Ideas & Debate

The struggle to be different in a world that frowns upon outliers

GTRhair

Young people are challenging the rules laid down by society on what is acceptable and what is not. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

Let’s talk about hair. I’m not certain I’m the best qualified to do that seeing how little I have of it on my head (and no, I’m not going bald, but the dictates of propriety and convenience mean that it is much easier to keep a closely-cropped head than to try and figure out what style to maintain from one week to the next).

But hair became an issue last week, in a way that illustrates a divide in opinion in society. The same debate is starting to show up in companies the world over and causing many human resource managers to, well, pull out their hair.

It all began in court in the middle of the week. A parent instituted a lawsuit against Nairobi’s Rusinga School, claiming discrimination after the school refused to admit her son to Class One because he sported dreadlocks.

Her contention is on two fronts – that the little boy had dreadlocks all through kindergarten, and only now is the rule being implemented; and that banning dreadlocks on boys and allowing them on girls is ipso facto gender discrimination. She rests her case on Article 44 of the Constitution, which guarantees the enjoyment of cultural rights.

I will not pretend to know the constitutional or legal merits of the case, but cultural arguments, Kenya’s fraught history, memories of school and the experiences of the workplace meant that this is a matter that’s got too many touchstones to pass up.

School life in Kenya has always had the loud undercurrent of the struggle between conformity and rebellion. High school, especially, is a well-worn battleground.

You wouldn’t expect any less from institutions in which young people are trying to break free of the stifling carapace of childhood, and attempting to discover their individual personalities. You see this in gestures large and small – a school blazer worn just so; an attempt to wear different coloured socks that always gets caught at parade time; the battles at opening day when girls and boys are compelled to change their holiday hairstyles.

In Kenya, for the most part, we hew to the traditional and the conservative. School uniforms are de rigueur because to allow “civilian” clothes in a school environment would be to introduce far too much variation and status signalling that little actual learning would take place.

Teachers would be saddled with the additional task of policing fashion choices, where there is no easy way to set hard and fast rules.

This is rapidly colliding, though, with life as currently lived today. In a world where you can make individual choices from your choice of breakfast bread to the news outlets you will patronise, some are starting to ask fundamental questions of what age individualism should begin to be expressed.

In addition, larger questions are arising on what traditional learning environments mean in a world where we’re in global economic competition.

Knowing look

Of course, if you’re a parent, especially of teenage children, you must be reading this with a world-weary sigh. The dread of familiarity doesn’t make this easier to digest but it does induce a knowing look.

But if you’re at the same time in charge of your company’s future and strategy, the knowing look is even more present because you have seen this issue arising in the workplace. Young people are getting into the workforce with a demand for individual self-expression that is bumping up against the need to drive a simple unified agenda.

What workplaces are having to figure out on the fly is whether allowing self-expression will lead to a flowering of creativity, which leads to greater financial results.

Creative industries – advertising and the like – long realised that the people who would be misfits in any other industry are the ones who create the greatest amount and variety of work.

In small corners of traditionally staid industries, such as investment banking, there is also an allowance for quirkiness and idiosyncrasy which supposedly leads to greater creativity. But what happens to the airline pilot who wants to maintain a luxuriant beard? What happens to the male cabinet secretary (or even chief justice) who wants to wear an earring?

Even more important, what happens when your 24-year-old salesman tells you they only work best in the afternoon (and they prove it by meeting and exceeding their numbers)?

What happens when your 30-year-old middle manager decides that they need a sabbatical every three months to recharge (and this falls right in the middle of a major system upgrade)?

Should corporations acknowledge that their workers are a bunch of distinctive individuals and alter their work around that? Or do they stick to the tried and true – get in, stick to the rules and rise up the ladder?

There are no simple answers, of course, but don’t assume that this absolves you from fairly difficult questions. They are rushing at you at a hundred miles an hour. Or at the speed of a dreadlocked, seven-year-old boy.

@wgkantai