Himba hairstyles: what their braids say about the woman who wears them

In north-western Namibia, a hairstyle can be read: child, teenager, married for a year, or mother. It isn't an ornament. So what does a hairstyle actually say?

Himba hairstyles circulate widely as images and very little with their meaning. So we wrote this article from identifiable sources rather than second-hand descriptions, and we list them at the bottom of the page. You'll find out who the Himba are, what women's and then men's hairstyles say, what otjize is and what research says about it, and finally what we think it's fair, or not, to take from it. Our step-by-step tutorial, meanwhile, walks through the six steps of the Rituel Texture®, which comes from an entirely different story, that of the Creole garden of Guadeloupe.

Who the Himba are

The Himba, or Ovahimba, are a semi-nomadic herding people living mainly in the Kunene region of north-western Namibia, and across the Kunene River in southern Angola. They speak Otjihimba, closely related to the language of the Herero, in the Bantu family. Cattle shape much of social life, in an arid region where water is scarce for a good part of the year.

Two points are worth making from the outset, because they're almost always missing from articles about their hairstyles. The first is that nothing described here belongs to the past: these hairstyles are worn today, made and remade, and they coexist with phones, schools and trips to town. The second is that this isn't a uniform, unchanging people: styles vary between clans and families, and general descriptions, ours included, remain approximations.

What women's hairstyles say

For little girls, the standard hairstyle is two braids brought forward, called ozondato, whose shape depends on the family's clan heritage. A child wearing a single braid is sometimes signalling that she is one of a pair of twins. The youngest often have shaved heads, with, here and there, particular cuts linked to taboos specific to a clan.

In adolescence, the hairstyle changes its purpose. Numerous long strands fall forward and partly cover the face. This isn't a style effect: the hairstyle marks a period and a distance, the time when a girl withdraws from the gaze of men.

The next change comes later, and it's very distinct. After about a year of marriage, or on the birth of a first child, a woman wears the erembe, a headdress cut from hide and placed on top of the head, while the braids are swept back to reveal the face. So the headdress isn't earned through age or ceremony alone: it states a status, that of an established wife or a mother.

This system has a consequence that's easy to miss if you only look at photographs. A Himba hairstyle isn't one aesthetic choice among others, it's public information about the person wearing it. You can't change it just because you feel like it, and you can't wear it without telling everyone something you may not be.

Men's hairstyles

The principle is the same, with fewer forms. An unmarried man wears a single braid at the back of the head, the ondatu. The hairstyle can be read from a distance and is enough to show his situation.

On marriage, the braid disappears under a fabric turban, which married men wear from that day on and never take off, not even to scratch their heads, which they do with small sticks slipped underneath. Here again, the headwear isn't decorative: it marks a marital status, and removing it would amount to changing that status.

Otjize, and what research says about it

This is the most recognisable element, and the most poorly told. Otjize is a paste of fat, often butterfat from goat's milk, mixed with ground ochre and sometimes scented with the aromatic resin of a local shrub, omuzumba, Commiphora multijuga. It's applied to the skin and hair, and gives everything its reddish-orange hue.

It has been analysed. A study published in 2022 in Scientific Reports showed that the ochre used contains nanoscale iron oxide particles, which strongly filter ultraviolet light and reflect a large share of infrared radiation. In other words, in a region where water is short and the sun is fierce, the paste protects the skin and partly takes the place of washing with water. A second study, published in 2023 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, characterised the mineral composition of these Namibian ochres and found that their levels of toxic metals remain below accepted thresholds.

That's as far as these studies go. They describe documented sun and heat protection, on the skin. They don't show that otjize makes hair grow, or that it would make a hair treatment you could transfer elsewhere, and we won't write that it does. The long braids seen in photographs owe more to a styling practice that keeps the lengths still and handles them little, which is true of many braided styles, here as elsewhere.

What we can take from it, and what we can't

A brand article about a living people has a natural slope, and it's a bad one: turning a social practice into inspiration, then inspiration into a product. We'd rather say clearly where what we can do with it stops.

What remains, and it's no small thing, is a deeper observation. In many African societies, hairstyles carried information before they carried style, and working on hair took up considerable time, together, from one generation to the next. That history is partly ours too: it runs through the history of African braids just as it runs through the pharmacopoeia of the Creole garden our method comes from.

Frequently asked questions

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Sources

• "Himbas' incredible hairstyles", The Namibian, 22 April 2014.
• Havenga D., Akoba R., Menzi L., Azizi S., Sackey J., Swanepoel N., Gibaud A. and Maaza M., "From Himba indigenous knowledge to engineered Fe2O3 UV-blocking green nanocosmetics", Scientific Reports, vol. 12, article 2259, 2022.
• Teklay M., Thole J. T., Ndumbu N., Vries J. and Mezger K., "Mineralogical and chemical characterization of ochres used by the Himba and Nama people of Namibia", Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, vol. 47, 2023.