22 Dec Botswana — Christmas In Southern Africa

Christmas comes to Southern Africa the same way it comes to every other place with shopkeepers. Stores fill with blinking lights. Shelves groan under the weight of gaily-colored boxes filled with plastic icicles. Glitter and pink, magic wands and unicorns and princess-dresses are laid out for girls; micro-cephalic dolls with Viking horns and Pancho Villa ammo belts for boys. Bing Crosby fills the air. Pictures of sleds, barns weighted down with snow, and happy families bringing home newly-cut fir trees populate card racks. Christmas bells and Christmas balls and Christmas stars hover over mangers.

Outside, it’s a hundred-and-ten degrees, the asphalt on the street melts, animals huddle in whatever shade they can find, summer settles in with all its antipodal glory, and garbage men expect Christmas presents.

                                                    Seeking shade beneath a leafless thorn tree

A garbage man told me the thing about Christmas presents when he came by our home to collect for his crew.

In Botswana, being a garbage man is a sociable activity and, when the trucks arrive, they arrive with a whole posse of men banging cans and calling to each other. This business about Christmas presents was a new one on me, though, and I told him to check back next time he came around.

It turned out he was right or, at least, he’d persuaded a lot of expats that garbage men get Christmas presents. “I think that’s the way it works in England,” somebody told me. “Part of their heritage, you know, like judges wearing wigs. Going rate is fifty pula.”

I could see the thing about judges wearing wigs being part of Botswana’s heritage, but I wasn’t persuaded there was a tradition involving garbage men. Of all the things I think about Colonial Brits, that they would have brought garbage men to Africa along with their governors and soldiers and administrators is something that had not occurred to me. Still, the next time the representative of the garbage crew showed up, I peeled off fifty pula and wished him, and all of them, Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas lasted until the following morning when the whole gang, minus the guy I’d handed the fifty, appeared at our door smiling and expecting their Christmas present. “Already gave,” I said.

“Who’d you give it to?” the unusually muscular gentleman who seemed to run the crew wanted to know. I think he had his suspicions, but he needed to hear it from me.

“The guy . . .” I said, “. . . the guy who’s not with you.”

He exchanged glances with the rest of the crew. “How much did you give him?”

“A hundred pula,” I told him. That was a lot better than the going rate, but I was feeling generous.