Habari za mbuzi?

Shame on me -- I have been promising news of goats (habari za mbuzi) but not delivering. Being a doctoral student, particularly one doing qualitative research, means my life for the foreseeable future will be comprised primarily of writing, so sometimes it’s hard to self-motivate to write for fun.

Anyway, back to the goats. About a week ago, Bre and Josh, the very generous couple I’m staying with here, were musing about how kitchen and household trash accrues in the yard (at least until it gets burned in a hole out back), and how grass gets cut around here (usually with some permutation of a machete), and how funny it would be to be known as goat-owning wazungu (foreigners). At the time, I was reading a book--for my two-member long-distance husband-wife book club) that talked about how the Saudi Arabian kingdom used hungry goats as citywide garbage control as late as the 1970s, and this might have been a catalyst for more serious thinking about the perks of small-scale goat husbandry here in Msewe. Bre and Josh already live in a walled compound that suffers from no lack of weeds and patches of uncut grass, and have a built-in herdsman: their night watchman, Yona, is a Maasai man from the vast steppe straddling Kenya and Tanzania, near Mount Kilimanjaro. He mumble-sings traditional pastoral tunes to himself perpetually, and he walks around with a long staff as a permanent fashion accessory. The initial idea was to get one goat, but after talking with Yona, the idea of two goats – a nanny and a billy – with the prospect of lots of little baby goats down the line – began to grow on Josh. And who better to buy said goats, than the Maasai Goat Whisperer himself?



We all mulled over names for a couple of days, and while Matunda and Mboga (Fruits and Vegetables) were front-runners for awhile, Dick and Condi emerged as dark-horse (dark-goat?) winners at the last minute, perhaps inspired by all the excitement leading up to the US election. A few nights and a few tens of thousands of shillings later, Josh and Bre came home late from dinner to find the goats already settled in the house in Msewe. Their names stuck instantly as soon as we saw them: Dick is pale and broad-faced, masking unparalleled cunning by goat standards, with the uncanny ability to sneer-smile with his little goat-lips. Condi is tiny and dark-speckled, and is utterly submissive to Dick (don’t know if that is symbolically important). Bre has a suspicion that both are neoconservatives hellbent on world domination, a plan plotted from their own backyard. I think she may be right, but their prospects may be a bit dimmer after last Tuesday (just re-grouping, perhaps?).

News of the goats' arrival traveled fast, despite no lack of barnyard animals in Msewe. Dick is quite well endowed, as Yona was quick to point out (by grabbing and displaying said endowment). He has quickly become the most sought-after billy goat around, and now boasts a harem of a minimum of three nannies, with plans to be studded out to even more. Apparently, there are visions of little goat kiddies dancing in most of the neighbors’ heads… and we are already contemplating the prospects of a quaint artisanal cheesery in Msewe. We like to call this little experiment our own little micro-Heifer Project. Donations, anyone?