December used to be a month of great expectations. That was way
back in the day, before Nairobi became a city of gated communities with
rough perimeter walls 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.
There
would be the loud assembly of relatives in the ancestral home and the
day-long feasts on traditional vegetables, goat meat, dried fish,
chicken and rice.
Their children longed for chapatis and stared at the kunde, tsisaga, terere and murenda
with something close to fright! Traditional vegetables had not made
their way to the city with the abundance that we see today.
Sukuma
wiki and cabbage were the norm and so going to the village to be
accosted by unfamiliar and bitter vegetable was part of the drama that
they called Christmas.
WEEKEND MOVIE
For
those who remained in the city, great expectations included VoK
television’s “Weekend Movie”. Every year one hoped VoK would screen
Scrooge, that 1951 adaptation of Charles Dicken’s novel, A Christmas
Carol. Few could afford to watch it at the cinemas and the family treat
to the Bellevue drive-in cinema off Mombasa Road or the one on Thika
Road was reserved for the time someone in the family passed CPE with
“flying colours”.
By mid December, the pain of end
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
pre-occupy anyone. And so the estates teemed with rowdy games — kati, blada, tapo, mchuz kaffir, futa, philipino, 7 stones and a whole bunch of innovations that had no names.
Everyone
worried about getting “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 the child whose parents had
failed to buy new clothes for Christmas?
INCREASED SALES
The
shops cashed in on these expectations with huge SALE signs to announce
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.
And if we were lucky, we would get
the additional treat of being taken to town to fit the fashion at shops
with enticing names like Pop-in, Njiri’s, Eastend, and Deacons.
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 involved several punctures. How those
Volkswagen Beetles carried six children and their parents, as well as a
carton filled with Kimbo, sugar, rice and cocoa boggles the mind. The
radio cassette played Skeeter Davis, Jim Reeves and Charley Pride over
and over again.
The scenes at Machakos bus-stop were as chaotic then as they are today! There was similar shoving, haggling and mandazi and samosas.
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