Fatness or Slimness of Women: Africa Lost her Beauty Preference to the Whites

 Fatness or Slimness of Women: Africa Lost her Beauty Preference to the Whites

- Emeka Esogbue

Do you know that fat was African beauty of women until western orientation changed it? In traditional African society, men loved their women fat. For the true Africans in Africa, fat was the beauty of a woman. Her husband loved her fat, with large 'back' visibly thrown back to the welcomed delight of her admirers and the breasts have to be large and pointing to the sky, succulent in appearance even while wrapped inside the dress and easily noticed by prying eyes. Such was the African beauty of a woman in the eyes of the African man and in Africa.

In cultural societies of the Efik, Ibibio and Calabari especially, husbands had to pay for their (future) wives to undergo what was called fattening room. This was a place young women that have attained puberty where taken to be prepared for womanhood. In this part of the world, it was a privilege to be fat and a sign of sexual purity to be seen as one by suitors. For this reason, ancient Efik, Calabari and Efik women were seen to be fat but all that changed with what was to successfully challenge and change their destiny of natural preference.

Fatness and fitness seemed a sort of virtue as a man should visibly see and know who he is spending the rest of his life with and seeing her look healthy. Indeed, fattening room was also a sign of fertility and virginity. It was where the women were frequently fed only to sleep, wake up and sleep again. Imagine that sometimes too, the father of the girl had to pay for her daughter to proudly pass through the fattening room just to be fat and become attractive to suitors. Every woman of the time looked forward to passing through through the fattening room to come out as the apple of a man's eye.

However, with western orientation, all of these have changed. Once the Europeans arrived Africa, everything changed including the size of beauty of women and how the men should have. The African man discarded his natural appreciation of beauty and took up the western preference. To the Western world, the woman needs to be slender in an attractive way and also tall. She does not require all the natural 'excessive luggage' being the preferences of the African to be beautiful. She has to carry less heavy load in front and behind to be fit and to also look appealing in the eyes of her admirers. For them, maybe, the natural gifts of a woman should be reasonably reduced if beauty must be complete.

She needs only maybe an obscure buttocks, tiny breasts that may be less visible to the eyes, pointedly marvelous though; white coloured skin and attractive eyes, such 'qualities' that would have tiringly put off an Ibibio man just returning from farm and enjoyably looking to grabbing his wife for the night exploit. Well, that's where the real beauty lies for the westerners. With the westerners came the idea that fat was obesity and also with other complications that could endanger the life of the beauty carriers, something the African never thought of. With this, the female beauty carrier must have to be careful with her beauty to live a long healthy life hence, Africans started to take note of the dangers of beauty.

With superior western adverts and publicity, the idea of slender women stuck and even beauty pageants promoted them against African preferences and just like their sovereign territories and everything else, suddenly denied them, the African man lost his natural preference of beauty to the choice of the whites. Fattening rooms are like museums today and maybe too, only haters would advise women on going through it. To worsen matters, variety of bleaching creams are all over the market with which African woman must bath to meet up the required standard of beauty now set by her western counterpart.

Beauty, as they say lies in the eyes of the beholder but a woman must reasonably look western to be seen as 'civilized'. What is more! Spaces are available for morning and evening jogging and even older women who fear untimely death or should look beautiful to see through their life span must also appear in knickers or trousers and T-shirts and no longer wrappers that should cover every part of their body. Colonial dawn appeared to usher and re-define the preferences of the African.