Jill Salmons recalls visiting a ‘fattening room’ in the 1970s

Jill recounts visiting the Opobo area in the 1970s, where she observed a young woman undergoing the ‘fattening room’ process, gaining insight into the conditions and practices involved. While she observed how the girl was being prepared for marriage by local women, she also expressed discomfort with the physically taxing methods used to encourage weight gain, particularly the enforced heat.
Transcription of audio:

I had also visited in the Opobo area, a fattening room girl in her fattening room, so I was able to see how she was kept.

Unfortunately, they were using plastic to help her to sweat, so she had – they had – created a separate room for her and this room was covered in plastic and she had a special bed that she laid on and the local women would come and teach her various things: local songs, local dance. They teach her how to cook. They teach her various things about what it was going to be like to be with her mother-in-law and so on.

But I felt very sorry for the girl because she was sweating. And the idea was that the more she sweated, the more she would eat, the more she would get fat.

They pummel them. They lie them on their backs, and several women will literally dance on them. And sometimes they will make her vomit so that she can eat more. I mean, it’s quite brutal, some of the things that they do, especially if they're fast tracking it. You know,in a two-year period, I think it's a lot easier.

But when it's three months, they have to really work at it because it's part of the pride of the family that the girl has to come out looking fat. And if she's not fat, it's seen that either that they are too poor and they haven't been able to give her the appropriate food or that there’s some bad spirit which is affecting her, or that she is already not a virgin and therefore the spirits are saying, ‘No, she can't get fat because she's... she's not an appropriate Mbopo.’ ’