Cameroonian goat pepper soup

My meat must have as few recognisable cognitive skills as possible. Its communication with humans must be close to nil.

It must not stare me down in the market. It must, in fact, not make any meaningful eye contact. These personal biases were brought to mind on the day I encountered a small white goat at Calabar's White Market.

The owner was an elderly man in a fez cap, who commented on everything and on every passer-by. He sat in a typically neat narrow market lane next to a man with a duck, next to battery chickens in cages. I was waiting for the boy who had gone to kill and clean my old layer. Did I want to buy his goat, he offered. I looked at the goat. The goat looked at me. I politely refused.

At this point I must give a small history of my hitherto encounters with goats, and the general nature of those goats to help the reader understand this look that passed between the small goat and I. All the goats I had ‘met' before this point were goats informally termed "hausa goats".

They resembled the ram in height and frame. They were often a dirty shaggy milky white or brown appearance. Their mouths were often moving in what seemed to be mindless chewing. They did not really appear to acknowledge my presence in any significant way.

This White market goat on the other hand looked as if he had had a bath that morning. He was spotlessly clean, white, pink at the point at which his little tail turned up. He was a short fellow, close to the ground with a rotund stomach.

He was chewing, but often stopped his meal to observe passers-by, like his owner, commenting monosyllabically. His bleating came across as conversational. The thought occurred to me that he perhaps believed he was there to sell the old man. One other strong distinguishing feature of this goat was its smell; so strong that I picked it up from the beginning of the market lane.

When I had a discussion about this goat later in the day, I was reprimanded for having refused an authentic delicacy. That he-goat I was informed, was 100% organic meat. Unlike the goats I was familiar with, it ate nothing but green leaves, and particular greens for that matter. That smell that I had encountered from the beginning of the lane was one of the greatest of Nigerian culinary aphrodisiacs.

It was a call to a feast; a preparation of the mind and stomach for what was to come, like the smell of freshly baking bread etcetera etcetera. Unlike some people, I have nothing against the strong ‘gamey' smell of goat meat, my problem was simply that the goat had given me a cantankerous look.

So, the goat was a particular goat. That just confirmed my suspicion...that it was so particular and intelligent, that it was in danger of losing its appeal to the discerning appetite. One of my Jurisprudential courses in university had to do with Animal rights, and one recommended text in particular made a compelling case for the rights of animals not to be eaten or bred for the purpose of consumption by humans.

Another compelling argument comes from the recent documented phenomenon of humans transforming into goats for the purpose of evading arrest. My husband found himself frantically searching for an answer when some Americans in Washington D.C. asked (and not at all condescendingly) why anyone in their right minds would choose the form of a goat for the purpose of evading arrest in Nigeria of all countries where people are keen goat eaters.

Why not the non-chalance of a tree by the side of the road, or the terrifying drama of a spitting viper?

Was there not a real danger of being led away and slaughtered for a meal, after one has escaped arrest, and should one not rather take one's chances with the prison cell over the no-return policy of the cooking pot?

Whatever the rationale for choosing to transform into a goat -even if the possible incompetence of the medicine-man, who engineered the transformation-, can one dismiss this phenomenon and consider edible just any goat that one encounters?

Some people might disdain my dilemma. Like those to whom I presented it on reaching the house that day. And what about all the other cantankerous intelligent goats that I had eaten in the past without any shred of remorse?

My stubborn conclusion was and is that they were not that goat. I do have the right to reform afterall, and like most people who grew up in Lagos, and have had few close encounters with live goats, the popular definition of goat for over thirty years as far as food is concerned has been a dismembered piece of meat on a table in the butcher's alcove in Sura market.

For those who don't care if a goat is making eye contact or not, I have a recipe for Cameroonian goat meat pepper soup coming up next. And by the way, it belongs to Sylvie Dunn, so that it is clear I'm no hypocrite.