This will be my last post from Bamako, and I would be remiss if I did not spend a little time mentioning the flora and fauna that Bamako has to offer. And if there’s anything I don’t want to be, it’s remiss.
By day, the place is packed with doves. Purple-mottled doves that flit about, sadly camera-shy and self-effacing individuals. By night, the sky is flecked with bats. Enormous fruit bats, wingspans at least two feet across, soaring hundreds of feet in the air, or scything out of mango trees at roughly face-height. At dusk they come out by the hundreds to gorge on precisely whatever they want. One of the few ecological bones that this scarcely habitable part of Africa threw to its human inhabitants was the fact that these bats forswear their obvious ability to carry away woeful toddlers, choosing instead to feed on fruit.
A family of geckoes lives in my kitchen. They skidaddle along the wall tiles to the safety of the corner as soon as the light comes on, like 6-inch, pink cockroaches that shit all over the countertop. In the bathroom, there is a little gecko that once upon a time stopped in mid-wall-descent and had a hold-your-breath contest with the world, and won. Because of the outrageous stickiness of gecko feet, a triumph of bionanotechnology that scientists are hard-pressed to figure out, the gecko died, but did not come unstuck from the wall. Is he really dead? Yes, I am quite certain he is dead, because his skin is mostly gone, and there is a gecko skeleton with boots and a facemask made from his own feet and face, viscera splayed out in perfectly indecent fashion. It’s gross. I had to see it, now you have to picture it.
The unmistakable winners in this zoological theater of absurdity, however, are the ovines. Rams, sheep, and goats have slowly been overrunning this town. In the last two weeks, every patch of flat land has been used to house, hold or feed sheep. The truck dump? Sheep-market. The dirt soccer field? Pasture and sheep-market. The road? Sheep-market. People with sheep are of course trying to sell them to the passing whiteboy with the same cool indifference of a burger vendor asking if I want a coke. The influx of sheep has become so bad that a select few Malians have declared the sheep to be illegal immigrants, on the basis that no sooner did they arrive than they began to demand free food and health care, despite making no attempt to learn the language.
Even public transit has also been overrun by sheep. Buses, bikes, carts, cars, you name it. There are few things more absurd than the sight of a donkey pulling a cart full of sheep. The lone book in the GAIA library is a tale of vanilla travel misadventures that always seem to involve a linguistic misunderstanding, an oddity at a local restaurant and the woeful traveling protagonist becoming calamitously late for something. On the cover of this book, the height of all not-that-shocking travel kerfuffles is a man on a motorcycle, carrying a sheep. It is bizarre to even look at a book like this in Bamako, where it is thoroughly unremarkable in this city to see a motorcycle of similar size with at least one or two live sheep accompanying the driver.
The reason for all of this is a theatrically insane celebration to commemorate an ancient deed that by today’s standards is grotesque and criminal. It is the Eid-al Adha, or Seliba, or simply the Grand Fête. A festival commemorating Abraham’s decision to kill his son Ismael (unlike the version popularized by Moses and adapted into a screenplay Soren Kierkegaard, where it was Isaac who was to face the knife), before being told by the Lord to instead kill an animal stupid enough to get its horns stuck in a shrub. In homage, every family slaughters, cooks and eats at least one adult male ram – ideally one ram per man in the household. Hence, grand fête. Everyone gets dressed to the nines, in brand new bazins and boubous, ornately embroidered in gold, bright blues, and if you’re really a baller, white. If you’ve ever been to a place where the clay dust is air-soluble, you know why wearing immaculate white makes you a status symbol. Malians spend a month getting ready for this day, buying their sheep weeks in advance to get them good and fat; commissioning their clothes at the local tailors, and generally enjoying the atmosphere of anticipation.
The big day, when it finally came, was surreal. I stumbled out of my house at around 9am, in the ovine equivalent to 28 Days Later. Only the smaller ewes and scraggly babies were still scampering about the streets. Others were laid down on their sides, in various stages of disembowelment. I hung around until just became it became absurdly morbid and went for a walk. Over the course of the next few hours, the charcoal lit up, the smoke began to rise. I was hesitant, because my dad once tried to cook curried goat. In short, there was sleep when there shouldn’t have been sleep, there was fire where there shouldn’t have been fire and for two weeks my house smelled like Satan smeared a brimstone-packed turd on my brain. So that was my point of reference for grilled goat. Imagine the goofy, satisfied grin on my face when the entire city smelled like Kansas City slow-cooker. Good lord.
La viande. Il faut manger la viande, they keep saying as they push the food around the third or fourth or seventh enormous platter of sheep, rice and onion stew, until it rests in front of me. It’s not polite to refuse, but I can’t help thinking that it’s also impolite to suffer a gastro-intestinal rupture from eating 18 pounds of meat in a single three-hour sitting. I finally learn to subtly push meat to other people’s sectors of the platter. “The meat. You must eat the meat”. I was eating with Kotou’s friend Alou and his family, who were as hospitable as could possibly be. It briefly occurred to me that I wasn’t the only creature that had recently been welcomed into this household and fed an unreasonable amount of food, and my predecessor in that act is now bite-sized and delicious.
And of course, I almost certainly ate balls. Let me take a step back here. Rams, goats, sheep, ibexes, the whole family has enormous man-danglers. The only thing more impressive than the sheer mass of their ammo-pouches is the fact that goats have such incredible balance even despite swinging a pair of bowling pins. And not the dinky New England skinny pins, either, the real bulbous Lebowski pins. The scrotapotamus is clearly held to be very important, as it goes through the priority lane in the butchering process. The three-step guide is quite literally:
1. Kill the ram
2. Detach Tom & Jerry
3. Skin and butcher the ram
Now, how do I know I’ve eaten caddysack? I present the balance of evidence. The ram had a pair of Hufflepuffs when I got to the house. When I left, there were only ribs and a few other bones left. No scrota. I ate a considerable portion of every platter brought to the table, including the ones with liver and trachea and heart and chunks of unidentifiable offal. So I can only imagine that Athos and Porthos were detached from Aramis, cut up, and served according to the recipe in the latest issue of Bon Appetit. And honesty, if I couldn't taste the difference, is it really worse than eating any other meat? My greatest regret is that I will never again win a game of never have I ever.
Si quelqu'un veut un mouton, c'est la preuve qu'il en existe un. - Le Petit Prince
It’s less like a religious atmosphere and more like Thanksgiving. People leave Bamako to hang out with their families in the country, everybody gets the day off work (at least the 30% of the population who are formally employed), and you stuff your face with more food than you could possibly ever want to eat. The differences are twofold. First, it seems odd, in a land of scarcity, to eat to such excess. Every family buys a ram or two or five, eats what they can, and hopes to share the rest. Of course, most people with whom they could share are also trying to crawl out from their glut of meat, so are hardly in need on more. Almost nobody has access to refrigeration so much of the meat invariably goes bad. Speaking in strict economic terms, it is the consummate irrational act. But they do it because there are some things that strict economic rationale doesn’t, and perhaps shouldn’t have a bearing on. Money works well for goods and services that are in the domain of free and uncoerced exchange. In this case, it is not traded not for goods and services per se, but for symbolic sacrifice, piety and family bonding, which, along with health, safety and dignity, can’t be fairly withheld, and therefore cannot be freely transacted, therefore they are not really valid candidates for strict monetary valuation.
That brings me to the second reason: the Malian understanding of family, which is altogether more elegant and 300% more absurd than any counterpart I’ve ever seen. As I’ve mentioned before, family is everything. Your bloodlines carry a lot of information about you, like it or not, and many families have the kind of deeply intertwined histories that can only come after centuries or millennia of coexisting in the dimly-lit territory between harmony and competition. No matter how long you’re in Mali, you can only meet about two hundred different people. There are about a dozen last names to choose from, and maybe ten first names for each gender. Meaning that as an Adama Traore, I would meet one or two other Adama Traores pretty much every day.
Combine the paucity of names with the long intertwined family history, and the result is profoundly odd. As a Traore, my relationship to most other clans is preordained, based on 900 years of cohabitation, conflict, slave-taking, historical dynasties. We get along well with the Diarras, but put one of us in a room with the Diallos and the insults fly. “Haha, Traore, that’s no good, your people are my slaves”. I cannot stress enough how weird it is that this is a totally normal way to follow an introduction and a handshake in a professional environment. “Without our help, your family would starve” or “You are a bean-eater” is the appropriate “How-do-you-do” response, both parties beaming all the while. This cockamamie social structure is actually, it has been theorized, the glue that holds Mali’s multiethnic, resource-strapped society together, preventing it from becoming a Yugoslavia or Rwanda, or even a Nigeria. Rather ignore hundreds of years of conflict, and in a setting where it is impossible to mandate that everyone is only Malian - otherwise anethnic – as was done in Rwanda after the genocide. Violent family feuds become jovial Family Feud, and would-be ethnic tensions are aired as hilarious dirty laundry. I think it’s safe to say that nobody ever went to war with someone they were trading fart-jokes with.
This is what impresses me most about Mali, and what development economists and human rights lawyers could not have devised and cannot appreciate. There are millennia of history and cultural precedent that shape the most trivial of human interactions. These oddities saturate life here, and can never really be intelligible to an outsider. They certainly seem ludicrous, but if something so benign and vernacular as fart-jokes have kept the peace while our continents, for all our professional diplomacy, spent the last century trying to annihilate each other in trenches and airplanes and submarines and damn near succeeded, from what vantage point do we deign to know how to bring order to a place we don’t understand?
I hope this doesn’t come across as a rallying cry for some cheap apologetic moral relativism – it is patronizing to people everywhere to pretend that they don’t have the capacity to be assholes just as well as we can. But culture is important, and not as an afterthought. Moreover, culture is not amenable to the minimalism of scientific method. You can’t take out one cultural practice and look at it in a vacuum, or graft it onto another set of practices onto a different set of symbols to see how it fares. A cultural act must be examined through the culture that performs and authorizes it, with its meanings speaking back to the underlying moral requirement of a secure and dignified life that all of us can understand.
