The genius of social control is that it is done through petty distractions

Wednesday night I went to see the annual one-act play festival at a Cape Town temple of secondary education. It was my first time in a high school since I left one, and all I could do was stare at boys' hair. Holy heck, there were some magnificent topiaries out there, a kind of roll-call of hairy highlights from the last half- century.

There was a Hugh Grant and a couple of Biebers, several permutations of Bob Dylan, a Mark Lottering, a bouffant Bea Arthur, a corn-rowed Beckham, some beaded Stevie Wonders, half a Colin Kaepernick and at least two Young Prince Williams. I think I even saw a Rachel from Friends, but that might have been a student teacher.

I was quite dazzled but then my eyes fell upon one young fellow in particular and after that I couldn't look away. What he had on his head was not so much hair as one of those brambly defensive thickets that Roman legions cultivated around their encampments when bivouacking in barbarian territories.

It was like some kind of gravitational singularity, with its own mass and density, as though all the matter of the universe were in the process of being compressed into one occultic mushroom-like head-nebula. It was viscerally disturbing and I'll remember it forever, like that dream I had of a python swallowing a baby, but I stared at him not in mockery but in recognition and deep fellow-feeling.

In my school our hair wasn't allowed to touch our ears or collars, so of course we became obsessed with stratagems to achieve maximum follicular length, even under the surveillance of the masters. It was like World War 1 trench warfare out there: dismal forces dressed in grey arrayed against each other in exhausted loathing, measuring victories and defeats in meaningless millimetres gained or lost.

Length was all that mattered: it didn't matter whether the result looked good or made us more attractive to girls on the bus home, it just had to be long, as long as possible, longer still, each telomere a symbol, like Sailor Ripley's snakeskin jacket, of your individuality and belief in personal freedom.

There were loopholes, if you had the genes to exploit them, and these were primarily fringe-related. It wasn't allowed to touch your eyebrows, but if you had access to a hot-brush and hair of a texture sufficiently silky and compliant, you could style your fringe into a great floppy Lady Di-like quiff that could achieve maximal length yet describe a perfect parabolic sine-wave to just skim the upper edges of one brow.

If you were Stewart Wright and your hair was spun of gossamer and spider-silk, you could sit in class with your chin on your hand, stick out your lower lip to form a wind-funnel and exhale sharply and your whole fringe would levitate, gleaming gold and platinum in the sun. You could snap your head and the whole magnificent delicate bird's-wing would flick and shimmer and conform to the contours of your head, before slowly starting once more the gorgeous glacial downward slide. I don't know where Stewart Wright is today, but I fondly imagine that, like most of the fine-haired blond beach bums of my Durban boyhood, he is half-bald.

I myself did not have hair like this. My fringe could not be levitated by blowing; it would scarcely budge under hammer and chisel. In the coastal humidity my hair didn't grow downwards, it grew outwards and upwards, it waved and corrugated and became sullen and involuted; it sold out and betrayed its own principles and ideals. In my soul my hair set me apart; it marked me as weird and lacking. To this day when in public and insecure I find myself reaching up absently to check I don't too egregiously resemble an eclipse of the sun.

And I didn't help myself: I knew that each iota of length added more ungovernability to my hair and made me look more and more like Art Garfunkel wearing a brown paper bag as a hat, but I was helpless to make the right aesthetic decision.

This is the genius of social control through petty distractions: even when there were bigger things to think about, when to rebel went obviously counter to my interest in looking cool and impressing girls, I could do no other than burn the fuel of youth in a kamikaze mission of self-assertion. Nowadays it's not just hair and not just teenagers: adults fall for it too.