Ethiopia 13 Stanley Stewart

 Amongst the animals skins, the arm bands and the long strings of beads, they had a startling item of clothing: brassieres. They had been to Addis; they had seen the future… And now they were wearing it. In this place, they seemed oddly indecent.

Stanley Stewart  

is the author of three highly acclaimed travel books and several-hundred articles based on journeys across five continents, for which he has won numerous journalism awards. He is a contributing editor of Condé Nast Traveller and his work appears regularly in the Sunday Times. He has also contributed to the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent and the Times. He writes for the National Geographic Traveler in the US, the Sunday Times in South Africa and the Australian.

Ethiopia 12 It Was Erotic, But Happily Innocent

 On a low ridge, we arrived at the village with flocks of goats returning to their family corrals for the night. There was a dance at sunset. The warriors appeared, their bodies decorated with white markings. They assembled in a half-circle under a rising moon. The women clustered nearby, wearing thick, bundled necklaces and skirts of oiled skins. 

With elaborate hand-clapping rhythms and deep, mesmeric chants, the men took turns leaping into the air. The women, too, began clapping; and one-by-one, they danced forward to select a man of their choice from the line. Amidst rising clouds of dust, the couples thrust their hips at one another in a pantomime of sex. It was erotic, but also happily innocent, full of laughter and teasing.

A trio of new women arrived on the periphery to watch the dance.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 11 A Karo Village

 The larger the lip plate, the more goats her father could demand from prospective bridegrooms for her hand in marriage. In these societies, marriage is a kind of pension fund: you pay for a big lip plate on your wife when you are young in the hope that you will have plenty of daughters with decent lip plates to sell in your old age.

 A couple of days later, we were in the lands of the Karo staying at a lodge at Murle on the east bank of the river. In the afternoon, we walked up to Kolcho, a Karo village. Termite towers rose from the savannah. We skirted a lake where tropical bou-bou birds were singing duets. In the woods nearby, families of colobus monkeys were quarrelling.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 10 anti-slaving device

 The plates are worn, rather like a veil in Islamic societies, in the presence of men. At home and in the company of other women, they tend to take the plates out and let the stretched lower lip dangle down below the chin in picturesque fashion. Older women eventually abandon their plates, while fashion-conscious young wives don’t like to be seen without them.

One theory is that the plate was an anti-slaving device: a way of making your tribe unappealing to Arab slave traders from the coast; another is that it is a protection against evil spirits, which are said to enter the body through the mouth. But the girl herself, working on her own lip in the dusk, said that it was chiefly a question of goats.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 9 Hideousness Of The Plate

 It seemed the moment to broach this delicate issue. But I was keen not to cause offence. I didn’t want to let on that it was the sheer hideousness of the plate that fascinated me. At first I thought I might try, “Hey, love your lip plate. Do the fellows in your tribe find that as much of a turn-on as I do?” In the end I settled for the neutral brevity of “why?”

Women do not insert the lip plate until they are preparing for marriage in their early twenties. An incision is made in the lower lip, which is stretched over a period of months to accommodate a plate made of baked clay or wood. The two front lower teeth usually need to be extracted to make fitting easier.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)