Hair today, gone tomorrow: The making of urban legends

PETER KIMANI} seriously speaking

There is an interesting tale doing the rounds around the world and it apparently originated from this newspaper. It was partly appropriated from Snopes.com. It purports that a certain manzi (lady) of Nairobi, keen about her looks and all, picked up a hair weave from some unnamed shop in town.

After suffering from head-splitting headaches, for which she had a range of treatments that included a brain scan – which surprisingly did not include the suspicious weave – the gracious lady was found to have been harbouring skin-eating worms that had hatched from eggs carried over from the artificial hair from a corpse, or some other more horrifying source.

The story, Huffington Post wrote this week, bears striking parallels to the one Snopes.com published three years ago about a Namibian woman who suffered a hair-raising spectacle after using a similarly diseased weave: both victims worked at law firms and the shops selling the harmful merchandise were unnamed. The moral of the two stories is, however, the same: it cautions women to appreciate their natural beauty, blah blah blah.

The Huffington Post concludes The Standard piece was a hoax. I disagree. It was an urban legend, which is a respected genre in fiction. One of my teachers, Robert Boswell, actually has an essay on how such stories function. The essay appears in his book on the craft of fiction writing, The Half-Known World, which I highly recommend to our creative reporter. The measure of her talent can be adjudged from the international news networks that picked the story and distributed it further around the world.