Feasting on the oily ram

Eid el-Adha, better known in Hausaland as Babbar Sallah, is a very important religious occasion with deep symbolism in Islamic history. But it is the kind of occasion that gives many Nigerian medical doctors a fit.  In their mind’s eye, our doctors can already see cholesterol levels spiking up as millions of Nigerians feast on […]

Eid el-Adha, better known in Hausaland as Babbar Sallah, is a very important religious occasion with deep symbolism in Islamic history. But it is the kind of occasion that gives many Nigerian medical doctors a fit.  In their mind’s eye, our doctors can already see cholesterol levels spiking up as millions of Nigerians feast on very oily rams that we ritually slaughtered yesterday to mark the Sallah.

Who told Nigerian Muslims that “oil” is what to look for in a sacrificial ram? I went to the Gudu ram market in Abuja last Friday to buy two rams. It is one of hundreds of emergency ram markets that sprang up in many Nigerian cities, towns and villages. Rams from as far afield as Chad and Niger Republics joined millions of others grown in Nigerian homes and farms in those markets.

Wizened old ram sellers are expert salesmen who guide buyers to the choicest rams. They have one unchanging admonition, “This one is very oily. Buy this one.” I have been going to ram markets on Sallah eve for more than two decades now. For two decades before that, I had been accompanying my grandparents and uncles to ram markets. Yet, I have never been able to figure out how to determine which live ram is oilier than another. At first I thought it was correlated with fatness. You see a ram bulging with meat in the tummy, neck, shoulders and thighs but a ram seller will overlook that one and go for a leaner ram, grab its tail, feel for something just above its tail and say, “This one has more oil.”

What is it above a ram’s tail that tells anyone that it has oil? I took several courses in animal anatomy and I did not see any large layer of adipose tissue above a ram’s tail, such as you see in a human being’s hind section. A ram does not need much fat around the tail because it does not sit on its behind the way a human does. A ram’s behind also does not serve purposes of aerodynamic balancing, since it does not walk around on two legs. My Polish physiology professor Robert Miodonski once said that human females tend to have more adipose tissue on their behind because of the need to counterbalance the mammary glands protruding in front. I cannot observe any such need in rams because the ewe carries its mammary glands at the bottom of the abdomen, quite close to the tail.

At Gudu market last Friday, I came to the conclusion that ram sellers tailored their claims of a ram’s oil to the suspected depth of a buyer’s pocket. They will first ask you the price range of the ram you are looking for. It is within that price range that they will tailor their claims about oily rams. If you mention a low price range, the seller will walk right past huge rams, which obviously have a lot of oil, and direct you to a smaller ram and claim that that one is oilier.

In the end you get to know which ram is oilier only after they are slaughtered on Sallah Day. The butchers will skin, wash and lay the rams out to dry in the sun before they are hacked into pieces, ready for the huge frying pans and pots. At that stage you can see which ram has more fat under its skin. Some rams have so much fat that the flesh looks white, instead of the reddish colour of real flesh. By the time the meat ends up in the pot, some rams can almost fry themselves in their own fat.

In the Sokoto-Kebbi-Zamfara area, Sallah meat is handled differently from all other places. After the rams are slaughtered, skinned and washed, they are not cut into pieces but are hung face down on huge racks. Neighbours will pool all their rams together for the tareni, a communal barbeque. A very hot fire made from specially chosen logs will be set in the centre, with the slaughtered rams surrounding it. The tareni lasts from midday until night, with the caretakers adjusting and replacing the blazing logs. At this stage you really see which ram is oily; as kids we used to place containers under each ram to collect the dripping oil. From my observation at that stage, the biggest and fattest rams are always the oiliest, never mind what the ram sellers said.

The tareni is removed from the fire in the evening and guarded until morning. Guarded from dogs and rats that is, but kids and the men in charge of the barbecue have the license to cut and eat oily portions of the rams called rebu. The oiliest portion is usually around the waist. Almost without fail, whoever eats rebu will have running stomach the next day but that never deterred us. Besides rebu, kids and the men handling the barbecue are also entitled to many portions of the rams such as neck, gonads, kidneys and a portion of the intestines.

The first time I knew that people in other parts of the North did not do tareni was in 1970 when the Lukman family moved into our Clapperton Road neighbourhood in Sokoto. I thought it was scandalous when they sent raw ram meat to our house on Sallah Day. My mother, who knew better, said, “They are from Zaria. They don’t do tareni there.” Tareni is quite wasteful in energy terms and I hope the Energy Commission of Nigeria will teach Sokoto people how to do a barbecue with much less fire.

The meat is shared on the day after Sallah. Our grandfather will assemble his barbecued rams, usually four, and have them cut into pieces, separating the thighs, front legs, ribs and large pieces of flesh. Magatakarda will make a long list of names in a notebook and will assign a piece to each name. His brothers and closest friends often got as much as a thigh, and he often sent me to go round the town and distribute it. The rest of the meat is then fried and shared to family members. Our grandmothers had a way of preserving it for weeks until some absent grandchildren come home.

In the run up to Sallah Day, Nigerian newspapers, radio and television have one story line they have used since the 1960: “Prices of rams shoot up; most people cannot afford them.” Newspapers have been saying the same thing for decades and yet, every year, most of the rams vanish from the markets into people’s pots. Two years ago the story had a ring of truth because our economy was in recession. Some state and local governments and many private firms were not paying salaries, contractors were stranded and alleged treasury looters were on the run.

Still, most of the rams were sold out. That is because millions of Nigerian Muslim men coughed out, saved, borrowed, did virement, begged, blackmailed or even stole in order to get a Sallah ram. Why should this be so when the Islamic injunction is clear, that one should only slaughter a Sallah ram if he or she can afford it? It is because, for a Hausa family head, failing to slaughter a ram on Sallah Day is regarded to be a big shame. The religious purpose of the sacrifice is almost entirely lost to the imperative of saving the family’s face from shame. One also strives to get an oily ram because when we do tareni in the Sokoto region, children will gossip at anyone whose ram is not very oily.

Last night I got my own large bowl of deep-fried ram meat. It set me thinking; since 2012 a doctor ordered me to eat only fish and chicken [I wanted to ask him to provide the money]. He will probably have a fit when he sees my bowl of very oily ram meat.

 

This slightly modified article was first published in 2017.