What is Christmas like in Africa?

This is a question that I have had to answer more times than I care to remember! In this thread I will tell you about Christmas in my family back in Uganda

Christmas had always been a happy day in our household not least because it was the only day of the year that mother cooked and in Uganda Christmas was and still is a day to go out and have fun.

Typically folk have lunch at home and then head out for entertainment, at bars, clubs, pubs, rivers, lakes etc. For the entertainment industry this is the busiest and most lucrative time of the year as people come out and spend!

As things change some families have given up cooking at home altogether and will go out to eat and some will hire in outside caterers’ to cook for them

Christmas 2009 was unusual for many reasons, instead of the usual summer sun that we get in December and especially on Christmas day, it was very wet. It rained from Christmas eve, through to Christmas day. I was tired from my trip to Rwanda so I stayed in bed until lunch time

We had a professional chef in for the day, but no one liked his food.
An evening BBQ had been planned at which friends and relatives were invited and luckily the rains eased off around 5PM. I don’t know what is wrong with us women but my aunty went into a panic over drinks, she suddenly announced that we didn’t have enough drinks and we can’t have that many people over and not have enough drinks etc… “Ida we must go and find some more”

It was Christmas day I wondered, “who in their right mind would be open”, but aunty dearest wasn’t having it so we hit the road to find wines, beers etc, To my surprise the main shopping Mall in the capital city was open and folk were out and about shopping!!

The BBQ got under way and the fun begun. But soon enough the mood changed as first mother become unwell, so she went off to rest. Next the conversation changed from light hearted family discussions to the Climate more specifically to the failure of the most recent Copenhagen Climate Summit!

A female relative, lets call her aunty Mary, is into agriculture in a big way and is very interested in anything and everything to do with the environment, she was especially upset by the goings on at Copenhagen. I had not followed the reports from the summit so didn’t have much to contribute until she uttered the words “of course the West is to blame for all this rain, we have never had such a wet December as we have had this year!

I was surprised by this assertion and I asked her whether it is folk in the West who had travelled to Uganda and cut down a 7 mile rain forest?

She had an answer for this! ooh at least folk have used the land for food growing which is better than installing factories which cause more damage to the environment. Did she have a point? I sincerely do not know, all I know is that an ancient forest is gone and that can’t be right and the West is certainly not responsible for that

Someone moved the topic onto plastic bags. I reminded them that Uganda’s policy on a complete ban had been hailed in the West as a good example that even the west could copy. However it would appear this was soon abandoned and now plastic bags are everywhere. I pointed out that in Rwanda things are different, you can’t find a plastic anywhere, supermarkets and corner shops will not offer you one, in fact if you arrive in country by road chances are all the plastics bags will be taken off you.

Aunty Mary interjected at this stage, well Rwanda is very well organised but what can she as one person do? I said plenty – we have beautiful baskets in the country why do we need plastic bags that clog up drains, kill off animals when eaten, amongst other things. In addition by using the baskets we create jobs for the weavers! Aunty Mary objected to this maintaining that she as one person could not make of a difference!

We had a man of the cloth at the BBQ who stepped in at this stage and said; we need to stop blaming everyone else for our actions. The environment of Uganda is the responsibility of Ugandans we have to do something to protect it and if we as individuals do our bit our neighbours will follow!

That pretty much closed that topic! Was this our family Christmas argument global warming/climate change? Would we pass the test of the Grumpy OLD MEN?

So if you didn’t know what Christmas is really like in Africa, hope this has given you an insight, but of course this middle class Africa, for the bottom billion things are very different.

Ida
Ida Horner is the Founder of Ethnic Supplies and blogs about issues of international development