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Namibia
 Photo: Clark Wheeler
Namibia
 Photo: Jeroen Peys

Namibia: Slaughter For The Sake Of Music
By Ryan Krogh

The smell of goat is not a pleasant odor.  This is not to say that it is especially vile, just that it is not exactly pleasing.   It is a little bit like wet leather and musk coupled with overtones of rotten cold cuts.  You might say it is an acquired smell, especially when you are covered in it.    

I learned this fact at a kraal on the outskirts of Windhoek, Namibia on a warm night just before the onslaught of rainy season.  Against my better judgment and at the behest of a cadre of amused Namibians, I was attempting to wrestle a live goat to the ground.  It was an exercise in futility.  Time after time I lunged in vain at a mass of stampeding goats that were being corralled my way.  Inevitably, at the exact moment I lunged, the fleeing goats would part around me like a school of frightened sardines.  Their bovid bodies would jump away in perfect synchronized motion, kicking up a cloud of dust in the calm African air and leaving me sprawled out again on the warm ground.  With each lunge, and each miss, I was only further soiling my already mucked pants.   

After half an hour of failed attempts, a dusty haze had kicked up around the kraal like heavy smog.  The auburn dust was sticking to my sweaty arms and coppering my sunburnt face.  The smell of goat filled my nostrils and seeped into my skin.  By then I wanted out, to call it quits, forget the whole damn thing.  The owner of the farm, however, had a different idea and just kept patiently herding the goats after each failed attempt.  Again he clustered them in the far corner of the pen.  Again he ran at the herd, chasing them my way.  And again I threw myself at the goats as they careened past, desperately reaching for something to grab hold of—a leg, a tail, even an ear—only to have whatever I clutched on to slip through my greasy hands.   

Every time I missed, the owner would smile and shake his head in bemusement, as if even he couldn’t believe I wanted a goat this bad.  His family, my audience at the kraal, also seemed to be enjoying my misery.  With each miss they applauded and cheered on the deft movements of the goats and the daft movements of their pursuer.   The stupid American flopping around, willingly covering himself in excrement in a desperate attempt to chase down a goat.  Somehow I couldn’t help but wonder if this was their plan all along.

Two hours earlier the proposition of buying and slaughtering a goat had seemed exotic but practical.  I had recently purchased a djembe drum from a street vendor—a heavy drum, made from African mahogany and adorned with a rustic village scene—only to have it split down the head two days later.  It was my prized souvenir from the trip.  I was devastated.     

Upon hearing of my broken drum, though, my good Namibian friend Liebs quickly reassured me, telling me we could restring it in no time.  He explained that it was my obligation to fix the instrument. The djembe drums, he told me, were said to contain three spirits: the spirit of the tree from which the drum was carved, the spirit of the animal from which the drum head was taken, and the spirit of the instrument maker himself.  Together, they each worked in unison as one instrument, but separate or broken, the spirits of the drum were lost in limbo, musical souls temporarily displaced.  It was my duty as the drum’s owner, he informed me, to restring it with a new skin and restore the spiritual balance of the drum.  Goat skin, I was informed, would work best.           
 
I realize now experiencing another culture can be a lot like cheap whiskey: sometimes it’ll make you do stupid things.  It is the fodder for the inborn fool in all of us.  Free from our own culture’s strictures, our common sense is often suspended.   I hadn’t fully taken in the scope of what I had agreed to do before Liebs had arranged for us to drive to a farm outside the capital city of Windhoek.  When we arrived, he explained to the owner our dilemma, conversing in hushed Oshivambo. 

The owner was a gruff-looking man but grinned broadly as Liebs talked.  He shook my hand smiling and then directed us to a pen off to the side of the others made from the dried and stripped branches of an acacia tree.  The branches stood tight against each other and were tied together with cracked and rotting bark.  They were positioned so snugly it was hard to see inside.
 
The kraal was full of adolescent goats.  They were just big enough to sell for a profit but still small enough to fit through the barbed-wire fences of the other pens.  These goats, explained Liebs, were the veal of goat meat and perfect for a drum head.  Red numbers spray-painted on their flanks advertised their price.   As we approached they crowded against the far wall.    

“You like?” the owner asked.  “Make good drum.”  He jumped inside the kraal and deftly straddled one of the goats.  He flipped it to the ground in front of us and grabbed its belly, pulling at the stringy skin.  “See,” he said, patting its stomach, “good skin, make good drum.  You like?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding not knowing what I should be looking for.

“Good,” he said, letting the goat free.  “Now you pick one.”

I tried to explain to the owner that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t know the first think about picking goats; but he remained adamant.

“You must pick,” he said. “It is for your drum. They are different priced.” 

Again I protested, but he was having none of it.  In the meantime, Liebs had begun chasing the goats around the pen, getting them sufficiently riled up for me.

In hindsight, perhaps I should have questioned the intentions behind Liebs’ desire to buy a live goat and his initial insistence on fixing the drum.  Perhaps I should have been more suspicious of the relish with which he organized the undertaking.  After all, this was a guy who had once convinced me to eat the tail end of a cockroach, telling me it was an African delicacy.  It was Liebs, after all, who taught me that practical jokes are not only an American pastime.    

Part of me knew I was playing the role of the gullible foreigner, and yet I still couldn’t resist.  Liebs had convinced me of the need to fix the drum, assuring me of the ease with which it could be done.  He even appealed to my cultural curiosity, explaining that if I participated in restringing the drum I would become a part of it and, in turn, Africa would become a part of me.  He knew the situation was too novel for me to pass up.  So when the owner refused to let me off the hook again, yelling at me to get inside the pen, secretly I was giddy.  I hardly even hesitated before jumping in to chase down the herd of goats.     

 

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