So, after
that little effort, the next day I rode into a National Park here in Southern
Ethiopia, again with a guide, and visited a “Mursi” village.
The Mursi
are a completely different group and number in the few thousands. Again it’s a nomadic
cattle herding culture. They have different rituals that include a very large
lip plate for young women (to attract the largest possible dowry from their
prospective husbands. I believe the men use brutal stick fights to assume
manhood, and both sexes use significant artistic body scaring in their early
teen years to adorn themselves.
An
interesting twist on things that I was told by the guide is that the very large
lip plates for the women (that leaves their bottom lip completely deformed and
useless for life) is a relatively modern trend (in the last several decades)…
Apparently they (the Mursi) were losing lots of women to tribal raiders who
stole the women for the slave trade (it still goes on quite a lot with the
slavers based in Somalia and Sudan Im told). But the slavers don’t bother
taking the women with the lip plates because their buyers find the deformed lip
very ugly (I tend to agree I admit), and so the habit got reinforced and
amplified as a result… The only gap in the story I can see is that the group
lives no where near either Somalia or Sudan…. Hmmm.
Clothing
here for both men and women is again a personal choice and it was a warmer day
so there were plenty of “public penises” as well as “bare boobs” about the
place… Its pretty easy to see how the people here don’t think of nakedness as
anything interesting.
Again
some villages choose to accept tourists and others don’t but the ones that do
get rich and the rest I suspect dwindle! And again I did a good long meet and
greet for an hour or so before I took the camera out. There is a fee to visit
the village (as well as another to enter the National Park and bring in a motor
vehicle) and then general pictures are free, but any of the individual pictures
costs an extra fee of about 25c per person or so. Again, many of the people are
a bit dressed up but they are all going about their normal daily lives.
Riding through the national Park
A decorated lead bull in the village herd
Nice shades man!
Accommodation at the village
This mature woman is chipping away at the big rock to make a grain grinding stone... slow work
The head man and some of his family
A younger adult man
Decorative scars
A girl and her younger brother
The girls decorations... she is just about ready to get married
An old woman
A grain grinding stone in use.
More decoration... They use scaring since tattoos just don't show on the very dark skin.
Comparing our marks :)
The village men
Scaring on a man
The bike is a pretty good ice breaker :)
BFFs
The lip plate... Huge! She was all pouty because the guide wouldn't let me pay her what she wanted for the pictures... But she wanted the money enough to settle for the lower price.
Metal is value.
Scaring on a woman
That lower lip is useless for the rest of your life!
Interesting hair cuts too
They killed a goat while I was around
then the old man "reads" the entrails for the head man.
Its a "hands on" type skill!
Cut that up and share it around the village.
Younger girls decorated with bridal head dresses
A bit posed you think?... yeah maybe, but the guns are there and are used by small boys to guard the cattle... I see it all the time.
Put the kettle on for a cuppa would you...
This guy!
Ok, now the posing is going tooo far :)
And the women often have very large ear labrets too.
And again I felt somewhat conflicted about it because I didn’t want to take pictures of everyone who wanted me to take their picture… (they all want the attention and the status of being popular) and there were others who I did want to take a picture of but they wanted too much money and the guide said I should not bow to it, so I didn’t… Its all so commercial and capitalistic and well… consumer!
But it is what it is and I left with a bunch more pictures…. Though I decided after that that I didn’t want to go visit any more villages so that was the end of my “Cultural Crawl”.
