In my British-Nigerian family, there is a frequently-recounted anecdote, first shared by some auntie or another back in the village, which then made its way to countless family Christmases in Blackburn where my mother grew up, to be circulated for years to come. The story goes that, upon hearing about the desire of his bride-to-be to lose weight for their wedding, an uncle in Nigeria had kissed his teeth and said “Nonsense! What I want from my wife is for her to stay at home and be fat!”
I was reminded of this much-beloved family heirloom when reading the third chapter of the journalist Afua Hirsch’s latest book, Decolonising My Body. On a childhood visit to Ghana, she too becomes acquainted with a truth almost unfathomable in the Western world. That across much of the African continent, the prevailing beauty standard for women is not the size zero, heroin-chic figures that populate the pages of Vogue, but, in fact, the opposite – to be, as my uncle so delicately put it, fat.
