The First (and Only) Bissap Wine Fest
The First (and Only) Bissap Wine Fest
You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of Mauritania. I hadn’t when I first learned I’d be living there. I confused it with Mauritius, which is tropical and vacation-like. It is not. At its most basic, Mauritania is a Muslim country on the Atlantic side of North Africa, but I prefer to describe it to those that ask by listing the things I didn’t have; English, running water, electricity, toilet paper, silverware, furniture, and alcohol.
In truth, all but the last of these deprivations served to make life more interesting and those of us living and working there embraced them. The prohibition against alcohol however, for a group in their mid-twenties, was an obstacle to be surmounted. A fortunate few found themselves posted to border towns just across the river from Senegal where you could acquire and smuggle home any liquor you desired so long as it was whiskey or gin. The rest of us were left to ferment our own.
Bissap wine is simple to make. Some bissap leaves, sugar, an empty bidon, two weeks of patience…and drink. But too much of that drinking was being done alone and so the First Annual (and only) Bissap Wine Fest was planned. Gathering in groups larger than four or five was deemed a security risk so preparations and invitations were kept quiet from the powers that were. Wine was fermented, lambs and goat were purchased, people came.
Because bissap fermentation affords a pleasant opportunity for self-expression, many brought their own brews for comparison. Three of us, having never slaughtered our own food, took the opportunity to do so. We followed the halal method we’d repeatedly witnessed at roadside meshwi stands and in our own villages. It was a nervous adrenaline-saturated moment ultimately bereft of the spiritual enlightenment I’d pre-imbued it with.
The animals were spit-fired and pit-roasted. For three days we drank and ate and slept and drank. We supped the only neighbors we shared a wall with short enough to see over. From everyone else our illicit festival remained hidden and unseen. When the bidons were drained, we slowly drifted back to the dry country from which we’d come. A few weeks later we evacuated.