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)

Ethiopia 6 - Naked Tribesman With A Spear

 On the third day, somewhere beyond Dimma, we began to drop out of the highlands. The fields and the villages fell away. The hills unravelled. The views lengthened. Breaking free of its confinement, the landscape was spilling out on all sides towards distant escarpments. We were falling into an empty world of savannah and acacia. Long waves of grass commandeered the horizons.

After the crowded uplands, the emptiness of this new country was almost unnerving. The land shimmered in lowland heat. A sentinel figure appeared, on a rock above the road, silhouetted against a pewter sky – a tall, naked tribesman with a spear: the archetypal image of Africa, like a guardian on the frontier of a new world.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 8 - Nothing Compares To the Lip Plate

They giggled behind their hands at our pale skin, our watery eyes, our bizarre clothing. In this barefoot, bare-assed and bare-breasted company, I felt I had arrived a trifle overdressed.

We pitched our camp in the grounds of the mission church, watched by hordes of spectators. Later, when I went for a stroll through the village, I came upon a woman sitting on a log outside her house. She was stretching her lower lip with a mixture of charcoal and butter. In all the sad history of crippling female adornment, from bound feet to suffocating corsets, nothing quite compares to the lip plate worn by the Surma and the Morsi women of the Omo Basin.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 7 - The Lands Of The Surma

 We were entering the lands of the Surma, one of the largest tribes west of the Omo. After that first figure, others appeared: boys herding goats; men melting away into the grass; a young woman naked in a river.

In the late afternoon, we arrived at Tulget, a Surma settlement straddling a long ridge. Few things were as novel as white folk in a car, so naturally the whole village immediately dropped what they were doing to get a good look at us. Men with spectacular, elongated earlobes and women with huge lip plates crowded round to gaze at us as if we were circus freaks. I knew they were dying to poke us. Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)

Ethiopia 5 - Taxis Were Donkey Chariots

 Traditional architecture is circular here – and in the flyblown towns, full of tea and tyre shops, square huts with corrugated roofs were a sign of decadent modernity.

We spent a night at Jimma, where taxis were donkey chariots driven by eight-year-olds; then moving on to Kaffe, where we slept among the topiary hedges of a government coffee plantation. As we pushed west and south, the road became rougher; the vegetation wilder; the faces blacker; the clothes more bedraggled; and the smiles wider.

Stanley Stewart  (to be continued)