The Fattening Rooms

FOR THE LAST SIXTEEN DAYS, Adele Mopoti, has sat on a low wooden bench in a thatched hut on the edge of her village, eating.

As soon as she’s scraped up the last spoon of lumpy grey porridge, her grandmother barges in and hands her another bowlful. Once she’s finished it, she will munch her way through a platter of cooked yams, and another heaped high with plantains. Then she will be permitted to sleep off the meal in the suffocating summer heat, before starting all over again at dusk.

Adele, seventeen, who lives in a small village on the Nigerian border with Cameroon, is being fattened up in an ancient ritual which has traditionally preceded marriage in south-east Nigeria. She is expected to eat between four and five enormous meals a day. The hope is that, once she emerges after a month, her body will be layered in a healthy cushion of fat. The thinking behind the so-called ‘Fattening Rooms’ has corresponded with customary values of the Efik and neighbouring tribes for centuries.

A stay in the rooms – generally no more than a thatched hut – have long been the last stop on a pubescent girl’s journey to the altar. The residence is one part of a complex tribal initiation from childhood into womanhood. It’s a place where one learns the responsibilities expected in the years to come, a time for solitary reflection, as well as an opportunity to get the body ready for years, possibly decades, of childbearing.

In a land where excess food has never been easy to come by, a plump bride has always signified health, wealth, and hinted at the ability to produce numerous children. But the young generation of residents in the Fattening Rooms of Adele’s village don’t see the point.

These days, most of them have other things on their minds.

‘I’m only here, to please my father,’ says Adele as she pushes back her braided hair, ‘he told me that if I didn’t spend two months here, then he wouldn’t pay for me to go and study in Calabar. I have dreams, big plans. I want to study to be a nurse. But at the same time I understand the importance of tradition. If I did not, I would have run away by now. As soon as I get out of the village, I’m going to lose all the weight I’ve gained. In the city people laugh at fat women, they make fun of you, saying that you’re backwards, and from a village.’

Adele’s best friend, Gloria, shares the scant room with her. They entered the hut at the same time, and spend much of their time talking, that is when they’re not eating. Both girls are dressed in a rappas, a loose-fitting sarong, their feet bare. Unlike Adele, Gloria’s legs are bound with shiny copper bracelets.

For the first two or three days you feel very pampered,’ explains Gloria, ‘our grandmothers come in with food all the time. They won’t let us do any housework, or even do the washing. They tell us how nice we look, and that all the boys in the village are asking about us. Of course it makes you feel good! But then you start feeling disgusted with yourself, and bored… so bored.’

Gloria is cut short by a scratching at the boarded-up window. She giggles nervously. ‘It’s my boyfriend, he’s not allowed to come in here,’ she says. ‘He misses me very much. And I miss him. But I can’t see his face until I leave here. If I do, then my father will whip me, and our family’s reputation will be ruined.’

Bending down, Gloria rubs her legs. It’s a clumsy process, made difficult by the spiralling copper bracelets. When she is asked what they are for, she grimaces. ‘They’re like manacles that a slave wears,’ she says. ‘If I sneak out and meet my boyfriend, then my grandmother will hear the metal jangling, and she’ll call out to my brothers. Then they will beat me, and when they have beaten me, my father will whip me.’

Gloria’s grandmother is blind in one eye, but she watches out attentively for the two girls. She can’t remember how old she is or when she herself was married. But she does know that of the ten children she gave birth to long, long ago, at least six are still alive. ‘Maybe seven are still living,’ she mumbles, correcting herself, ‘the youngest son went away to Yaounde and never came back.’

The old woman, whose name is Walima, crouches outside the thatched hut, stirring an immense pot of millet porridge. ‘These girls are eating well,’ she says as she stirs. ‘But it’s not their appetite’s I’m worried about… I’m worried about their minds. They don’t understand about duty now, and when you say anything to them, they think they know better than the customs.

‘How can a girl know how to please her husband, how to care for him, how to cook for him, unless she has listened to the elders?’

Suddenly, footsteps can be heard from behind the hut.

With her one good eye, Walima moves her head about fitfully. ‘There’s been a boy coming here,’ she rasps, ‘if I catch him I’ll have him beaten. Oh, the young generation have no respect for tradition. It will lead to the downfall of all we have.’

Tradition is something of incalculable importance to the Efik tribe. It is the traditions which have formed a basis to life, and have allowed vital knowledge to be passed down from one generation to the next. For millennia the Efik have been a farming people, tilling the land for maize and millet, fishing in the rich waterways of the Calabar delta. But now the traditions are under threat.

‘We have talked and talked about what is right and wrong,’ says Thomas, Adele’s father. ‘When my wife went through the iria initiation, she was so happy to eat the food her grandmother cooked for her and then, soon after, we were wed, and then the children were born. Adele wants to go and get educated and become a nurse. That’s fine, but there’s so much else for her to know. The mbobi, the fattening hut, is a place where she can learn much deeper information… information about people, about life.’

Across Africa initiation rites abound for both young men and women, all of them drawing a firm line between youth and maturity.

The iria ritual is different from many other initiations, in that it shows the community who is ready to be married, and just how beautiful they are. The fattening rooms are essentially pampering parlours, in which the nubile girls are indulged with food, attention and advice. One cannot overstate the significance of this last ingredient – the advice.

The elders dote on the beauty of their daughters, pointing out the growing layers of fat, but you get the feeling their attention is really on the wealth of information that the fattening rooms pass down. In a changing society, the information may be out of date, but it is ancient and tested knowledge.

Throughout the iria ritual, the elder women of the community guide the iriabos, the initiates. No one takes a keener interest in the proceedings than the girls’ grandmothers. They take every opportunity to remind the young generation how things have not changed since the time they themselves passed through the ritual.

More than thirty years must have slipped by since Adele’s grandmother was initiated, but she remembers the routine in astonishing detail.

‘If you don’t do everything right,’ she says shrewdly, ‘then the ritual will be worthless. Make a mistake, and a blanket of shame will descend not only over my family, but over the entire community.’

The iria initiation usually begins about five months before the fattening period. A group of girls pass through the rituals at the same time, bonding them together for life. The first step in the process is the cutting of their hair. A knife is sharpened ceremoniously, before being wielded by one of the oldest, most respected women. After that, the girls strip off their clothes, their bodies anointed with a paste of ash, ground indigo seeds and red camwood powder. Intricate geometric designs are scored into the paste, highlighting the girls’ natural beauty, as well as repelling insects.

The second stage of the initiation is held on the morning of the entry into the fattening room. It involves the elderly matrons of the community inspecting the girls, scrutinizing their naked torsos, watchful for tell-tale signs of early pregnancy. Nothing is so important as for the iriabos to be seen to be chaste.

‘The great danger is at that moment,’ says Adele’s grandmother. ‘It is then that any mature woman can come forward and claim your daughter or granddaughter is not pure. Refuting such a charge is hard, and can only be done by a priest. I remember when I was an iriabo a bad woman with a grudge against one family said that their daughter had been immoral. A cloak of shame fell down on that family, and the girl had no choice but to drown herself.’

Then the girls are massaged with palm oil, and some of them have the spiralling copper bracelets, called ikpalla, wrapped round their legs. In some Efik villages, the leader of the community presents each girl with a wooden or paper tag, tangible proof of her purity. It’s a sombre moment, similar in its portent to graduation at a western high school. With the entire village looking on in pride, the iriabos are ushered into the cramped huts.

During the confinement period, the girls are either alone, or in pairs. The last intention is for them to spend their time chattering. The period is intended for quiet reflection – mouths are supposed to be eating, not talking. Sometimes the rooms are hung with raffia, onto which are tied the bones of fish that the initiate has consumed: partly as decoration, and partly to show her ravenous appetite.

In the days that follow, the girls are massaged frequently with palm oil, and smeared with clay and ash. All the while, plates of food are ushered in – fish, millet porridge, cooked yams and maize.

Traditionally, the confinement period could last as long as a year. It was a buffer between puberty and marriage, and an effective way for girls to postpone married life. But these days the girls are anxious to escape the fattening rooms as quickly as they can, just as they are eager to make a break with the village. For most, nothing is so powerfully alluring as the draw of the city.

A hundred miles to the south of where Adele and Gloria are sitting, Constance is impounded in another fattening room, on a backstreet of the bustling town of Calabar. Unlike the others, Constance, aged eighteen, is eager to put on weight.

‘I have been here for about a month,’ she explains, ‘and I will try and stay for another month or two. If I want to get married to a nice boy, I have to look my best, and boys here in Calabar like a girl with a full figure. I have seen the magazines from America… all those girls who look starved. That’s so nasty. Oh, no, we don’t want to look like that here in Calabar.’

Constance, who is of medium height, is doing well to achieve her ideal weight of ninety-five kilos. She is eating more food than she ever thought possible, all of it served up by her doting mother, Grace.

‘In the morning I eat three or four large bowls of millet porridge,’ she says, ‘and then a bunch of bananas, and some boiled yams. At lunch I have more porridge, and a plate of fatty meat, potatoes, more yams, maize and some fruit. Then in the evening, I eat whatever is left in the kitchen.’

Constance’s mother scurries around their three-room family house, attending to the cooking, giving orders to the younger daughter, who does the food shopping. ‘We are pleased that Constance is putting on weight so fast,’ she says. ‘Yes, all this food is expensive, but we have no choice but to bear the expense. It’s costing us about twelve thousand naira (£60) a month. We want our daughter to marry well, and for that we have to make sacrifices.’

Unlike many in Calabar, Constance’s family was reluctant to send their daughter to one of the established fattening rooms operating in the town. Usually owned by women of vast proportions, they double up as beauty salons, where stern regimes dedicated to pampering are the norm. For Constance’s parents, the commercial parlours were unnecessary, as they had space enough at home to turn a bedroom into a private fattening room for Constance. Then there’s the issue of young male visitors. A recent scandal involving midnight parties has tarnished the reputation of one of the town’s most established fattening rooms.

At home, the high-calorie diet has helped Constance gain weight fast. She’s put on about eight kilos in a month. But another, darker factor has led to the rapid weight gain – steroids.

Like many Nigerian girls of her generation, Constance has discovered the little strips of pills, called Easi-Gain, which can be bought from chemists without a prescription. They make her feel hungry and sleepy, but they help her to put on the pounds extremely fast. And, like most other young women, Constance has no idea of the damaging effects of the pills.

‘As a modern woman I am using modern methods to make myself more beautiful,’ she says, reclining on the sofa. ‘The pills are quite safe, and they are cheaper than all the food I have to eat to gain the same amount of weight. In any case, everyone is taking them.’

In a small office across town, a group of women is in the middle of a meeting at the, ‘Women Guiding Women’. The walls of their headquarters are adorned with colourful posters, bearing slogans like ‘THIN IS NATURAL’ and ‘SLENDERNESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS’.

Leading the gathering is a woman called Ruth. ‘Our aim is a simple one,’ she says to the audience of new recruits, ‘we go through towns and villages and teach women that moderation is good, and that gluttony is bad. You don’t have to be the size of a whale to be happy with how you look.’

Ruth works part-time at WGW, an organization founded five years ago. It walks a fine line between traditional Nigerian rituals, like the fattening rooms, and the Western obsession of slenderness. As with many women of her tribe, Ruth spent more than a month being indulged with food before her marriage. After giving birth to four children, she realized that piling on the pounds for the sake of it wasn’t necessary.

‘Our society is changing fast,’ she says, ‘and as women we have to change with it. Our daughters need to be educated – taught how to use computers, not forced into fattening huts.’ Ruth pauses in mid-sentence. ‘There’s a new danger in our society, though,’ she says darkly. ‘We hardly even know how dangerous it is to become. But news of it and its “magic” is spreading like wildfire.’ As she speaks, she holds up a packet of pills. ‘This is it… it’s Easi-Gain.’

Back in their village, Adele and Gloria are sitting down to yet another high-calorie meal. A bulky pot of bubbling millet porridge has been carried in, and Adele’s grandmother is dishing it out with a ladle. Two plates of bananas and boiled yams are standing at the ready. The two girls frown at the sight of yet more food. They’re already full to bursting.

As she passes out the porridge, the old woman snaps: ‘Eat it up, eat up, you lazy girls! If you stay skinny like that we will never find a good husband for either of you!’