#4 Wedding traditions in Surma

We have been exploring a few places in Africa. So let us move to Asia, which Surma in Ethiopia, Afghanistan.

Every tribes have their own culture, same goes with Surma people in Ethiopia. The young men and women spend a lot of time painting and adorning their bodies in a bid to attract members of opposite sex during their marriage and courtship celebrations.

In African Wedding Traditions. com, (2010), it stated that the Surma have two options when it comes to their own wedding rituals. Either a man selects a bride and pays her father a bride price, or a woman gets to choose the man she wants to be her husband. the men however have to prove their worth by engaging in a competition with each other known as a Donga stick fight. This is a somewhat violent stick fight where the only rule is not to kill your opponent, doing so will result in banishment if his entire family from the village. The winner becomes the prime choice for the "belle of the ball". It does not end there though, the winner will still need to pay the girl's family a bride price for her.

So let us watch their creepy video muehhehehee.

Youtube : Ethiopoa Surma

So, in order the youth to get married, the men should have at least 60 cows, (it is like show their wealth) and win in the stick fighting.

Surma men and their 60 cows

Donga stick fighting

The Suri girl is putting the plate in her bottom lip

The plate and the hole-lip.

No one knows why lip plates were first used. One theory goes that it was meant to discourage slavers from taking the women. It is undoubtedly painful. Suri women wear giant lip plates as a sign of beauty, like in mursi tribe, and also as an attraction for tourists, maintaining their image of an untouched people, living in one of the last wildernesses of Africa.

When they are ready to marry, teenagers start to make a hole in the lower lip with a wooden stick ; it is to be removed the day after to put a bigger one ; and then by a lip plate ; few months after, it reaches its final size, and girls are seen as beautiful ; the lip plate is made of wood or terracotta ; the pressure of the plates breaks the lip, the girl will be considered as ugly and won't be able to marry anyone apart from old men or sick people.