Seliba pt. I
Two weeks ago, I did something incredibly naive, especially given the fact that I am now a second year volunteer and should know better: I travelled shortly before seliba, or Tabaski, the most anticipated holiday in Mali.
To give a little context, Tabaski is a Muslim holiday, during which Muslims who have the means to do so demonstrate their devotion to God through the sacrifice of a sheep (or multiple), and reinforce communal ties with their neighbors through giving blessings and demanding pardon. The sheep-sacrificing recalls the story of Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael to prove his love for God. However, when I asked my seemingly very faithful host dad about the significance of seliba (Bambara for Tabaski), he didn’t mention this. As is true of the Christmas holiday for many Americans, seliba seems to be just as much about getting together with the family and eating way past your comfort level than it is about proving your devotion to God. While the older generations head to the mosque, the younger ones tend to stay at home and cook and prepare the meat. There is certainly religious significance in the sharing of meat that goes on between community members; wealthier families are encouraged to give a portion of their food to the poor. However, it seems that this sharing aspect is as much a part of the Bambara tradition as it is of the Muslim tradition.
In an effort to relate to this holiday, I like to understand Seliba as a cross between Halloween, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. The importance of this holiday, the build-up, the universal freaking-out over the seliba outfit reminds me of Christmas (we freak out over the gifts, Malians over the clothes). The little children who go around from door to door giving blessings and hoping for coins and candy in return (they all prefer coins) makes me think of Halloween. The amount of effort and time that goes into preparing and eating the food, which leaves every one completely exhausted and unable to look at meat for several days afterward, reminds me of Thanksgiving.
In any case, I made the horrible choice of travelling to Bamako the week before seliba. The trip was ill-fated to begin with. I spent six hours on the side of the dusty road that passes Kola waiting for transport. There are two varieties of public transport that leave daily from Dioila, the market-town just south of me, heading to Bamako. The first is basically a van, the interior of which has (I assume) been gutted and refitted with four rows of five seats. Each seat is big enough for about half of a normal-sized person. The people working these buses tend to squeeze five people in each row, regardless of their size, and regardless of whether or not they have one or two infant appendages. The second mode of transport is a big bumbling slightly antiquated looking bus which has comfortable, spacious seats, but which tends to be stuffy in cold-season and an inferno in hot season. Yes, the amount of people and luggage that they stuff in, behind, and on top of these cars is impressive and often the cause of blown tires and other accidents, but for the most part, I have been lucky in avoiding these incidents. So, I spent six hours two Tuesdays ago, watching various vans pass me, all bursting with people, belongings, and suffering sheep, until finally, at about two in the afternoon, I got a ride in a large pick-up truck owned by the government owned cotton company, CMDT, which dropped me off in a large-ish town called Fana, which is halfway between Bamako and Segou. Once in Fana, I was able to find a van heading to Bamako and got myself a rear window seat. Long story short, I didn’t realize there were sheep tied to the top of the roof right above me. They shat on me the whole ride to Bamako.Two friendly Malians helped me wipe the sheep-poop off of my bag and pants (onto the seat and floor of the bus). The ride back from Bamako to Kola (two days before seli) was far worse as it involved waiting for several hours amongst throngs of impatient people in what I consider the all-time most miserable place in Mali: the “gare Ngolonina”, the hub of all buses heading to Dioila. Ngolonina=pure squalor.
Clearly this entry is beginning to take on a more negative tone than I had planned, and I am getting bored with it.
What I hope to write about, at some point, is the family drama that unfurled during seliba, which provides an interesting insight into Mali’s overall reluctance to give up certain (in my opinion) retrogressive traditions such as polygamy in the midst of its overall push to educate its women, and its failure to offer professional opportunities to its more progressive, educated youth.
