Sheep baa-ed in the street in front of our house all day; sheep baa-d in the neighbor’s driveway all night. A small herd of sheep trotted down our dead-end road in the morning, and trotted back out again. Sheep munched on grass in the empty lot next to the Broadway Café. Sheep dozed and fidgeted nervously alongside every road in the city.
Passengers on scooters carried bound and docile sheep in their laps. Small boys dragged unwilling sheep down dirt roads. Ornery sheep dragged small boys down dirt roads.
Sheep stood in herds in the ad hoc sheep market near our house, clogging the road, rendering it virtually impassable for a week or more. Before I knew better, I drove that way. As I inched through the market in my little Toyota hatchback -- no air conditioning, windows down -- sheep after sheep after sheep stared me in the eye, rather menacingly, it seemed to me, but I didn’t grow up around a lot of sheep. I wound around the herds. Some little clumps were tied together with ropes; if one sheep jerked, the movement rippled through the others. Some were marked with paint for easy identification and proof of ownership. Some were segregated by color: white, black spots, brown. The road is still covered in straw, and smells like a barn.
The thing about Tabaski -- the Muslim holiday that comes two months after Ramadan -- is that the chef de famille, the head of the family, has to buy a sheep. If he can at all afford a sheep, he must. If he absolutely can’t afford a sheep, he may buy a goat, but a sheep is really the thing. The price of sheep skyrockets before Tabaski. Everyone complains, and everyone buys one.
So the herdsmen came to town. They were, even to my inexperienced eye, clearly not Bamakois. They were country boys, thin, nearly gaunt. Many had the lighter skin distinctive of North Africans, longer narrower noses. They squinted. They never smiled. Many wrapped their heads in long black cloths, and they didn’t wear tailored boubous; baggy blue sheets dangled to their ankles.
Today, at last, was Tabaski. The sheep are gone. Husseini went out with a machete in the morning, and the sheep in the street, his brother’s, went quiet. He came in a little later dangling a skinned leg by the hoof. An hour or two later he had “bien mange,” eaten well.
We went for a walk, and were swarmed by children in their new finery, reciting the benedictions in Arabic and hoping for some change. All they got from us was handshakes and smiles. We waved au revoir and, stepping carefully over the occasional tail or horn or stray entrail, headed home to enjoy the rest of the fête.
