City Life: Johannesburg

A visit from township men with knives and bloodied hands would usually have white suburbia reaching for its revolver, or at least its panic button, but not this time. These visitors were invited guests.

"It's for the ancestors," said Sphiwe, sharpening a blade on a stone beside the swimming pool. "You must let them know you have moved to a new place and to contact them you need to slaughter something."

Beside him a tethered sheep nibbled the lawn, unaware that this was a Zulu-style house warming in one of Johannesburg's plusher suburbs and that mutton was on the menu.

My friend Richard had just moved into a big house with high walls and armed-response signs. Invited to the party alongside his white neighbours were black work colleagues from Alexandra township. It was their idea to double up as butchers to honour Richard's ancestors.

As affluent black people move into formerly all-white suburbs so does the tradition of backyard slaughtering: a bylaw last year allowed it in residential areas for ceremonial and religious occasions.

After centuries of trying to create a miniature Europe behind hedges and walls and no-go areas, it is high time the descendants of Dutch, British and French settlers experienced an intrusion of Africa, reckon some black people.

Some whites are appalled. In letters to newspapers and on radio phone-ins they have branded the practice an affront to civilised values. Others cast their protests in terms of animal welfare and consumer health.

They are objecting to the idea more than the spectacle, since suburbia's high walls block views of the slaughter. You see it only if invited to the party.

Richard's house warming was not for the squeamish. Purchased that morning from a market outside the city, the sheep was transported home in the boot of a VW Polo.

Sphiwe, who had recently slaughtered a sheep to honour his own ancestors when he moved just 20 yards from his grandmother's house to a shed in her garden, was the master of ceremonies.

A wooden board was laid on the lawn, "to not stain the grass". Four men held down the sheep as Sphiwe sliced open its throat and angled the red spurts into an orange plastic bowl.

The animal rolled its eyes but made no sound - a propitious omen - and a minute later was dead.

The carcass was swiftly skinned, dismembered and gutted. Sphiwe's privilege was to eat a slice of salted warm liver.

A hole was dug in the flowerbed into which was squeezed the stomach's undigested food, a brown gloop. Sphiwe stashed the head in a cupboard for the morning after the party: "It cures hangovers."

A blue-green bulbous gall bladder the size of a sausage was carefully extracted and stored in a cup. Tradition dictated that it was to be punctured and the bile emptied over the new homeowner's head. But Richard demurred. "No bloody way."