Hair, Scissors, and Colonial Ghosts: How to Lose a Republic Over a Haircut.

Juliet Yaa Asantewaa Asante — a daughter of the land, a filmmaker by trade, and now, by the grace of her convictions, a theologian of the scalp — has declared war on scissors. Usually, I would let such declarations float down the Volta without comment, but her sermon began with the audacity of prophecy: “When I am president,” she said, “the first thing I will do is pass an executive order stopping anyone from cutting a girl’s hair, unless she so wishes.”

Now, that kind of statement wakes even the ancestors from their afternoon nap.

Juliet explained her reasoning as one might cut a film — not in straight lines, but in montages: one scene dissolving into another, logic giving way to emotion, theology dressed in the silk of cinema. It is good storytelling, but poor statecraft. On screen, magical thinking can win applause; in the real world, it only breeds mosquitoes. Cinema is not governance.

Juliet may carry the ancestral dust of an actress and a storyteller, but the clay of leadership demands another kiln. Yet since she has declared her presidential intent, she has earned my attention. Her argument — stitched with passion and perfumed with righteousness — insists that the forced cutting of Black girls’ hair is a colonial and patriarchal assault upon the sacred. She believes a woman’s hair is divine — the “Eve gene,” she calls it — a symbol of identity, strength, and cosmic origin. To shear it, she says, is to amputate power, dignity, and self-awareness.

It is a grand claim, sweeping as the Atlantic. She ties the issue to Africa’s broader spiritual decay — that a people who cannot manage or honor what naturally grows from their own heads cannot possibly manage nations. In this, Juliet touches a deep ancestral chord: the politics of the body as a mirror of the soul. Yet, her melody risks becoming a dirge of exaggeration.

Her musing was sparked by a viral scene worthy of her own camera: a fresher at Yaa Asantewaa Girls’ Senior High School weeping as her hair fell to the floor — a small but cinematic tragedy. Before this, two Rastafarian students, Tyron Iras Marhguy and Oheneba Nkrabea, sued Achimota School for refusing them entry without cutting their locks. The court sided with the boys, and a nation applauded — or groaned — according to the length of their own convictions.

And so the war of hair resumed, smoldering through salons and barbershops, over radio waves and WhatsApp sermons. Barbers became philosophers, hairdressers prophets, and each stroke of a comb became an act of theology.

Juliet, too, has joined the clergy.

I, for one, am torn between camps. I would like to supply both sides with wisdom, but neither seems to want any. What I wish, instead, is to prune away the sentimental weeds from this debate — to touch root, not petal.

Juliet’s opinion — that girls should not be forced to cut their crowns — is valid, yes, but her thinking, like uncombed hair, requires some detangling. She mistakes emotional fervor for intellectual fire. Her essay defends dignity, autonomy, and pride, but her reasoning rests on shaky roots: biological essentialism, historical confusion, and the seductive glamour of righteous outrage.

Her central claim, that “Black women carry the Eve gene,” is poetic, but not persuasive. What has that to do with the question of school grooming? Does shaving the armpit also snip away at the Eve gene? Does trimming the hair of the buttocks make one less divine? If so, the ancestors are in trouble.

Hygiene is not heresy. Shaving — for both girls and boys — in crowded dormitories is not oppression; it is public health. Schools are not beauty salons, and certainly not Nollywood film sets. To confuse the symbolic with the sanitary is to turn metaphor into dogma.

Juliet must dismount her high horse on this “Eve gene.” No girl in Yaa Asantewaa High School is Eve herself. The myth of genetic sanctity is a dangerous one — it breeds hierarchies of worth, cloaked as heritage. All humanity, Black and White, descends from that same mitochondrial mother. The divine is not in the follicle, but in the mind that tends it.

And then comes Juliet’s favorite refrain: that hair-cutting is a colonial imposition, kept alive by local proxies. She is partly right — but mostly wrong. Yes, colonial schools enforced short hair. But the act of shaving predates colonization. Among priestesses, initiates, and warriors — even the Gbetto Amazons of Dahomey — the head was often shorn as a sign of discipline, purity, or readiness. The razor was not born in London; it lived in Africa long before the missionary came with his Bible and his scissors.

So, when Juliet blames colonial ghosts for every haircut in Ghana, she commits an intellectual trespass — the very kind the colonizers loved. She simplifies Africa to victimhood, forgetting that even our ancestors wielded blades in ritual and in rule.

The irony deepens: if hair-cutting was colonial, then so was the school itself. So was the English she used to write her essay. So was the presidency she wishes to occupy. Shall we reject them all in a single stroke? History is no clean shave.

What is not a colonial imposition—what is, in fact, our own proud inheritance of folly—is the voluntary importation of billions of cedis’ worth of wigs and hair into Ghana. Nobody forces us. No missionary holds a razor to our throats. We do it gladly, with receipts and reverence.

But imagine this: what if the government, in some moment of rare courage, allowed every girl in public school to wear her hair in all its natural defiance—yet banned the importation of wigs and weaves, human or artificial, from sea to border post? Would the true gospel of vanity preached from Makola to Madina keep quiet?

No. The cries would rise like incense. For even “Eve,” our mother of the mythic gene, might look down and wonder—are these truly my daughters, or merely my descendants in name, still ashamed of the garden that grows freely from their own heads?

The debate over hair will rage again — because it is not about hair at all. It is about self-image, authority, the body as battlefield. But we must not turn this into another racialized, radicalized, neoliberal sermon. That road ends in noise and nothingness.

Let us, instead, learn what our ancestors knew and what our teachers forgot: that beauty, like discipline, has many shapes — and none of them are sacred enough to escape a good haircut.