Christmas trees and cultural imperialism

A farm worker checks piles of recently-felled trees at Keele Christmas Tree Farm in central England on November 30, 2014. PHOTO / OLI SCARFF/ AFP.

What you need to know:

  • Scholar Oliver Boy-Barret says cultural imperialism is when one culture influences another “without proportionate reciprocation”. 

  • It’s not our fault Westerners have not adopted our nyama choma culture, sukuti dance, mugithi, or eating chapati for Christmas. Or is it?

  • Never mind, there is also an economic angle.

We’ve adopted Christmas as a Western mid-winter celebration. Never mind the implicit cultural imperialism.

Never mind Mark Mwithaga, who lamented in Parliament that Kenyans cut small trees, decorate them with cotton and electric bulbs,  and place them in their homes to mark Christmas.

“If you ask many people why, they will not tell you because they do not know what it means,” he said. 

 “That cotton connotes winter and we don’t have winter in Kenya,” he offered.

“So some of these things we’re doing are just being copied or adopted blindly. If people want to say that the cotton reflects the snow on Mount Kenya that will be fine and we are going to accept it but nobody has ever said so. I hope that somebody is going to... say that the cotton reflects the snow on Mount Kenya. However, does Mount Kenya become snowy during the time we have Christmas?”

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

Yeah, Mr Mwithaga, it snows during Christmas! Mount Kenya is perpetually snow-covered. And cultural imperialism apart, one can’t say they had a very merry Christmas without a Christmas tree.

If one doesn’t want to use cotton snow, one can order a snowing Christmas tree from Alibaba, the Chinese online consumer retailer. If one doesn’t like local trees, one can import the Norwegian spruce, the most popular in Britain.

So, dear reader, in all good conscience, go the whole hog and celebrate Christmas Western-style.

Get a Christmas tree. Decorate it with twinkling lights, (fake) snowflakes or cards with snow scenes. Add images of Santa and reindeer.

The more visible the tree is — glitter and size-wise — the merrier.

Even more so if your family and guests can gather around and sing Jingle Bells: “Dashing thro’ the snow in a one-horse open sleigh. O’er the fields we go laughing all the way.”

Silent Night is optional for Christians.

A Christmas tree is a status symbol, depending on the number of beautifully wrapped gifts under the tree.

We’ve come a long way from merely eating chapati, chicken and goat meat and singing carols as a way of celebrating this Western-Christian rite.

We’re now officially a middle-income country. We can afford to have snowing Christmas trees.

Never mind what Mr Mwithaga and like-minded Africanists say about cultural imperialism.

ECONOMIC ANGLE

Scholar Oliver Boy-Barret says cultural imperialism is when one culture influences another “without proportionate reciprocation”. 

It’s not our fault Westerners have not adopted our nyama choma culture, sukuti dance, mugithi, or eating chapati for Christmas. Or is it?

Never mind, there is also an economic angle.

If all Kenyans who celebrate Christmas do so with trees in their homes, millions of cypress, fir, cedar and pine trees would have to be grown and cut to meet the demand.

Think of the business, and jobs, that would be created locally.

There is also a huge market for Christmas trees worldwide.

The European market alone is about 50 million trees per year. We could compete with Denmark as the leading supplier of Christmas trees to Europe.