Ekemon's biggest fan is her daughter, Catherine. Photos: Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman/TNS
One year ago, Sonia Ekemon, 41, led the fight to make it legal for Idahoans to braid hair without a cosmetology license.
After the law passed in March 2022, Ekemon launched one of Idaho’s first hair braiding salons. And business has been booming.
Since opening African Braiding Salon in Meridian last September, her clientele has more than doubled, she’s gotten off food stamps and she’s already dreaming of expanding.
Though she has lived in Boise for 23 years, Ekemon’s connection to braiding began when she was just 12 years old, living in a Benin refugee camp after escaping Togo.
More than 200,000 Togolese fled to neighbouring countries in the 1990s to escape violent government crackdowns against democratic reforms, according to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.
Life wasn’t easy in the refugee camp. Hunger dominated Ekemon’s seven years there. She remembered eating leftovers from strangers’ plates and fishing food out of trash cans on the street.
Many turned to prostitution to survive, Ekemon said. She saw girls become pregnant in the camp at alarmingly young ages.
"Imagine being in a refugee camp and you cannot feed yourself,” Ekemon said. "And then you get pregnant on top of that. That was my biggest fear.”
When her sister became pregnant, Ekemon decided she needed to find something to ensure that wouldn’t happen to her. She learned how to braid and quickly became so good that people would pay her to do their hair.
Ekemon (centre) styling box braids for her daughter, Catherine, at the African Braiding Salon by Sonia Ekemon, her business located at Phenix Salon Suites in Meridian, Idaho.
"When I’m hungry, I can go on the street and do somebody’s hair,” Ekemon said.
Ekemon eventually left the camp to earn a professional hair-braiding license in Benin as a teenager before immigrating to the United States in 2000.
She had hoped to continue braiding in her new home state of Idaho until she found out it was one of five states where it was illegal without a cosmetology license. Ekemon said it felt like she’d been stripped of part of her identity.
"This is me, this is what I do,” Ekemon said. "When they said I cannot braid, it shocked me a lot. Because I’m like, if you know what I go through to learn how to braid – it’s my culture, it meant a lot to me – you will let me have this. But I never gave up. I kept trying to do whatever the state wanted me to do.”
Fighting to utilise her skill
Getting a license, however, was financially out of reach for Ekemon. Idaho cosmetology licenses require 1,600 hours of training and can cost up to US$20,000 (RM88,760), according to the state licensing board.
The state doesn’t require cosmetology schools to teach “African-style” braiding. Instead, hair braiders had to learn complicated techniques like how to cut, colour and chemically treat hair – even if they had no intention of ever providing those services.
Ekemon (standing) was part of a lawsuit in 2022 against the state's Idaho Barber and Cosmetology Services Licensing Board for the right to braid hair without a license.
But money became especially tight when Ekemon’s husband died of liver cancer in 2018, leaving Ekemon’s job at the Idaho Central Credit Union as her family’s only source of income. Needing a second job, Ekemon began illegally braiding hair out of people’s homes.
"I have a mortgage and three little kids that I take care of and have to feed,” Ekemon said at a news conference last year. “This is what I have to do to feed my kids. I really need this.”
She never stopped dreaming of opening a hair-braiding salon, but didn’t know how to make that possible considering Idaho’s law. Her friends found a solution: Ekemon would sue the state of Idaho. They also found her a lawyer.
"I told the lawyers all of my story,” Ekemon said. "They’re like: ‘Oh my gosh, you’ve got a good case. We would love to work with you.’ That’s how they came all the way from California to help me fight the lawsuit. It was no easy journey. But because I believed in myself, that’s why I had the courage to fight this law.”
When Ekemon and two other hair braiders announced the lawsuit from the steps of the Idaho Capitol Building last year, it was the first time many legislators had heard of the issue. Ekemon, it seemed, wasn’t the only one who thought the law was problematic. A bill was quickly drafted to make hair-braiding without a license legal. It passed unanimously in both chambers.
Hair braiding once hard to find
Ekemon’s salon has filled a much-needed gap for the Treasure Valley’s Black Community. Phenix Salon Suites, at 3909 E. Fairview Ave in Meridian, has more than a dozen hair stylists who rent rooms. Ekemon is the only Black stylist there.
Before the law passed, Ekemon had about one client a week. She now has more than 30 clients and employs a second hair braider. Instead of getting their hair illegally braided in their homes, clients can walk into the brightly lit salon, sit in a professional salon chair and pick out accessories from of a wall of colourful weaves, threads and beads.
Ekemon has received a flood of requests from one group in particular: white parents with adopted Black children. The parents didn’t know how to braid hair themselves and struggled to find a salon that offered the service.
Katie Brady visited the salon for the first time in March with her 11-year-old adopted daughter Zoe. When Zoe expressed interest in having her hair braided, Brady tried to learn to braid her hair through online tutorials but quickly found how much skill the task actually took.
“I’m grateful to find people that I can pay,” Brady told the Statesman. “I didn’t know a lot of (Ekemon’s) story before coming here and then listening to her, it’s like oh my gosh, I want to come and support her all the time.”
Ekemon’s biggest fan, however, is still her 12-year-old daughter Catherine Ekemon, whose favourite hairstyle is backward cornrows with a single braid in the back.
“It’s amazing what she can do,” Catherine said. “It’s pretty cool to know all kinds of people can come and she can do their hair.” – Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service
