Maradi Journal; On the Scale of Beauty, Weight Weighs Heavily
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: February 12, 2001
A small group of teenage girls crowded into a one-room hair salon here after school recently, and the talk eventually settled, as it perhaps would in a similar setting anywhere else in the world, on their body shapes.
The young women, who were from Niger or other countries in West Africa, almost unanimously agreed -- after a series of squeals -- that of all the girls in the room Monique Adimi, 15, had the ideal shape. Monique, who runs the hair salon with her sister, is of medium height and has short hair and a pleasant face. Above all, though, she is heavy for her age and, unmistakably, on the way to becoming corpulent.
''I want to gain weight like Monique,'' said Antoinette Dossa, a slim 16-year-old student. ''I don't want to be thin.''
With the confidence of a woman held up as an ideal, Monique said of Antoinette, ''Really, she's just too thin.'' Casting her eyes around the room, she remembered perhaps that it was bad business to speak ill of customers. So she finally said of her own sister, Estelle Adimi, 23 but nowhere as full-bodied, ''And that one!'' Translation: hopeless.
In Niger, as in many other places in Africa, fat is the beauty ideal for women. At one festival, called Hangandi, women of the Djerma ethnic group compete to become the heaviest. They train for the beauty contest by gorging on food, especially millet, and drinking lots of water on the morning before the contest. The heaviest woman is declared the winner and given a prize -- and more food.
Among the Calabari people in southeastern Nigeria, brides are sent to so-called fattening rooms or fattening farms before their weddings. They are not permitted to leave the farms for a few weeks, during which their caretakers prepare copious helpings of food and massage them into a rounder shape. At the end of their stay, before the wedding, the brides are paraded in the village square so everyone can admire their fullness.
So popular is fat that here in Maradi, a sleepy town just north of the border with Nigeria, women take steroids to gain bulk, or pills to sharpen their appetites. To gain weight, some women even ingest feed or vitamins for animals -- though few will admit it.
''Caution: for animal use only,'' read the pamphlet for Savit, a well-known livestock feed sold here. Among its benefits: ''fleshing in beef animals, body weight increase.''
Abdou Idi, a 24-year-old who sells Savit and other medication from his bicycle, said the fattening pills and animal feed are among his best-selling items.
''It's usually married women who buy these products,'' Mr. Idi said. ''If the women are too thin, they worry that their families and friends will think that their husbands are not taking care of them or that they have abandoned them. So they come and buy these products, especially before the major holidays.''
And so, if the beauty concept here is the reverse of the West's, its motivations appear the same: seeking men's approval.
''If you are a man and your wife is not fleshy, people will say that you are not taking care of her,'' said Ramatou Lea Roger, 31, a radio host here, who was sipping soft drinks with two of her friends at a bar in the late afternoon. ''But if your wife is fleshy, people will say that you are a wealthy and responsible man who takes care of his family. And so there is a lot of pressure on women to become fat. If they don't have the money to eat lots of rich food, women will take a shortcut and buy these chemical products.''
Besides animal feed, the most popular product is dexamethasone, a kind of steroid easily bought without prescriptions on the streets, said Dr. Ousmane Batouré, 37, who like many physicians in Niger studied medicine in China. Many women, he said, come to his general clinic desperately wanting to gain weight.
''I tell them to take ordinary vitamins,'' Dr. Batouré said. He warns them away from the chemical products, especially the animal feed, which can cause lasting health problems. But he said he knew that many did not follow his advice -- the same way women in the West might ignore medical advice not to overdiet.
''The world is a funny place,'' the doctor said. ''In America, you are rich, you have everything, and the women there want to become so thin as if they had nothing. Here in Africa, we have nothing, the women who buy these products have nothing, but they want to become fat as if they had everything.''
At the bar, one of Ms. Roger's two friends was undeniably corpulent. Saying she was a married Muslim, the woman, who was in her 30's, refused to give her name. Though her friends said the contrary, she denied ever having taken fattening products.
''I'm fat and it's creating a lot of problems for me,'' she said, making a face. ''I already have problems with my knees and hips. I'm big like this since I was 11 years old.''
''She's a comedian,'' Ms. Roger said of her married friend.
''It's true,'' the woman said, twisting her mouth into a grimace. ''And besides fat women like us are good for nothing at night. We tire too easily.''
So did she want to lose weight?
''Well, no,'' she said.
Across town, at the hair salon, the young women were expounding on the merits of corpulence. So fashionable is fat that some rich men go out at night surrounded by overweight women, the teenagers said.
But Laouratou Souley, a slim 17-year-old student, said she wanted none of that.
''Most of the women who take these products are not enlightened,'' she said. ''They do it to please well-heeled men who like fat women as a status symbol. But girls who go to school know better. Me, I like the way I look. I don't want to gain weight -- well, maybe just a little bit, not more than a couple of pounds.''