Sarki-Fest 2K7

OK. This is gonna be tough to explain but I’ll give it a shot. Kantche is the town right next door to Matameye, just 12km away. And although Matameye is bigger in size (we have about 45k people to Kantche’s 15k or so), in Kantche sits the Chef de Canton for the region. You are probably asking, what is a Chef de Canton? Well, I’m about to try and tell you. The Chef de Canton is basically the religious head-honcho and I think that’s the same thing as a Sarki. The list of Sarkis who have sat in Kantche traces back to the mid 1200’s and for reasons I don’t fully understand, the one in Kantche is a particularly huge deal. (NOTE: please take this entire explanation with an enormous grain of salt, that I’m really quite uncertain as to what exactly I’m talking about.)

Well, just before I arrived the old Sarki who had been in place for 50 years passed away and was replaced by a new Sarki who is just 25-years-old. In other words, the changing of Sarkis doesn’t happen very often and depending on who outlasts who, this could be the only time in my life that it does. So, all of that is leading up to say that the Sarki finally had his convocation party/fest/ceremony spanning the past week and culminating last Saturday. I went.

The population of Kantche probably tripled or quadrupled for this week. Kings from Nigeria and leaders from all over Niger were invited and came for the festivities. It was madness to see this sleepy town bursting with people. And it was a ton of fun. As my friend Gina said, “It feels like we’re at a fair”. She’s right. It did. Tons of demonstrations, people wearing amazing outfits, riding camels, racing horses, selling food, doing crazy stuff, and just generally being out and having a good time.

There’s a PG and a PG-13 version of the description I’m about to tell you. So if you want the 13 and over appropriate portion, you have to email me and I’ll let you know. To fill in some of the gaps, basically the day consisted of a huge procession of people riding beautifully decorated horses and camels. There were thousands of people lining the road and climbing on top of buildings and trees to watch the procession.

Scattered throughout the crowd and the procession were an assortment of… characters. Among them were a troop of men who wore shorts instead of pants (pretty uncommon here) along with women’s wigs, and of course, brandishing long swords. One picture is of one of these guys approaching an innocent spectator who happens to stand out a little from everyone else at over 7ft tall. I also saw a guy come right up to me as he used a knife to drag the blade across his eyeball, and then swallowed needles and regurgitated them again. Yeah, it was amazing. I wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t been about a foot in front of my face.

Finally, the Sarki himself came through the procession surrounded by a band of musket carrying escorts who would intermittently fire blanks off into the air making the whole crowd jump. Of course the temperature was preposterously hot (I’m guessing up around 110) and as a result exhausting. But in short, it was amazing. Good times in Kantche.