In Mauritania, young girls are harshly force-fed a diet of up to 16,000 calories a day—more than four times that of a male bodybuilder—to prepare them for marriage. Here, a woman must be fat by force. if she is not big, she is not beautiful, reports Ganiu Amodu
“In Mauritania, young women are often beaten and force-fed to ensure they gain vast amounts of weight in the short period of time spent at the fat farms”.
Mauritania, officially the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, is a sovereign state in Northwest Africa. Mauritania is rich in mineral resources, especially iron and ore. In the West, it is seen as a valuable ally in the fight against islamist militancy in the Sahel region. Mauritania is said to be the eleventh largest country in Africa.
In Mauritania, young girls are harshly force-fed a diet of up to 16,000 calories a day—more than four times that of a male bodybuilder—to prepare them for marriage. Fatness or robust is regarded as beauty in the country. They usually use the word “big is beautiful”. Most girls wed between the ages of 12 and 14 because of their physical appearance. In the country the daily routine of the girls is for them to eat and sleep.
In Mauritania, a woman’s size indicate the amount of space she occupies in her husband’s heart. They force the young girls to eat excessively to achieve female roundness so that she can get married as young as possible. A successful fattening process will see a young girl weigh 80kg. It is deeply practiced in the rural Mauritania. Obesity is viewed as a sign of wealth and prestige in a woman. The standard of beauty in Mauritania is the practice of “gavage” or “fattening up”.
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Older women called “fatteners” force the young girls to consume enormous quantities of food and liquid, inflicting pain on them if they do not eat and drink. One way of inflicting pain on them is to pinch a limb between two sticks. Force feeding the girls and the consequent weight gain also leads to early onset puberty in girls. For the Mauritanian men, fat women are more desirable than the skinny ones. Mauritanian tradition believes that fat women are attractive and preferable.
The democratic government tried to enforce a regime of nutritional health in 2003, but every effort was opposed and thwarted by the coup in 2008. Consecutive fraudulent elections sustained the farms.
