Among the Karague, women were exempted from hard labor because the men were anxious to have them as fat as possible.  To please the men, they ate enormous quantities of bananas and drank milk by the gallon.  Three of Rumanika’s wives were so fat that they could not go through an ordinary door, and when they walked they needed two men each to support them.

Speke measured one of the much-admired African wonders of obesity, who was unable to stand except on all fours.  Result:  around the arms, 1 foot 11 inches; chest, 4 feet 4 inches; thigh, 2 feet 7 inches; calf, 1 foot 8 inches; height, 5 feet 8 inches.

“Meanwhile, the daughter, a lass of sixteen, sat stark-naked before us, sucking at a milk-pot, on which her father kept her at work by holding a rod in his hand; for as fattening is the first duty of fashionable female life, it must be duly enforced by the rod if necessary.  I got up a bit of flirtation with missy, and induced her to rise and shake hands with me.  Her features were lovely, but her body was round as a ball.”

Speke also tells (370) of a girl who, a mere child when the king died, was such a favorite of his, that he left her twenty cows, in order that she might fatten upon milk after her native fashion.

ORIENTAL IDEALS

Mungo Park declared that the Moorish women

“seem to be brought up for no other purpose than that of ministering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious masters.  Voluptuousness is therefore considered as their chief accomplishment....  The Moors have singular ideas of feminine perfection.  The gracefulness of figure and motion, and a countenance enlivened by expression, are by no means essential points in their standard:  With them corpulence and beauty seem to be terms nearly synonymous:  A woman of even moderate pretensions must be one who cannot walk without a slave under each arm, to support her; and a perfect beauty is a load for a camel....  Many of the young girls are compelled, by their mothers, to devour a great quantity of kouskous, and drink a large bowl of camel’s milk every morning....  I have seen a poor girl sit crying, with the bowl at her lips, for more than an hour; and her mother, with a stick in her hand watching her all the while, and using the stick without mercy, whenever she observed that her daughter was not swallowing.”

A Somali love-song says:  “You are beautiful and your limbs are fat; but if you would drink camel’s milk you would be still more beautiful.”  Nubian girls are especially fattened for their marriage by rubbing grease over them and stuffing them with polenta and goat milk.  When the process is completed they are poetically likened to a hippopotamus.  In Egypt and India, where the climate naturally tends to make women thin, the fat ones are, as in Australia, the ideals of beauty, as their poets would make plain