The Bana Tribe

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mytripsmypics/5973526114/

I decided to look up interesting tribes in the world and came across the Bana tribe that lives in Ethiopia. The tribe lives mostly east of the Omo Valley in Southern Ethiopia which is believed to be one of the most interesting places on Earth because of so many of the different tribes that live around that area.

When I was looking at pictures of people in the Bana tribe, I noticed that they wore a lot of bright colored things. The women have beaded hair and the men wear sort of embroidered undergarments. Men that are “whippers,” which I will explain later, wear a sort of headband with feathers that distinguishes them as “whippers.”



http://www.flickr.com/photos/mytripsmypics/7885787942/

The Bana tribe has many different rituals and customs. Of these, I found two to be the most interesting; when someone in the tribe is married. When a man wants to marry a woman he must go “bull-jumping” successfully four times in a row. The man must “jump” or walk, naked, across ten cows that have been lined up by the other people in the tribe. If he fails, he will be ridiculed for the rest of his life...a little bit of pressure eh?

The women in this ceremony though, are subject to be whipped. This is actually wanted by the women though, and sometimes they will even fight each other for who gets to be whipped first. They want to see how many times they can be whipped without showing pain. I don’t know about anyone else, but this doesn’t really seem like something that I would be overly excited to be subject to, at all.

If there are even more diverse tribes around this part in Ethiopia I would be very interested to learn more about them and their different traditions and cultures. (302)