LETTER FROM DAKAR
On the first floor of the Latyfah hair salon in Dakar, brushes, hair dryers and pairs of scissors are constantly moving. Sitting in the middle of bags full of wigs, the boss, Awa Ndao, checks the finishes before entrusting the precious strands to the delivery men, while taking a look at the video surveillance screens installed in the middle of the room. For several weeks, the store has been under construction to strengthen security, while thieves recently tried to enter in the middle of the night. “Burglars already took around thirty wigs, computers and perfumes three years ago. More than 20 million CFA francs [30,500 euros] were lost,” explains the business manager.
“We only use quality natural human hair which is very expensive,” says Awa Ndao, who has been in the industry for over thirty years. Nicknamed the “queen of small heads” for her famous short cuts, the hairdresser sells wigs that cost from 75,000 (100 euros) to several hundred thousand CFA francs depending on the cut, density, texture, length and material of the hair.
A thriving business as wigs resist the “nappy” fashion – a contraction of “natural” and “happy” – which aims to rehabilitate natural African hair. As the end-of-year holidays approach, orders from Senegalese women explode and this “gold in strands” increasingly attracts thugs. The wigs are then often resold on markets, or on social networks, at a much more affordable price than their initial value. On the street, thugs sometimes prefer them to phones or handbags.
“Customers can keep them for up to ten years”
In Dakar, women are no longer safe from theft of their headdresses. Nogaye Sidy Fall, 42, had this bitter experience in September 2022. She was shopping in the popular Colobane market, on the eve of the start of the school year: “And suddenly I feel like my wig is gone … it was made of natural hair, I had paid nearly 300,000 CFA francs for it,” she says. She had bought it a week earlier and had not yet dared to tell her husband the price. She therefore preferred to tell him that it was made of synthetic hair – much more affordable – and that there was no point in filing a police report. “I can’t afford the luxury of buying wigs of this value every year,” explains the mother. In her cupboards, she carefully keeps two other quality hairpieces worth 150,000 and 200,000 CFA.
Adji (who prefers to remain anonymous) had her wig ripped off when she got off the bus by young people on scooters, while she was on her way to work. A square, curly cut that she had just given herself. “I’m going to have to wait a long time before I can afford a new one of this quality,” regrets the young woman. The height of it comes when she works at Enera Beauty, one of the most famous hair salons in the capital for its natural hair wigs.
“We import human hair from Vietnam at 200,000 CFA per kilo, they are treated without chemicals,” explains the boss, Arène Khouma, who opened her salon in the West Fair district of Dakar in 2017. Every month, she imports between 5 and 10 kg of hair – 30 kg in festive months. At Enera Beauty, wigs cost 165,000 to 400,000 CFA francs. “Customers can keep them for ten years with proper maintenance,” she explains. “We don’t do mass manufacturing, we personalize all our products because each customer has a different head. This explains the price,” explains Arène Khouma.
Difficult-to-resolve cases
Most salons import their wigs from China or India, where the strands are harvested from temples when worshipers shave their heads as religious offerings. The country has become the world’s largest supplier of human hair with 2,383 tonnes exported in 2022, a market growing by 66% between 2018 and 2022. In Senegal, the importation of “feathers, artificial flowers and hair” increased from 145 million to 286 million CFA francs between 2017 and 2021 according to the National Agency for Statistics and Demography (ANSD).
The Senegalese police are now dealing with multiple cases of hair theft. In September, following the complaint of a victim, who had recognized on TikTok the hair torn from his head a few days earlier, the thieves were arrested. They owned 91 second-hand items and were sentenced to two years in prison, including three months in prison.
However, these cases are difficult to resolve. Despite the images from CCTV cameras provided to the police when he filed a complaint, Melchisedek Ibrahima, manager of the Perles Hair hair salon in the Ouakam district of Dakar, was never able to find out who the perpetrators of the crime were. “On Sunday July 24, 2022, around 6 a.m., the neighbors called me because the windows were broken. When I arrived, all the heads of the mannequins in my store were bare, the stock had disappeared… We estimated the damage at 14 million CFA [21,400 euros],” laments Mr. Ibrahima.
A year and a half later, the store’s shelves decorated with artificial flowers are once again filled with wigs of all colors and lengths. “We had to start from scratch. But we have increased security by hiring a security company,” continues the store manager. It’s worth it because, as his colleague Arène Khouma says, now “a wig salon is like a jewelry store.”