Burnt Chicken

Bafata sported a one room schoolhouse that taught local children from several surrounding villages. The only requirement for entrance was that the kids had to be Catholic. No animists or Muslims allowed. A lot of parents declared themselves Catholic just to get their kids into the school. At the school, the children would learn French, history, catechism and other largely western fare.

The school teacher was a Mankine tribesman named Jean N'Deki. He was unmarried and had no family in the village, so he was often lonely and looking for company. One day, a group of us were chatting with Jean in the evening. He invited us to stay for dinner and promised us a chicken. Eating meat was a luxury in the village that did not come around very often.

There were plenty of chickens around - scrawny, small things that had developed resistance against the various avian illnesses in the area, and were very hard to catch. There were also sheep, goats and even a few cattle in the village, but these were rarely slaughtered for food. More often they were used for barter. The village slaughtered a cow only once in the entire time that I was there.

So Jean's promise of chicken for dinner wasn't to be lightly ignored. Besides, hospitality being the major cultural value that it was in that part of the world, it would have been surpassingly rude to refuse. So we all accepted.

We sat around a small fire pit as Jean artfully snagged a chicken and broke its neck. This in itself was an odd start since the usual way to kill a chicken was by slicing its throat. The idea was to cut the artery without severing the head. I never quite mastered it, probably because my delicate urban sensibilities made me queasy every time I killed a chicken anyway, so I didn't get a lot of practice.

Usually, the chicken is then dipped briefly into a pot of boiling water. This loosens the feathers, which then can be "rubbed" off pretty much with just a swipe of the hand. But Jean had lit the fire and simply tossed the entire chicken into the flames. The feathers burned off instantly with a little *whoof*. Jean began talking animatedly to the rest of us. I couldn't believe that he was just going to leave the chicken in the fire, as though it were another log. Fascinated, I couldn't take my eyes off it.

It slowly blackened and turned to charcoal. After about 10 minutes it was a lump of charcoal in the outline of a chicken. At last, Jean took a stick, which he used as a poker. I figured that he was going to take the chicken out of the fire. I consoled my hungry stomach with the thought that there was still probably some meat on the thing deep inside.

But it wasn't done enough for Jean. He simply moved it around, turned it over, and left it in the fire. I was astonished.

After several more minutes he finally took it out of the fire. There was now no meat at all left on or in the chicken. He graciously broke off pieces of charcoal and handed them to us. We politely accepted his courtesy and ate them, nodding and telling him how good it was.

I suspect that each of us was having the same thought as we left: "We have GOT to find this man a wife!"