Mireille Liong-A-Kong

Mireille Liong-A-Kong is a Surinamese/Dutch author, internet entrepreneur, photographer, and social media activist. She is best known as the author of Going Natural How to Fall in Love with Nappy Hair and founder/developer of Going-natural: a social web and community site advocating equal hair rights for Black women in the Diaspora.
Personal life
Mireille was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands and grew up in Suriname. Her father was Daisy Liong-A-Kong and mother Hertha Ritfeld; the granddaughter of William Severinus Richenel Ritfeld (1902), one of the first Black intellectuals after slavery after whom the W.S.R Ritfeld school was named. He held a degree in English and Mathematics and was a math teacher for years. Mireille Liong-A-Kong grew up in a little town Wageningen in the District Nickerie of Suriname. She moved to the capital Paramaribo when she was a teenager where she finished high school and college. Afterwards she got her Master Degree in Information Technology at the University of Amsterdam in Holland. Liong-A-Kong's struggle with relaxer induced alopecia, a hair loss disorder that affects 73% of african American women, motivated her to use her IT expertise to change the perception of natural hair and advocate for equal hair rights.
Advocacy
Mireille began advocating for equal hair rights in 2002 by launching the first hair website in the Netherlands kroeshaar.com, a couple of months before her book Kroeshaar, Wat je moet weten en meer was published (publisher Conserve). She was the first author with a supporting website in the Netherlands. In 2004 Mireille published Going Natural How to Fall in Love with Nappy Hair and used her IT expertise to create going-natural.com, using joomla to build a social web and networking site.
Besides a book and her social web and networking sites Mireille also launched America's Next Natural Model in 2008, an online pageant to promote the beauty of natural hair. To challenge the stereotypical idea of natural hairstyles Mireille shoots for justice aiming to paint a different picture of natural hairstyles with a traveling photo exhibition.
Awards
In 2005 Mireille was awarded the MDG-Global Watch Community Outreach award by UN Ambassador of Suriname Irma Loemban Tobing-Klein. In that same year Mireille was nominated for the Masters Pioneers Award for helping many women to establish businesses and careers in the Natural Hair world. She was also awarded the Kuumba award from the Sankofa Community.

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