The pan-African reality show Big Brother Africa is a few weeks old now, and this time they dubbed it Big Brother All Stars – because they recycled housemates from previous episodes.
Zambian housemate Paloma, with her large backside, is back.
She makes for an intimidating presence. To the uninitiated eye she was not the most desirable woman in the House, but she has quite some following. Interviews have been shown of people saying "she is a true African woman" or "just my kind of woman". When this Big Brother Africa thing was on last year, I went with a group of friends to Club Afrique in Nairobi’s Museum Hill (it has since closed).
Lo and behold, it turned out they were holding the semi-finals of the chakacha dance. Most of the competitors, all female, were slim or medium size with reasonably rounded rears. Then dancer No. 11 came on.
She was pretty-faced, had wonderful skin tone, but she was big and her tummy wobbled as she did the chakacha. One of the three judges, an unflinching dreadlocked fellow, took her performance apart saying, in the manner of American Idols' Simon Cowell, that it was rubbish.
The club nearly rioted and heckled him down. No. 11 was not just the biggest dancer, but she seemed to have the most friends in the club. Women like Paloma and No. 11 will always flourish in Africa, where the slender variety much favoured in the west tends to be sneered at. A man will be ridiculed if his wife has not filled out in the right places after a year in marriage. It could be construed to suggest he is mean, an unloving husband, or a wife beater.
Likewise, a husband who is still thin after a year or so in marriage reflects badly on his wife. She is a bad wife, the in-laws will conclude. In Cote d'Ivore, women inject all sorts of things in their buttocks so they can grow big.
In many countries, even health-conscious women who exercise to lose weight worry about the bottoms shrinking with the rest of the body. As a result, there are many quack regimes for losing weight in all parts of the body, but the "bumper".
Why this African obsession with large booty? My sense is that in poor societies fat women - and men - are fancied because they represent that which is in short supply; prosperity and well being. The promise of an abundant tomorrow. Thin women, on the other hand, symbolise need and scarcity. This seems to be the case, because in Africa there are many women who struggle to be and to remain slender.
However, they are overwhelmingly middle class, where the desperate search for solace from symbols of prosperity one sees among the working and peasant classes is little or absent. One can expect that as soon as per capita income in most of Africa averages $2,000 and above, the prospects for ample women will nose-drive, and the premium for the slim ones will rise. Otherwise, for a long time to come, most thin women in Africa will mostly be confined to dating expatriates, a life of single motherhood, or marriage to men with well-endowed mistresses.
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