Afro - Similar Styles Internationally

Similar Styles Internationally

A Jewfro (portmanteau of the words Jew and afro) or Isro (portmanteau of the words Israel and afro) refers to a curly hairstyle worn by certain people usually of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Similar hair worn by non-Jewish people is usually considered, with humor, to be a Jewfro. Its name is inspired by the afro hairstyle, which it resembles, and also builds on a history of racial discrimination.

The term has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s when many prominent figures were described as sporting the hairstyle. The Los Angeles Times called college football star Scott Marcus a flower child with "golden brown hair...in ringlets around his head in what he calls a Jewish afro style".

The New York Times in a 1971 article on Harvard University's "hairy" basketball team, wrote that Captain Brian Newmark, "hasn’t had a haircut since last May and his friends have suggested his hairdo is a first cousin to the Afro...in the case of the Jewish Junior from Brooklyn, though, the bushy dark hair that is piled high on his head has been called an Isro." Novelist Judith Rossner was described in a Chicago Tribune profile as the "grown-up Wunderkind with an open, oval face framed by a Jewish Afro."

The Hadendoa Beja of Northeast Africa were called Fuzzy-Wuzzies by British colonial troops during the Mahdist War of the late 19th century due to their oftentimes large and elaborate hairstyles, which they shaped with the assistance of butter. Similarly, young males of nomadic clans in Somalia were known to tease their hair into rather large bushes, which they would also hold in place with butter. As they aged and got married, they would tend to cut their hair.

Variations of the afro have been worn by one or both sexes in the many disparate cultures of the African continent. Due to the hairstyle's links to members of the African-American Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Afro was seen by several outside cultures as a dangerous symbol of political unrest, including Tanzania where the Afro was banned in the 1970s because it was seen as a symbol of neocolonialism and as part of an American cultural invasion. In the 1950s and 60s, South African women were also known to wear their hair in an Afro-type style.

The Afro did not rise to the same level of popularity among the Afro-Caribbean community as it did in the United States, in part because of the popularity of dreadlocks, which played an important role in the Rastafari movement. Not unlike the Afro's significance among the members of the American Black Power movement, dreadlocks symbolized black pride and empowerment amongst the Rastafari of the Caribbean. The hairstyle was also banned in Cuba during the 1960s.