Tiimbe & Tabaski

So about a month ago was the village fete of Tiimbe. I asked around to neighboring volunteers, and no one else had ever even heard of the fete, so I’m pretty sure that it is just celebrated in Yaho. We did have school that day, so I asked each of my classes, what is Tiimbe, what is the village celebrating, how do you celebrate? Well, the last question listed is much easier to answer than the first two; to celebrate you eat sauce arachide (peanut sauce), traditional dancing, you go out late and drink and dance some more. But the first two questions were a little harder. It sounds like Tiimbe is in celebration of the harvest (although the harvest is most definitely not done yet at that time of year), but also is sort of a new year’s festival. The elders of the village are apparently the only people to really know exactly what is going on.
So after school that day, I changed into my Tiimbe shirt and went to talk with some neighbors. One offered me tô with sauce arachide. But this sauce was not the same sauce that I’d had before, and normally you don’t eat tô with sauce arachide, normally that is for rice. But this sauce was much thicker, it had pate arachide (literally peanut paste, but the same as peanut butter) and leaves and was really really delicious. I really don’t know what kind of leaves they were, and even if I knew the word for them, either in Bwamu or Jula, I wouldn’t know the French word, and we probably don’t even have the same plant in the US, so we can just call them something similar to spinach. So imagine spinach & peanut butter sauce served over a corn product with a Jello consistency, and you’ve got the traditional dish of Tiimbe :P
Also that afternoon there were some women doing traditional dance around the petit marche. And I have to admit, it looked kind of painful… They would dance around a little then whip their heads back to the beat of the music. They tried to get me to try it, and I danced for a bit with them, but as I said, the head whipping just looked painful. The elders/leaders of the community were watching the dancing and giving out prices to the women, but I don’t know how that was decided. I believe the prizes were donated or purchased with the money that was raised from the t-shirts and fabric they sold.
That night, after everyone went back to their houses and ate dinner, they all came back out and went dancing at the ball. There are a couple places you can get a cold drink in village, and one of them has dancing once a week and for all the fetes. So the night of Tiimbe, the obviously had dancing, and because I didn’t have school the next day, I decided I was up for some fun! I convinced my friend Tené to come out with me, and we had a fun time!
Hopefully next year, I can get a head start and try and figure out a little more concretely what the purpose of the fete is, but either way, I’ll be excited to eat more special peanut sauce like that!!
Edit: So, upon posting this, I remembered that I titled it Tiimbe AND Tabaski, but have yet to say anything about Tabaski! It is a Muslim holiday (side note: I’m not sure if I’ve said this, but Muslim in French is Musselman, so it sounds a little like muscle man, and always makes me smile) in celebration of when Abraham was supposed to kill his son, but then didn’t have to. Of course, the Muslim tradition recognizes Ishmael as the son in this story, and the Christians say it’s Isaac. But to celebrate the fete, they eat mutton, because Abraham killed the sheep instead. In village, I celebrated the fete by eating well (note the pattern between all fetes). I went with the other professors to my director’s house, and we had some chicken and riz gras. We just sat and talked for a couple hours then I went home and hung out with my next door neighbors. I’m not sure if it’s always like this, but I felt like Tabaski was more celebrated than Ramadan, but that might just have more to do with how well I know the community at the two different points of time. And this year it was the day after Tiimbe, so it was a pretty good week!