Humour: Remembering the village Christmas gifts

Christmas is around the corner! So, for many families in Kigali, it’s time to buy Christmas gifts for the children at home. These days, kids go to sleep expecting juicy gifts from Father Christmas. And indeed the next morning, they find lovely gifts ranging from toys to bicycles. MEN! How I wish these kids would have been around many years ago when kids deep in the villages never had this kind of luxurious lifestyle. Apart from a very few! For example, there was this small villager boy called Bruno. He had earned his name after the renowned boxer in Britain called Frank Bruno. This small villager liked to fight his fellow kids along the dusty streets in the village. He became a darling of the nearby Muzungu Priest who fancied boxing as a sport. The Muzungu Priest liked Bruno so much that he used to buy him many gifts. And on one Christmas season, the Priest bought a special gift all the way from Europe – especially for Bruno. The gift was a pair of nice red under pants! Wow! Bruno had never had that rare golden opportunity to dress up in under pants. That is why Bruno was seen all over the school compound showing off his red underwear. That is also why Bruno developed this idea of visiting the toilets and then always forgetting to button up his fly. During those days, school boys dressed up in a pair of shorts which never had zips. Those were the days when zips were regarded to be special products for the rich alone. As for the poor folks such as Bruno, their shorts were decorated with several buttons to keep the fly shut. But for Bruno, the buttons that were meant to protect his fly were always open for everyone to see. In fact, he even got to an extent of simply plucking off the buttons so that he could visibly show off his newly acquired underwear. So, as he boasted around the school compound, his friends became envious. They felt left out by their colleague who, prior to this Christmas present, had shared everything with them. Now, they felt that he had taken a serious leap forward by abandoning the “Original” panty that all the other lads were used to. The “Original” panty that Bruno and his friends had been used to was what I can only refer to as a cobbled up hybrid of a modern day boxer and a G-string. The material used was Nylon, which was sometimes referred to as ‘Solome’. Those were the days when the only shopkeeper in the village used to import rolls of Nylon tissue all the way from Mombasa. Apparently this shopkeeper also hailed from that coastal town and he was so famous for his Nylon sales that he earned himself a nickname; Mr. Solome. Villagers would trek from all corners of the village to Solome’s shop so as to buy themselves a few meters of the Nylon cloth. It was not everyday that the villagers visited Salome’s shop for Nylon tissue. Their calendar was well known to Solome and that explains why his shop was always out of stock during the months of January and February. Then in March or April, Solome stocked his shop with more Nylon as the Easter days approached. Thereafter, the shop would remain half empty until the Christmas days came knocking at the door. I believe that if Mr. Solome was still alive and kicking, you would find a long queue of people at his shop. Having saved some cash for the past nine months, the villagers cherished the month of December. This was the time for them to dress up in style. So, they would carry their Nylon rolls from Solome’s shop and cross the valley in a bid to visit yet another monopolist. This other monopolist was none other than the village tailor. Here, the tailor would use a measuring tape so to arrive at the right sizes of the ‘Original’ underpanty for each of his clients. As for Bruno and his fellow playmates, it was real fun visiting the tailor. He would play with the kids as he measured the size of their waists and their small bums. Then he would patch up some makeshift panties for Bruno and his fellow small gangsters. As I said before, those panties were a combination of boxers and G-strings. This is because the tailor thought that a boy’s underwear should stretch all the way to the knees. He claimed that such fashions hailed from America. Then he would slice off chunks from the sides so that they resembled today’s most popular G-string. Contact: diaspoman@yahoo.com