Eid el Kebir

A few days after we arrived we started hearing about an upcoming national holiday called Eid el Kebir. People were telling us to food shop a few days in advance because everything would shut down for several days around this holiday.

Some people were also leaving town for it, and their reasons were explained in gory detail. The celebration involves every family in the city slaughtering a sheep inside their house – sometimes more than one – stringing it up on the rooftop or over the courtyard for disembowelling and skinning, and then the sheep’s heads would be burnt on bonfires down the streets. The skins/fleeces would also be piled up in the streets and the smell was apparently awful.

We talked to westerners who had experienced it before and the horror stories sounded apocalyptic – streets running with blood, the stench of burning flesh, locals running wild in the streets brandishing bloodied knives.

The actual celebration was on Saturday the 28^th, with most people on holiday the Friday before and the Monday after. We did as we were told and stocked up on food in order to bunker down for the weekend.

Several days before Eid, I started seeing sheep being brought into the medina. The idea is to keep the sheep in your house for a few days, like a pet, before killing it. At first it was just the occasional sheep, rope wound around it’s horns, being wrestled down alleyways – the sheep digging it’s hooves in, clearly knowing what it was in for, and young boys excitedly hanging on the other side of this tug-of-war. Then it was sheep in trolleys, two at a time, being wheeled down the road. We were driving back from the new town when I spotted a sheep poking it’s head out of a car boot. I even saw a sheep being carried on a scooter! In the Ain Azliten car park I then saw vans with half a dozen sheep being unloaded. Finally, it was whole herds of sheep being shepherded into the medina and down among the shops and market stalls.

I also started seeing impromptu stalls set up for selling sheep fodder, and the day before Eid the knife sharpeners arrived with their foot operated whet-stone turning and glistening as it sharpened hundreds of knives for butchering. On witnessing these scenes and knowing the fate of the animals my face must have belied my vegetarian sensitivities and I was often the cause of much laughter among the locals.

When talking to a local man we were told of the idea behind Eid el Kebir. Apparently it was originally designed as a way of giving to the poor – rich people slaughtered a sheep and gave two-thirds of it to those in need. Only now everyone buys a sheep, as to not do so would mean losing face in the community. People sell their televisions in order to afford a sheep, there are sheep loans, and people are usually still paying off the sheep they bought at least two years before. A live sheep costs around 2500dh, a lot when you consider that the average wage is 2200dh a month.

Still, the celebration is a family occasion, where people travel to their home towns to get together and the children’s excitement in the streets was palpable.

In the days before Eid, we had gotten used to the sounds of baaing from the rooftops. The night before, the baaing was drowned out by a chorus of men singing near our house. The singing and chanting seemed to go in rounds through the large group, building and dropping, always in harmony. It was magical to listen to and went late into the night. When I awoke the next morning before dawn I could still hear singing and wondered whether they had sung all night as part of the celebration.

My apprehension had been growing as the day of the slaughter grew closer, and we had even been invited to a local family’s celebration. Vincent wasn’t bothered by it as he’d seen slaughtering before and had butchered animals on my parent’s farm in England. However Mike had called with an offer of refuge at the Clock – as it was closed a bunch of people were going to hang out and use up some of the leftover food in the fridges while hiding out from the surrounding butchery. We decided to go there instead.

In the morning I had sat on the terrace with a cup of tea but had had to retreat inside – I could hear baaing from the roofs all around me and couldn’t bear listening for the moment when they would stop – literally the silence of the lambs. I turned some music on to distract myself.

At 1pm we decided to head to our car – about ten minutes walk away – to collect some more of our belongings, as we’d just moved into a long-term rental house the day before and wanted to unpack everything. The plan was to trolley a load of stuff down to the house and then walk back up to the Clock for two-ish. The slaughter usually takes place in the morning, so I figured things would have calmed down a bit and I would be fine. Wrong!

We walked out into scenes of death and devastation. In the time it took for us to walk from our house to the car-park we passed eight or nine ‘barbeques’ – cremation sites fashioned from a base of old bed springs and piles of wood on which the sheep’s heads are burnt. Blackened skulls and smouldering sheep’s horns littered the edges of the sites and the acrid smoke filled my lungs as I struggled to get by. Buckets of entrails, their grisly contents overflowing onto the pavement, were placed nearby. And piles upon piles of sheep skins, the wool matted with congealed blood and the raw-skin sides facing upwards lined our path. The narrow streets left little space to negotiate between the burning bones on one side and the buckets of gore on the other. Desperate not to look I tried staring at my feet, with Vince guiding me by the hand, but my peripheral vision was filled with everything I didn’t want to witness.

Trying to stay calm I took deep breaths and forced myself to keep moving. By the time we made it to the safety of the car park however, I was struggling to stay composed. “I cannot walk back through that again, I just can’t,” I gasped to Vince. “I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can face it.” He suggested that I call Mike and see if he was at the café yet – only a short distance away. I nodded and dialled Mike’s number, praying that he would be there. He answered, but was at his place in the new town. “Are you ok?” he asked. I had managed to keep it together until that point, but as I tried to say “I’m a bit shell-shocked” I dissolved into tears. “Stay there,” he said, “I’m on my way.” While I waited, hiding out in the car and trying to get myself together, Vince organised a trolley to take the stuff back to the house and arranged to meet me back at the Clock as soon as he could. Ten minutes later Mike rescued me and ushered me past another couple of bonfires to the refuge of the café. “Look up, not down!’” he instructed. “Check out that lovely minaret, and over there, aren’t they wonderful beams,” he rambled, trying to distract me.

Finally I collapsed gratefully onto a couch in the café with glass of wine to calm me down and asked “how did you get here so fast?”

“Well, I raced out of the house and there was a huge queue for taxis,” he said. “But then I saw a scooter going past - and I’ve seen people do this but I’ve never done it before – so I stuck out my arm and flagged him down yelling ‘Batha’, he pulled over, I jumped on and here I am!”

The image of Mike gallantly riding in on a scooter – not quite a trusty steed but close enough – to rescue a damsel in distress, was so comic that we both laughed uproariously and the trauma of the day began to seep away.

Later that night as Vince and I walked home the streets had mostly been cleared and the fires had died down. The next day – well-overdue because of an unseasonably warm November – the rains finally came and washed the streets clean again.