Efik, Ibibio, Ibo In The Fattening Room
BY
THE Efik people are found in Calabar town, the capital of Cross River State. The Efiks are also found in some villages called Creek Town around Calabar. Their main traditional occupations are fishing and subsistence farming. Their religion centres on the worship of the river deities. In the olden days they used bamboo, calabash and raffia in the making of their arts and crafts. Their religion revolves around different deities as well as ancestral worship.
The Ibo people are found in Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo, Abia, Anambra and parts of Rivers and Delta States. They are predominantly farmers. Their religion revolves around different deities as well as ancestral worship.
Meaning of fattening room: A fattening room is a place where a lady is trained for the tough job of marriage, of being a wife and mother. It is where she is groomed in the duties that are expected of her. She is taught everything she needs to know about her relations with her in-laws, the community etc.
Apart from the training given to her, she is also fed with the best foods by her future husband, her body is massaged three times a day with a special kind of wood to make her skin soft and smooth.
Fattening culture among the Efiks
The Efiks have two types.
(1) Ordinary type
(2) Special type (called Nkuho-Eket).
Ordinary type: This takes place when the girl is between 15 and 18 years of age. Efik fattening room is a place where their girls are instructed in domestic life and rest before they pass to their husband's hands and not just to go in and come out with hanging fat.
Six months before going into the fattening, the girls shave their heads, starts powdering themselves with camwood and wear hollow cylindrical brass rings around their ankles. Into these rings they put some small stones which produce a gentle noise when they walk. Each girl wears about six of these rings. When the day comes to go in, each girl is rubbed all over with palm-oil and is given a secluded room curtained off with raffia strands where she has to lie on a mat. Across the room, a raffia string is tied on which she hangs the bones of the fish she eats during this period in order to show her visitors how sumptuously she is being fed.
After three days, she is given a bed, the raffia string with its load is removed and she ceases from rubbing on oil and starts to rub herself with white clay. She is supplied with a very large calabash which serves her as a portmanteau for storing things friends come in to play with her. Children are brought to her for nursing when their mothers go to market or farm. She is being taught on native etiquette on how to serve visitors and craft works. She can step out of her room but not beyond her room. Girls start this type in the months of December or January and it lasts about a year.
Special types
Nkuho-Eket: Girls of weak constitution, who suffer from intermittent fevers, and who have blood relationship with the people of Etebi-Eket (a part of Oron) go for this type. It starts in June or July and lasts at least a year and half or three years if the parents are wealthy.
Before a girl undergoes this fattening, a soothsayer is consulted who names an Oron woman who has to perform necessary sacrificial rites and the nominee must have undergone this type of fattening before. After the necessary sacrifices have been made, a curved piece of cylindrical brass is hung with a piece of string from the girl's neck as a sign that she belongs to this type. They are served by small girls and are fed on special food cooked with special kind of firewood. They must not eat fresh crops from the farm and must not step out of their rooms.
Mbobo: The girls are secluded in the huts for a shorter or longer period depending on the wealth of the parents.
After reaching the age of puberty, the girl is clothed in an embroidered cloth cap, a loin roll of bright coloured cloth, a correlate ornamented with beads and cowry shells, headed shoulder braces and leglets of gaily coloured cloth or coiled brass rods, necklace and armlets of bead work. She is taken to the fattening hut called Mbobi by her mother. The huts are situated on the outskirts of the village. Her period of seclusion may extend from six months to two years. Whilst in the hut, she is called a woman of seclusion (wann-kukho). During the fattening process she is compelled to eat vast quantities of fat producing foods including pounded yam cooked in palm oil. She is not allowed to exert herself in any way. Her face and body are not washed and she is rubbed with clay. White cloths are tied round her neck, wrists and ankle to prevent evil spirits retarding the process.
While she is in Ufok n-kukho she is not allowed to touch anything in the hut and she must avoid all possible contact with the ground. When she has occasion to leave the hut and go into the yard of the compound, she calls out "Onukhomi, nukhofio". During her period of seclusion she undergoes the operation of clitoridectomy (Circumcision) usually at the hand of her mother.
How the circumcision is done: A piece of coconut shell perforated. The glans of the clitoriclis is drawn through this hole and cut off with a sharp knife or splinter of glass. It is believed that the operation has the effect of making the girl sterile.
At the time when her period of seclusion is over, she is taken from the hut and appears before the members of the tribe, who great her with great joy and who offer her presents. She is dressed in a loincloth, bead-braces and numerous neck, arms, leg ornaments. Her hair is dressed in the form of three crowns and is ornamented with beads. Before she is claimed by her groom, she is taken to the Isa ekpo of her ancestors. A white chicken is suspended from a cord round her neck, and when she leaves, it is dropped to the ground in front of Isa ekpo. The marriage ceremony is closely connected with the Ekpo ghost cult of her tribe, and she must certify an oath before Isa ekpo that she will be faithful to her husband. The form of oath varies among the Cross River tribes, but in all, sacrifices must be made to ekpo. The violation of the oath would mean that the ekpo would either cause the woman to bear stillborn or deformed children or make her become sterile.
Going out ceremony
Three days before this ceremony, the girls are taken to their husbands' house to receive crowns and plumes of rare birds. The girls stay over night and return the next day. The parents of the girls entertain them with food and the girls are expected to dance until the next day.
The day before the final day of the ceremony, young men play music and wrestle and the girls are carried on the shoulders of young men and are taken to the market.
On the last day, the girls are handed over to their husbands by their fathers and they are carried home on young men's shoulders. After eight days, they return to their village where they visit the market in their best attires and then go back finally to their husbands' house.
Fattening room after birth in Calabar
After the birth of a baby, the new mother is taken to her own father's house by her mother to enter the fattening room. This is usually done because they believe that a woman who has just given birth needs special food and care and rest to allow her add weight and recover from the rigorous work of child delivery.
In her parents' house, she is not allowed to do any work, her only work is to eat, sleep and breastfeed her baby while all other works in the house are taken care of by her mother. Her mother massages her body early in the morning with oil to remove stains on her body. She stays in the fattening room for 3 to 6 months as the case may be. On her outing day she goes to the market with a basket and people give her gifts of different kinds and they eat and merry and goes back to her husbands house.
Fattening for ogbanje or abiku in Calabar
When a native doctor ascertains a young girl/woman to be an ogbanje, she is taken into the bush where a hut is built for her and she stays there only to be eating and drinking concussion for a number of months without doing any work. When she comes out she adds flesh and celebration follows.
Fattening room culture among the Ibibios
When a girl is ripe for marriage, she spends a time varying from six to twelve months in the fattening house in her parents compound.
During the seclusion, she wears brass rings round the ankles and most of that period, she is rubbed and massaged with red dye of the camwood tree from head to toe in other to obtain a smooth complexion. A few days before the marriage she also wears a multiple leather girle with small brass bells. She is always allowed to receive her husband-to-be in the fattening house and very often becomes pregnant during the seclusion.
A great feast is made and dancing takes place when the girls leave the fattening house. No other wedding ceremony takes place. The girls usually undergo clitoridectomy (circumcisions) at the age of puberty and the operation is performed by the village midwife.
Fattening room culture among the Ibos
Among the Arochukwu people of Abia State, the girls go into fattening room which they call Iru-Mgbede (meaning going in to fat). Their girls spend six or twelve months in the fattening house in her parents' house.
She wears waist beads of different colours during this seclusion period. A string is tied where she hangs the bones of meat she eats to show how wealthy her husband is. The girls are regularly rubbed camwood powder, white chalks and Indigo ink (uli) to smoothen and decorate their body. They are fed with fat producing foods so that when they come out they come out with hanging fats. On the outing ceremony day, they are dressed with wrappers of different colours and they dance in the market-square and they are given to their husbands.
August 2002