You couldn’t take a peek at the news this past week without reading about Pretoria High School for Girls, local sites dominated by the actions of some brave girls taking a stand.

We covered that HERE and HERE, in case you’re somehow out of the loop, but we’re going to look at some of the media attention from a little further afield.

Mashable have a post titled “South African girls take a stand against school rules by rocking natural hair”, so we’ll take a few snippets from the opening paragraphs and suss out the vibe:

After being told by school officials to chemically straighten their natural hair, girls with Afros and braids gathered together last weekend to protest the rule and defend their black individuality, and their actions are inspiring an important change…

Despite the official end of the apartheid 22 years ago, the school is still run by mostly white administrators and racism remains a serious issue in the area.

They also have a pretty decent range of videos and pictures from proceedings in Pretoria, but let’s move along to the BBC:

Gauteng Education Minister Panyaza Lesufi, who held emergency talks on Monday with pupils and administrators at the prestigious private school in the capital, criticised its “stone-age rules” on hairstyles…

During his visit, black pupils told him that some staff at the school “tell them they look like monkeys, or have nests on their heads”, a statement from the Gauteng Department of Education said.

It’s much the same over at the Guardian, with some snippets of extra info mixed in:

Politicians weighed in on the row, with the Economic Freedom Fighters party accusing the school of seeking “to directly suppress blackness in its aesthetics and culture”…

“We are being discriminated against because of our hair. They want us to relax our hair – they want our hair to look a certain way,” an anonymous student told the PowerFM radio station.

Perhaps the headline is worth a mention though – “Racism row over South Africa school’s alleged hair policy”. I think the hair policy is pretty clear, nothing alleged about it.

Nothing like a South African race row to grab the attention of international media, I guess.

[sources:mashable&bbc&guardian]