Forced to be fat

Olenka Frenkdel on the real danger to women in Mauritania

Mauritania

Strange place. And the strangest of missions. While the UN warns of famine, I am driving through the Sahara in search of fat ladies. I meet World Vision, a Christian relief agency, on the road and ask their project chief if she’s seen any.

‘Er, I don’t think so,’ she says with a withering look. ‘We’re in a stage three emergency here; that’s one step away from famine.’ Locusts have devoured harvests, rains have failed and as investigations go, this one feels absurd. Yet female obesity, not starvation, is what’s killing the women of Mauritania.

A doctor in the town of Kifa examines a woman in her thirties weighing in at 18 stone. ‘Most of the women here are obese,’ he says. ‘First they become less fertile. Then they get gallstones in their twenties, arthritis, diabetes and heart disease in their thirties and forties. By 50 and 60, if they survive that long, they can no longer walk. They are completely handicapped. They can do nothing.’ He wraps the woman’s arm in a giant bloodpressure sleeve. It is 160 over 120.

A younger woman in the obstetrics ward smiles in protest when Dr Sid Ahmed Ould Megeya, Mauritania’s surgeon general, explains that she has just lost her fourth consecutive baby in childbirth because of obesity. ‘I’m not fat,’ she says. ‘I’m just swollen because of heart disease.’ He smiles back and shakes his head.

‘You won’t see the really severe cases,’ he tells me. ‘They cannot get on to a camel or into a car. I have had women carried in on a blanket and rolled along the floor into my consulting room.’ What has brought this on? Not the junk foods that have fattened Westerners, though they are on their way and will compound the problem once Mauritania’s off-shore oil receipts start flowing this December. Here chronic obesity starts with the tradition of gavage — the force-feeding of girls from seven years old.

‘I was force-fed as a child,’ one woman tells me. ‘We all were. We thought it was good, that we would marry well. Now fashions have changed.’ Why do they do it? Force-feeding in this highly stratified, tribal, Islamic society comes from a mixture of cultural legacies which have conspired to fatten, immobilise and disable the women of Mauritania’s ruling tribes, the White Moors.

This is a country the size of France with fewer than three million people. Mostly desert, it’s where the Arabs once came to trade in the region’s most lucrative commodity: African slaves. Long after the rest of the world had banned the trade, Mauritania’s White Moors refused to give it up. It’s now been officially abolished at least three times, the last in 1980. Old habits die hard and although the word ‘slavery’ is now taboo, little black housemaids still grace many homes. For the women of the ruling tribes, to be fat is still a sign of being rich enough to be indolent and own slaves.

Government health campaigns haven’t reached the desert. The men tell me that ‘in matters of love, of course bigger is better’. ‘Who likes a small mattress?’ they ask, confusing me. Do they sleep on their wives? Some whispered admissions and raucous laughter reveal another reason. The vagina is tighter in a fat woman than a thin one, they are saying. This makes everyone merry.

There’s a logic to it. It’s a society of camel breeders, so stocking up in times of plenty seems efficient. But add a little conservative Islam, which confines women to the home, plus the indolence that marks out the slavetraders from the traded, and you have a problem.

Like slavery, it’s all officially in the past, but one in ten Mauritanian girls are still force-fed according to independent estimates. Getting fat without Western food is long, hard work. A small child has to be forced to drink vast, unnatural quantities of milk — three or four litres of cow or camel milk — every night for years. The milk is mixed with couscous and water to swell the stomach. She is given marbles to play with to keep her still, she cannot play sports, ride a bike or run around, and older women supervise, ensuring the milk stays down. They clamp the child’s fingers and toes between sticks to stem the vomiting reflex by distracting the child with a little local pain. Often the girls vomit violently.

In a village near the Mali border I am invited to watch as Souadou, a ten-year-old girl, sits with her grandmother, her fingers in the wooden clamps. She smiles, embarrassed and delighted to be the centre of attention. This is her third year of force-feeding and she no longer struggles or resists. She’s been told it’s done out of love, that’s it’s for her own good so that she will be beautiful and marry well.

‘For us, a girl who has not been force-fed is ugly,’ explains one huge matron. ‘She is a source of shame to her family.’ The young girl wriggles her fingers free of the torture clamp to adjust her veil, then reinserts the fingers between the sticks herself. Three years into her force-feeding she is apparently compliant. But then suddenly she runs from the tent, apparently to pee. Her grandmother frowns. ‘She is vomiting. She digs a hole in the ground to bury the food. She won’t admit it but her friends have told me. She is very stubborn.’ Later, in the moonlit desert, I steal a few moments with the girl alone. ‘I am afraid of the fat. I don’t want to be crippled. I want to go to school, to study, to be a teacher.’ ‘Can you refuse?’ ‘No, I can’t refuse. But I stick my fingers down my throat and throw it all back up.’ This is her resistance. Here, where there are no supermodel magazines, no MTV, this child has discovered bulimia for herself.

It’s unusual to see girls outside in the desert so I stop when I spot one washing clothes at a well. ‘I have no maid,’ she says. Although her skin is light, she’s thin and must be poor. ‘Do you know girls who are force-fed?’ I ask. She looks doubtful. ‘The cattle only arrived back yesterday. There isn’t enough milk yet. But some are quite fat.’ A wistful look. ‘Would you like to be force-fed?’ I ask. ‘Oh yes. I would like to be fat. Everyone knows that to be fat is to be beautiful.’ As the oil begins to flow, force-feeding won’t be necessary. Western food and drugs will make it easy. Women in the villages keep asking me for ‘cow-pills’, their name for steroids, which pharmacies sell illegally over the counter. I am sold a brand which is usually only for patients with terminal cancer.

‘You can always tell the ones on steroids,’ my driver says, his eyes twinkling. ‘They are large on top but their hips are small.’ ‘Acne and facial hair,’ adds the doctor to the list of symptoms. He isn’t smiling. He lost his own sister to steroid abuse. He looks at my stash of illegally bought drugs and shakes his head. ‘Did you really buy these here? They will kill you, the pharmacy should be shut down. He is a merchant of death. But it makes me sad,’ he says, ‘that a woman would risk her life just to be fat.’