Thoughts around the festive season

David Mungoshi  Shelling the Nuts
The festive season has come and gone and there were as many expectations around it as there were people. The festive season is always a time of mixed fortunes for some and bonanzas for others. During this time of year, everyone loves a surprise and enjoys feeling good.

The surprise can come in a variety of forms: a new fashionable outfit or a visit to a popular spot somewhere in the country. It is that time of year when domestic tourism gets a bit of a boost. However, there are many for whom the wish is always much simpler and more down to earth.

In such cases, a simple cup of tea with lots of bread and some rice and chicken, later in the day, washed down with a fizzy drink or more tea is the order of the day. Sadly, there are many for whom hope is a luxury. And whenever they look to significant others to come through for them, they are always disappointed.

With the Diaspora now vital in providing livelihoods, one must pity those who are victims of this phenomenon. The tears just well up in my eyes when I reflect on the doings of some fathers who turn out to be damp squibs in the end. A child spends a whole year waiting for a father working somewhere outside our borders. The envisaged visit is a very special one indeed.

Justifiably then, after spending much of the year dreaming about being spoiled by a doting father with a surfeit of goodies, the child feels terribly let down and abandoned when none of this happens. From about the end of the school term in early December, the count-down begins. Each child is certain that dad is bringing nice things and that he will be the envy of everyone in the neighbourhood.

But some fathers and some mothers somehow always fail to turn up. Christmas and the New Year become drab affairs with no excitement whatsoever. The thrill of Christmas dissipates into a mist of nothingness.

A friend of a friend is currently domiciled outside our borders where he is earning heaps of money, or so we hear. That means he buys whatever excites his fancy, from candy to juices and all sorts of trinkets. Probably his son is hoping that he will bring a smartphone and a mountain bike. Lots of fashionable gear as well. Then the bombshell!

Dad is no longer coming. Much as I wish this was just one of those stories that preachers weave, this drama is enacted every year with regular monotony. We must at times stop to think about the things that we do and the impressions we create. It should matter to us what people think of us after we are gone and what it is that we shall forever be remembered for. The opposite of that can also happen. To go and be forgotten in perpetuity. To blow away with the wind or settle in the dust.

As a boy, I travelled often on the Gwelo-Fort Victoria train (Gweru- Masvingo) and always disembarked at Umvuma (now Mvuma) at just after noon. That short trip of a few hours by train was one of the most amazing you could ever imagine. The trip was a veritable feast of culinary pleasures from the dining car and from vendors at railway stations.

Some travellers had home-cooked meals in plastic carrier bags; usually brown rice flavoured with peanut butter and chicken. Aboard the train, the clowns had their day, as did the garrulous ones, who could not resist the free audiences.

Some men always beseeched the train driver to please speed up as he didn’t want to get home after the chickens were in their coops. It mattered little that the engine man did not hear them. There was also talk about getting home before the children retired for the night.

Later, I understood that finding the children asleep and the wives awake was what most men preferred. Such conversational sub-texts can be quite mystifying if you are uninitiated. People can assassinate your reputation in gossip and you would be none the wiser.

Girls in my time were notorious for inverting their words and saying things in a contorted way. One had to be alert to the trickery to understand the conversation. Whenever I read about Tepsy Nyanhete, the “girl Jesus” from the Mudzimu Unoyera Church of Guruve and “titinoia piridia”, her church’s mystic language understood only by those in her church, I can’t help wondering at the ingenuity displayed.

I mean, let us face it, Tepsy seems to have created a whole new language out of nothing and from nothing . . . ab nihilo! I wonder why no linguist has tried researching the phenomenon of titinoia piridia.

Did a girl of six create it or was it created for her by someone else? What are the rules of the language? Does it have an etymology (history of its words), and has it got a systematic phonology? Who is to say whether or not someone is proficient in titinoia piridia?

The Christian festive season is anchored on Christian teachings around the nativity of Jesus. Central to these teachings is the Immaculate Conception that precedes the birth of Christ.

It is this Immaculate Conception that needs no human agency that makes Christmas a commemoration of divine purposes. We see birth expressed as both renewal and redemption. But whether or not the festivities retain their proper identity is a moot point. We can talk about that till the cows come home. Let me digress a little here. I just can’t resist telling you this one. You know how cartoonists can be so humorous on a good day. I have never forgotten this hilarious piece I read in a magazine whose name I no longer remember. In the cartoon, a man is sitting at a table writing a love letter.

He signs off with the words, “Yours till the cows come home,” and, as he does so, a cow moos from the door. Such hilarious irony. Some people might argue that commercial excess and self-indulgence supersede the spirit of Christmas by far. It is difficult to avoid being tempted to agree with this assessment, especially in a context, where everything is done to make Christmas as materialistic as possible.

It is all so overwhelming that here in Africa we have taken other people’s myths and made them our own and have done so at the expense of our own folklore and myths. Since Christmas is about birth or nativity, let me at least try and celebrate children.

Children are the surprise packages of our lives, although quite often we take them for granted. They can bring boundless joy to life, but are also capable of bringing into our lives depths and varieties of untold misery. Happily for me, my grandson is a bundle of joy, energy and surprises.

A few articles ago, I wrote about my two-year old grandson, whose rate of development I find fascinating. You may remember that I quoted him telling me a hare and baboon story. Well, he has gone and outdone himself even more. He makes me wonder if what he is showing us around the house is a reflection of what the future holds for him.

Will he be a lawyer or a doctor or a civil engineer? Or will he choose the arts? But, as Rueben Barwe, the veteran TV newsman might say at his liveliest, “Only time can tell.”

My grandson has created three fictional friends, who each answer to a name and have a job in town. His three friends are Skihwiki, Vendy and Colly. How he settled on these names is anybody’s guess. And as if to plug any information gaps that there might be, my grandson tells me that he too on occasion goes to work in town.

On such days, he tells me that he’s got the keys to a car in his hand and is wearing a jacket and a tie. These are the things he says when he isn’t jogging around the room and saying he is a commando. The army guys have really scored big with him. When pictures of the current president and the generals appear on the TV screen, he recognises them and calls each by name.

If you ask him what happened to Sekuru Mugabe, he tells you without hesitation that Sekuru Mugabe retired. At his age, such things were Double Dutch to me. Such gifted children as he is, keep the miracle of wonder children alive, children that exude knowledge and wisdom beyond their tender years.

Fathers and mothers must ensure that life grants these children most of their fantasies, although, as one cleric recently said, December 25 is just one day and we should not pack all of life into it. If we do, the consequences might be dire and unfortunate.