Paper Short Abstract:

Through the usage of the knife Kisu, and the building, this ethnography shows the experience of Elakat, Bukavu's slaughterhouse, and its more-than-human inhabitants of an unhealthy ecology made up of failed institutions, unregulated practices, revisions of health, and economic insecurity.

Paper Abstract:

“Here the meat isn't bad because the animals are inspected by vets (…)”. Over my three months of fieldwork I followed the transformation of cows into meat “fit for human consumption” at Elakat, the public slaughterhouse in Bukavu, South-Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As part of a multidisciplinary project on emerging infectious diseases -RESOH-LABO-, I am exploring killing, health and human-cow livelihoods in the slaughterhouse. My ethnographic attention on human-animal livelihoods focuses on the knife used to kill and inspect meat, the Kisu, and the building, the slaughterhouse, a vestige of colonisation and of ways of existing and killing. The knife in this context appears as the object that crosses social groups, expertise, species and health. First as the object of “undoing” life and the animal; it also is the tool for veterinary inspection and regularization for meat ; or the tool by which people get by through carving oneself a “salary” from slaughtered animals. Elakat, built in 1955 was intended to provide westerners with meat from the ranches in the countryside. Since independence, the building has been left deteriorating. Without fences and with rapid urbanisation, the interface where human and animal meet is transformed, and health and hygiene are being renegotiated. If slaughterhouses can be good examples of " unhealthy ecologies ", this ethnography shows that they are made up of failed institutions, unregulated practices, revisions of health, economic insecurity and intimate encounters between people, cows and pathogens.