“When we stop giving birth, we hold our heads up high. There is no pretending; no lie. We say ‘Now we are old!’ and that is what we want to be. That is our way. Wanting to be called young by others, like the foreigners, is not part of our tradition.”

I read these words, from an Omo Valley tribeswoman, in a small ethnographic museum in Ethiopia a few years ago. I had spent the morning in a nearby grass