The Sunday Mail
Emmanuel Kafe
WHILE hair is the crowning glory for most women, something that makes them feel beautiful, a woman in Kaitano Village, Mudzi, has none whatsoever.
Dorica Ngwenya, who lost every strand of hair on her body in her teens, is treated like a freak.
She has been without hair for the past 15 years. Regarding her condition, squabbles within her family have hindered her prospects of ever getting medical or even traditional help.
This has led many locals into speculating that the condition could be a side-effect of get-rich-quick black magic. Stranger than Fiction reached out to Ngwenya.
“It all started some 15 years ago when I woke up one morning with a small portion of my hair missing,” she began her narration.
Looking a bit strange with some of her hair missing, Ngwenya decided to shave it all off.
But when it was time for the hair to grow back, she said it only grew on the sides.
When she shaved off her hair again in an effort to have it all grow back, that was the last time she saw any hair on her body. It never grew back.
“At first I would hide and those close to me thought I had gone through chemotherapy,” she said.
Unfortunately, hair loss is not something that can be hidden for long. Friends said attempts to help Ngwenya have been unsuccessful due to objections from some family members.
However, Ngwenya’s case is not an isolated one. In 2014, a Gokwe woman, Thokozani Mpofu, also spoke about how she went without any hair for nine years. She claimed that her hair was being used for rituals.
Can hair be used for rituals?
Does hair contain something special which makes it a target for ritualists? Is rapid hair loss a result of juju? If not, is there is a medical explanation for it?
According to The Scientist Magazine, rapid hair loss is a medical condition called alopecia iniversalis. It includes loss of hair, including eyebrows and eyelashes. Health specialists and online sources say it is the most severe form of alopecia areata, with an incidence of 0,0005 percent or one in 200 000 people.
There is no standard treatment for people with this condition. Spontaneous re-growth is always a possibility, even for those with 100 percent hair loss over many years. However, it is not possible to predict when re-growth will occur. While cancer treatment in the form of chemotherapy is known to cause hair loss as a side-effect, doctors say a thinning mane may be a sign of certain types of cancer in the first place.
Cases of mysterious hair loss
Lauren Engle, a woman who lives in Dallas Texas, United States of America, lost every strand of her hair in a mysterious way. Her ponytail shrunk to the thickness of a pencil before it eventually fell off. Efforts to get medical attention were fruitless and she had to live with her baldness for years before her death. Millions of women in the United States of America suffer from hair loss, caused by genes, age or alopecia areata. In Engle’s case, the culprit was unexplained female pattern baldness.
Australia
Life Science blog reports of unexplained hair loss in a four-year-old boy in Australia. The boy was born normal but later lost every strand of his hair mysteriously. His parents claim that it was the work of black magic. The child just woke up without hair and they could not find any traces of hair that had been cut. The child is still a bald head.
Malawi
In Malawi, a woman, Kondwani Nankhumwa, had her hair cut when she was asleep at a friend’s house and it never grew back. She believes her hair could have been used by ritualists because every effort she made to make it grow back never worked.
