adminLenox Mhlanga
Christmas is around the corner and the stores are decked out in decorations. Carols are all jingle-jangle while the kids line up for selfies with Santa at a leading department store. We can’t fault them on this because there is good money to be made during this time.
The festive (my uncle calls it the ‘fistive’) season witnesses the usual sharks circling in commercial waters. The vendors have already hopped onto the bandwagon in fleecing the populace.
Parents are expected to shell out a mint buying presents, throwing parties or bankrolling the mandatory trip to the rural home. That said, we will not bore you any further. Travelling the road of critical analysis should be left to the academics. Our brief here is markedly different.
We take a different trajectory, to borrow the language, and deal with an issue that many parents, and their children endure at this time of the year. The Christmas play.
A friend posted a picture of his toddler son on social media appearing in his first Christmas play as a rabbit. Ranga went on to reveal that his first role in a play was as the donkey in the nativity play.
Now how many people are brave enough to reveal to all and sundry that they played a donkey in a play? I found that to be pretty daring to say the least. That must have represented a very significant hallmark in his life.
Yours truly, ever being the cynic asked him what part of the donkey he was. You see, being experienced in nativity plays (having once played the camel) one knows that the donkey is constructed out of two actors, if one may call them that. Was my friend the head of the donkey or the rear, I asked out of morbid curiosity.
His response was clever. Ranga claimed that he played the whole donkey. I will not go into an argument about how this can be highly unlikely.
Unless the construction of donkey costumes has undergone a radical change over the years. It is in this vein that I found his response rather suspicious.
Why should this be an issue. Ask any parent that they would be pleased that their little pride was cast as a donkey. Of all things, a donkey! I have witnessed irate parents cause a furore at PTA meetings wanting to know why their kid was cast in part of the donkey and not Joseph or Mary.
I have a philosophical approach to the issue being broached here. I would advise parents with bruised egos to stop and reflect on their own past performances at their pre-school nativity plays. First ask yourself where you were cast.
I will take a trip to my own pre-school past to provide some illustration. I went to the ‘Y.’ Those from my generation know what that was. It was the YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) pre-school just behind Mpopoma High School. It was the creme de la creme of early childhood learning at the time. Remember this was in the late 1960’s. Yes, I will allow you time to retrieve your jaw from the floor.
There were very few pre-schools at that time because “Africans” (read blacks) did not normally send their kids to pre-school. It was a luxury that most parents could ill afford. Yet my middle class parents saw the need.
It was a choice between sending us to cantonment (which we felt pre-school was) or coming home to find the house totally destroyed or the maid murdered. I am not implying here that we were that bad.
But I can’t think about any other reason why our parents banished us to those institutions. Though of course I will be the first to admit that we had fun there.
To cut a long story short, I should say that I admire the fortitude of pre-school teachers. Every year a wild bunch of screaming, hair-pulling or wailing imps would be shunted into the Y.
By the end of the year they would have been transformed into dear little souls who performed the most tear-jerking nativity plays. Yet behind the scenes, there was a lot of politics in the production of the play itself. This fact wasn’t lost to our small brains. We could have been small but we were not stupid.
We knew that the role one would be cast in the play was determined largely out of one’s behaviour through-out the year. So it went without saying that the exceedingly naughty among us would never see the inside of a costume. Let alone a part in the mass choir. As a parent you should be very worried if your little bambino is lost in the madding crowd.
My realistic advice is; don’t go to the play! This saves you the embarrassment of being reminded by the person sitting next to you that mwana wangu iyeye! (that’s my child).
A precious few fill the coveted roles of Joseph or Mary. Then of course you have those of The Maggi or what we called The Three Wise Men from the East. These were the most elegantly costumed and the most handsome.
Playing the animals in the manger was much more unglamorous but at least one would have made it on stage.
The narrator of the play’s role went to the most articulate among us. Before you make any fantastic insinuations that it must have been yours truly,
I will burst your bubble by admitting that I wasn’t. My talents only surfaced much later in life. The role, contrary to conventional wisdom, always fell on the now late Phange Ndlovu. Never mind the fact he was as naughty as they come, the boy was good. He even memorised his lines in record time before going back to his shenanigans.
Phange was articulate and had an angel’s voice though he definitely could not have played Gabriel’s role for obvious reasons. It would have been a sin.
What role did I play, you may ask. Well, I was part of the camel if that is of any comfort. I was the backside of the camel. But my mother was thrilled that I was in the play out of the horde that did not make it.
Gladly, three of our boys all played the role of narrator without missing a heartbeat. You should have seen me beating my chest. I would tell everyone who would listen that it was in their genes. Their mother’s of course!
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