One Picture And One Story Week #33 || The Fattening Process

Hello friends of Steem for Pakistan, warm greetings to everyone in this community.
Exciting to join the One picture, one story contest by @suboohi.

For this week, the picture I am going to use was taken during the cultural exhibition in my state. This picture speaks a lot about my cultural heritage and I am going to tell you the story about it.

The Ibibios/Efiks tribes of Nigeria engage in what is called fattening. This is done for young girls or women who are about to marry. The process of fattening happens when a young lady is isolated and then fed with food over a period of time, so that she would become fat.

When a young lady comes to the age of fattening which is mostly decided by her father, she is kept with probably other ladies in a room. They are not allowed to be visited by men and just a handful of women are allowed to visit them. Women are put to take care of them, providing everything they need. Provision like food, medication, clothes and every amenities needed to make them look beautiful and fat.

Being fat was seen as being healthy and beautiful. So if a young woman was skinny, she is soon going to be fatten in a period of probably 6 months to 5 years and not allowed to go outside. This cultural heritage was passed down from generation to generation and soon became a ritual for young ladies who are about to marry.

After a certain period of time, the man who wants to marry the young girl that has been fattened will come for what will be a marriage ceremony.

The bride will be oiled with a local oil and also adorned with beads and the best clothings.
The bride to be is now brought out, and by this time she has been fattened to the standard that is needed. She will be checked thoroughly to make sure that there is no blemish on her. This is also done by the family of the groom.

This process is accompanied by traditional sounds from drums and flutes. After the rites, the bride follows the groom back home and she is declared married.

The process of fattening was very popular and well known in the olden days. We rarely see such again.

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The process of fattening is actually going into extinct as modernization as brought about information that puts fattening into bad light.
Firstly, overfeeding the young woman to become fat is unhealthy.

Putting her away from the social space too is not really great for a social being.
There were some rites too that seem not good enough when Christianity came in, so the fattening process was kind of left to die naturally.

The picture above reminds of the fattening process and how it was done. The picture showcased the cultural heritage of the Efik/Ibibio people of Nigeria.

Though the fattening process has been stopped, the younger generation needs to learn about it.

I hope you had a great story about the Fattening Process.

Thanks for going through my post.
I invite @basil20, @vudeme123, and @imohmitch to participate in this contest.