23 Feb 2006 |
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| Butchers won't learn By THERE is an abattoir not too far away from where I live in the border zone between Lagos and Ogun state. Occasionally, I go to the market myself to buy meat, shrimps or snails, and fruits. I love the freedom of the market space, the mix of sound and spectacle, the drama of moving from one stall to the other in the open air, haggling, touching and dropping food items,, sometimes you run into a known face or someone recognises you and decides to express surprise: "what are you doing here?" He or she points to the "polybag" that I am carrying and tries to peep into it. A brief exchange of pleasantries follows and you move on with your own business. The market place offers you so much: the freedom of movement, the freedom of choice, and above all, the traders treat you with so much dignity. They want your money, and they go about it so nicely. Over time, you become a known face across the stalls. The moment they see you, they welcome you with open arms: "customer, customer". The women in particular are infinitely creative. They call you oko mi (my husband). They may even offer to follow you home! Across the road is a makeshift palmwine shop: you can cool off with cups of local wine, and then continue with your tour of market sections. There is a section for every class of food items. Often I end up in the abattoir part of the small market. I don't know whether you have ever been to an abattoir in Lagos, and the stall of meat sellers that is often nearby. Right there before your eyes, if you arrived early enough, you would see the butchers as they throw a cow onto the floor, they drag it, stretch its legs and then they throw a dagger into its throat. If you really have the time, you would also see goats being killed. Or large parts of pork being cut into smaller parts. The abattoir is the dirtiest part of the market. The butcher's uniform is marked with caked blood turned brown and black. The butcher himself reeks of offensive odour. He waves two long knives, occasionally polishing them against each other. Across the abattoir is dirt, filth actually, with every one looking as if they had just stepped out of a garbage dump. While you watch, one of the butchers could just stand next to a slaughtered ram and bring out his "thing" and water the ground with hot urine, a trail of it flowing into the meat on the ground. He removes his hand from his "thing", then takes it to his nose, he blows hard on it and throws some mucus onto the floor. He wipes the nose with his hand, and then he picks up the sliced big portion of the animal and throws it into a bowl which is just as dirty. There are flies everywhere, cow dung. He steps into everything. Always, the meat is covered by flies, all kinds of flies including those big ones that look green and fat as if they would soon burst and empty their eggs onto the meat that you are waiting to buy. As soon as the animal is slaughtered, it finds its way to the sales point where women are already moving from one meat seller to the other. The meat is transferred into bowls which are kept under the table. In most cases they are covered with the same dirty clothes of a few minutes earlier, those same clothes that had been watered with urine and mucus. The flies are also everywhere; they settle on the beef that is now on display. The meat seller is just as dirty, well, perhaps only a bit cleaner but from the strong stench that hits your nostrils, you can be sure that what he is wearing has not touched water in at least six months. But the long queue of meat buyers do not care. Nigerians love parts of meat. They point to their preferences. Some point to the intestines. Some ask particularly for the heart and the kidney. Shaki (tripe) is also very popular. And cow leg. Of course, most people buy plain beef. Or they ask for the head of the goat. A visit to an abattoir in Lagos will fill an animal rights campaigner with horror. The way the animals are slaughtered and thrown around, and the glee in the eyes of the butchers as they draw blood, would tell you, the observer, that these men are involved in a ritual that defines their being. It is not for nothing that other traders in the market do not pick quarrels with butchers. They are allowed to stay in their own world. Once in Agege, there was a clash between the butchers and the cattle dealers, daggers and long knives were used freely not on the animals but human beings. Human beings were carved into pieces as if they were animals. Long knives in the hands of a butcher are sometimes used as tools of conversation. Their cousins, those who sell roasted meat (suya) by the roadside behave the same way: it could be suicidal to argue with a suya man. One fellow tried it, the angry meat seller simply placed a deep lateral cut on his face. (see The Sun, February 23, p. 16). From killing animals and seeing blood, butchers are forever tempted to plunge their knives into any kind of meat. A public health expert may have a fit if he or she decides to visit a typical meat seller's stall in the market, or the abattoir. The other day, a story in the Daily Telegraph (London) indicated how a tie could be a killer. If it is worn for many weeks, and you do not dry clean it, after dropping oil on it, or walking round the city, it gradually gathers germs which pose serious health risk. These include "fungal candida, streptoccocal bacteraemia, e facecimum, staphylococcus aureaus, c difficile, enterococus bacteraemia..." Scary, not so? But if a butcher's clothings and knives were to be subjected to any kind of test, only God knows the number of dangerous germs that would be found. If the meat we buy from the markets were also to be tested, only God knows what Nigerians go home with each time they visit the meat seller. But this does not bother the long queue of buyers. The meat seller waves the flies off. They return, he chases them away again. But after a while, the flies return in larger numbers. The meat is not covered. The flies are allowed to have their way. When you point to a particular size of beef, he picks it up throws it in the air, if it drops onto the dirty floor, he picks it up again, and if you say, yes, he cuts the meat into pieces and packs it into a "polybag" for you. The butcher does not worry about your health. He is not bothered about the threat that he poses to the community. I often make a fuss about hygiene, but the women who usually outnumber me at the butcher's stand tell me not to worry. They insist that once the meat is properly cooked and dressed with spices, all the germs from the market will be converted automatically into nourishing protein! But thank God, there is now a plan to teach butchers in Lagos some hygiene. I found this useful piece of information in The Comet of February 22, p 36: "Lagos Butchers want to learn" . We are told: "Butchers in Lagos have admitted to unhygienic handling of meat sold to the public, but say they are willing to learn some hygiene education. Investigations by reporters have revealed meat sellers' continued disregard for standard practice in the mode of transporting meat in the metropolis. Transportation of meat from the abattoir is still being carried out on rickety vehicle sand motorcycles, popularly referred to as Okada". Apart from The Comet, award-winning photographer Uche James Iroha has done a set of photographs reproduced in the February 2006 edition of Farafina magazine through which he conveys the sordidness of the butcher's deed. The proposed education for butchers is important but we should not just be worried about the standards of the butcher in the market place, there is yet another category of butchers in our land whose population is increasing and who is as much a threat to public health and sanity. This set of butchers also slaughter animals, the only difference is that it is human beings that they slaughter. They can be found in every corner of Nigeria. They also have long and short knives, well-sharpened daggers and swords. Like the ordinary butcher in the market, they also have customers who ask them to provide meat for the "family pot". Life means nothing to them. Just as that other butcher drags an animal and with a song on his lips, cuts through its throat, this other butcher thinks nothing of the life of a human being. He provides service for his masters or sponsors by cutting through human flesh. The conversion of the whole of Nigeria into one large abattoir is the biggest threat today to the future of the Nigerian state. Something has happened to us. In the past week, angry butchers, using the publication of certain cartoons in a Danish newspaper as excuse turned their knives on fellow Nigerians and slashed human throats in Kano, Katsina, Bauchi, Maiduguri, and Gombe. This has resulted in reprisal killings in the East: as lorry loads of butchered Ibos arrived in Onitsha from the North. Angry Ibos, seeing how their kinsmen had been turned into slaughtered animals and transported like dead cargo, also took to the streets. More persons have died in Nigeria in the last week on account of cartoons that never appeared in Nigerian newspapers, cartoons that the killers have not seen. On display is the fragile state of Nigerian unity, the failure of the state itself, the division of the country into war zones between settlers and indigenes with each group having its army of butchers, the reign of cruelty. The customers of these butchers, those who sustain them by patronising them for either personal or political reasons need to be identified. They need to be made to understand that the filth of their abattoir, the song on their lips, the germs on their cloak, their mode of operation fall below acceptable human standards. They pose a threat to each and every one of us. But I am afraid. Butchers won't learn. They won't learn because of that complex Nigerian disease: present-mindedness, amnesia, a collective failure to learn from history, and a terrible capacity to rationalise anything!
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