Ethiopia’s Omo Valley is one of the last remaining places in the planet for few of the most colorful tribal groups. Among their many features, two stand out. The body painting and the lip plate traditions. If you are interested to know few things about them here a short note that I have got from a well researched resourceful book “Omo valley and Design”
Body Painting
Among the omo peoples body painting with clay is usually related to rituals and transitional phases. The first menstruation, the birth of the first child, the death of a family member, illness in the family and the killing of an enemy are all events that give rise to the body painting.
As the combination of patterns and colors is specific to the circumstances, body painting sends visual messages so that everyone can see who is in a specific traditional phase and who has participated in which ritual.
Painting the body or Parts of it on purely aesthetic grounds is rare. The kind of Body decoration is usually reserved to the distant cattle camps Where Young men and girls stay for long periods.
The majority of omo peoples associate white with herding cattle, herders cover their body entirely to better see each other from a distance, Body Painting in the cattle camps is also seen as an informal playful event and an expression of freedom.
Unfettered by social control and the rigid communal life, young People in the camps are free to experiment. This seems to be the case especially with the Suri who have traditionally been the people most interested in body painting in the omo valley.
In addition to the playful dimension, there are obviously aesthetic aspects involved the search by the young for renewed results in the application of Combinations of colors and patterns.
Lip and Ear Plates
For the Mursi and Suri, the lip plate is an expression of female social adulthood reproductive potential. Like so many other forms of body ornamentation in world cultures, it is a bridge between the biological and social.
That is why a woman throws her lip plate away when her husband dies and does not wear one anymore. The lip hanging loose then shrinks gradually to a withered thick lip.
For the mursi and suri themselves, the lip plate is a visual expression of what it means to be a woman it turns a girl in to a woman, someone who can bear or has borne children. That is why the lip plate is inserted when the girl reaches puberty and is fifteen or sixteen years old.
At that time her mother or another female relative will make a horizontal incision in her lower lip. The incision is kept open with a wooden plug, which remains there until the wound has healed.
After that, almost every evening a plug of a wider diameter is inserted. This process goes quickly and after a few weeks, the girl can already wear a lip plate.
