“He’s saying you slice it this way, across the neck."

I looked at the knife, long as a forearm, the honed blade putting a cut-throat razor to shame.  The bullock looked at the knife too. Maybe it had seen it before. Seen it used. Maybe it recognised the inevitability of what was about to happen. Or maybe it was just an animal off the farm, an animal that wouldn’t know a knife from a fencepost. I hoped it was the latter, for my own conscience if nothing else.

I looked at Hamid, my sales manager and translator, then at the knife-wielder, the butcher-in-waiting, a swarthy unnamed Berber who I had never seen before.

“Thank him,” I inclined my head towards the grinning butcher, a hand over my heart, “it is indeed an honour, but an honour surely best served on one of your own.” The butcher shrugged indifferent. It was the response he expected. I was a westerner after all.

It was May 2014, forty kilometres south of Casablanca where for the past nineteen months I had been struggling to build a steel rolling mill in the middle of nowhere. Not just any rolling mill but a big US$50 million dollar state of the art plant on seven hectares of nothingness somewhere between the coast and Marrakesh. And today was the day. The unknowing wretched bullock, all horns, hoofs and wild eyes, the symbol of our success at last.

It was a lovely Moroccan spring day. Cloudless skies, sun high, the factory painted, washed and gleaming. It would never look so again. The invited crowds had gathered; workers, their families, kids, local dignitaries, owners, managers, well-wishers and those just angling for the party bag of a banquet feast. Tents had been set up and decorated; carpets, tapestries, low tables. Posters had been erected extolling the arrival of Morocco’s newest steel industry wannabe. The roads washed free of dust, the gardens raked and watered, the kerbs painted. All that was needed now was the production line start-up, the first half-hour of rebar production then the congratulations, the back slapping, the bonhomie and feast.  For many of the 157 workers it would be the first meat they and their families would be eating in seven months, since the Eid al-Adha sacrifice of goats the previous October. But first and before all else would be the necessary business with the bullock.

Having adroitly side-stepped the dubious honour of slitting the poor animals throat I stood back as the crowd surged in around the increasingly panicking animal. I might not know, or wish to know, much about throat slitting, but I do know about pressurised vessels, especially pressurised vessels about to be ruptured.  I stepped back another twenty-feet. The crowd had their phones and ipads out now, assembled, primed, ready and waiting. Beast hobbled, the butcher and his team tackled the stricken animal, two either side, their combined weights on the wide levers of its horns,  pulling down on one side, pushing up on the other, turning the beast’s head, twisting it down onto the floor, its body following. Now the bullock was bellowing, kicking against the hobbles. The butcher shouted and men from the crowd, some my own workers, descended upon the animal pinning its body under their weight. Now for the coup de grace. The butcher’s team had the horns in a different grip now, pulling back hard, ratcheting the hapless beast’s head back towards its shoulders, the arc of its exposed neck taught, quivering like a bow string. The butcher raised his voice in an incoherent incantation, the crowd holding its breath, the wicked blade flashing, the beast bellowing.

The blood came;  gallons of it, under pressure, a bright 20-foot cascade of steaming red jetting into the pressing crowd better than any fire hose. Drenched, shrieking, the crowd pulled back, the butcher and his team grinning like monkeys.  One particular white-shirted individual stood out.  Needless to say he wasn’t white-shirted anymore. I can’t say I was sorry. The bullock still writhing, the crowd drew back like a living thing, the wretched animal bleeding a river for half-a-minute more before losing consciousness. Then the butchering and the man was an expert. Forty-minutes and the bullock had ceased to exist. Tail to horns, hoofs to ears; gone, swallowed by an armada of plastic bags. Families loaded down with skin, meat, offal, bone and gristle, grinning like they’d won the lottery. The only thing not bagged or bucketed, the stomach.  Buried deep in a hole opposite the rolling mill’s main entrance,  supposedly the touchstone of ongoing good fortune for the facility and all concerned.  

Did I have misgivings about sacrificing such a fine and obviously healthy animal? Yes.  Am I relieved I didn’t have to wield the blade? God yes!  Did the sacrifice work? Perhaps. Who can ever know for sure? Given similar circumstances would I allow another such sacrifice? I like to think not but I guess when in Rome? But eight years hence, long gone from Morocco, an abiding thought remains. Stupid I know. Apple, Samsung and the rest - waterproof? Okay maybe - but what about blood?