Head-dress and hairstyles: the tok and the kono

The Lango were known for the care they gave to their hair. The ethnographer J. H. Driberg described two main head-dresses worn by men.

• The kono was a crown of cock’s feathers built up on the hair with clay and chalk. It was mostly, but not only, a war head-dress.
• The tok covered the crown of the head in a close cap of small discs of ostrich eggshell and black seeds. White beads later replaced the seeds and were worked into patterns, sometimes with cowries, and red chalk could be rubbed on for ceremonies. Dressing the hair took several hours, and the barber was paid with a pot of beer and a chicken.

In time the tok and the kono were made so that they could be taken off, and a round wicker tok, worked with the wearer’s own hair and decorated with rings of beaten brass, came into fashion. A warrior who had killed an enemy cut off his tok and hung it at his outdoor hearth, the otem.

Named haircuts

• Achudi – the head shaved except for a top-knot.
• Atira – a strip three fingers wide shaved from the crown to the forehead, done after killing an enemy.
• Ajulu (“the crest”) – the head shaved except for a comb of hair three inches wide.
• Kinga – reserved for twins: long hair with a fringe shaved round the head.
• Apam – hair shaved short all over.

Women did not cut their hair. They oiled it with croton or sesame oil mixed with ashes or chalk and twisted it into strands. Women dressed each other’s hair and charged nothing for it.

Source: J. H. Driberg, The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda (London, 1923), pp. 58–61; public domain. It describes life about a hundred years ago as a colonial administrator saw it, so customs have changed and some may be told differently today. Elders and families are invited to correct it and add what they know.