An Interlude with the Killing of the Cat

I was quite amused to arrive at Mummy’s place the other day to a lively argument between one of the Senegalese guys, Aboo, and a Ghanaian girl. The man turned to me, outraged with disbelief, and said, not quite getting the word right, ‘They killed a cake; right in the street, I saw them earlier, they slit its throat’. After taking some seconds to realise that the cake was a cat, I understood that some people in the street had closed in on the furry street prowler and committed the deed on our road to prepare it for cat soup.

‘Your people are animals’, he declared. The Ghanaian girl was standing her ground, ‘you eat snake in Senegal’. ‘A snake is not a pet’, he cried.  Not accustomed to eating either cat or snake, as a traveller from the West, with the vigour of our ancestral explorers, we tend to get our knife and fork ready for anything. Additionally, political correctness and a modern trend of inclusiveness and self-critique have made us limp opinionators. As a blog writer, I felt more of an impulse to document the killing of the cat and to write about it later rather than comment on the killing itself.

As far as I could see, the people who were hungry seemed to benefit from both having streets cleared of stray animals and some fresh meat on the table. The only party that truly didn’t benefit of course was the poor cat. Personally, I was very glad that I hadn’t witnessed the event or seen the pot of cat soup.