Science: The Duck-Billed Women

In the Lake Chad region of French Equatorial Africa, a curious native custom has long puzzled anthropologists. Versed as they are in the world’s habits from necking to nose-rubbing, the scholars have yet to figure out why the native women pierce their lips at girlhood, then put increasingly bigger straw and wood plugs in the holes to stretch their lips until they protrude like duck bills.

Some observers claim that the disfigurement grew out of a perverse sense of beauty. Others offered an ingenious reverse explanation: originally, the duckbilled women had merely tried to make themselves unattractive to marauding Arab slave raiders who were seeking likely harem material. Both explanations are dismissed by French Sociologist Jean-Paul Lebeuf, a longtime expert on African ethnology and prehistory, who believes he has found the real clue in the lore of the upcountry Fali and Sara tribes.

To the women of the Fali tribe, says Lebeuf, the toad represents the divine messenger who brought all wisdom from God to the first woman, the Fali Eve. The toad asked the woman to put plugs into her lips, shape her mouth like the wide palate of the toad, thus acquiring some of the toad’s own strength and wisdom. No aids to beauty, the plugs were truly reli gious objects, passed on from mother to daughter. As told by women of the Sare tribe, however, the legend differs slightly. They believe that the first woman climbed down from heaven on a beanstalk, on her arrival was already wearing the plugs given to her in heaven. To be strong, fer tile and wise like their first ancestor, Sara women also wear the ugly plugs.

But the inroads of civilization and the disintegration of the ancestral myths have made “duck-billing” a dying custom. Only a few elderly believers are still alive. Even they have shown a tendency to go mod ern; instead of the old wooden plugs, the Fali women are turning to plastic lip plugs, preferably colored bright red.