Why Afro-Brazilians Are Travelling to South Africa for Braids in Maboneng, the story from our recent travellers Camilla de Lucas and Brafrika who journeyed with CURIOCITY for this moment where beauty and history converged.

It starts with a DM. A saved Reel. A friend who just got back from Jozi with scalp-tight cornrows and stories of rooftop parties in Maboneng. Then it becomes a ticket. A journey.  A braid appointment with Lebohang Motaung, visual hairstylist, artist, alchemist.

In 2025, a growing wave of Afro-Brazilians are travelling not just for safaris or sunsets but for hair. Real hair. Hair that honours ancestry, refuses assimilation, and reclaims space, moving beyond the adventure and tourism, into tracing our roots, quite literally becomes an act of cultural restoration.

At the centre of this trend is Kolene, a curly hair brand backed by fragrance house Symrise, with a mission that goes beyond curl definition. Their recent collaboration brought a collective of Brazilian creatives including a major influencer and a film crew to Johannesburg, where they embedded themselves into the textured world of African hair care. Not the salon-glossed, Eurocentric kind. The real kind. The kind you find in downtown Jozi, twisting, coiling, living.

And there’s no better place for that than Maboneng, a neighbourhood that feels like a pulse. It’s part art district, part open-air gallery, part informal economy. Street-style meets ancestral wisdom. Braid shops sit shoulder to shoulder with underground galleries and pop-up shebeens. And on any given Saturday, you’ll find queues of women, local and global, waiting to get their hair done by hands that hold generations of technique.

This exchange isn’t one-sided. Afro-Brazilians, historically cut off from the continent by colonialism and slavery, are reconnecting to a cultural lineage that was once violently erased. “It’s more than the connection of having my hair braided, this is touching my ancestry,” says one traveller. “It’s like… remembering something I wasn’t allowed to remember, something cultural and even tribal..”

Through CURIOCITY, a Joburg-based travel collective built around connection and counter-narratives, the group also met with Jabu Stone, one of the OGs of natural hair in South Africa. His brand helped carve out a space for Black South Africans to love and maintain their hair without chemicals, without apology.

And then there’s Lebohang Motaung, whose art blurs the line between braiding and fine art. Her installations have appeared in museums. But her studio? Still open for appointments. That’s the point. In Johannesburg, hair is both installation and income. It is resistance. It is expression. It is art.

The Kolene and Symrise trip culminated at South African Fashion Week because, obviously. The intersection of hair, fashion and politics is seamless here. Braids walked the runway. Locs told stories. Edges were slicked down with ancestral pride.

What’s happening in South Africa marks a significant movement, it’s attracting diaspora from across the world, especially in Brazil, where the politics of Black hair are still riddled with Eurocentric pressure and salon-based shame.

Now, Brazilian women are flying across the Atlantic for box braids in Maboneng. They’re meeting the stylists who turn scalp into statement. They’re shooting docu-style Reels that rack up hundreds of thousands of views. The trip becomes about hairstyle, healing, aesthetic, history and memory.

Take a curated journey into identity, art, and ancestral memory, led by CURIOCITY, the collective connecting the curious to the continent’s most powerful stories.

To find your own way into the braid shops of Maboneng or the culture-rich corners of Johannesburg, head to www.curiocity.africa or follow @experiences_by_curiocity for what’s next.