The salon is never silent. Even when the hair dryers hum like low thunder, and voices weave through the noise: laughter, complaint, story, song. I spend long hours here every few weeks, sitting in my loctician’s chair as she sections and twists my dreadlocks with a rhythm that feels almost ancestral. Across the mirror, I see lives overlapping: a nail technician buffing someone’s nails, another woman shaping eyebrows, and yet another gliding through the door with a bag of bras, socks, and Ayurvedic supplements. She makes her rounds like a familiar wind, always welcomed, because everyone here knows someone who might need what she’s selling.

The salon isn’t just a beauty space; it’s a world inside a world. Beneath the hum of dryers and the scent of hair oil, deals are made, debts are settled, hearts are mended. Someone is negotiating rent, another is sharing news of a job lead, and a third is venting about a husband who still can’t understand why she comes home tired after “just sitting and gossiping at the salon all day.” But this is where so much of our unwaged labour happens; the tending, the listening, the invisible stitching together of each other’s lives.

I’ve come to realize that these women’s spaces are the soft architecture of our survival. They aren’t designed by architects or written into policy; they’re grown, improvised, fluid. The salon, the mama mboga kibanda, the chama that meets over tea and mandazi. These all form an unspoken network of care. Within them, women become each other’s accountants, counsellors, stylists, and sisters. It’s a micro-economy built not on hierarchy but on reciprocity, powered by shared emotion and resilience.

There is something deeply political about that, even if no one calls it politics. Because when formal systems fail us, women invent parallel ones. A chama gives one of the members a small loan. Mama mboga keeps groceries aside on credit until payday. A woman who lost her job starts braiding hair from her veranda, and before long she’s employing two other women. The scale may be small, but the impact ripples outward, quietly, persistently.

As my loctician works, we talk about everything; politics, motherhood, faith, fatigue. She tells me she’s saving to open her own place one day, somewhere bigger, with space for a few young women to learn the trade. She says she wants to call it “Roots.” I smile at the name. Every twist she makes feels like the perfect metaphor: building strength strand by strand, from the root up. Around us, the salon keeps pulsing. A baby wails, someone bursts into laughter, a phone rings with a gospel tune. The air feels thick with life – imperfect, noisy, unstoppable.

I think of my mother, and her mother before her. Their women’s spaces were different; kitchens, church groups, market tables. Yet they carried the same hum: women gathered around purpose and possibility. They understood that power doesn’t always need to roar. Sometimes it only needs to gather, quietly, in a room full of women who see and hear each other.

Even in our digital world, those spaces persist – they’ve just moved. The WhatsApp chama that raises money for hospital bills. The Instagram and TikTok thrift sellers who ship dresses across counties. The YouTube tutorials teaching women how to braid, bake, sew, speak, lead. The texture changes, but the essence remains. It’s all soft power; adaptable, connective, enduring.

By the time my last loc is palm-rolled and oiled, the sun has dipped low outside. I feel lighter. My hair is done, and somehow, my spirit is, too. I pay my loctician, tip the girl who did my nails, buy a pair of socks from the vendor because it feels right to end the ritual with exchange. As I walk out, I think about how many women will walk into other such small rooms: salons, kiosks, kitchens – and keep this gentle machinery running.

We don’t call it architecture, but maybe we should. These are the structures that hold us up: improvised, resilient, tender. The walls may be made of conversation and care, but they are sturdy enough to shelter a whole society.