Hollywood star Lupita Nyong’o showcases her nappy hair proudly on the cover of Porter Magazine. The black American actress is still riding on her Black Panther monumental success, and has gone ahead to star in a new movie: the new horror movie called Us directed by Get Out creator Jordon Peele.
The Oscar winner has successfully added a sci-fi blockbuster and now psychological horror to her résumé while showcasing Africa in the best ways possible through her outfit or her hairstyle.
She was a beautiful vision in evening wears as she graced Porter Edit Magazine’s latest issue.
In her interview with the magazine, she discusses her fear, her new film and embracing her hair.
Read excerpts from her interview below:
“I don’t feel defined by my hair, and I think that’s why I like to play with it. I remember when I was a teenager in Kenya, I had relaxed hair and I decided on a whim that I was going to cut it all off and grow my hair natural. I’d been going to the same hairstylist for years – he was a Kenyan, like me, and when I went natural, he didn’t know what to do with it. He was like, ‘They don’t teach us how to style natural hair in school.’
“There’s been a whole revolution, led by African America for sure, where we are embracing our natural hair texture and returning to a past glory. You look at beautiful traditional hairdos from pre-colonial and colonial times and they have been erased from so much of our contemporary expression.”
“I remember one of the first times I really saw African hairstyles preserved and celebrated as art was through the photographic lens of Leni Riefenstahl. I was 10 years old and had not truly seen images of natural pre-colonial hairstyles beyond our Kenyan borders. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with Riefenstahl’s work as a Nazi propagandist and that, in and of itself, is highly problematic, because this deeply colonialist, white supremacist gaze was introducing me to the people and hairstyles of the Nuba, Dinka and Shilluk of Sudan.
Essentially, even when we as a colonized or oppressed people are engaging with images or notions of our ancestry, it is so often within a Eurocentric gaze. That idea has stayed with me. Now at least it seems like we are waking up to ourselves again, and are like, ‘Hey, hold on, wait a minute…’ Our hair is kind of fabulous and it’s like clay and we can do all sorts of things with it.”
