So, as each of the young girls step out to the middle of the circle, the leader of the game asks, Bebedi, and the others answer in the chorus, Owanmbe.
The girl in the middle then shakes her backside, now called twerking, for the others to judge. Naturally, the one judged most endowed of the group wins the game. Such is the importance attached to the female bum, especially in the African continent.
The female bum represents many things for the African society, just as much sentiment is attached to it. It houses the whole essence of a woman’s feminism and ***uality.
The Bebedi, Jigida or Ileke idi, otherwise known as waist beads are one ornament that have fascinated me for many years. Why? I really have no definite answer.
Perhaps it is because of the beautiful array of
blended colours which often glistens against the rays of light when the beads sneak out of their hiding under the clothes, or just the idea that one is wearing something unusual and secrete from what everyone else is wearing. Unfortunately, I have not found the
courage to wear one yet. A childhood experience, still fresh in my mind, probably contributed to this.
As a child, I lived with my grandmother, a very loving but strict disciplinarian and daughter of a clergy who took her Christian religion very seriously. However, we lived in Sango, Ebute Metta area of Lagos where a
large number of Northerners and Muslim Yorubas also lived.
This gave me the opportunity to interact with and make friends with several Hausa children and fell in love with a few of them. Because their lifestyle was quite different from mine, I was really enchanted by everything about them and I became quite attached to two of them. Ruwa, who was a few years older
than me lived next door to my right while Binta, my age mate lived two doors to our right.
Virtually all my spare time, after school and evening lesson, was spent in Binta’s company, in their dimly lit rooms with blue and yellow light bulbs and thick smelling Arabian perfumes. Binta’s mother must
have been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen at the time. Tall, dark, beautiful and soft spoken she was always dressed in gold and other shiny ornaments, same with Binta.
Long, drop earrings which my grandmother insisted were unsuitable for children were Binta’s favourites.
And she always had a string or more number of beads tied around her waist which she would let me see whenever she got a new one. I loved them and wished I could own a couple too but my grandmother would always say no, insisting that they were for
adults.
At about seven years, I did not understand why my friends could wear them and I could not. Then one day, on a visit to Binta’s, her mum gifted me with a very beautiful set, similar to one of Binta’s. I quickly rolled it up my waist and bounced home to show off to my grandmother. Since she could not make one for me, well, my friends have given me one.
What happened that evening formed one of the few childhood experiences I could not understand for a very long time. The beads were not only snapped off me, I received a very good beating as well and told never to go to Binta’s house again. My grandmother insisted the beads were obscene, dirty and for wayward children. I did not understand what the fuss was about, but a few weeks later, Binta came to inform me that she was getting married and moving to somewhere in the North, I later learnt was Kano.
The reality of what happened to Binta did not dawn on me until many years after, as a full grown adult and Journalist, but the memory of my grandmother’s reaction to the beads that night has never left and is often replayed in my mind whenever I see a woman wearing one.
As I grew up, I realised my grandmother was not the only person with a misconception and bias towards the jigida. Just as I have met women who adorn them and even swear to their potential benefits, so have I met people like my grandmother who have serious aversions to them especially because of their ***ual undercurrents. Waist beads have, for a very long time, been associated with female *** and ***uality.
They are believed to possess great erotic appeal and the ability and power to provoke ***ual desire and deep emotions from the opposite ***. Primarily, a traditional female beauty enhancer, they are worn to accentuate feminism and beauty, drawing focal attention to the hips, bum and thighs as well as their
movement. (The sway of the bum as a woman walks).
A woman’s chastity and ***ual character can be decoded by the use of beads.
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