Where Fat Is a Mark of Beauty

It’s a Thursday afternoon at the Seville Beach Hotel in Miami Beach, and tourists have gathered to watch the Most Beautiful Women in the World emerge from the ladies’ room.

Here comes Miss Estonia! She’s tall and blond and thin!

Here comes Miss Venezuela! She’s tall and blond and thin, too!

Here comes Miss Croatia, and … my gosh, she’s tall and blond and thin!

Here comes Miss Australia! Of course, she’s tall and blond and thin!

It turns out that a great many of the Most Beautiful Women in the World are tall and blond, and all of them are thin, thin, thin.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere in Africa, people seem to have a very different idea of what is beautiful.

In Akpabuyo, Nigeria, Margaret Bassey Ene currently has one mission in life: gaining weight.

The Nigerian teenager has spent every day since early June in a “fattening room” specially set aside in her father’s mud-and-thatch house. Most of her waking hours are spent eating bowl after bowl of rice, yams, plantains, beans and gari, a porridge-like mixture of dried cassava and water.

After three more months of starchy diet and forced inactivity, Margaret will be ready to reenter society bearing the traditional mark of female beauty among her Efik people: fat.

In contrast to many Western cultures where thin is in, many culture-conscious people in the Efik and other communities in Nigeria’s southeastern Cross River state hail a woman’s rotundity as a sign of good health, prosperity and allure.

The fattening room is at the center of a centuries-old rite of passage from maidenhood to womanhood. The months spent in pursuit of poundage are supplemented by daily visits from elderly matrons who impart tips on how to; be a successful wife and mother. Nowadays, though, girls who are not yet marriage-bound do a tour in the rooms purely as a coming-of-age ceremony. And sometimes, nursing mothers return to the rooms to put on more weight.

“The fattening room is like a kind of school where the girl is taught about motherhood,” said Sylvester Odey, director of the Cultural Center Board in Calabar, capital of Cross River state. “Your daily routine is to sleep, eat and grow fat.”

Like many traditional African customs, the fattening room is facing relentless pressure from Western influences. Health campaigns linking excess fat to heart disease and other illnesses are changing the eating habits of many Nigerians, and urban dwellers are opting out of the time-consuming process.

Effiong Okon Etinm, an Efik village chief in the district of Akpabuyo, said some families cannot afford to constantly feed a daughter for more than a few months. That compares with a stay of up to two years, as was common earlier this century, he said.

But the practice continues, partly because “people might laugh at you because you didn’t have money to allow your child to pass through the rite of passage,” Etim said. What’s more, many believe an unfattened girl will be sickly or unable to bear children.

Etim, 65, put his two daughters in a fattening room together when they were 12 and 15 years old, but some girls undergo the process as early as age 7.

As for how fat is fat enough, there is no set standard. But the unwritten rule is the bigger the better, said Mkoyo Edet, Etim’s sister.

“Beauty is in the weight,” said Edet, a woman in her 50s who spent three months in a fattening room when she was 7. “To be called a ‘slim princess’ is an abuse. The girl is fed constantly whether she likes it or not.”

In Margaret’s family, there was never any question that she would enter the fattening room.

“We inherited it from our forefathers; it is one of the heritages we must continue,” said Edet Essien Okon, 25, Margaret’s stepfather and a language and linguistics graduate of the University of Calabar. “It’s a good thing to do; it’s an initiation rite.”

His wife, Nkoyo Effiong, 27, agreed: “As a woman, I feel it is proper for me to put my daughter in there, so she can be educated.”

Effiong, a mother of five, spent four months in a fattening room at the age of 10.

Margaret, an attractive girl with a cheerful smile and hair plaited in fluffy bumps, needs only six months in the fattening room because she is already naturally plump, her stepfather said.

During the process, she is treated as a goddess, but her days are monotonous. To amuse herself, Margaret has only an instrument made out of a soda bottle with a hole in it, which she taps on her hand to play traditional tunes.

Still, the 16-year-old says she is enjoying the highly ritualized fattening practice.

“I’m very happy about this,” she said, her belly already distended over the waist of her loincloth. “I enjoy the food, except for gari.”

Day in, day out, Margaret must sit cross-legged on a special stool inside the secluded fattening room. When it is time to eat, she sits on the floor on a large, dried plantain leaf, which also serves as her bed. She washes down the mounds of food with huge pots of water and takes traditional medicine made from leaves and herbs to ensure proper digestion.

(Adapted from A. M. Simmons “Where Fat Is a Mark of Beauty”)