What Gets Your Goat?

            Now replace the black armor with fur and the dialogue with bleating, and you have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to watch a goat slaughter.

            For the past couple of weeks, a group of the researchers here were working on organizing a big goat roast for the Mpalan researchers, staff, and local villagers. The deal was that the Mpalan researchers would go out to a different village, buy the goats (six total, at 3000 shillings—about $35—a pop), and bring them back to Mpala on Sunday, when the villagers would slaughter, prepare, and cook them for everyone to share. Though I’m normally a pescetarian, I make exceptions for special events, so I chipped in my five hundred shillings and on Sunday afternoon went to go see what my contribution had helped wrought.

            Mike, one of the researchers who helped spearhead the goat campaign, went and picked up the goats (which actually turned out to be five goats and one sheep) around midday on Sunday, returning with them in the back of his big neon green Land Rover, “Kermit,” like so many bags of groceries. Except, of course, that groceries don’t poop all over the back of your car. The goats, bleating placidly, didn’t seem any worse the wear for the ride. On the other hand, considering the state of Kermit’s trunk, the trip left Mike a bit disgruntled.

African groceries

            Around three in the afternoon, Mike and Bob (another researcher) transported the goats up to a patch of grass near the village—a patch of grass that would, in fact, be the goats’ last. It occurred to me as I followed them and the several other people from Mpala interested in watching the butchering process that it was indeed fortuitous that we had two guys with such manly and handy names as Mike and Bob to help facilitate the slaughter (though to be fair, my roommate Alice did help pick out and pick up the goats too. You’re pretty handy yourself, Al).

Mike (left) and Bob. Sunglasses are excellent indicators of handy, manly men.

            Once the goats were delivered, though, the Kenyans took over. It turned out that we couldn’t have even been involved in a hands-on way even if we had wanted to (not that I was that disappointed, but I think manly Bob was), since the goats had to be slaughtered in a specific way in order to make the meat halal for the few Muslims in the village. In halal slaughter (dhabiha), as in kashrut slaughter (shechita) in Judaism, the animal is killed by deeply cutting the throat to sever the jugular vein, cardiod arteries, trachea, and esophagus (but leaving the spinal cord intact). The deep cut is designed both to kill the animal quickly (in about three minutes) and relatively painlessly, and to bleed out the meat, since blood is neither halal nor kosher.

Halal slaughter

            Now that we’re on the topic, let’s talk about blood for a little bit. You know how that blood looks totally fake spurting from the black knight’s severed limbs? It’s actually entirely realistic. Prior to Sunday, I had never had any personal encounters with blood that couldn’t be controlled by a Band-Aid or two, so I was taken aback by the sheer quantity that came out of each goat. All that liquid doesn’t go to waste, though: even though blood is taboo for observant Muslims, Jews, and those with delicate American sensibilities, it is a traditional part of the diets of many Kenyan tribes (most notably, though not exclusively, the Maasai, who drink it mixed with milk). The women assisting with the slaughter were careful to collect as much of the blood as they could in metal bowls, and we watched one guy stick a mug under the stream coming out of the neck of the first goat and knock it back on the spot. 

Not quite a coffee break, but each to his own

            My concessions to pescetarianism didn’t extend that far.

            As the designated slaughterer moved on from each goat, other guys set in to start skinning, opening, and gutting the meat. This was the part where everybody got involved. Yay! The women collected and carried away the skins, intestines, and meat:

            The older kids helped hold the goat steady for the butchers:

              The Americans watched and sort of got in the way:

           

           and the younger Kenyan kids tried to get the Americans to make themselves useful and play with them:

These kids take their playtime seriously.

           One kid came running up to me with a severed goat’s foot that he had been playing with and tried to give it to me, an offer which I regretfully declined. A couple of four-year-olds started a game that involved taking turns high-fiving my hands, and quickly evolved into just smacking me. I decided it was time for me to decide the activity and spent the next hour and a half covered in kids enthusiastically swiping through pictures on my iPhone and identifying all of my Asian friends as “Alice.”

            Dinner began around 7:30, and it was awesome. We were greeted, typically, by a swarm of babbling, smiling kids. Being a white person and walking into a group of Kenyan kids is like being a new class pet introduced to a bunch of American on the day before spring break after a class donut party: you’re perpetually surrounded by small people who want nothing more than to touch you and play with you and who are utterly incapable of being quiet or sitting still. 

This is probably what the world looks like to a class pet.

            The energy is absolutely fantastic.

            Though I’m sure the kids could have kept playing right through dinner, I was thankful when the head of the village stepped up and gave a brief but lovely speech welcoming us to the village, thanking us for the goat, expressing his gladness that we had a chance for all of the Mpalans, villagers, researchers, and staff alike, to eat together, which, after he finished, we did.

The final product.

            Conclusions: roast goat is slightly better than stewed goat. Both taste great with ugali. And if you want to work up an appetite for a goat feast, just find a few Kenyan kids to play with first.