Fat or Skinny: Who's the Judge?

In the United States there are some things that you just don’t say to people, regardless of if it is true or not. When a woman asks her husband, boyfriend, or friends if those jeans make her butt look big the only acceptable answer is a big Hell No. It doesn’t matter if those jeans make her ass look like a balloon; you lie, because you know it will hurt her feelings and her wavering self-esteem if you tell her the truth. Unfortunately, South Africans did not get that memo before I moved here. Since I have been here I have been told that I am too skinny (which I was excited about), that I am going to get fat, that I need to get fat, and that I am getting fat. People I have never spoken to will come up to me in town to comment on my weight and then walk away. I have tried to remind myself that the culture is different and that I shouldn’t take anything personally, but let’s be honest ladies. If some stranger came up to you and said “Wow, you are looking so fat today” and then walked away, how do you not take that personally?!

Now, the last time that I went to the doctor I was told that I had lost a little over ten pounds since I have come to South Africa. I know that I have not gained weight because I am still able to easily fit into the size smaller jeans that I brought from home in the hopes that I would lose weight while I was here. I told a group of my teachers once that comments like that make me feel really bad and that in the US you would never say that to someone. They seemed extremely confused and told me that getting fat means South Africa is good for me. So the fact that people have taken it upon themselves to inform me of how my weight is looking has made me really think about the idea of weight and beauty in different cultures.

Looking around at women in my community you will see variations of size to the extremes. There are women who look like they might blow away in a strong gust of wind, and then there are women who could crush me with their thigh alone. For the most part though, women are BIG in this country. When I am coming home from town and stuffed in the back of the taxi, I am usually the smallest or one of the smallest women in the truck. The trend seems to be that the older you are the bigger you are, to the point that many women have trouble walking by the time they are in their 40s. South Africans have serious problems with heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, but if you ask them about it, no one mentions weight or poor diets as the cause of those problems. The average life span in South Africa is 52 years, but in this country it seems that bigger is better, regardless of the repercussions that that might have on your health.

When I watch my host mother, who is a very large woman, I am reminded of the idea that in the olden days being larger was a sign of wealth and higher social standing. My host mother makes a lot of money for someone in a rural village. She has multiple small businesses that she runs out of her house, and has a few properties in other villages that she rents out. She also has a few orphan girls that live at her house for which she collects grant money from the government for taking in. These girls are basically treated like indentured servants. They fetch water from the river, wash the clothes, mop the floors, and do most of the cooking. This allows my host mom to basically be sedentary and eat for the majority of the day. It is like being fat shows that she is able to eat and be lazy all day, which in this country translates to having the money and the means to not do any work. While I think that this lifestyle is not good and extremely unhealthy, most people seem very happy with eating fried chicken and a loaf of bread for lunch every day, but you never hear people telling them that they are fat.

So what does this mean for me? Are people telling me I am getting fat as a complement, or do they just not know that a comment like that is extremely rude? Do they think that because I am an American that means that I should have lots of money and therefore I should be very fat? Do they want me to be fat so they feel better about the fact that they are extremely obese, or are they intentionally being rude? I guess it doesn’t really matter. Being overweight does not have the same negativity associated with it here, and people have no problem commenting on my weight regardless of how much smaller I am than they are. Regardless of knowing that, the next time someone casually tells me that I am looking fat today I might have to smack them!