Cape Town – Mariem Sow was a little girl when her sister Zeinabou choked to death in front of her while being force-fed camel’s milk by a family slave.
Beaten if she refused to swallow the rich diet of sweetened milk and millet porridge, Zeinabou was one of many Mauritanian girls fattened up because of an ancient belief that fat women make more desirable wives.
“As soon as my older sister was 12 they started force-feeding her so she would be plump by 15.
They wanted to prepare her for marriage,” said Mariem, now 42, wrapped in white robes and reclining on cushions in her home here.
The traditions of the desert are very much alive in Mauritania, an Islamic republic on the western edge of the Sahara whose people were still almost entirely nomadic when the country gained independence from France in 1960.
Wealthier families who have settled here often keep a “khaima” – a nomadic tent – in the courtyard of their homes. Men and women walk the sandswept streets in flowing robes and headscarves.
Having a voluptuous wife and daughters – well fed to survive the rigours of a desert lifestyle – was long a visible sign of wealth and power among the country’s light-skinned Moors. It is still seen by many as a canon of beauty.
But with Lebanese satellite television broadcasting images of flat-stomached girls cavorting on beaches, and more Mauritanians travelling abroad, the vogue is starting to change.
Many Mauritanians believe it is unseemly for women to be seen engaging in any strenuous activity, but as dusk falls, chubby ladies shuffle self-consciously around the stadium here, their tracksuit trousers hidden under flowing “malhafa” robes.
More than one in five women were force-fed as young girls, according to a government survey from 2001. “Our society has this vision that a woman has to be fat to be beautiful. It is a canon of beauty,” said Marienne Baba Sy, head of a government commission that deals with women’s issues.
The force-feeding technique known as gavage – a French word more closely associated with fattening up geese to produce foie gras – is less widely practised than it used to be after the government launched campaigns to highlight the health risks.
But the cult of fatness has deep roots.
“My husband says he wants me to lose weight, but he looks at fat women and I think he prefers going to bed with them,” said Nene Drame, 47, a writer working on a novel about force-feeding. “The Mauritanian man is savage by nature. He likes something he can get his hands on,” she said.
Gavage left some women struggling to walk, not just because of their weight – which often tops 90kg – but because they were tortured as they were force-fed.
Some had their fingers or toes broken so the pain would distract them from having to swallow the milk and porridge. Others had their feet crushed by a zayar – a wooden vice which would only be loosened once they ate.
Although gavage may be on the decline, the pressure to conform to traditional notions of beauty has given rise to a new phenomenon in which girls take pills to stimulate their appetite or animal steroids to boost their girth.