Former African National Congress chief whip Tony Yengeni was thrust into the spotlight again this week after reports that he stabbed a bull with his family’s spear before it was slaughtered as a cleansing ceremony at his parents’ house in Guguletu, Cape Town, following his release from prison after serving four months of a four-year sentence for lying to Parliament.
His action provoked howls of outrage from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), and the Arts and Culture Ministry leapt into the fray, saying it was not a matter for the SPCA because it went much deeper than cruelty to animals.
Three Mail & Guardian journalists give their views on the matter.
SPCA needs to work with black people
One of the most familiar lines at the funeral services of slain anti-apartheid activists was that their blood would nourish the tree of freedom, writes Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
Last weekend, the blood of a Cape Town cow nourished two causes. One, espoused by the SPCA, is the humane treatment of animals, befitting an evolved people who now know that they, too, feel pain. The other is the right of African people to pursue their cultural traditions as they please in the land of their forebears.
Black South Africans are not interested in whether the criminal code governs the transition from cow to beef. They see killing cows in deference to their God, gods or ancestors as part of being African. The ”enlightened” would probably reject this argument as out of place in an age of reason. But who said killing the beast was an act of reason? Many religious rituals make no sense if measured by this standard. The test should be the sincerity of the faithful, however misguided the ”arbiters” may consider them.
If the SPCA tried to demonstrate sensitivity to why the practice is carried out, instead of engaging in legalistic whinging, perhaps it would find it easier to reach the ears of those it is trying to convert.
In its dedication to the cow’s cause, it betrayed a glaring insensitivity to South African and African history. Its objections came over as a knee-jerk reaction, inspired by the colonial desire to educate the brutish natives.
The SPCA will say, with justification, that it is fighting for living organisms that do not have a voice of their own. But a bit of South African history would tell it that among black South Africans, there has always been a perception that whites care more about animals than about black people. Its actions this week did nothing to dispel this belief.
If the SPCA regarded black people as partners in the fight against animal cruelty, it would avoid giving the impression that it is carrying the white man’s burden in trying to civilise the natives.
The South African SPCA needs blacks as equal partners if it is to have the credibility to take its work into the mainstream. In siding with another attempt to kick Yengeni when he is down, it came over as part of a right-wing lynch mob. And we know it is not.
Culture is not static
White South Africans should not get high and mighty about the treatment of animals in African tradition, writes Drew Forrest. After all, cruel sports such as bull and bear baiting were common in Europe deep into the 19th century, and cock-fighting and dog-fighting still flourish in the shadows.
George Orwell remarked in the 1940s that Spaniards were habitually cruel to animals, and anyone who has witnessed a bullfight can testify to the hair-raising brutality it entails.
Yet the idea that particularly the higher animals are entitled to humane treatment has gradually become entrenched in Western culture. Interestingly, Spain took the lead last year by passing a law that gives the great apes the same rights as human beings.
So it is silly for the Arts and Culture Department’s Sandile Memela to accuse the SPCA of ”racism”. What the row over Yengeni’s spearing of a bull at a traditional purification ceremony really bears out is a clash of cultural values.
Debates about tradition and custom are deeply complicated in South Africa because of the country’s apartheid/colonial past, when whites routinely cited Africa’s ”cultural backwardness” to justify minority rule. Memela’s reaction speaks of the extreme sensitivity that persists around matters of African identity.
But it ought to be possible to confront the question of which traditions belong in a democratic and rights-based South Africa. No culture is static, and no cultural practice should be seen as immutable. Few South Africans would now defend the bar on female inheritance and absence of leadership election in traditional societies, for example.
The issue is not confined to Africa. Until very recently, militarism, imperial expansion and subjection of ”inferiors” and ”heathens” were integral to the culture of Europe — and the American right has yet to get the message.
Certain African traditions are more than worth preserving – they are essential to South Africa’s survival. Whites are apt to scoff at ubuntu (African humanism), but anyone familiar with the support networks for the young, old, sick and workless in poor black communities will know how real it is. Organisationally, its most obvious standard-bearer is the trade-union movement.
The Constitution says nothing explicit about the humane treatment of animals. But it is indirectly enshrined through the emphasis on environmental stewardship — which implies concern for non-human life — and, more broadly, mercy and compassion.
The use of spears in African sacrificial rites is not the issue; if death is quick and relatively painless, the method used hardly matters. But we are told Yengeni’s bull was slaughtered after he speared it: How long was it made to suffer before the coup de grace?
Indeed, M&G staffers who have taken part in traditional ceremonies say a quick death is precisely not the aim — contact with the ancestors takes place as the animal kicks, bellows and bleeds its way to oblivion.
The ritual is aimed at give participants ”peace of mind”, Memela tells us. The question is: To what extent should we view animals as rightless slaves to human need? And should we defend traditional practices, including the prolonging of animal suffering, which run counter to the broad thrust of South Africa’s new moral order?
‘Conditioned ethical blindness’
Am I the only one who finds all the kerfuffle around Yengeni’s bull-slaying just a teensy bit hypocritical? Are we to believe that the outraged suburbanites decrying the pain suffered by the poor bovine before it was dispatched are all vegan, to the last soul?
Most of the people who decry the killing of animals in such ceremonies probably don’t give a second thought to where the meat that appears on their refrigerated supermarket shelves comes from, writes Nicole Johnston. Nicely packaged in styrofoam and plastic, with no visible blood or gore and far removed from the stench of the slaughterhouse, those uniform, anodyne hamburger patties and chops allow them to forget that an animal died to provide them with a meal.
The horrors of factory farming are well documented, but very easy to ignore when there are so many intermediaries between the killing and the kitchen.
Do these people really believe that the beef they eat comes from happy cows frolicking in sunlit, daisy-strewn meadows, and that these creatures are gently and painlessly bumped off, without an inkling of what is happening? Do they genuinely not know that cattle are branded, transported in terrible conditions, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and often crammed into overcrowded, airless dark pens?
And anyone who claims that the animals don’t fear that butcher’s bolt through the brain should remember the numerous incidents of cows escaping from abattoirs and running like hell, literally for their lives. (Sceptics are encouraged to browse websites such as Peta.org and GoVeg.com for video footage of what really happens in abattoirs.)
The same people who are devoted to their household pets would vomit at the suggestion that they eat their dog. Frankly, I don’t see the difference — either you believe in eating animals or you don’t. It’s a response that animal rights activists call ”conditioned ethical blindness”: we don’t want to eat cute fluffy animals like bunnies and kitties, but don’t turn a hair at the thought of eating a sheep.
There is, of course, an argument to be made for the humane treatment of animals destined for butchering, but I am particularly irritated by the knee-jerk reaction to ritual slaughter. GoVeg.com runs a campaign called ”Meet your Meat”, encouraging consumers to be honest with themselves about what they are eating and the conditions under which these animals live and die.
While I would prefer it if animals weren’t killed for food at all, I can summon up more respect for a person in the rural areas who personally raises and cares for a cow, values and has respect for it and then kills it with his own hands than for some city slicker who never stops to think where the flesh on his plate comes from, who would faint at the sight of blood, but is very happy for someone else to do the dirty work of killing.