Rest In Peace, A Million Rams

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY MAHMUD JEGA

I happened to drive past the imposing headquarters building of the National Bureau of Statistics in Abuja’s Central Business District last week, so I pulled up in front of it and shouted for the hearing of anyone inside the building, “Have you got the figures for the number of rams slaughtered for Sallah last Wednesday? When will you publish it?”

It is not only figures for poverty, unemployment, inflation, naira depreciation, negative GDP growth rate, galloping population growth, out-of-school children and other distressing things that NBS should be publishing. It should tell us how many rams were slaughtered during this year’s Sallah, compared to how many were slaughtered last year and every year in the last 30 years, for us to see whether there is a positive or negative growth rate. Whether NBS statisticians use regression, integral calculus or randomized block design, it is up to them.  We want to know the number of rams left, and whether we will have enough rams in the years to come to sustain this 1400 years old religious tradition.

Okay, did anyone stop and say a prayer for the repose of the souls of millions of rams that were slaughtered last week? Five human souls perished in the Titan submersible on their way to ogle at a 110-year-old accident scene, and CNN talked about nothing else for a whole week. Sheep lost millions of comrades last week and NTA made only a brief mention of it, emphasizing the message of the Imam as he brought out a sharp knife and slaughtered his ram. Is it because sheep have no tv stations or websites of their own?

Beyond the lives of sheep, lets now turn to the lives of the millions of Nigerian men, women and children who ate the ram meat. Eid el-Adha, better known in Hausaland as Babbar Sallah, is a very important religious occasion with deep symbolism in Islamic history. It is however the kind of occasion that gives many medical doctors a fit.  In their mind’s eye, doctors can already see cholesterol levels spiking up as millions of Nigerians feasted on very oily rams.

Who told Nigerian Muslims that “oil” is what to look for in a sacrificial ram? On Tuesday last week, I went to the Galadimawa emergency ram market in Abuja to buy one ram and add to the three rams that I got as gifts from very generous masters. It was one of hundreds of emergency ram markets that sprang up in many Nigerian cities, towns and villages. Rams from as far afield as Chad and Niger Republics joined millions of others grown in Nigerian homes and farms in those markets.

Wizened old ram sellers are expert salesmen who guide buyers to the choicest rams. They have one unchanging admonition: “This one is very oily. Buy this one.” For at least two decades as a youth, I accompanied by grandfather and uncles to ram markets on Sallah eve and for more than two decades now, I have been going to ram markets on my own steam. Yet, I have never been able to figure out how to determine which live ram is oilier than another. At first, I thought it was correlated with fatness. You see a ram bulging with meat in the tummy, neck, shoulders and thighs but a ram seller will overlook that one and go for a leaner ram, grab its tail, feel for something just above its tail and say, “This one has more oil.”

What is it above a ram’s tail that tells anyone that it has oil? I took several courses in Animal Anatomy and I did not see any large layer of adipose tissue above a ram’s tail, such as you see in a human being’s hind section. A ram does not need much fat around the tail because it does not sit on its behind the way a human does. A ram’s behind does not serve purposes of aerodynamic balancing, since it does not walk around on two legs. My Polish Physiology professor Robert Miodonski once said that human females tend to have more adipose tissue on their behind because of the need to counterbalance the mammary glands protruding in front. I cannot observe any such need in rams because the ewe carries its mammary glands at the bottom of the abdomen, quite close to the tail.

After four decades’ accumulated experience, I came to the painful conclusion that ram sellers tailored their claims of a ram’s oil to the suspected depth of a buyer’s pocket. They will first ask you the price range of the ram you are looking for. It is within that price range that they will tailor their claims about oily rams. If you mention a low price range, the seller will walk right past huge rams, which obviously have a lot of oil, and direct you to a smaller ram and claim that that one is oilier.

In the end you get to know which ram is oilier only after they are slaughtered on Sallah Day. The butchers will skin, wash and lay the rams out to dry in the sun before they are hacked into pieces, ready for the huge frying pans and pots. At that stage you can see which ram has more fat under its skin. Some rams have so much fat that the flesh looks white, instead of the reddish colour of real flesh. By the time the meat ends up in the pot, some rams can almost fry themselves in their own fat.

In my native Sokoto-Kebbi-Zamfara area, Sallah meat is handled differently from other parts of Hausaland. After the rams are slaughtered, skinned and washed, they are not cut into pieces but are hung face down on huge racks. Neighbours will pool all their rams together for the tareni, a communal barbeque. A very hot fire made from specially chosen logs will be set in the centre, with the slaughtered rams surrounding it. The tareni lasts from midday until night, with the caretakers adjusting and replacing the blazing logs. At this stage you really see which ram is oily. As kids we used to place containers under each ram to collect the dripping oil. From my observation at that stage, the biggest and fattest rams are always the oiliest, never mind what the ram sellers said.

The tareni is removed from the fire in the evening and guarded until morning. Guarded from dogs and rats that is, but kids and the men in charge of the barbecue have the license to cut and eat oily portions of the rams called rebu. The oiliest portion is usually around the waist. Almost without fail, whoever eats rebu will have running stomach the next day but that never deterred us, though a doctor told me that it is due to contamination, not the fat.  Men handling the barbecue are also entitled to many portions of the rams such as neck, gonads, kidneys and a portion of the intestines. Last week Malam Bello Anka posted on Facebook a picture of a mutilated tareni ram and was told that cats ate it. The stolen portion was so neatly done that it was obviously the work of men, not any cat. Tareni is quite wasteful in energy terms and I hope the Energy Commission of Nigeria will teach Sokoto, Kebbi and Zamfara people how to do a barbecue with much less fire.

The meat is shared on the day after Sallah. My grandfather used to assemble his barbecued rams, usually four, have them cut into pieces, separating the thighs, front legs, ribs and large pieces of flesh. Magatakarda, being an old school teacher, will make a long list of names in a notebook and will assign a piece to each name. His brothers and closest friends often got as much as a thigh, and we were sent me to go round the town and distribute it. The rest of the meat is then fried and shared to family members. Our grandmothers had a way of preserving it for weeks until some absent grandchildren come home.

Every year since I began reading Nigerian newspapers, they invariably have one lead story as Sallah approached: “Prices of rams shoot up; most people cannot afford them.” They have been saying the same thing for decades and yet, every year, most of the rams vanish from the markets into people’s pots. Even when we had two recessions in recent years, some state, local governments and many private firms were not paying salaries, contractors were stranded and alleged treasury looters were on the run, most of the rams still sold out.

That is because millions of Nigerian Muslim men coughed out, saved, borrowed, did virement, begged, blackmailed or even stole in order to get a Sallah ram. Why should this be so when the Islamic injunction is clear, that one should only slaughter a Sallah ram if he or she can afford it? It is because, for a Hausa family head, failing to slaughter a ram on Sallah Day is regarded to be a big shame. The religious purpose of the sacrifice is almost entirely lost to the imperative of saving the family’s face from shame. One also strives to get an oily ram because when we do tareni in the Sokoto region, children will gossip at any household whose ram is not very oily.

Millions of teeth all over the country are busy chewing fried ram meat as we speak. Doctors are already lining up Lipitor and other cholesterol-controlling drugs in readiness for the epidemic to follow.