by Will McGrath
Baholo objects. “No, this is not accurate. The fariki is a fine animal. The flesh is very rich in flavor. It is excellent for consumption—but perhaps only for men.”
Poho shudders and sticks out her tongue. “I can attend the party,” she says, “but maybe I will take just the papa and moroho to eat.”
I suppose I should mention that I begin most school days by visiting the swine.
The high school where I teach is part working farm, since everything in Lesotho is part working farm. Hired shepherds graze school-owned cattle through the academic grounds. There are battered chicken coops behind the Math and Science staff room and careful plots of moroho out by the volleyball net. But it is the pigsty—down by the rim of the gorge—that I find most alluring.
The pigs tiptoe daintily through their muck-filled stone-and-mortar enclosures, the ends of their snouts tilting, sniffing, expanding, contracting, trying to fathom my purpose there. Some piglets lie massed in piles, asleep and grunting in the shade, dreaming porcine dreams—fantasies of mud and maize husks and more sleep. Beside the pigsty, dung is piled in great iridescent mounds, bejeweled with blue bottle flies, shimmering in the heat.
Anyone who professes to find pigs adorable has probably never seen a pig up close. Or perhaps they are familiar with the manicured pigs that celebrities sometimes own, ironic and calculatedly quirky pets far removed from rural farm swine. Pigs are foul, stinking, rather disagreeable creatures. They are not adorable. They are coarse and bristling with all manner of whisker, tails twitching neurotically. Horseflies skitter in and out of their enormous flopping bat ears, which are a pale, unpleasant pink, encrusted with brittle mustard-colored scabs. Some of the swine have dark ink blotches spotted across their tapered snouts, the same hue as long-faded tattoos.
It is their eyes, though, that are most remarkable: human eyes, guarded by blond, decidedly human eyelashes.
When I come down to the pigsty for my daily visit, the animals scrabble to their feet, emitting warning grunts to their penmates as they splash from murky puddles. They sniff the air to garner information, eyeing me warily before eventually growing accustomed to my presence.
I understand now why Homer sang of the witch Circe, who transformed Odysseus’s men into swine. As the pigs watch me expectantly, I am looking into human eyes encased in animal bodies, alive with some frightened, mute intelligence.
We are four days away from the party. My wife and her brother, Dan, head off to find the requisite pig. Her brother is in Lesotho to visit; he is an experienced chef and thus a good candidate for pig sourcing. Ellen and Dan set off for the outlying villages, further into the mountains, along with ‘M’e Matello, a friend who will help negotiate the pig purchase.
The three of them take the pickup out past Linakaneng clinic, past the carapace of a long-abandoned truck that rusts halfway down the valley. They meander toward a village where Matello thinks they can find a pig dealer. On the road, they come across some shepherd boys—jauntily whipping their cattle into rank and file—who point them to a nearby village.
It is a beautiful day and the swine are grazing on the hillside. They are robust, dynamic creatures, these mountain pigs. After Matello haggles with the pig dealer, who eventually settles for the equivalent of $40, they go to collect their new animal. But the pig is uninterested in captivity and immediately bolts for the horizon, bounding off with surprising vigor and agility.
The better part of an hour passes in hot pursuit.
Eventually Ellen, Dan, and Matello—with the assistance of the pig dealer and a pack of harassing dogs—are able to corral the wayward hog. The pig dealer, in a nimble feat of legerdemain, snatches the beast’s hind leg as they converge. He upends it and has the animal bound around the hooves before it can react. The pig pants and squirms on the ground, hog-tied.
Now, as they traverse the pseudo-roads of the district, heading back toward Mokhotlong camptown, Ellen hears a thump from the bed of the pickup. She glances to the side mirror, where she can see that the pig, having somehow freed its feet from the rope, has thrown itself over the side of the truck. Matello stops the vehicle.
The pig is dangling over the side of the pickup, still bound around the neck, hooves churning in the air as it is slowly strangled. It looks for all the world like an attempted suicide.
For three days, the pig lives behind our hut on the grounds of the safe home, tied to a stake we have hammered into the earth. We feed the pig pans of milk and apples. We do not know if this is appropriate pig food, but—our theory goes—this will enhance the animal’s flavor. Enlightened gastrophiles are always holding forth on what the animal ate before they ate the animal.
Was it grass-fed? Grain-fed—how gauche! We imagine telling people about this experience, years later, at some exclusive cocktail party.
Of course it was free range, I chuckle, there’s no other way in Mokhotlong.
And pan-fed, Ellen adds. Pans of cream and apples.
Nthabeleng’s daughter, Tseli, and her friends come by to play with the pig. They think this is fantastic, this pig we have. It is their friend. Children passing on the road are fascinated as well. “Hello!” the bold ones yell as they pass. “Who is the owner of that pig?” When I tell them it is our pig, they begin to laugh. “No, tell us!” they say. “Tell us!”
The pig escapes several times each day. It defeats square knots and bowlines, sheet bends and clove hitches, arbor knots, nail knots, slipknots. This pig is the Harry Houdini of pigs. Sometimes we observe the moment of emancipation and chase after the pig, pursuing it around the fenced-in grounds of the orphanage. Sometimes we go to feed it and find it gone. One time I find the pig sitting behind our hut, having yet again untied itself. The end of the rope lies several feet away, cast off disdainfully. The pig is staring at the mountains as it lolls in the shade. It looks over at me and snorts, eyes showing only disappointment in being paired with an adversary so inept.
One midnight I step out behind our hut to urinate. The night is perfect black, soundless, and holy. Nearby, the pig begins snoring sweetly, and I consider going to pet it, but I stop myself—no one wants to be woken from a dream about flying.
Today is the day we kill the pig.
Here comes Senkatana, riding majestically onto the grounds of the safe home, looking like some southern African Hercules. He is tall, muscular, and bearded, wrapped in what appears to be an animal skin. He is wearing the weathered bucket hat that shepherds favor, with his tattered gray pants tucked into his gumboots. Senkatana dismounts from his horse—whipping his animal-skin cape back over his shoulder—and laughs. This laugh is not triggered by anything in particular, but rather indicates the great pleasure he takes in existing. His laugh has the timbre of a baritone sax, oozing mellowed virility and relaxed confidence. It is honeyed and warm in a way that is impossible to fabricate.
This man, Senkatana, is the ur-Mosotho. Nthabeleng has suggested we hire him to do the actual slaughtering, based on the rather sound assumption that if we are unable to keep a pig tied to a stake, we cannot be trusted to oversee its humane execution.
It is perhaps relevant to note that any Mosotho man can kill a sheep. In Mokhotlong, sheep butchery is a skill acquired through osmosis, swallowed in gulps from mountain streams and inhaled through the nostrils. During the last party we threw, the man who hacked open the sternum and eviscerated the sheep was a social worker from the safe home. Many of the male teachers I know can do the same.
But the killing of a pig is a different matter altogether. As Senkatana leaps down from his horse, as he unsheathes his colossal knife, I can see the other men staring at him with some mixture of admiration and jealousy. People are milling eagerly now, staff from the safe home as well as various strangers who have stopped in the road to watch. It is a Friday afternoon and some men have begun drinking. The air is charged with anticipation.
It happens like this:
When Senkatana comes around behind our hut, and not some idiot lekhooa, the pig knows that the moment of his
death has arrived. I can see the flash of instantaneous comprehension. He springs to his feet—and in that tragic instant realizes he has not undone this last rope. Then Senkatana is leading him away squealing, while he tears the earth with his hooves. He is a large animal, as high as my mid-thigh, and it takes three of us to drag him over to the kill zone. Someone has already dug the hole in the ground into which he will pour his blood.
The two sheep killings I witnessed were quiet, almost banal affairs. The sheep went gently to their deaths, oddly mute, without any obvious attachment to life. They knelt—dull-eyed, motionless, docile—and offered up their throats. They lay down, emptying, perhaps gave a last twitch. All of this provoked in me the most bizarre and inappropriate of reactions: anger. What thing lacks the basic ability to fear its own death?
But the pig.
The pig is bucking wildly, all muscle now. Eventually they have him by the fetlocks and flopped over onto his side and bound around the feet again. He thrashes frantically, writhing against the inevitability of this last moment, squealing. Two men hold down his rear while Senkatana kneels on his head, pressing the pig’s face into the gravel.
I catch one last glimpse of those frightened Homo sapiens eyes behind delicate blond eyelashes. Then Senkatana pulls the pig’s head quickly back and makes a deep lateral slash across his throat. The neck is thick with muscle and it takes even the expert Senkatana two more deep slices before the gouts of arterial blood come pulsing forth. This whole time the pig has been screaming in the most distinctly human way. And now, as the vocal cords are cut and the neck opens up and begins to separate away from the body, I realize that the sounds are no longer coming from the pig’s mouth, but are issuing directly from the trachea—a pathetic wheezing and gurgling as the carotid artery chugs away over this last spastic vacuuming of breath.
Senkatana gives another sharp upward tug and snaps the pig’s neck. The convulsive struggles of the body taper off, the horrific choking sound fades, and the pig is dead. Blood runs into the hole in the ground. All of this has taken about forty-five seconds.
Some logistics:
After the pig is dead, two things occur. The second thing that occurs is the depilation of the pig, the removal of the dense wiry hair that covers its body. This is done by pouring buckets of boiling water over the carcass, then scraping vigorously with the jagged tops of metal cans. Senkatana and his assistants scrub away with these makeshift tools until the pig is stunningly pale and hairless.
But the first thing that happens after the pig’s death is the removal of its testicles. These have been promised to Senkatana as part of his fee. With the deftness of a surgeon, he makes quick, artful incisions and then removes the testicles, each of which is bigger than a man’s closed fist, perhaps the size of a large mango. He places them on a table—his prize—these two purple, perfect veined ellipsoids. They look like human hearts.
The gathered crowd has turned festive, anticipating the real celebration tomorrow. Men are now grilling the freshly excised organs for late afternoon snacking: heart, lungs, liver, kidneys. Senkatana begins dancing merrily, a quart of beer in hand, and it is only now that I notice he is wearing a black and blue argyle sweater, perhaps from an old J.Crew catalogue. Somehow it works perfectly with the rest of his ensemble: animal-skin cape, gumboots and tattered pants, shepherd’s hat and whip, and an argyle J.Crew number from Fall ’99.
Even when slaughtering an animal, one must dress to impress.
It is Saturday noon, the day of the party. We have stayed up all night, slow-cooking the pig over a bed of low coals, hand-turning the beast on a jury-rigged metal spit.
Now the women come dancing up from the safe home, in procession toward the pig buffet, their red plastic plates held out before them. They are doing the slow shuffle-stomp and singing a song of thanksgiving as they march. These are the house mothers—the bo-‘me’—who care for the orphaned children day and night. The men are eating already, drinking and laughing and leaning casually up against things in the way that all men at parties must do.
Everyone is here: Nthabeleng and her children, Neo and Tseli, the organization’s entire thirty-person staff, fifteen teachers from the high school, assorted friends from around Mokhotlong. Also in attendance are a Peace Corps volunteer from New Jersey; two Congolese doctors who give preferential treatment to the children at the safe home; a Zimbabwean teaching colleague of mine and his cousins; a Frenchspeaking Quebecer on a six-month furlough from her job; and a windblown British woman hiking her way through Lesotho, whom I found wandering in town earlier today and looking rather hungry.
People begin to dig into the hog. The bo-‘me’ pile their dishes high. Tseli razes small towers of meat in a way that American five-year-olds cannot. The teachers, through mouthfuls, argue the relative merits of spit-roasting versus grilling. The night watch—Ntate Bokang and the ancient Ntate Motsi, who alternate nights shivering next to a small fire in the guard shack—are giddily tearing through platefuls of pork. Motsi is—can that really be?—Motsi is dancing as he eats, Motsi who is older than Jesus, older than the oceans.
The meat is unlike anything I have eaten before. It does not taste like milk or apples. It tastes feral and unsubtle. Is it possible for meat to taste vigorous? This meat tastes vigorous.
We eat, we drink, we dance. Someone has run miles of extension cord up from the safe home and the famo blasting from the speakers sounds like an explosion at the old accordion factory. Everyone is joyously shake-shaking, even the kids, up from the safety of the building, in our arms now and laughing maniacally at this adult madness. Now someone is passing the charred head of the pig around. Its face is frozen in a warlike snarl, lips pulled back to expose jagged teeth. This quickly becomes a photo op. The teachers pose with the animal’s head, proof that they ate pig at some crazy makhooa party. Bokang the night guard poses with it, pretending to punch the hideous death mask, conqueror and vanquished. Nthabeleng poses with it, holding it in front of her face, ferocious four-foot pig-woman.
As the afternoon stretches, we approach a moment of decadence and comfort which is hard to properly convey. We all dance and shimmy. We sing and stomp. We lie in the grass.
When night comes, we sit around a fire and watch the riot of galaxies overhead.
A PARTIAL DICTIONARY OF FOOD & DRINK
Boroso: This is the word for sausage; it refers to any seasoned meat mélange that has been packed into intestinal casing. I have often seen men rinsing out the intestines in the aftermath of an animal slaughter, a simple process that involves inserting a garden hose into one end and flushing out unwanted elements.
The first time I eat boroso is at a party thrown by the teachers on the last day before a break. We have been drinking in the afternoon out among the deserted school buildings, and by nightfall a general clamor for meat arises.
Inside the Math and Science staff room, the women are dancing to American hip-hop, while outside we men gather around the grill. A cold wind is blowing down the plateau and into the gorge, the first sign that autumn is coming. As we stand huffing in the wind, Ntate Baholo lays an enormous length of boroso onto the grill, coiling it carefully as it sizzles and pops. We warm ourselves against the fire, huddling closer, breath steaming like cattle. When the boroso is finished, Baholo cuts it into segments to be distributed to the crowd inside. The party has already been a success—no pistols—and I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that, at this point in the evening, the boroso is a revelation.
In the darkness, I watch Baholo separate several links onto a different plate.
“Who are those for?”
“Ah, my brother, this boroso must be for the night watchman here at the school grounds. I can bring it to him so he will not assault us.”
I consider his words for a moment, wondering if perhaps something has been lost in translation. Baholo sees my puzzled look.
“My brother, it is not that he will assault us—”
He stares down into the black void of the
gorge and then pulls from his bottle. “But I am saying that these are his grounds at this time.”
I nod, feeling that I understand his meaning in some roundabout way, and Baholo heads off into the dark with the steaming plate of boroso.
Chakalaka: This tomato-based vegetable curry is often served with papa (see below) and moroho (see below). It usually consists of diced onions, tomatoes, garlic, peppers, carrots, cauliflower, beans, squash, chilies, and sweet corn. Regardless of ingredients, it is a pleasing word to say.
In Mokhotlong, we buy cans of KOO brand chakalaka, which carries the tagline “KOO: It’s the best you can do”—a motto that always strikes me as a tad fatalistic. Buck up, KOO brand products, that attitude is bringing everyone down.
Coca-Cola: Ubiquitous in Lesotho. It may well be the national beverage. Head up to the loneliest mountain aerie and you will undoubtedly run across that iconic red and white. The government has trouble transporting and supplying antiretroviral medications to some of these remote mountain clinics, but Coke? No problem.
Granadilla Twist: Comes in a clear glass bottle with no information other than the word Schweppes printed on the container. No product name, no label, just a liter of unmarked pale orange liquid. I didn’t even learn its real name until much later, since most people around here just call it “SCHWE-pees.” When I first tried it, I was expecting some generic orange-flavored soda pop. What I received instead was a liter of the soda pop that the angels drink in heaven. One day I plan on looking up what exactly a granadilla is, but—you know what?—I will probably never do that. It is better not to know everything.
The flavor of Granadilla Twist exists on a spectrum somewhere between orange, apricot, and peach, with an additional tang in the finish that saves it from over-sweetness. In addition to the clear glass liter bottle, Granadilla Twist also comes in a confusing smaller size, sold in an opaque purple can. Purple does not taste like orange and peach and apricot. Back to work, design team.