Barka da Sallah!

Today is the first day of a four-day weekend in Nigeria to mark Sallah – the feast to mark the end of Ramadan.

Yesterday, as the okada I was riding neared my workplace, we drove straight through a river of blood. I didn’t get chance to see where it was coming from, but the driver confirmed that it was coming from the animals they were slaughtering for the Sallah feast.

As I walked into the compound of our offices, I saw that my boss was already there (this was at 8.30 in the morning – I was technically 30 minutes late for work, but I have never seen him there before 9am), so I waved and walked over to him. It was only as I came close to him and the woman he was talking to that I noticed the activity to my right. On a raised concrete platform, there were about eight men hacking at bovine carcasses with hatchets, knives and other instruments; a short distance away, on a bright yellow plastic sheet spread out on the ground, another group of men sliced chunks of flesh, tore membranes from meat and washed and cleaned cow innards

My boss confirmed that shortly before I arrived they had slaughtered three cows in order to give some meat to every employee for the Sallah feast. I looked beyond the raised platform and saw another four men grappling with what looked like a live cow on its back; on closer inspection it turned out to be a dead cow with its head cut off which the men were skinning. He told me that the cows had been ‘troublesome’: “One of them, as we were trying to tie her up, broke her leg! Then, when we were dragging another of them across the courtyard, she broke her leg too!!’ He laughed and the woman next to him joined in, chuckling merrily and proclaiming with a smile “They didn’t want to be killed!!”. I’m no vegetarian, but this kind of humour when we were surrounded by the fresh flesh of the same animals made me feel slightly uncomfortable.

Later, after a morning shower of rain had passed, I went back out to take some photos of the event. I chatted to a colleague about what we thought the best bits of the cow were in terms of meat: she was absolutely horrified that we didn’t eat the head in the UK, and bemused by the fact that we didn’t eat the heart or intestines (so much so, that she repeated the question several times, as if I might not have understood). For the record, she said that Nigerians probably thought the neck was the best bit.

My boss returned to the scene. He walked over to the piles of meat, picked up a very large lump – difficult to identify: surrounded by a rounded membrane, looking almost like I’d imagine a stomach to look like, but with recognisable, steak-like meat inside – and said “How would it be if I gave you this?”. Now, we’d had a brief conversation the day before, so I was prepared for the fact that I would probably be given something from the slaughter, so I wasn’t too shocked and very gratefully accepted. Nonetheless, walking back across the courtyard to my office, I felt mildly hysterical about the fact that I had a heavy, unwrapped, unidentified chunk of beef in a carrier bag in my hand, and that I was going to just plop it onto the desk and get on with my day until home-time.

I left work early, and hurriedly texted other volunteers to see if they would come over and help us eat this enormous quantity of meat.  Simon and I then spent 45 minutes trying to cut this huge lump into more manageable pieces, using knives, scissors, hands; we are inexpert butchers. With that task out of the way – feeling slightly nauseated and with hands wreaking of raw meat – we were finally able to start cooking, and managed a very respectable beef stew (although the ratio of meat to veg was approximately 3:1) which we shared with 5 others. Happy Sallah!