The Omo Valley, situated in Africa’s Great Rift Valley, southwest Ethiopia, is home to an estimated 200,000 indigenous epoples who have lived there for millennia. The indigenous groups have always traded between each other, for beads, food, cattle and cloth. More recently, the trade has been in guns and bullets.
Because it was an island for so long, the costume of Marken is quite different from many other traditional costumes in the Netherlands. It is, for instance, the only costume with a corset-like bodice.