Sitting between an aunt’s knees, two or three hours, on a Sunday. You’ve lived this scene in Dakar, in Pointe-à-Pitre or in the Paris suburbs. It carries a craft handed down without a school, without a manual, without a break.
Braids were a language before they were a hairstyle. They spoke of age, rank, mourning and belonging. They survived deportation, they were banned, and then they became a political act once more. Here is that history, with what the sources establish and what they leave open. For the practice, from putting them in to looking after them, see our ten good reasons to wear braids; and for the state of the fibre between two styles, our step-by-step tutorial walks through the six steps of the Rituel Texture®.
PrehistoryWhat prehistory shows
You often read that braids are more than twenty thousand years old, based on two Gravettian figurines: the Venus of Willendorf and the Lady of Brassempouy. The Venus of Willendorf, held at the Natural History Museum in Vienna and dated to around twenty-nine thousand five hundred years ago, wears a circular pattern in tight rows across her whole head.
What the claim leaves out is that the museum itself hesitates: it describes the pattern as either an elaborate hairstyle or a woven cap, without deciding. The debate isn’t trivial, because it says something about the whole discipline. Hair doesn’t fossilise. Of the vast majority of human hairstyles, nothing at all remains, and we’re left reading carvings a few millimetres across.
What we can say without forcing the sources is more modest and more interesting: the braided pattern, in basketry as in hair, appears in the very first known human representations. Braids aren’t a fashion that comes back in cycles. They are one of humanity’s oldest documented gestures.
Precolonial AfricaWhen hair served as a civil record
It was in Africa that this gesture became a system. In many societies, hair worked as a civil record worn on the head: it showed age, marital status, number of children, social rank, a mourning in progress, sometimes the group you belonged to. Changing your hairstyle wasn’t changing your style; it was announcing a change in your situation.
The anthropologist Sylvia Ardyn Boone described this system among the Mende of Sierra Leone, where abundant, cared-for, styled hair sits at the heart of the ideal of female beauty, and where a neglected head signals a woman at odds with the social order or with herself. Time spent on hair there isn’t a comfort: it’s a social obligation and an act of affection.
This dimension explains something that’s poorly understood today. Hair was done, and still is, between women of the same family or the same neighbourhood. Nobody braids alone. A hairstyle required someone else to be there, and so time, conversation and touch.
DeportationThe crossing, and what memory kept
The transatlantic slave trade targeted this system directly. The accounts gathered by Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps describe the shaving of captives on arrival as a documented practice, stripping deported people of an immediately readable sign of identity, along with their name. What disappeared wasn’t just a hairstyle; it was a way of saying who you were.
The craft itself survived on the plantations and in the communities of people who had escaped slavery. In Colombia, San Basilio de Palenque is one of those fortified villages founded in the 17th century by people who had fled; it’s the only one still standing, and UNESCO has inscribed its cultural space on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
That’s where the most famous memory attached to braids was born: hairstyles whose lines are said to have traced escape routes, and in which seeds were supposedly hidden to survive after the escape. This story is carried by Palenquero oral tradition and has since been taken up by the community’s descendants. It isn’t established by written sources from the period, and historians debate its extent. We report it for what it is: a memory, handed down by the women who are its heirs, and one that shows how much hair mattered.
The braid was never merely decorative. It served as a civil record, then as a rallying sign, then as memory. It carried information before it was ever an ornament.
The 1960sThe decade when hair turned political again
For more than a century, in America as in Europe, the norm imposed was the opposite: straighten, relax, bring hair closer to a texture that wasn’t its own. Byrd and Tharps traced the considerable industry built on that demand.
The civil rights movement turned that around. Wearing your hair as it grows, in an afro or in braids, became a public statement. Hair became exactly what it had been in the societies of origin: a message you could read without a word. We’ve written an article about this shift and what it set off in France and the Caribbean, with the afro in the 70s.
The movement isn’t over. Court rulings and legislative debates in several countries still concern the right to wear unrelaxed or braided coily hair at school or at work. A hairstyle that needs a law has never been a mere aesthetic choice.
TodayWhat braids say today
They say fewer coded things and more personal ones. Marital status can no longer be read on a head, but hair still says something: an embraced relationship with your texture, a lineage, sometimes an explicit refusal to conform.
Among the Himba of Namibia, on the other hand, the old system still works and can still be read: hair there shows age and stage of life. See our article on the hairstyles of Himba women. Along the way, they recall something France long forgot: coily hair, cared for and handled little, reaches great lengths.
Passing it onWhat passes from hand to hand
What travels from one generation to the next isn’t a catalogue of hairstyles. It’s a way of holding the head, parting a section, judging the tension, knowing when a strand is about to give before it gives. This knowledge isn’t written down. It passes through the hands, and it’s lost as soon as one generation stops doing the next one’s hair.
That’s also why leaving for mainland France was such a brutal break for so many families: it didn’t just change the water, the products and the climate. It cut chains of transmission that had lasted for centuries.
My mother, my aunts, my grandmother: each had her own way of touching the hair, of thinking about the plait, the volume, the style. What they shared was beautiful, moisturised hair, and length you could see growing from one style to the next. That’s the heritage we formalised in the Rituel Texture®, so that it would stop depending on the luck of having someone to pass it on.
Ghana Elin, founderThere’s a continuity between the grandmother who detangled with a horn comb on Sunday mornings and the woman who books an appointment today. The gesture is the same; the vocabulary has changed. The conditions under which a style truly protects are set out in when a protective style damages your hair.
Frequently asked questions
Are braids really twenty thousand years old?
Did braids really serve as escape maps?
What did a hairstyle say in African societies?
Why is braiding still passed on from hand to hand?
Further reading
Sources
- Notice for the Venus of Willendorf, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (Natural History Museum, Vienna).
- Boone S. A., Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art, Yale University Press, 1986.
- Byrd A. D. and Tharps L. L., Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
- UNESCO, “Cultural space of Palenque de San Basilio”, Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 2008.
