Scotch & Live Goat

I went to a coming-together ceremony for one of my 2 host families recently. It was an event where all extended family members (quite a large number of people) get together for a day to dance, talk, eat, and generally just rejoice. It was on a Sunday. There was a goat involved. The family decided that a goat should be slaughtered for the ceremony. They wanted me to help with this. I was all for it.

So we leave at 5:45 in the morning to go pick a live goat from a nearby man’s farm. When we get to the farm, I notice a canister of Glen Fiddich Scotch sitting on the fence post! Now -this is really out of place. In the middle of rural South Africa on a farm surrounded by mountains and baboons, wading among a field of live goats lies a bottle of fancy scotch sitting out. Ummm.

So I ask my host brother, Mamakgeme, about it and he laughs and says that they use the canister for target practice with their guns. Then he turns to me and says “that’s a nice scotch.”

And the goat? The meat was good. The intestines and “the big artery from the heart” were not. But I ate it all and I helped hold the squirming beast as Mamakgeme laboriously cut its neck with a dull knife better suited for spreading butter than killing.