Standing at school assembly under a chilly winter sun on a Friday morning in August 2017, the learners are listening to the pastor. He is barely audible, preaching from the balcony without loudspeakers. The learners are also not quiet: a palpable excitation animates them; something is brewing. They cannot wait for him to end his speech. The principal is absent today, allegedly attending some funerals. Today he will not address them about the need to improve their pass rates or the imperative to make informed career choices as he usually does after the sermon. As soon as the last “Amen” is said, a group of older girls starts whistling and yelling “Hayi-Hayi!”

Within seconds, they form a compact jumping mass: the protest has begun. Some girls are proudly brandishing a pack of hair extensions. The message is clear: allow hair pieces at school! The deputy principal is the only one chasing them. He is holding his folders with a disturbingly confident attitude, as if he has everything under control. The teaching staff is carefully observing, from a distance, this seemingly undisciplined, volatile mass of young women. As the deputy principal walks towards them, they quickly encircle him. Hundreds of girls take over, discovering how easily they are winning the courtyard battle. They then run towards the gate and are soon outside, marching towards the neighboring school with whom they had planned the protest. Unable to mobilize them, some of the learners slowly return. No teaching can happen today. “The learners have won a longer weekend,” the school security guard cynically puts it. A policeman discreetly leaves the school management building. Things did not appear so unruly to necessitate his team’s intervention. Representatives of the education district enter the building to initiate the independent revision of the code of conduct.

This is not happening in isolation, Indeed, in July 2017, protests over electricity and housing service delivery were flaring in Soweto and scandals about racism spread across Johannesburg’s schools. The provincial MEC for Education, Panyaza Lesufi, was forced to respond. He visited a variety of schools, from the elite private boys college, St Johns, to a middle-class private school in Kempton Park and also Klipspruit West High School in Soweto, the site of some contention between parents and the Gauteng Education Department over the appointment of a Black principal. Considering the national and global coverage and the highly political handling that a similar protest at Pretoria Girls High School earned the year before, the lack of coverage of the hairstyle protest in Soweto  appears unsettling. By contrast, at Pretoria Girls, schooling was never disrupted by the mobilization which took a much more disciplined form during a Saturday school fair. It was then carried further outside the school, among others by university students then in the thick of protests over decolonizing campuses.

Natural hairstyles in the form of afros, dreads or braids is associated with anti-conformist, cosmetic consumption and aesthetic performances of antiracism and anticolonialism against the white canons of beauty. In South Africa, this claim for capillary liberation has had an especially high political resonance as it led to learners’ collective mobilizations in a context of school desegregation. The emblematic protest at Pretoria Girls fits within these interpretations, drawing attention to the gendered aspect of institutional racism at school.