Tabaski

Written Wednesday, December 26, 2007

 

 

Last Friday my village celebrated Tabaski, commemorating the story in the Bible (and I guess in the Koran) when Abraham was told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, but then at the last minute he was allowed to sacrifice a sheep instead.   It's the most important holiday of the year here, but the celebration is almost exactly the same as Korite (the feast at the end of Ramadan) except that more money is spent on the feast and new clothes for everyone.  

 

So shortly after breakfast all the men and the older women went to a field to say Tabaski prayers.   I got to go too and take some pictures, which hopefully I'll upload soon.  After the prayers we started eating whatever food was already cooked, so in my family we ate couscous with oily macaroni (I hate the oily macaroni, but what can you do).   Soon afterwards I ate lunch with my family – a sheep they had sacrificed – and then my counterpart invited me to come eat with him, which I couldn't refuse, so I had a second meal of grilled sheep.

 

Throughout the day I was the official photographer – everyone wants a picture of themselves in their new pretty outfits – so I went around taking pictures of everyone, and they would tell me to come eat with them.   I was stuffed already, but it would have been insulting to refuse, so I would have about two bites each time.  I have definitely not had anywhere near this much meat since coming to Senegal.   It took my digestive system three days to recover from the shock.

 

Around noon we spotted smoke out in the bush.  It is not unusual at this time of year because it is common practice to set fires in the bush to clear away the undergrowth, but it was unusual on Tabaski because nobody was working that day.   So some men went out to investigate, and they came back and said that there was a wildfire threatening the banana plantation.  So some people went out to try to put it out, but I guess it wasn't a big threat because most people just carried on with Tabaski celebrations.   We found out a few days later, though, that in the neighboring village some people's cotton fields got burned up, which is really unfortunate.

 

At the end of the day, just as for Korite, the women dressed up in their new outfits (they had been wearing old clothes all day for cooking) and went around the village to greet people and apologize for sins of the past year (but mainly to show off their new clothes, I think).   This time I wore my blue boubou that I had made for swearing in, which none of my villagers had seen before.  They got a real kick out of seeing me dressed up like that, and everyone agreed that I was a "real African" now.