In Nige­ria, a head­wrap is called a gele, a Yoru­ba word. Ghana­ian women call theirs dukus, while for South African and Namib­ian women, it is a doek.

Orig­i­nat­ing from sub-Sa­ha­ran Africa, head­wraps were first worn by women dur­ing the ear­ly 1700s as in­di­ca­tions of their age, mar­i­tal sta­tus, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and pros­per­i­ty. In Nige­ria, the style of gele varies if a woman is sin­gle or mar­ried. If the end goes to the right, she’s mar­ried and if it tilts to the left, she’s sin­gle.

Head­wraps al­so serve a very prac­ti­cal pur­pose to pro­tect from the sun and keep cool in warm weath­er. A sym­bol of slav­ery in colo­nial Amer­i­ca, head­wrap had a resur­gence in the 1970s, dur­ing the Black Pow­er Move­ment.

Su­san Cum­ber­batch has been do­ing head­wraps for more than 20 years. Self-taught, she found it a great style op­tion when she didn’t want to comb it. Head­wraps are now pop­u­lar show pieces at the an­nu­al Eman­ci­pa­tion cel­e­bra­tions and have be­come more pop­u­lar, with the younger woke gen­er­a­tion and the nat­ur­al hair move­ment, with a shift to­ward tra­di­tion­al African cul­ture.

Cum­ber­batch ex­plained that for women with short hair, a base is need­ed to build up­on for the wrap, such as a stock­ing fill with pa­per to cre­ate vol­ume.

In these se­ries of im­ages, Cum­ber­batch demon­strates five dif­fer­ent head­wraps on mod­el Terneille Samuel Her­bert, each one an add on to the pre­vi­ous wrap, us­ing pins to keep the fab­ric in place.