A head wrap or head scarf is a very common accessory among women in many parts of Africa and abroad. The cloth around the head is not specific to any one cultural group, as it is found in many societies.
Here, we delve into the historical and cultural significance of various types of head coverings, exploring their origins, meanings, and evolution over time.
Origins and Royal Connections
Some make the historical link of origins to royalty in ancient Egypt, Nubia and West Africa. Hieroglyphic evidence points to Pharaohs who wore headbands or covered their hair with wigs. The divine crowns for royalty and gods were made of cloth and had specific meaning and significance. In other parts of Africa hair wigs were made of natural materials such as beads, feathers and plant fibres from the baobab tree.
As in medieval Europe, in a majority of African communities it is shocking for a grown woman to show her hair. In Arles France, between 1162 and 1202, a law was passed that forbade women of ill-repute to wear head veils, just in case they were mistaken for virtuous women. The public was encouraged to snatch any veils off the heads of suspected immoral women.
Traditional Jewish women cover their hair with a tichel or snood. Rastafarians wear turbans over their dreadlocks for protection against the environment, religious purposes and again for respect and humility - as with the Ethiopian Muslim who wears a hijab or khimar.
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In Christianity there are no direct divine commands for women to cover their heads, however Bible verses can be found that showed a level of modesty and this practice: Genesis 24:65, Numbers 5:18. In the New Testament can be found more direct guidance as to practices to be followed at Corinthians 11:2-16.
Among Jewish women, the Biblical source for covering hair comes from the Torah in the book of Bamidbar Parshas Nasso which contains the source for the obligation of a married woman to cover her hair. An eesha sotah is a woman whose husband suspects her of having acted immorally. The Torah commands the Kohein to take various steps to demonstrate that the sotah has deviated from the modest and loyal path of most married Jewish women (Rashi 5:15-27). Among the procedures, the pasuk clearly states: "ufora es rosh haisha..." and he shall uncover the hair of the head of the woman (5:18).
Woman with headscarf in Oman
Regional Variations and Meanings
Its uses and, of course, meanings vary greatly depending on the country and culture of those who wear it. Some men see head wraps as exclusively for women only, although there do exist other forms of headgear for men. In northern Africa, head ties are worn for day to day activities, elaborate ceremonial occasions and spiritual worship. A renaissance in African pride has seen many of the head ties worn up north being now worn to signify affluence as well as spirituality in black women.
These are generally bigger in size and more elaborate in design than the ones worn down here in the south. The ones worn in southern Africa are smaller and much more conservative. For rural women head wraps are often used as protective clothing to cover hair from dust and dirt while doing chores.
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Although the head-wrao is mostly seen on married and elderly women in rural and some urban settings, it has developed into a popular, ornamental head covering and fashion accessory even among the youth.
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Newly married young women in African culture receive head ties (like the sarong) especially from mother-in-laws to denote respect and an achievement of respectable status. In Africa in general, and universally in some houses of worship, women (for example ZCC) are often required to wear head ties to cover their heads as a sign of respect and humility.
Here in southern Africa, the name used is influenced by the Afrikaans name for cloth which is “doek”. In South Africa and Namibia, the Afrikaans word doek (meaning "cloth") is used for the traditional head covering used among most elderly local women in rural areas. Malawian head-ties are usually small and conservative compared to the Nigerian style. Women wear duku at special events like funerals. Urban women with plaited hair also wear a duku when visiting rural areas out of cultural respect. In South African church services women may wear white "dukus" to cover their heads.
Gele in Nigeria
In Nigeria, Gele is are Nigerian Yoruba style of headdresses which are elaborate. Although the gele can be worn for day-to-day activities, the more elaborate ceremonial ones are worn to weddings, special events, and church and other religious activities. They are unique to the Yoruba culture. There are different types of Gele, some more flared and others fanlike.
Geles are tied around the head in different fabrics, It is usually made of a material that is firmer than regular cloth. Asooke, Damask, Sego, Brocade, Jawu, Seghosen are materials usually used for Gele, though Adire can be used. A more recent invention available is the option of the Autogele which come pre-made and worn like a hat.
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When worn, especially for more elaborate events, the gele typically covers a woman's entire hair as well as her ears. The only part exposed is her face and earrings on the lower part of her earlobes. The gele is accompanied by traditional local attire that may or may not have the same pattern as the headtie itself.
Different Gele styles
Duku in Ghana
In Ghana, opportunity to wear a duku usually falls on a religious day of Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Senegalese women used to cover their hair and ears in day to day activities or special events such as baptism or wedding ceremonies, or during prayers with colourful headties called Moussor.
Kente Cloth: A Symbol of Pride and Heritage
This spring thousands of college students will march across commencement stages to receive their degrees. Many of these students will do so while wearing a Kente cloth stole. This annual college ritual of marking oneself with a visible sign of Africa is a practice that literally weaves together the wisdom of Africa before the Middle Passage with the persistent struggle to (re)attain knowledge of oneself that defines Black experience in the Diaspora.
The Kente center of the world is the village of Bonwire, Ghana. According to Asante mythology, it was here that great trickster Ananse the Spider, ever skillful and cunning, spun a web of intricate detail in the jungle. When Nana Koragu and Nana Ameyaw, brothers and weavers by trade, came upon Ananse’s web, its immaculate beauty enchanted them. After studying Anansi’s handiwork, the pair returned to the village and began to weave Kente.
Historical documentation indicates textile production among the Akan and Ewe peoples began as early as 1000 B.C. Kente cloth as we know it today with its rich bold colors emerged among the Asante during the seventeenth century A.D., as Chief Oti Akenten (from whose name Kente derives - “basket” in Twi) established trade routes from the Middle and Far East bringing into the Asante Empire a variety of foodstuffs, gems, dyes, leather goods, and silk fabric. Chief Akenten commissioned the new cloth to be spun for royal ritual attire.
Kente is a meaningful sartorial device, as every aspect of its aesthetic design is intended as communication. The colors of the cloth each hold symbolism: gold = status/serenity, yellow = fertility, green = renewal, blue = pure spirit/harmony, red = passion, black = union with ancestors/spiritual awareness.
Kente cloth sheets are assembled out of sewing together long strips or bands of fabric, each 6”-10” wide. Each one of these bands are themselves composed of panels of alternating designs. Each weaver creates this patchwork appearance through a complex interplay of the warp (the threads pulled left to right during weaving) and weft (threads oriented up and down).
These warp and weft motifs form a repertoire of craft work, as Asante weavers give each one a name that indicates clan, social status, or sexuality, such as AberewaBene meaning “a wise old man symbolized wisdom and maturity.” Other Kente design names form proverbs reflecting the Asante ethos and worldview. Owu nhye da (“Death has no fixed date”) is said to encourage people to right living, as death may come unexpectedly and allow no time for penitence. Nkum me fie na nkosu me aboten (“Don’t kill my house and then mourn for me in public”) cautions against the two-faced and duplicitous impulse of human nature.
Richly expressive and personalized Kente meanings emerge out of clever combinations of colors with various warp and weft designs. Kente cloth materialized the spoken rhetoric of proverbs and circulated them among the Asante as sartorial text/iles.
Kente appeared on the radar of most African-Americans in 1958 when Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister of independent Ghana, wore the cloth to meet with President Eisenhower at the White House. Coinciding with the Civil Rights and African Decolonization Movements, Black Americans associated Kente cloth with Black politics and the dignity of the African heritage.
By the early 1970s, the predominant garment featuring Kente in the United States was the dashiki, a long tunic-type shirt that grew increasingly popular and commodified by the fashion industry. Kente’s appeal within Black Power waned, with Fred Hampton and other Panthers leaders deriding those who wore them. Nevertheless, Kente cloth and dashikis remained staples of urban Black life and received a new layer of significance when adopted by the Hip Hop community in the 1980s.
Another important moment in Kente fashion history occurred at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Recognizing the need to honor the particular historical and personal struggle of Black students to complete a baccalaureate degree, Dr. Franklin Simpson, Director of Affirmative Action and Jerome “Skip” Hutson, Director of Minority Affairs, met with with two English professors, Drs. Christian Awuyah and C. James Trotman. Together the four came up with the idea of a Kente Commencement Ceremony, and on May 15, 1993, thirty graduates attended that first ever event called A Family Affair.
To date, nearly two thousand graduates of West Chester University have donned Kente stoles. When Black students wear Kente stoles as a sign of their successful matriculation through higher education, they transform their bodies into living, breathing proverbs. The Asante stylized their values and ethics through the poetics of Kente. Kente’s Diasporic genealogy weaves a pattern of African knowledge and pride across the Middle Passage and onto the capped and gowned bodies of Black American graduates.
Graduates wearing Kente stoles
The Kaffiyeh: A Symbol of Palestinian Solidarity
Once used for sun protection from the blistering sun in Southwest Asia and North Africa, the kaffiyeh's function, and symbolism, has undeniably transformed over time. It’s been spotted on high-fashion Palestinian supermodel Bella Hadid, on the necks of students at college encampments, and covering the faces of activists at pro-Palestinian marches. It’s been sold on the shelves of Urban Outfitters and Louis Vuitton, and subject to bans by the Australian state of Victoria, which barred legislators from wearing the scarf in parliament because of its “political” nature.
And in recent decades it has become widely recognized as a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and resistance. The link far predates the Israel-Hamas War, which has taken the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, when 200 Israelis were taken hostage and more than 1,000 were killed on the night. Just last week, the Noguchi Museum in New York City fired three employees for wearing it to work, banning clothing associated with “political messages, slogans or symbols.”
For Palestinians, the symbolism of the kaffiyeh can also be deeply personal. “I embroidered my kaffiyeh with tatriz, which is the word for embroidery in Arabic, to express my connection to my homeland, not just as a symbol of resistance to what is happening today in the Israeli occupation, but as an expression of myself,” says Wafa Ghnaim, a Palestinian dress historian and researcher.
The kaffiyeh is a square-shaped hand-woven checkered scarf with a wavy motif around the border- representing olive leaves-and oftentimes tassels along opposite sides. (Olive trees, which have been growing in Gaza and the West Bank for centuries, are a pivotal part of both Palestinian culture and the local economy.)
Though historically an Arab male headdress, today the kaffiyeh is worn by people of all races and genders across Southwest Asia, Northern Africa and beyond. “There used to be many different patterns, sometimes different colors and designs. But the idea was having a scarf that was useful within a hotter climate,” says Haitham Kuraishi, a tour guide at the Museum of the Palestinian People. The black-and-white kaffiyeh is the one most commonly worn by Palestinians and those who wear the scarf in solidarity with the people living under tumult in the Gaza Strip.
But other predominant colors of the kaffiyeh are popular in other territories. The red kaffiyeh, for instance, is more popular in Jordan, suggests Kuraishi.
Kaffiyehs were first worn by Sumerians, part of an ancient civilization dating back to 4500 BCE, in what was then-known as Mesopotamia, according to Kuraishi. The scarf then took off among Bedouins, indigenous people in the desert regions of the Arabian Peninsula, partly due to its practical uses. “If you were trudging through the desert, you could also use that scarf to cover your mouth from a dust storm, or a sandstorm, and [it was] also a way of just having shade,” says Kuraishi.
Until the early 20th century, kaffiyehs were primarily worn by Bedouins, to distinguish nomadic men from the villagers and townsmen, according to Ghnaim. That changed after World War I when the League of Nations issued the British Mandate for Palestine, which was drawn up in 1920 and granted Britain responsibility for the territory that then comprised Palestine. That mandate also called for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people,” according to the document.
The resulting tumult broiled into the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, which marked the first “sustained violent uprising of Palestinian Arabs in more than a century,” in a call for Palestinian sovereignty and independence, says Kuraishi. “Palestinian men put on the kaffiyah, and not just on their head, around their neck, as almost a uniform,” adds Ghnaim. The kaffiyeh thus became a symbol of solidarity uniting working class Palestinians with the upper-class, who would typically also wear a fez.
Other prominent figures also popularized the scarf in the years to follow. Former President of the Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat, who once graced the cover of TIME magazine with the kaffiyeh in 1968, was well-known for wearing the scarf on his head in a triangular shape that mimicked the shape of Palestine, Ghnaim says. designated a terrorist group-also wore the kaffiyeh.
“That move of wearing [the kaffiyeh] on her head as a woman, like a hijab, garnered a lot of attention [and] widespread popularity around the world, but also in the Palestinian community [and] diaspora,” adds Ghnaim.
The scarf has resurged in the fashion world several times in recent decades. In 1988, the same year that the Palestine National Council announced the establishment of the State of Palestine following a staged uprising against Israel, TIME wrote about the scarves' adoption by the American public.
Then, TIME reporter Jay Cocks argued that the kaffiyeh, once a “garment of choice among the political protesters and antimissile advocates of the ‘70s and early ‘80s” had become “politically neutral.” That connotation doesn’t remain true today. In 2007, the New York Times reported that kaffiyehs were marketed as “antiwar” scarves by Urban Outfitters, though they were later pulled from stores “due to the sensitive nature of this item.”
Today, many Palestinians recognize that while the checkered scarf is a symbol of resistance, it's still undeniably tied with their own cultural heritage. “While other Arabic-speaking nations might have a similar pattern or design, [the kaffiyeh] doesn't have that added meaning of resistance against occupation and invasion that it does amongst Palestinians,” says Kuraishi. “Palestinians will wear it for weddings or graduations, not just protests-so good times and bad.”
Palestinian Kufiya
Headwraps in the American South
In 18th-century Louisiana, the Tignon Laws forced Black women to cover their hair in public to mark them as inferior. But in true Black fashion, what was intended as suppression became a tool of rebellion. The head wrap’s reclamation is one of triumph.
For generations, the head wrap has been more than fabric-it has been a symbol of dignity, culture, and survival.
Wearing a head wrap today is often both personal and collective. It can be a nod to heritage, a shield in spaces that misunderstand us, or a form of self-love. The head wrap is not a trend. It’s a tradition. And like so many traditions from the African diaspora, it carries both weight and beauty.
The headwrap exhibits the features of sub-Saharan aesthetics and worldview. The headwrap as a queen might wear a crown. The headwrap is more ornamental than the simple Euro American scarf.
The headwrap serves yet another function as an emblem of their West African ancestry.
The reappropriation of the headwrap is how enslaved American ancestors, but those who remained in Africa as well, expressed themselves.
