Turkey & Goat Feasting

Instead of my writing something about my celebrating two holidays this past week, I thought I'd share with you this article about Thanksgiving and Tabaski instead. Interesting how two different holidays can mean kinda the same thing.


Tabaski, Thanksgiving: Back to Back

Wednesday 25 November 2009

by Joseph Hellweg, for the other afrik

On-line source: http://en.afrik.com/article16535.html

The moon and sun align this year to bring two holidays together: the Muslim feast of Tabaski (also called Eid al-Adha and Aïd el-Kebir) and the United States holiday of Thanksgiving. They occur on November 26 and 28, respectively. Although Tabaski is explicitly religious, and Thanksgiving ostensibly secular, both re-enforce ties to one’s family and larger communities. Both focus on animals.

Those buying sheep right now may have to pay a hundred U.S. dollars [50.000 francs CFA] or more for one in the final days before the feast on Saturday. If one lacks the means, a goat will do. Wealthy benefactors even sacrifice cattle.

In the U.S., a frozen turkey from the grocery store is the main Thanksgiving course and less expensive than a ram. But Americans still make a fuss about buying it. They follow sales and compare prices and the quality of different brands. They may order it weeks or months in advance for fear of waiting too long and going without. Type just two words into any online search engine—Thanksgiving turkey—and you can gauge the extent of the obsession. You will find endless advice about how to choose, thaw, clean, bake, spice, serve, and eat a turkey. You can even order it online with overnight shipping. Frozen turkeys can’t walk, but they appear to be able to fly.

And they are easier to take home than sheep. You may have to make extra space in your freezer, but a turkey will fit. You don’t have to feed it. It doesn’t make a mess. It’s already cleaned. And unless you plan to deep-fry it outside—a specialty of the U.S. south—the trick is to keep the meat moist while it cooks in the oven. Despite all this attention lavished on an edible carcass, a family has little personal relationship with its turkey. It is meat from start to finish.

In Africa, things are different. A family lives with its meal before eating it. Last year in Kankan, Guinea, I saw rams tethered outside of every compound I visited in the days before Tabaski. Children and adults may name the sheep and play with it. They feed it and may grow fond of it, especially when purchased well in advance. Then the pet for a day becomes the plat du jour.

Processing the sheep is as much a family affair as taking care of it. When I was with Malian friends in Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire, in the 1990s, men killed the sheep, children cleaned the entrails, and women cooked the meat. In a way, the sheep is like family and, as such, the whole family prepares it.

But the goal of each feast is still the same: to share meat with relatives and friends, some of whom travel far to eat it. Last year in Kankan, I met Guineans who had returned home from Conakry, Europe, and the U.S. for the meal. Imagine my surprise when a man in sunglasses walked up to me and told me in fluent English that he had just arrived from Washington, D.C.

Thanksgiving in the U.S. is no different. It is the busiest travel day of the year. Airports are jammed, and flights run late, making national news every year.

The feasts are variations of each other. On Tabaski, families distribute meat to their neighbors. This happens at Thanksgiving, too. Families invite neighbors to dinner or send turkey, sweet potatoes, and gravy to those they know who will be spending Thanksgiving alone or in nursing homes. And soup kitchens offer free turkey and mashed potatoes to the poor and homeless.

In other ways, Tabaski is incomparable. It has no equivalent in Judaism or Christianity. Like Christmas and Hanukkah, Tabaski evokes a spirit of giving. It commemorates Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram instead of his son, Ishmael. But like Easter and Yom Kippur, it is the holiest of holy days.

It is also like New Year’s Day and Rosh Hashanah, even though it is not the Muslim New Year. In Bambara, the blessings one uses as greetings on Tabaski make the case: “Ala ka san kura d’i ma,” ‘May God grant you a new year’, or “Ala k’i san hèrè chaya,” ‘May God give you peace in the year to come’. West Africans offer similar blessings in French, sometimes cutting to the chase with the expression, “Tous les tés,” which sounds to an English-speaker like, “two lay TAY,” an abbreviation for a range of blessings, all of which end in the French sound “tay”: bonté (plenty), prospérité (prosperity), santé (health).

Tabaski resets the ritual clock, whether in Bambara or French.

Both Tabaski and Thanksgiving recreate the world. Each marks a turn in the year—the start of the dry season and the beginning of Christmas shopping, respectively—and the hope that those who celebrate will endure these trials.

The day after Thanksgiving—always a Friday—is one of the year’s busiest shopping days in the U.S. How well sales do on that day is seen as an augur for the country’s economic welfare, a sign of how well Christmas sales and, as a result, the national economy will do in the coming year. Thanksgiving is the ritual sacrifice that precedes the divination of the kingdom’s future. I mean, post-Thanksgiving sales are key indicators in the nation’s economic forecast. When sales looks bleak, priests blame the failing ritual power of the sacred king. In other words, leading economic experts criticize the president’s fiscal policy . . .

Ironically, it is this commercial side of secular Thanksgiving that most closely resembles the religious side of Tabaski. Thanksgiving marks the opening of a month-long ritual of buying and spending that culminates in Christmas, the most elaborate American sacrifice in which gifts are given shortly before the New Year to assure that it will be safe and prosperous, Christian beliefs aside.

Similarly, Tabaski brings to a close a period of two lunar months in Islam that include Ramadan and the most intense season of pilgrimages to Mecca.

Just as Tabaski takes Muslims back to the first ritual expression of obedience to Allah, Thanksgiving takes Americans back to the first prayerful consecration of a sustained Anglo-Saxon presence in North America. Taking part in the harvest meal that contributed in some way to the eventual establishment of the United States is like taking part in the meal that spared Ishmael’s life. Both feasts renew their respective worlds through ritual participation: the Muslim community through Tabaski, and the United States via Thanksgiving.

Here we see the richness of these holidays as well as their limits. In the United States, the Christian, Anglo-Saxon origin story of Thanksgiving now bolsters a suspicion among some Americans of both Muslims and immigrants of color, just as claims of religious absolutism grounded in God’s revelation to Abraham justify hostility among some Muslims against secularism.

Religious or not, holidays are rituals. They operate beyond strict divisions between sacred and profane; they bridge the two. This year, occurring in such close proximity, they might raise a common prayer for a better welcome to Islam and immigrants in the U.S. and for increased dialogue between secularists and Islamists across the world.

But in the end, holidays are mostly about the small ways in which people connect through sharing. This Thursday, a Muslim friend of mine from Mali, Diadié Bathily, plans to attend my family’s Thanksgiving dinner in St. Louis, Missouri. My Catholic mother will help him celebrate Tabaski far from home (two days early) by making him mutton in addition to turkey. Knowing Diadié, he will eat both. Shouldn’t we all?

Joseph Hellweg is Asst. Prof. of Religion at Florida State Univeristy. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Virginia and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale. He has done research with initiated hunters (dozos) and on HIV and AIDS in Côte d’Ivoire from 1993-1997 and in 2002. In 2008-2009, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Kankan, Guinea, where he taught social science research methods. He will complete his fellowship at the University of Bamako. He speaks French and Mandenkan and eats fonio with okra sauce whenever possible.

The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Afrik.com.

Thank you for all your help!!

What a nice birthday surprise it was come into town this week and find out my project has been completely funded. Thank you everyone for all your contributions!! I will keep this updated on how the project continues; currently, the community is still working on their share of the fund-raising, but I hope that in the next few months we will have finished everything. Thank you again, from myself and from everyone in my village!

Dirty Laundry? What dirty laundry?

One thing that still continues to surprise (and sometimes annoy) me is the fact that there is no such thing as privacy in this little village of 2000. Everyone knows everyon's business, including all the bad stuff. Unlike in the States, it generally happens that when there is an argument or a problem involving several parties, people will generally air their grievances, sometimes very loudly, in public. Friends or neighbors will then usually come by to mediate the issue, and then people will accept whats been discussed. The third party is very important here in Mali, not only in mediating conflicts but with informing others of an event or a decision. It so often happens that during meetings, one person will make their case, or inform the person "in charge" of the meeting, and then that person will inform the most senior person at the meeting, for example the chief of the village. Then people will have their opinions voiced aloud, and then those comments will be reiterated back to the person who organized the meeting in the first place. Everything is talked about here, everyone else's business (scandalous or not) known. If nothing else, I provide everyone a great topic of conversation, because inevitably I do something strange or funny every day. I guess when you don't have contact with the outside world, there is nothing else to talk about, except each other, and I'm their very own Angelina Jolie.

Its Peanut Season Again

Its still a little hard to believe, but its cold season here, and peanut harvesting time again. In an effort to have something to do and get out of my house, I have been going to some of the women's fields to harvest. Its a long, tiring process; although its mostly women's job to farm peanuts, men help in planting and weeding, and then pulling up the plants. After the men pull up the peanut plants, the women collect the plants into a large pile to dry in the sun. Once all the plants are pulled up, each woman asks her friends to come help pull the peanuts off the plant, to be dried in the sun some more before being take home or bagged up to be sold. Its a long, back-breaking process, but doing the work with your friends and neighbors alleviates the tediousness a little bit. The sale of peanuts is one of the main sources of income here, especially for women. Unfortunately, although I'm no expert on agricultural economics, I think the women get the short end of the deal. Women here sell their 50kg (110lbs) for about 5,000CFA, or about $11USD. There are so many middlemen, and so many difficulties into getting the peanuts to the capital or another major town, that the women have no other choice but to sell for what they can, and the end consumer gets the high price. After seeing the farming process from the beginning, I doubt I will ever eat peanuts again, without thinking of all my Malian friends working so hard under the African sun.

Another (Peace Corps Country) Bites the Dust

I remember that living in the States, one would often hear about foreign countries suddenly erupting in violence, or staging a coup, or generally fall apart for some reason. Well, living here in Mali, the experience is brought a little closer to home. Not to say that Mali is on the brink of state collapse any time soon, but as another African Peace Corps program is closed this week, one starts to wonder about the future stability of the other countries around, and yes, even one's own country. This week, Bamako is hosting 90+ volunteers from Guinea- yes, that Guinea, the one I just went to and had a lovely time despite the crazy leadership in power. In case some of you missed the violence last month(and I know some of you did): during an opposition rally in Conakry in September, the military decided to open fire, killing over 150 people. Well, despite the leader in charge claiming he had no idea it was going to happen, the fact that elections keep getting pushed back and opponents keep getting harassed or worse, convinced PC headquarters to shut the program down. Hence, the "refugees" hanging out here in Bamako. What happens to them now? you may ask. Some go home to the States; some join the post PC program, Peace Corps Response; some go to other countries in the area, to start afresh; and some are staying in Mali. This is actually the third time Mali has received "refugees" from a former Peace Corps African nation. Seven months ago, we got six volunteers from Madasgascar, after the political upheaval there. Two months ago we had several volunteers move to Mali after Mauritania essentially kicked them out; one girl is now my neighbor. We joke about the coups going on around us and moving about countries, but it is true there has been one volunteer moved around three countries in as many months here. So we wonder about what will happen now and what country is going to shut down next, and hope it isn't our own. Because I would personally be very, very pissed if I had to leave before I got to install those solar panels on my clinic's roof.

Making Malians Do It Themselves

Sometimes I am convinced that my main job here is not to make things better but encourage Malians to change themselves. What I mean is this: there is usually a group of people in the village- generally professionals such as health staff, teachers, politicians- who have some kind of knowledge. Sometimes, what they need is someone else to encourage them to transmit that knowledge, and sometimes the materials as well. For example, one of the things I regularly try to do is give weekly health talks to the women's association meetings. Normally the health staff is busy or forgets to come help me, but at this last meeting both the midwife and the vaccination guy came, which was a good thing because I had chosen to talk about birth spacing and birth control. Well, I always have a planned speech, but my partners in health kind of took over half-way through. And the thing is this: they know the advantages of spacing pregnancies as well as I do, as well as how birth control works. And on top of that, they have the language and cultural sensitivity to transmit that information. So its not that I'm here to tell anyone some groundbreaking new information, I just have to convince people to share that info with the general public. At times that is what frustrates me here: there seems to be two groups of people, the ones that are educated and the ones who aren't. And they aren't trying to meet in the middle. The ones with the knowledge are usually dismissive of the general public (most often with the women) and argue that they're not trying or that they don't care, like getting their children vaccinated or studying hard to pass school, and the population has so many other matters on their mind, and things to do, that they often don't see the importance in such things. So it feels in Mali that there is a conflicting desire for change and yet cynacism of that change. I guess not unlike the rest of the world.

One sidenote: more photos of my village are up in the Mali album! Including pictures of wall murals, goats and babies.

Who Wants To Donate?

So many of you have probably been wondering what I’ve been doing the past year. Other than giving health talks, weighing babies and drinking lots of tea, I’ve been talking to the community about their needs/wants. The staff at the health center has made clear that what they really want is electricity to light the center up at night and to power their vaccinations freezer. So if you were waiting for a chance to contribute to my little community here, now is your opportunity!

Basically, my health center services the little district I live in; its comprised of about 15 villages and smaller hamlets. There about 10,000 people in the district, most of them women and children. Currently, there is no power at the district. The freezer that holds the vaccinations runs on petrol, which is both expensive and wasteful. We are hoping to buy solar panels that would power the freezer and provide light at night when needed. I’m keeping with Peace Corps goal of making our work sustainable by teaching people to help themselves, so the community is required to raise a third of the total cost themselves. Part of the remaining costs will come from Peace Corps funds set aside for this very purpose, and I am asking for your help to finance the rest. I know there is a global recession going on right now, but even a little amount will help a great deal. If you want to help, there are two ways you can reach the Peace Corps page to donate. The website with my project is

www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=688-313

If that link does not work, you can go to the Peace Corps page, www.peacecorps.gov, and then go to the Donate Now link on the left-hand side of the page; from there, you can search for my project by my last name. Thank you so much in advance for your help, and I promise to keep you updated on how things turn out!

Sahara: Worst Movie Ever!

I’m not usually in the habit of writing movie reviews, but my friend and I decided to watch the movie Sahara the other day, and we were so offended I felt I had to say something about it. If you’ve never seen it, it stars Matthew McConaughy and Penelope Cruz trying to find a missing ship/ stopping an epidemic outbreak/ some other ridiculousness in Mali. The only problem is that they make up some fictional Mali that has nothing to do with the current situation. In Sahara’s scenario, Mali is run by some reggae-sounding general with dreads, with chaos and strife ruling. Now Mali has a lot of problems going for it, but the one thing they have managed to avoid is falling into the civil-war/ warlord scenario that has plagued many other African nations. I’m not expecting Hollywood to be all politically-correct all of a sudden, but poor Mali barely gets any face time as it is in the world, the least they could do is give it a good rep. True, there are some problems in the north, involving a small rebellion from an ethnic minority population and the presence of Al-Qaeda coming across from Algeria, but overall Mali is a really (really!) peaceful country that has transitioned rather tranquilly from colony to semi-democracy.

Pictures of Guinea!

Sorry it has taken a while, but pictures of my trip to Guinea can now be seen in my Google photo album: just click "New Mali Album" and enjoy!