..Put Heavy Clay Plate To Get Married
By Gbenga Sodeinde
Heritagenewsng reports that there is a unique culture being practiced before a girl can get married in a part of African country, called Mursi in Southern Sudan and where the language they speak is also called Mursi.
Why girls of the Mursi tribe must remove their teeth and stretch their lips before they marry. Investigatoon revealed that when a Mursi girl becomes a teenager, she begins the process of lip stretching. The girl has her bottom teeth removed to make space for a lip plate, which is increased in size annually.
The plates are inserted into the lip causing it to stretch, and it is said that the larger the clay plate, the more the woman is worth before she gets married.
Mursi women only wear the plates for a short time because they are so heavy and uncomfortable.
It is said that the clay plates were originally used to prevent capture by slave traders.
The practice was first carried out to allegedly make them look ugly when Arab merchants continually raided their villages in search of slaves.
However, that explanation has been rejected as studies reveal that the plates are a symbol or expression of social status among the Mursi people.
The supposed historical link between lip-plates and the activities of slave traders is an idea that goes back to colonial times.
In an article in the September 1938 issue of National Geographic Magazine, C. and M. Thaw report meeting women with large plates in both their upper and lower lips near Fort Archambault, on the River Chari, about 400 miles southeast of Lake Chad, in what was then French Equatorial Africa:
“Here both the upper and lower lips of girl babies are pierced and small wooden plugs inserted into the holes. As they grow up, these holes are gradually increased in size until they reach the dimensions of large soup plates… This form of disfigurement was begun centuries ago to discourage slave raiders, the French Administrator told us. Why it didn’t discourage the young men of the tribe, as well, we will never know. (Thaw & Thaw 1938: 357)”
The use of lip-plates is neither peculiar to Africa nor to women. Amongst the Kayapo of Brazil, for example, senior men wear ‘a saucer-like disc some six centimetres across’ in the lower lip, according to Turner, 1980: 115.
“The lip-plug, which reaches such a large size among older men, is incontestably the most striking piece of Kayapo finery. Only males have their lips pierced.
The Mursi (or Mun as they refer to themselves) people are the most popular in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley. They are well known for their unique lip plates. Mursi are a Nilotic pastoralist ethnic group that inhabits southwestern Ethiopia.
They principally reside in the Debub Omo Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region, close to the border with South Sudan.
According to the 2007 national census, there are 7,500 Mursi, 448 of whom live in urban areas; of the total number, 92.25% live in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR).
Credit: Pulse
