Butesap

First of all, I have no idea what the aforementioned word means. It might mean banging metal together; it might just mean cultural party; it might mean whatever happens before a circumcision ceremony, but whatever it is, it just happened in my area.
A couple of days ago, we had the official announcement of when the circumcision ceremony near me is scheduled to be. This was a huge party. We had people coming in from all over the area, the city and the Cassamance to attend the event. The event was supposed to start around 8 or 9 am, but in tradition of Gambian Maybe Time, it began around 4pm. There were a couple of hundred people dancing on the highway for a while to the music of girls banging pieces of metal together. During this dance, there was one old man in the front who was using something which was possibly formerly a cow's tail to fling ceremonial water on people in the crowd. A few times during our time spent in the road, some men did a display of the magical powers of their jujus by attempting to cut themselves with knives or machettes, but they were never cut because they were protected by their jujus. There was maybe an hour of dancing in the road before the whole crowd moved into the bush to wait for the date announcement. On the way, the crowd upset some bees, making everyone run a small portion of the trail to avoid being stung. This episode also made the crowd really nervous of bees, thus contributing to a couple of stampedes later in the day when a few people in the crowd thought they saw a bee. Before we walked back to town, an offering had to be brought to the bees to convince them not to sting anyone on our way back out. It must have worked because there was not nearly so much running and yelling as on the way in.
While we were in the bush, there was more dancing to clanging metal with the ladies, while the men all went to sit under a big tree where the date decision was being made. After an hour or 2, the date was announced and the men paraded back to meet the women waving tree branches and singing.  We all walked home for dinner, and then after dinner, there was a party with a drumming group and lots of dancing until late into the night.
After all this, I assumed the date would be all anyone talked about, but in fact, no one seems to care about the date that was announced- the entire purpose of this party. I think there was just too much fun to be had to worry about some date. I still don't know when it is and I've asked around like crazy. But whenever that date is, I've been promised that the party will be bigger, better, and last a whole week.