Labuko

Labuko

Labuko is a Mursi village in Ethiopia's Mago National Park. The Mursi, or Mun as they call themselves, are an ethnic group of the Surmi people in Ethiopia. They live mainly in the Debub Omo zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region, near the border with South Sudan. There were 11,500 Mursi living in Ethiopia according to the 2007 census. The Mursi homeland is one of the most isolated regions in the country, surrounded by mountains between the Omo River and its tributary, the Mago. Its neighbors include Aari, Banna, Mekan, Karo, Kwegu, Nyangatom and Suri. The Mursi people undergo a variety of rites of passage, educational or disciplinary procedures. Among the Mursi and Surma, who are possibly the last African ethnic groups where it is still common for women to wear large wooden discs or "plates" made of clay on their lower lips. A girl's lip is cut by her mother around the age of 15 to mark her transition to adulthood. A series of progressively larger clay or wooden plugs are used to stretch the lip over the next few years. A source of great social status is the size of the wooden disk. Occasionally, lip plates are worn by unmarried women at a dance, and more and more they are being worn to attract tourists in order to earn a little extra money. The lip plates are known as the dhebi a tugoin. Mursi men are divided into age groups, with individuals within each age grouping forming strong bonds that last a lifetime. Upon reaching adulthood, young men fight each other with two-meter-long wooden sticks in stick fights. Though ceremonial, the fights are violent, often ending in serious injury and death. The champion of a stick tournament has great social status.