Why do mursi women wear clay lip plates

Mursi woman with clay lip plate

Do you know women of the Mursi tribe cut their lips and small clay plate is inserted in to the lips? When a girl reaches her puberty her lower lip is cut and held open by a wooden plug until heals. But the dimension of the stretch depends on the wearer.  Mursi owns good plant based ointment to recover the wound quickly. If a girl prevent from wearing this plate she is considered as lazy and she is hard to find a husband. Mursi are a surmic pastoralist ethnic group that inhabits Southwestern Ethiopia. According to history they came to recent territory 200 years ago from Sudan-Ethiopia border lands. Mursi tribe is one of the most dangerous and aggressive tribe in the world. The motto of the Mursi tribe is “It is better to die than live without killing.” Their main crop is sorghum. They also grow maize, beans chickpeas. Women main work is to fetch firewood, water and cook the food provided by men.

The unmarried women are more worth when the size of the clay plate increases. The size of the plates represents the amount of cattle they give to the husband as a price for her hand in marriage. Nowadays this becomes a source of income as tourist pay money to take their pictures. If there’s no major health issue of stretching one’s lips out, the major side effect is lips never shrink as it is. Women didn’t wear these plates all the time. They remove the plate to eat, sleep and when they are only in the company of women and children. They wear this in the company of men, during ceremonies and special occasions.

Mursi girls practicing to wear lip plates

 It is said that one of the main reason for wearing this type of clay plate is to rescue from slave traders. But researchers reject the explanation after revealing that the plates are being wearing as a symbol or expression of their social & economic status. According to article issued in September 1938(Thaw & Thaw 1938:357) said that girl babies wear large plates in both their upper & lower lips. Small wooden plugs are inserted into the holes pierced in both upper & lower lips. These holes are gradually increased in size when they grow up until it reaches size of large soup plate. Some resources express the idea that if this is true why the activity of disfiguring body didn’t discourage the young men within the tribe. And also they mention that this tradition is not unique to Mursi tribe women. Like Mursi tribe Suri, Chai and Tirma tribes in Africa wear lip plates. In those tribes not only women men also wear these special plates. According to me this is somewhat painful and uncomfortable but according to reporters some women like to wear this special plates and think that it increase their beauty.

Reference-GhanaWeb.com

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