‘MYHAIR IS MY IDENTITY, IT’S WHO I AM’

ZULAIKHA PATEL

Zulaikha Patel first grabbed the world’s attention in 2016 when, at the age of 13, she led protests against racist policies at her school, Pretoria Girls High. ‘We became a global icon for decolonisation.’ That same year, the BBC listed her as one of their top 100 world’s leading female voices. She also became an ambassador for the Thuli Madonsela Foundation, among others. Half Indian, half Ndebele, the teen found that this allowed her to have a much wider perspective on life – but it also exposed her to racial prejudice. ‘When I was with my Indian father, people questioned whether I was actually his daughter,’ she recalls. ‘And they would assume my mother was my helper.’

Zulaikha says she was raised to be an activist. Her father, an activist in his youth, stressed ‘that we need to rewrite the narrative; to write about Africa from the African perspective’. Although Zulaikha excelled academically, she was expelled from primary school twice – for disobeying their hair policy. Her natural hair, she was told, was ‘exotic’ and ‘untidy’. She fell in line then and straightened her hair, which made her question her own identity. ‘I hated every aspect of being black as I saw how we were treated,’ she says. Then she read Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like and fell in love with Black Consciousness. She cut off her hair and embraced her afro. That was the moment, she says, that she first ‘allowed herself to be black’.

When she started at Pretoria Girls, says Zulaikha, ‘I got the biggest shock: 22 years into our so-called democracy, the policies drafted before 1994 still existed.’ But this time, other girls joined her cause, and soon they had the entire country backing them up. The school amended its hair policy and now Zulaikha wears her afro with pride: ‘I’m not going to be ashamed of being African in Africa.’

Now 17, she calls herself a champion of women’s rights, particularly women of colour. ‘If I’m not given a seat at the table, I’ll create my own. We as young women are ready to design a future for the Africa we are going to inherit and lead. Our table will be ready to challenge the system of exclusion.’