RefleXions

REFLECTIONS ON SUNDAY 0001

My first Christmas, my gosh!

If there is anything that I do not want to be reminded of, it is my first Christmas. You see, I was asked by a knighted friend from Imentishire, and I couldn’t say ‘no’, for the life of me. What do I mean, I can hear you ask. My friend is knighted in the sense of the English culture, and that is why he carries the title “Esquire” (“Esq.” for short) after his name. His manor (‘farm’, if you have not read “Animal Farm”) is in Imenti, and the manor of a knight necessarily carries the suffix “shire”, thus “Imentishire”.

However, even if you were to ignore the business of being knighted, a man from Imenti does not ask you to do something and you decline, unless you are fed up with your life. Imenti is found in northern Kenya, at the slopes of Mount Kenya. Now, if you think a Mulera from the slopes of Mount Muhabura, here in Rwanda, has a temper, then that temper fades into insignificance when compared to the temper of a Mmeru from northern Kenya! If you are a regular reader of the Kenyan newspaper, ‘The Daily Nation’, maybe you remember the story, of a teacher and a policeman, which appeared only a few weeks ago.

I’ll jog your memory, if you don’t. This policeman calls on his teacher friend after school and says: “Bwana, why don’t we go for one?” The teacher gladly accepts the generous offer, but alerts the policeman on the fact that he is as broke as a church mouse in mid-month. The policeman says not to worry, he can afford four Tusker beers, they’ll share those and call it a day. After two beers each, the policeman realizes he’s even thirstier, and asks the teacher “kurudisha mkono”, literally meaning “to return a hand”, but which actually means to reciprocate. Of course the import of the words can never come out clearly when you do not use the language of the men, but I’ll try.

There is nothing as annoying to a Northerner (of any country, it seems!) as appearing to doubt his manhood, and maybe you’ve heard about “Uzi ico ndi co?” from the men of Ruhengeri here in the north. So, when the policeman insisted on the teacher ‘returning a hand’, the latter would have borne it and gone home to nurse his seething anger but, unfortunately, the policeman went on to say: “Yani wewe mwanaume gani huwezi kurudisha mkono?” That did it. The teacher calmly got up, went to the market and bought a panga (long African knife) and carefully hid it in his long coat that is commonly worn in those cold areas.

He went back to the bar, asked the policeman to stretch his hand, and when he obliged the teacher chopped it off and said: “Hata wewe hutarudisha mkono tena!” Indeed, literally, the policeman would never ever return a hand again. With that, the teacher again calmly walked home! So, when my friend from Imenti says: “Can you write a story?”, you understand why I eagerly say: “Yes, how long?” ….

But I was talking about my first Christmas, and why I don’t like remembering it. It must have been 1957 when we were confirmed as Catholics, which meant that we would receive the first Holy Communion that Christmas, eating the body of Christ. To make us young rascals look as holy as possible, one month in advance our mother asked for help from all the adults around so that we could be scrubbed and rubbed everyday until our little bodies turned bloodless and ashy.

Being rubbed and scrubbed, however, was child’s play compared to what they did to our feet. You see, we were going to don shoes for the first time and it was imperative that our feet be clean and our toes ‘well aligned’. Unfortunately, growing up in the volcanic rocks of i Mulera, northern Rwanda, gives cracks to your heels and to all the sides of the under-soles of your feet. Those cracks in turn make very fertile breeding ground for jiggers, and removing those jiggers is like excavating centuries-old archeological finds!

Picture little big-headed me then, being held by two men by the arms while two others are holding my little stumps of legs and my mother digging her long safety-pin into the cracks of my feet, all amid my writhing and screaming. After removing the jiggers, salt was put in the wounds and if somebody has ever put a hot knife in your old wound, then you have an idea of the pain that was visited on large-headed Ingina, in preparation for Christmas celebrations. By the time Christmas arrived I was still sobbing, and matters were not helped by the conditions under which I had to make the 16-km journey to our church in Kinoni, from Canika.

At about four in the morning on Christmas day, we were bundled out of bed and water was splashed over our already-shivering little bodies, after which we were asked to quickly complete the bathing. Our little bodies were then stuffed into ill-fitting khaki shorts and shirts that had been starched so hard that they cut your body with every movement. Because your toes had many times ‘housed’ many jiggers and tended to point upwards and sideways, a piece of cloth had to be used to ‘bind and align’ them before they could be squeezed into tight-fitting, second-hand shoes. The shoes never used to be bought, influential parents used to get them as gifts from the church, but then there was no luxury of checking the sizes!

It is thus donned and on a hungry stomach that we set off, on our long trek to the church. No one ate before going to church those days because, if you ate before receiving Holy Communion, the bread would turn into blood. I remember then that by the time I reached church, after falling 12 times in the classical Jesus-and-the-cross way, I could hardly stand and had to be carried to the altar to eat the holy body of Christ for the first time on that Christmas day. I only breathed a sigh of relief after mass when we came out of church: it was only then that I was allowed to remove my shorts, shoes and to untie my toes.

Merry Christmas!

ingina1@yahoo.co.uk