This picture shows a girl from Ethiopia’s Arbore tribe, not Mursi tribe
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on March 18, 2022 at 14:38
- 2 min read
- By James OKONG'O, AFP South Africa
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
The photo was published on Facebook on March 12, 2022, and has since been shared more than 250 times.
However, the claim that the girl in the picture is from Ethiopia's Mursi tribe is misleading.
Arbore tribe
By conducting a reverse image search, AFP Fact Check found the photo on the Fine Art America website.
It is credited to photographer Trevor Cole, who told AFP Fact Check that he took the photo in 2020. He denied the girl belongs to the Mursi tribe, as claimed on Facebook.
“She’s an Arbore girl living close to Lake Chew Bahir (Lake Stephane) in Southern Omo Valley” in Ethiopia, he wrote in an email.
Cole added that an Arbore elder told him that “traditionally teenage girls from the community wear many multi-coloured beaded necklaces, large earrings and goatskin skirts, and cover their heads with black clothing”.
Cole posted the photo on his official Instagram account in April 2020.
Arbore and Mursi tribes
The Arbore, also known as the Hor, are a small Cushitic agro-pastoral ethnic group living in southern Ethiopia, near Lake Stephanie, which is locally referred to as Lake Chew Bahir. As is the case for most tribes in the Omo Valley, cows, goats and sheep are the main sources of livelihood for the Arbore people.
The International Cultural Diversity Organization (ICDO) told AFP Fact Check that the name Arbore literally means “land of the bulls” (“Ar” means bull and “bore” means land).
Meanwhile, the Mursi tribe lives in Ethiopia’s southern Omo Valley. The ICDO explained that its people adorn themselves with elaborate “lip disks and cattle headdresses and are a Nilotic, agro-pastoralist tribe that undergo various rites of passage. Lip plates are a well-known aspect of the Mursi women who wear large pottery, wooden discs, or plates on their lower lips. Girls’ lips are pierced at the ages of 15 or 16.”
Nilotes are a group of people from East and Central Africa who speak Nilotic languages. They inhabit Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. The majority of them are pastoralists and farmers, supplemented by fishing and hunting.
The Mursi rely on their herds of cattle for meat, milk and blood.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
