have passed on.