The Hat Is for the Sun
A Christmas Stetson, three rodeos, and a western wear store north of Nairobi. On the hat I wear, the cowboy and explorer pictures behind it, and the culture I'm still learning to see whole.
I keep touchstones. A bracelet, a necklace, a hat. Each one has a story.
The hat is the one people notice first.
This one was a Christmas present in 2019, the year I came back to the United States after three years in Tanzania. Since then it has been with me in Washington, Idaho, Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, Tanzania, and Kenya.
Where it comes from
My parents are from West Texas. I never lived there. I was born in Arkansas. But I grew up inside Texas cattle culture all the same. Both sides of my family ran beef cattle, along with oil and whatever else that country had to offer. I grew up visiting family ranches and farms, riding horses and driving tractors.
As a teenager I started training horses. Then I had the kind of idea young men have, and decided I would ride bulls. I competed in three rodeos: one for the Washington State University rodeo team and two in the Professional Western Rodeo Association.
I didn't make time on any of them.
That ended the bull riding. It didn't end the hat.
What a hat is for
The hat was always practical.
It keeps the sun out of your eyes and the rain off your neck. You can swat flies with it, or stoke a fire. A good hat will hold water, so you can cool your own head or let your horse drink.
That's why a wide brim turns up in every bright, working landscape on earth. Plenty of hats can do this work. I wear a Stetson because of my family, and because of the life I've lived in one.
Uganda
Uganda was one of the first places I went without a cowboy hat.
I didn't expect to see one there. Then I saw them everywhere: cowboy hats, and wide brims cut close to them, worn above all by the elite.
It was the same in Tanzania, and again in Kenya. There's a western wear store in my neighborhood, north of Nairobi.
On me, the hat is obvious. My skin makes it obvious. But I wasn't bringing anything new. I was just one more man under a brim.
The cowboy was never one thing
It took me years to understand the culture I grew up in as more than one thing.
The American cowboy was built by many hands. Ranching in the West came north out of Mexico's vaquero tradition: the saddle, the rope, the words. Lariat, rodeo, corral and chaps all came from Spanish.
Further east and earlier, colonial South Carolina's cattle economy relied on enslaved Africans. Many came from West African regions where herding cattle was old, skilled work. Historians credit them with shaping how cattle were worked in the American South, long before the great drives.
By the time those drives ran north out of Texas, about one cowboy in four was Black. Many others were Mexican or Native American. The picture I grew up with, the lone white man under the brim, left most of them out.
Exploration was not the problem
The same thing happened to the explorer.
People have always crossed mountains to see what was on the other side. Traders, pilgrims, herders and the plainly curious have been doing it for as long as there have been people. Exploration and exploitation have always existed side by side. But they were not the same thing.
In the fifteenth century they were fused. Papal decrees later known as the Doctrine of Discovery declared that lands not ruled by Christians could be claimed by the Christians who "found" them. After 1492, that idea crossed the Atlantic and then the world. From then on, the explorer and the conqueror wore the same clothes.
RootedNomad is an attempt to separate them again.
My culture
American culture is my culture. I don't get to trade it in.
What I can do is be honest about it. I can let the other cultures I live among inform it, and I can reflect on it. I can name the racism that runs through it, including the parts that run through me. Decolonizing my own mind is slow work, and it isn't finished.
But you can see the beauty and the flaws in a culture at the same time. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The cattle, the horses, the work and the hat are real, and they came from more people than I was taught.
The explorer was never the costume. It was the reason for going. RootedNomad goes to belong, not to claim.
The hat is for the sun.
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