Modernism has killed the Christmas  of yore

December used to be a month of great expectations. That was way back in the day, way before Nairobi became a city of gated communities with closed access roads and rough perimeter fences topped off with broken bottles.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when city estates had wide, open playing fields and no gates to ward off adventurous children, the town would lose virtually all of its proud “born-towns” to the feverish travel bug that gripped their parents as soon as schools closed for the December holidays.

The parents were clearly filled with all sorts of expectations, including the loud assembly of relatives in the ancestral home and the long day of feasting on traditional vegetables, goat meat, dried fish, chicken and rice.

Their children longed for chapatis and stared at the kunde, chinsaga, terere and murende with something very close to fright! In those days, traditional vegetables had not made their way to the city with the abundance that we see today; an abundance that has brought pumpkin leaves, nduma and sweet potatoes to the buffet trays of five-star hotels!

Back in the day, even if you had the money to frequent these chic hotels, it would have been a sacrilege for you to order ugali or matoke, for they simply didn’t serve those local foods.

But I digress. City kids were not in those five-star hotels anyway, but the vagaries of distribution ensured that terere and murende got into their city residences only very rarely. Sukuma wiki and cabbage were the norm, and so going to the village to be accosted by the scents and tastes of these unfamiliar kali mbogas was one huge part of the four-part drama that they called Christmas Ushago!

For those who remained in the city over Christmas, great expectations included VoK television’s Weekend Movie. Every year one hoped that VoK would screen Scrooge, that 1951 adaptation of Charles Dicken’s novel A Christmas Carol.

Few could afford to watch it at the cinemas in the CBD and the family treat of going to the Bellevue drive-in cinema off Mombasa Road or the one on Thika Road was so rare that one never knew whether it would fall on Christmas day or be reserved until someone in the family passed their CPE examinations with “flying colours”, as the lingo of the day went.

As they waited for the treats of the season to reveal themselves, city kids spent the month of December roaming from one estate to another.

By mid December, the pain of end-of-term reports had retreated into distant memory and the challenges of repeating or going to a new class were too far off in January to occupy anyone’s mind.

And so the estates teemed with rowdy games — kati, blada, tapo, mchuz kaffir, futa, philipino, seven stones and a whole bunch of innovations that had no names.

Amid the games, everyone worried about whether they would get “Christmas clothes”. This was an annual ritual that could send a child into self-imposed banishment away from the playing fields.

How could you bear to be that child whose parents had failed to buy new clothes for Christmas Day? What “Sunday Best” would you wear in the coming year?

The shops downtown cashed in on these expectations with huge SALE signs as others announced the fashion of the year — bell-bottom trousers, platform shoes, wedges, wet-look/psychedelic shirts in bright polyester colours, crimplene trousers, elephant trousers, halter necks, maxis, midis, gypsy skirts aka peasant skirts to be worn with cheesecloth tops with balloon sleeves and the plastic hair-band called “Love made in Tokyo” to go with the drop-waist dress.

No-one knew where Tokyo was, but it didn’t matter, we all wanted Love made in Tokyo! And if we were lucky, we would get the additional treat of being taken to town for a long, hungry day of fitting these wonderful fashions at shops with enticing names like Pop-In, Njiri’s, Eastend, and Deacons — the last of which was strictly for the absolutely well-endowed.

Those who had spent the better part of the December holiday in the city were still likely to find themselves travelling to the village a day or two before Christmas Day. For those who were driven to the village in their parents’ cars, the twists and turns of those inordinately long journeys has been beautifully captured in Sitawa Namwalie’s hilarious poem, We Leave our House to go Home!

It was a journey that involved several punctures in those amazing Volkswagen Beetles that somehow carried six children and two adults at the back, as well as a carton filled with Kimbo, sugar, rice and cocoa. The lucky ones carried a transistor radio set that played Skeeter Davis, Jim Reeves and Charley Pride over and over again, soothing frayed nerves.

The scenes at the Machakos bus park were as chaotic then as they are today. And on Latema Road, where vehicles to Central Province departed, there was similar shoving, haggling and great expectations.

The shops nearby offered city delicacies to fuel anxious travellers — mandazi and samosas, especially. There was the usual frenzied last-minute shopping that seems to grip travellers everywhere, from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to Nyamakima!

The drivers of the Peugeot 404 station-wagons that served as matatus sized up against each other, each claiming to have the prowess of Joginder Singh, the famed Safari Rally driver.

If you ever wondered where our national need for speed came from, it started with those drivers. They claimed that by the time you finished listening to both sides of a vinyl record, they would be arriving in Murang’a town!

TYRANNY OF GREETINGS

Were they talking about the long-playing records (LPs) with at least six songs on each side of the album, or the single santuri which held a maximum two-minute-and-38-second song on each side?

 In later years, I would always think of these lines of TS Eliot as perhaps the best way to describe the first few moments that greeted the arrival of itinerant relatives in the village:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

 Oh, the tyranny of the greetings — what was the proper way of greeting your grandmother? Help! Aunts reprimanded us sternly and we retaliated by sniggering at the mother-tongue influence that coloured their English. Grandfather called for tea. It arrived steaming, in glasses that were filled to the brim. Act Three, Scene Two: How to hold a hot glass!

The cousins stood by, impatient to show us their games and their friends. Their new clothes had been tailored at nearby markets and were carefully secured in locked wooden boxes.

If it was a rainy December, we would be out sliding in the mud and chasing hens until the boys were called away to help slaughter the goat and the girls were asked to help ferry water and firewood.

Christmas Mass in vernacular was the highlight of this drama of cultural cross-wires. Who was the “clean father” mentioned in the prayer? Silent Night in mother-tongue became another reminder of your inadequacies, your alienation.

Most of the time, you just drifted in and out of the Mass, like a short-wave radio that transmits snippets of conversations and sounds followed by long bleeps of blankness.

Still, no-one needed to be taught how to drink soda or how to eat goat-meat, even if the city boys might have been terribly traumatised by the ritual of slaughtering animals.

But oh, how the village has changed now, in these years of Sheng-speaking grandparents! Today, portable gas cookers speed up all the cooking and, for others, outside caterers — made up of thrifty women’s groups — do the work and lay out sumptuous pilau, kienyeji, fried tilapia, and grilled chicken on bedecked tables under pretty tents.

In the towns, the old city traditions of having Christmas lunch at the home of family friends or relatives have been eroded over time. Middle-class families have gradually fallen into the routine of old Jomo Kenyatta, who usually spent his Christmas in Mombasa.

Wabara invade the coastal towns and resorts in such staggering numbers every December, bringing choc-a-bloc traffic jams that turn the 14-kilometre drive from Nakumatt Nyali to Mtwapa into a two-hour nightmare!

In towns all over the country, the Christmas Day church service is now followed by lunch at venues where clowns, face-painters, jumping castles and dancing competitions keep kids busy as the adults delve into high-brand alcohol, delicately prepared meats, salads, desserts and even the coveted traditional vegetables.

And all of this is done with the kind of reckless abandon that no other season in the year brings upon Kenyans!

Dr Joyce Nyairo is a cultural analyst. A shorter version of this article was first published on December 21 this year.