Since I arrived to Matholeng back in December, I have kept a
small green bucket in my kitchen area, which I use to dispose of all my food
scraps e.g., potato peels, apple cores, carrot ends, and the like. In the
mornings, I bring the bucket to the pigsty at the edge of our yard, and feed
the food scraps to our pig. I’d always been fond of this pig, and after my
ntate told me it was ok to feed it chicken bones, I would often, while feeding
it, think to myself of that character from Snatch
who menacingly told people how long it would take pigs to completely devour a
human body. But more recently, our relationship took a turn for the worse,
after the rope that held it inside the sty began coming loose with some
frequency.
Some mornings, I would wake up to hear a heavy breathing
right outside my door punctuated with the occasional light snort. I fixed this
by taking out the green bucket and leading the pig back to the sty, and it
would trail fitfully behind me, periodically pressing its wet, dirty snout
against the back of my thigh. I imagined it was thinking “Whatcha doing? Is
that food? Are you going to give me that food? Can I eat it? Whatcha doing?
Whatcha doing? Whatcha doing?” Please try to picture this pig in its full form,
110-pounds and extremely persistent and usually covered in mud. The low-point
of our relationship came one weekend that I was very sick, and spent most of
three days walking back and forth to my pit latrine, my steps shadowed each
foot of the way by this pig.
I have given you all of this information so that you can
fully appreciate the my feelings when I learned that this pig was due for
slaughter Saturday the 29th of March. Perhaps you suppose I received
the news with equanimity, and acted kindly to the pig in its last days. You
give me too much credit. I spent the last few trips to the sty issuing under
the breath taunts like “I’m going to a workshop on Saturday. Have you got any
plans?” and “You know what would happen if the community cut me up and ate me? There would be
congressional hearings. You know what’s going to happen when they do it to you?
Nothing.”
When I returned home from the workshop Monday night, I was
pretty tired and planned to eat a small dinner and go to bed. While I had some
eggs hardboiling in the pot, I heard a knock on my door. My ntate and I talked
briefly about the weekend, and then he presented me with a small share of the
slaughtered pig, which equaled a very large share of pork for one human to
consume. There was one roughly triangular piece about the size and shape of a
properly folded American flag, and another scythe-like piece comprised of two
rib bones. “You’ll have to cook it now,” he advised me. After a brief moment of
meat-panic (look it up in the DSM-V), I settled to the task at hand and started
hacking away the meat from the skin with a sharp but woefully unsuited to the
task knife. This knife is great for tomatoes and dices onions admirably, but
for cutting flesh it was like shoveling snow with a soupspoon.
I went and knocked on my ntate’s door and said something
like “Ke soabile ntate, empa ha ke tsebe ho pheha nama ea fariki.” I’m sorry sir/father, but I don’t know how
to cook meat of pig. He laughed and beckoned me in to see the setup he had:
all of the meat in one big pot with an inch or two of water to steam, mixed
with some spices and onions. I went back and steamed the meat that I hadn’t yet
hacked off. Four straight meals of pork later, I was done.
How did it feel to eat the creature that once tormented me? Reader, it felt good.
How did it feel to eat the creature that once tormented me? Reader, it felt good.
