THE FATTENING ROOM

Much has been written about the fattening room among the Annang, and the interest of the academic community in this subject has increased since Professor Brink’s introduction and field work in Annang. The Annang Heritage Preservation Society, a socio-cultural organization dedicated to the preservation and archiving of the Annang culture is in the process of documenting these practices and appeal to individuals and organizations to help us to document them for posterity.
The fattening of the bride in Annang land, though seen mostly from the point of view of aesthetics, is more than a demonstration of what the culture regards as “beautiful”. To the Annangs, plump women were seen as beautiful. It meant that the woman came from a home where the parents were well-to do and it also meant that the husband was also well-to-do. Some western social scientists have theorized that individuals from societies where the food supply was lean and famines  frequent were likely to regard being fat as a desirable body structure and to see being fat as beautiful. We in Annang are not surprised by such theories because western scientists who derive their worldview from evolutionary perspectives have always seen Africa and Africans from Darwinian lenses.  As Gloria Allred observed, the characteristics of the powerful have always been seen as the ideal while those seen as without power have historically been relegated to the background and often seen as pathological. The destitute-likes-fat explanation disregards the very definition of what a culture is and looks at the world primarily from an ethnocentric perspective. Thus, what is western is ideal and how the other lives becomes primitive.  Augustus Comte had divided the cultures of the world into two camps namely: the primitive and the civilized. Under the Comtean classification the European culture was the civilized one and all the others were primitive. Yet according to him, they all began at the same time but the development of the primitive cultures was arrested and the western culture advanced and reached a civilized stage. Today, this Comtean model has been used to describe the fattening of the Annang brides.
What the world has refused to hear in the fattening practice is that the fattening period was a period of education. The young bride was taught house keeping, child care, history, and how to be a wife and citizen of the community. The Annang society was semi-matriachal before the Christian missionaries destroyed it. It became important therefore for the women to be taught the importance of good citizenship in the fattening period. The fattening room was more than an exercise in primitivity; it was a period to educate and to socialize the young into the values of the society.