Once upon a time, in a small village nestled deep in the enchanted forest, there lived a magical hairdresser with baby blue hair. His name was Cedric and he was known far and wide for his extraordinary talent in styling hair like no other. Cedric possessed a rare gift, which allowed him to create hairstyles that could transform a person's life. Whether it was hair that sparkled like stars, or hair that changed colors with every breath, Cedric had the innate ability to bring people's wildest hair dreams to life. His hair salon, nestled beneath a towering oak tree, was a place of wonder and enchantment. It was adorned with glittering crystals, vibrant flowers, and whimsical mirrors that seemed to possess a mind of their own.

Rihanna, defiant witch-woman

Sometimes when I remember my paternal grandfather, it is in monochrome: I imagine him capable of expressing only one emotion: anger. In my mind the Shona patriarch dispenses neither hugs nor kisses but bellows, commands and, occasionally, the whip.

Happily, I never stayed with him for long, for the little time I spent with him was never fun. Older cousins would always say to us with envy: “You guys are lucky, he has become a saint; we saw the worst of it.”

A conjoined, yet contradictory fact was that my aunt – grandfather’s only biological daughter – is one of the strongest women I know, able to stand up to her father. When I was older, I discovered this trait is one she shared with my grandfather’s sisters. As the concentric circles grew beyond direct blood kinship, I found out that this independent and strong-headed streak is shared by other women in the clan of vaHera.

The clan folk are generally known as vaHera and the woman of the clan is known as chiHera or achiHera.

VaHera are of the Mhofu/Mpofu clan, of the Shava totem, whose totemic animal is the eland, the spiral-horned, tan-coloured animal in the antelope family. The origins of the chiHera’s autonomy is steeped in the same mythologies as that of the Shona, who arrived on the plateau of what is now Zimbabwe from that mythical land of bounty in the north, sometimes called Guruuswa, Shona for the land where the grass is tall and green.

Much later, when I was older, I would hear snatches of dialogue along the lines of, “chiHera is an outlaw”, a patriarch might grumble over a sorghum brew as he wipes the edges of his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yes, she is a renegade,” his companion would agree, sighing in accents in which desire is never far away. Somehow, against impossible odds, chiHera had managed to carve out not negligible autonomies, in which she lived without bother and with minimal censure.

If she lives in the village, often she is divorced or never married, in which case she lives on her own or at her parents’ homestead raising her children, daring the men around, including her father, brothers and uncles-patriarchy’s local representatives; in other cases she is married but it is a well-known fact that in her household it is her word that is law.

Unlike most cases in which patriarchy meets a match and throws its favoured epithets of witch and prostitute in the general direction of its targets, chiHera is, for some unfathomable reason, spared these categories. Her rebel DNA is a given, it’s just the way these chiHera women are and it’s better that they are left alone.

This figure, to be sure, comes back again and again in other tribes, nations and races to menace the landscapes of patriarchy, one day as the bitch, the next day as the witch, what has been argued to be the social and spiritual categories for “deviant” women.

One of the most dramatic and, unhappily, fleeting moments this witch-woman appears in fiction is towards the end of Heart of Darkness, the much maligned novel by Joseph Conrad.

When she makes an entrance, she naturally brings the darkness she inhabits and with which she menaces the men around her. “Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest …”

In a portrayal that would not be out of place if it was Charwe, the most famous medium of the spirit of Mbuya Nehanda, the legendary renegade woman credited with inspiring the anti-settler war of 1896-1897, popularly known as Chimurenga and on whose orders a white colonial administrator was killed.

On the eve of her hanging by her colonial captors, rebuffing the entreaties of a priest to convert her, she is reported to have declared “my bones shall rise,” and then went to the gallows singing and chanting. Whether by coincidence or by dint of the rebellious cultural DNA that runs in the women of her clan, Charwe herself is also a chiHera.

In Heart of Darkness, we read of how the witch-woman “walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witchmen, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step.

“She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress,” the narrator tells us, one moment his voice cracking with awe and the very next with lust.

“She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her.”

How were those watching this spectacle taking it?

“The young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back.” Some man on the steamer then resorted to a time honoured method of controlling those you can’t dominate: “If she had offered to come aboard I really think I would have tried to shoot her.”

It’s natural that this woman elicits this reaction, a reaction reserved for independent women such as the Wife of Bath in Chaucer; or Lucia in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, “a wild woman in spite of- because of- her beauty”.

Back when the mantra “black is beautiful” didn’t have any currency, Lucia was already espousing it, mocking women who used skin-lightening creams in this classic line, “Fanta and Coca Cola. Aiwa! Not me. I prefer to be the same colour all over.”

The renegade in Jamaica Kincaid’s prose poem Girl is determined not to be a lady but is bent on fulfilling her destiny as a “slut”. Like an Ogbanje, the child in Igbo mythology forever destined to come into this world again and depart again for the next world in a cyclical journey, this woman has come back as Rihanna, the Barbadian-American pop star. Even calling Rihanna a pop star sounds so wrong for someone who has been described as “magic,” “epic” and “a folk hero”. I am tempted to speculate whether in her ancestry there were some djukas or maroons, runaway slaves who escaped and set up free communities across the Americas.

I have outgrown American pop culture and so for some time now have had a detached relationship with its pop music. But, for some reason, it is principally Rihanna whose career I follow, perhaps because she is one of a few American pop stars who is also steeped in the Caribbean sound. No one mixes those soulful, dreamy vocals with a nonchalant Jamaican style half-chants better than Rihanna, a rough DJ-meets-singer soft style which reached its apogee in the 1990s when Buju Banton and Cocoa Tea had that memorable duet Too Young or when Cutty Ranks & Cocoa Tea collaborated on Waiting in Vain. I believe their version is better than the Bob Marley original.

Few celebrities walk the world like a goddess, own their sexuality like a slut and show the self-assuredness of a witch – after all, if she so desires, she can take your life. As Miranda July wrote, Rihanna “hasn’t created a persona around herself like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Madonna or so many other stars at her level. She doesn’t have to manufacture dimensionality, because she actually is soulful, and this comes across in every little thing she does.”

Maybe I adore her because of her uncultivated badassness, maybe because she reminds me of my clans woman, the achiHera.

Repeating Islands

It was adorned with glittering crystals, vibrant flowers, and whimsical mirrors that seemed to possess a mind of their own. Clients would eagerly line up outside, hoping to get an appointment with the legendary hairdresser and witness the magic for themselves. Each day, as Cedric sat on his velvet chair, he would carefully listen to the wishes and dreams of his clients.

News and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature, and the arts

Rihanna, defiant witch-woman

Sometimes when I remember my paternal grandfather, it is in monochrome: I imagine him capable of expressing only one emotion: anger. In my mind the Shona patriarch dispenses neither hugs nor kisses but bellows, commands and, occasionally, the whip.

Happily, I never stayed with him for long, for the little time I spent with him was never fun. Older cousins would always say to us with envy: “You guys are lucky, he has become a saint; we saw the worst of it.”

A conjoined, yet contradictory fact was that my aunt – grandfather’s only biological daughter – is one of the strongest women I know, able to stand up to her father. When I was older, I discovered this trait is one she shared with my grandfather’s sisters. As the concentric circles grew beyond direct blood kinship, I found out that this independent and strong-headed streak is shared by other women in the clan of vaHera.

The clan folk are generally known as vaHera and the woman of the clan is known as chiHera or achiHera.

VaHera are of the Mhofu/Mpofu clan, of the Shava totem, whose totemic animal is the eland, the spiral-horned, tan-coloured animal in the antelope family. The origins of the chiHera’s autonomy is steeped in the same mythologies as that of the Shona, who arrived on the plateau of what is now Zimbabwe from that mythical land of bounty in the north, sometimes called Guruuswa, Shona for the land where the grass is tall and green.

Much later, when I was older, I would hear snatches of dialogue along the lines of, “chiHera is an outlaw”, a patriarch might grumble over a sorghum brew as he wipes the edges of his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yes, she is a renegade,” his companion would agree, sighing in accents in which desire is never far away. Somehow, against impossible odds, chiHera had managed to carve out not negligible autonomies, in which she lived without bother and with minimal censure.

If she lives in the village, often she is divorced or never married, in which case she lives on her own or at her parents’ homestead raising her children, daring the men around, including her father, brothers and uncles-patriarchy’s local representatives; in other cases she is married but it is a well-known fact that in her household it is her word that is law.

Unlike most cases in which patriarchy meets a match and throws its favoured epithets of witch and prostitute in the general direction of its targets, chiHera is, for some unfathomable reason, spared these categories. Her rebel DNA is a given, it’s just the way these chiHera women are and it’s better that they are left alone.

This figure, to be sure, comes back again and again in other tribes, nations and races to menace the landscapes of patriarchy, one day as the bitch, the next day as the witch, what has been argued to be the social and spiritual categories for “deviant” women.

One of the most dramatic and, unhappily, fleeting moments this witch-woman appears in fiction is towards the end of Heart of Darkness, the much maligned novel by Joseph Conrad.

When she makes an entrance, she naturally brings the darkness she inhabits and with which she menaces the men around her. “Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest …”

In a portrayal that would not be out of place if it was Charwe, the most famous medium of the spirit of Mbuya Nehanda, the legendary renegade woman credited with inspiring the anti-settler war of 1896-1897, popularly known as Chimurenga and on whose orders a white colonial administrator was killed.

On the eve of her hanging by her colonial captors, rebuffing the entreaties of a priest to convert her, she is reported to have declared “my bones shall rise,” and then went to the gallows singing and chanting. Whether by coincidence or by dint of the rebellious cultural DNA that runs in the women of her clan, Charwe herself is also a chiHera.

In Heart of Darkness, we read of how the witch-woman “walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witchmen, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step.

“She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress,” the narrator tells us, one moment his voice cracking with awe and the very next with lust.

“She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her.”

How were those watching this spectacle taking it?

“The young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back.” Some man on the steamer then resorted to a time honoured method of controlling those you can’t dominate: “If she had offered to come aboard I really think I would have tried to shoot her.”

It’s natural that this woman elicits this reaction, a reaction reserved for independent women such as the Wife of Bath in Chaucer; or Lucia in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, “a wild woman in spite of- because of- her beauty”.

Back when the mantra “black is beautiful” didn’t have any currency, Lucia was already espousing it, mocking women who used skin-lightening creams in this classic line, “Fanta and Coca Cola. Aiwa! Not me. I prefer to be the same colour all over.”

The renegade in Jamaica Kincaid’s prose poem Girl is determined not to be a lady but is bent on fulfilling her destiny as a “slut”. Like an Ogbanje, the child in Igbo mythology forever destined to come into this world again and depart again for the next world in a cyclical journey, this woman has come back as Rihanna, the Barbadian-American pop star. Even calling Rihanna a pop star sounds so wrong for someone who has been described as “magic,” “epic” and “a folk hero”. I am tempted to speculate whether in her ancestry there were some djukas or maroons, runaway slaves who escaped and set up free communities across the Americas.

I have outgrown American pop culture and so for some time now have had a detached relationship with its pop music. But, for some reason, it is principally Rihanna whose career I follow, perhaps because she is one of a few American pop stars who is also steeped in the Caribbean sound. No one mixes those soulful, dreamy vocals with a nonchalant Jamaican style half-chants better than Rihanna, a rough DJ-meets-singer soft style which reached its apogee in the 1990s when Buju Banton and Cocoa Tea had that memorable duet Too Young or when Cutty Ranks & Cocoa Tea collaborated on Waiting in Vain. I believe their version is better than the Bob Marley original.

Few celebrities walk the world like a goddess, own their sexuality like a slut and show the self-assuredness of a witch – after all, if she so desires, she can take your life. As Miranda July wrote, Rihanna “hasn’t created a persona around herself like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Madonna or so many other stars at her level. She doesn’t have to manufacture dimensionality, because she actually is soulful, and this comes across in every little thing she does.”

Maybe I adore her because of her uncultivated badassness, maybe because she reminds me of my clans woman, the achiHera.

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Six Celebrities Who Have Been Accused of Witchcraft

From Beyoncé to Stevie Nicks to James Dean's ex-fling.

Welcome to [W’s Witch Week](https://www.wmagazine.com/topic/witch-week), a celebration of all things witchy. In the days leading up to Halloween, we’ll be boiling up a wicked brew of all things occult, from pop culture’s favorite new witches to the real women practicing Wicca today.

Witchcraft has long been entwined with society’s fear of the power of women, particularly their subversive powers. Tales of murder, torture, and shunning of women believed to be dabbling in the dark arts dot history across centuries and cultures long before Salem, Massachusetts, was even a settled town. When something about a woman’s way just seem too threatening or independent, well, her contemporaries throughout history have decided, “Perhaps she’s a witch?” So, while we no longer burn anyone at the stake for witchcraft (so far as we’re aware of), perhaps it’s not too surprising that rumors of witchcraft still linger around powerful women even today. Here, a short history of witchcraft rumors that have haunted celebrities.

Stevie Nicks

Nicks’s tendency to sing about things like crystal visions and cats in the dark, as well as her fondness for flowy black clothing and shawls, may have made her the original Silverlake shaman, but back in the ’70s, rumors spread that she was an actual witch. The Fleetwood Mac singer, however, didn’t take too kindly to the suggestion. “In the beginning of my career, the whole idea that some wacky, creepy people were writing, ‘You’re a witch, you’re a witch!’ was so arresting,” she once told the L.A. Times. “And there I am like, ‘No, I’m not! I just wear black because it makes me look thinner, you idiots.’” Sometimes, a woman just likes black clothing. Though, after decades of clarifying that she does not and never had practiced any sort of black magic, Nicks finally leaned into the rumor by appearing as herself on American Horror Story: Coven in 2013.

Malia Nurmi, aka Vampira

Yes, the Finnish actress Malia Nurmi may have been better known by her alter-ego of Vampira during the 1950s, but despite the aesthetic of her character, the rumors that had circulated about her had less to do with sucking blood and more to do with casting hexes. Indeed, many blamed Nurmi’s supposed witchcraft for the untimely death of James Dean. In 1954, Nurmi began hosting midnight showings of horror movies on Los Angeles local channel KABC as the subversive Vampira, becoming the first “horror host” in America (indeed, the Elvira character was patterned after Vampira). A pre-fame Dean became a fan and friend, and even briefly appeared on her program. There may very well have been some kind of a relationship, but Dean publicly asserted they never dated, supposedly telling gossip columnist Hedda Hopper that he doesn’t date “cartoons” or “witches,” depending on the version you happen to hear. When Dean died in a car crash, in 1955, the seedier tabloids of the day ran stories claiming that Nurmi had hexed him out of her supposed unrequited love and caused the crash (though some claim that Nurmi had actually built an altar for Dean months before his death, in an attempt to keep him safe). Shortly after the rumors spread in 1956, Nurmi crashed a Halloween party full of Hollywood heavyweights dressed as a witch and with a man dressed as a bandaged and battered Dean.

LOS ANGELES,CA – OCTOBER 30,1956: Maila Nurmi aka Vampira attends Carol Righters costume party in Los Angeles,CA. (Photo by Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Beyoncé

Earlier this year, Kimberly Thompson, who performed drums in Beyoncé’s backup band for seven years, filed a bizarre request for a restraining order, accusing the singer of practicing vindictive witchcraft. (Obtained by gossip Web site The Blast](https://theblast.com/beyonce-restraining-order-former-drummer-witchcraft-dark-magic/), the filing claimed Bey dabbled in “extreme witchcraft, dark magic” and cast “magic spells of sexual molestation.” A judge, of course, quickly turned down Thompson’s request for the order. Yet folks on the Internet began dabbling in their own dark social media magic, diving into the possibility that Beyoncé did actually practice the dark arts. Those theories ultimately dovetailed with longstanding conspiracy theories that Beyoncé and husband Jay-Z are high-standing members of the Illuminati. Beyoncé never publicly responded to Thompson’s claims, but perhaps she said it best on her song “Formation” when she rapped, “Y’all haters corny with that illuminati mess.”

Jennifer Lopez

Jennifer Lopez may have mastered a lot of skills, but no one has accused her of actually mastering black magic herself. As for outsourcing it, well, that’s a different story. Back in 2011, Spanish-language media ran with some suspicious Santeria accusations stemming from a woman who was dating Lopez’s first husband, Ojani Noa, at the time. “I’ve been told she does the worse—frightening stuff! Jennifer has a godmother in Miami, which I’ve never met, but Ojani knows her, and she calls this woman to tell her, ‘Do this to this person, put up a black candle, etc.’ She’s done amarres [spells] on all her boyfriends,” said the woman. “It’s a typical thing for anybody involved in Santeria. But, even with all that, she always ends up leaving them.”

Fairuza Balk

As one of the stars of The Craft, perhaps it’s not a surprise she’s been accused of witchcraft over the years, but it turns out it’s all a bit of a misunderstanding. She’s not a witch. She just supports small business. The actress did happen to own an occult shop at some point, but it wasn’t because she was a previous customer. “The true story is I found this occult shop in L.A., and I used to go there to ask them questions and do my research,” Balk told Entertainment Weekly last year. “They were really lovely people. The woman who owned it wanted to retire. She couldn’t put the kind of money into it that it needed to keep it up, and so it was going to be turned into a Chinese restaurant. I thought for the oldest occult shop in the country, that’s a tragedy.”

“So I bought it and put some work into it and helped it survive,” she continued.

Balk said she never actually practiced witchcraft in her personal life, and has long since divested herself from the shop.

Marina Abramovic

Conservative conspiracy theorists riding high off of Pizzagate thought they had found their next big hit by positioning Marina Abramovic—the performance artist famous the world over, though perhaps not to the type of people who believe conservative conspiracy theories—as a Satanist who involved Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, Jon Podesta, in the dark Satanist ritual of “spirit cooking.” The rumors got so bad that Snopes decided it warranted a thorough debunking.

As it turns out, Podesta’s brother, Tony, a major art collector, had donated to Abramovic’s KickStarter campaign and was rewarded with an invitation to attend a dinner with the artist featuring “spirit cooking.” Tony had forwarded an invite to his brother Jon, and that e-mail got leaked in WikiLeak’s release of hacked e-mails from the Clinton campaign. Despite the spooky name, it was actually a performance project Abramovic first performed in 1996. “It was just a normal menu, which I call spirit cooking,” she told ArtNews. There was no blood, no anything else. We just call things funny names, that’s all.” Clinton herself had no direct involvement in any of it, other than the fact she had hired a campaign manager who had an art collector brother.

He would then close his eyes, focusing deeply on the energy and aura of their hair, seeking inspiration from the elements around them. With a swish of his wand and a sprinkle of stardust, he would embark on a journey to create a hairstyle that would leave his clients feeling not just beautiful or handsome, but magical. The transformations that took place within Cedric's salon were nothing short of extraordinary. The once shy and introverted would leave with bold and confidence-inducing hairstyles, ready to take on the world. The stressed and overwhelmed would exit with hair that seemed to carry a calming energy, easing their worries and bringing them peace. But Cedric's magical hairdressing didn't just end with his clients. He would often venture into the village, seeking out individuals who seemed in need of a little magic in their lives. He would gift them with beautiful hairstyles, carefully selected to help them find love, success, or whatever their hearts desired. The baby blue hair that adorned Cedric's head also held a secret. It represented the never-ending possibility and wonder of the world. It acted as a reminder that magic could be found in the most unexpected places, even within ourselves. And so, with his baby blue magical hair, Cedric continued to style and transform the lives of those around him, bringing a touch of enchantment and joy to all who crossed his path. He became a true legend, a beacon of light and inspiration in a world that often needed a little bit of magic..

Reviews for "Channel Your Inner Unicorn with Baby Blue Magical Hairdress"

1. John Smith - 2 stars - I was really disappointed with "Baby blue magical hairdress". The story was confusing and had no clear plot. The characters were also very shallow and uninteresting. I expected more from a fantasy novel, but this one fell flat for me. I wouldn't recommend it to others.

2. Sarah Johnson - 1 star - I couldn't finish "Baby blue magical hairdress". The writing style was too clumsy and the dialogue felt forced. The concept of a magical hairdresser sounded interesting, but it was poorly executed in this book. I found myself bored and disinterested after just a few chapters. Save your time and skip this one.

3. Emma Davis - 2 stars - "Baby blue magical hairdress" lacked depth and substance. The magical elements felt out of place and forced into the story. The main character was annoying and lacked development, making it difficult to connect with her. The plot was predictable and unoriginal. I was hoping for a fun and enchanting read, but was left feeling underwhelmed.

4. Michael Thompson - 1 star - This book was a huge disappointment. The writing was amateurish and filled with cliches. The dialogue was corny and the characters were one-dimensional. The magical hairdresser aspect was interesting, but it wasn't enough to salvage the overall story. I would not recommend "Baby blue magical hairdress" to anyone looking for a well-written and engaging novel.

5. Jennifer Anderson - 2 stars - "Baby blue magical hairdress" did not live up to the hype for me. The plot was repetitive and seemed to drag on without much direction. The magical elements felt forced and didn't add much to the story. The writing style was average at best, lacking in creativity and depth. I was left feeling unsatisfied and would not recommend this book to others.

Elevate Your Style with Baby Blue Magical Hairdress