Christmas period is an interesting time for Kenyans with strong rural connections. Whenever the festive period approaches, this group of people, most of whom had a rural upbringing, start experiencing a mixture of apprehension and excitement, a phenomenon that causes time to move at a sluggish speed.
Apprehension occurs because of the financial obligations associated with temporary relocation from urban areas to the village, usually for a period of between three to ten days. The excitement is usually in anticipation of the good times in the village among long lost relatives and friends.
Factory and domestic workers usually leave their urban dwellings on the 23rd of December every year so that they can travel upcountry, and join their rural folks for Christmas eve preparations.
The big day comes with a mixed bag of activities. While the rural folks typically dress in their Sunday best to attend church service, and later converge at home for special meals, the urbanites take time to reconnect with the village mates, often attending one Christmas party after another.
The urban children take time to interract with their relatives and reconnect with their roots. This is also a time for the urban kids to show off their exotic attires, mannerisms and strange urbane languages to their rural folks.
Thinking of my own time in the village, this was the period when we started admiring urban lifestyles that we were yet to experience. Our teachers kept assuring us that if we worked hard at school, urban lifestyle would be our reward.
At Christmas time, we were coming face-to-face with children whose parents had worked harder than ours, and were now enjoying life with big spoons in the city. The lessons that we learnt at school were beginning to make sense to us; there was better life away from the village.
In this respect, the mad rush to the village for Christmas celebrations made huge sense in terms of encouraging the village folks to aim higher in life.
In our days, we took advantage of the Christmas holidays to learn a few exotic words from our urbane cousins. We also taught them the native language in a mutual cultural exchange that ensured that our cousins did not totally get assimilated into the urban cultures and languages, while tge village folks did not remain oblivious to modern ways of life.
These year-end visits have also ensured that Kenyan children maintain their identities. Depending on one’s perspective, some people have blamed such cultural interactions for planting strong tribal identities that have undermined creation of one cohesive Kenyan society.
In fact, some people have argued that the regular flare-ups that often follow disputef presidential polls are attributable to strengthening of disparate cultural identities. On the other hand, there are those who argue that one needs a strong cultural identity in order to competently appreciate other cultures.
Whichever school of thought one embraces, Kenyans have absolutely no excuse to physically attack fellow citizens due to differences in political persuasions. Back to the holiday issues. The low income factory and domestic workers in urban areas save parts of their meager incomes throughout the year in order to finance the Christmas extravaganzas in their rural villages. They transport all their spouses and children to the village for Christmas.
These extravaganzas last for just about two or three days before a new wave of apprehension sets in. These folks have to travel back to Nairobi and elsewhere on the 26th of December so as to be ready to resume work the following day.
In most cases, they are paid a daily or weekly wage, and therefore, do not have the luxury to overstay at their rural homes for fear of either loosing their jobs or not being able to save enough money to take their children back to school in January. So, in a sense, it is a huge sacrifice on the part of this category of Kenyans, who are typically one-paycheck families, to travel upcountry for Christmas holidays.
The working parent, usually the father, rushes back to the city, leaving behind the wife and children at home until the weekend just before schools open in January. Another nightmare confronts the families as they all embark on the journey back to the city on the same day, creating a shortage of public transport and traffic jams of monumental proportions.
The transport vehicle operators respond to the surge in demand by doubling fares. The men, who by now have gone back to work, do not have adequate funds to pay for the spiked transport costs. So, they are forced to take a loan from their bosses, to be recovered in subsequent weeks and months. Back home, these fellows and their families have consumed large amounts of family wealth, and literally left their elderly parents poorer than they found them.
All the same, parents relish in the fact that they were able to see their grandchildren. Meanwhile, the men back in the city start saving for the December ritual. This means that, essentially, these people can hardly save money for anything else apart from Christmas holidays.
However, due to their attachment to rural roots and the December celebrations, they cannot entertain any suggestions on alternative holiday months that are cheaper and less hectic. This phenomenon is mostly found among the communities from Western Kenya.
The explanations are varied, but a few of them appear plausible. First, these people tend to work far from home due to lack of adequate employment opportunities in the region. The low income earners who work far from home can hardly afford to travel back to their rural homes as frequently as they would wish to due mainly to lack of cash and exigencies of work.
Second is the legendary kinship ties among these people. The Luo and Luhya have a special liking for their elaborate kinship ties that it is not uncommon to find people of an entire county who can trace their lineage to a particular progenitor.
This makes is easy for these people to enjoy one another’s companionship as they freely interact and enjoy drinks and meals as relatives. Such communal gatherings afford opportunities for members to create and strengthen family bonds, and for the young ones to get to know one another and appreciate their kinship ties.
It is instructive that among tge Luo and Luhya, intermarriage among people who are considered to be blood relatives is strictly prohibited. Blood relatives could go up to the fifteenth ancestor. Some Kenyans have always wondered why the Luo and Luhya people have to travel all the way to Western Kenya for Christmas holidays that last just a handful of days. T
he simple explanation here is that these are very important opportunities for cultural gatherings and retracing roots. Teenagers get to learn how to carry on the cultures and traditions of their communities by closely observing or interacting with traditional foods, etiquette, mannerisms, dances, marriage ceremonies, dress codes, respect for elders, cultural roles, mourning and burials, among other practices.
Third is the shame of being perceived as lost in the city. The attachment of the Luo and Luhya people to their rural roots is simply legendary. It brings huge shame and ostracization to parents for their male children to be categorized as “lost.” Culturally among these Western Kenya communities, male children are still considered as the heirs to their fathers’ thrones. So, their long absence from home may attract some unscrupulous neighbors to try to disinherit the families of their ancestral lands.
Other Kenyan communities, especially those who live near urban areas have huge advantages of being able to visit their rural homes as frequently as they wish. They also have the benefit of high income income urban dwellers who create effective demands for their goods and services. Hence, they can easily turn their ancestral lands into commercial farms since the market for their produce is assured. Besides, due to interactions with immigrant culture, these communities no longer have strong attachments to their cultural roots.
There is therefore, no strong allure to visit home over the Christmas period. In any case, the relatives can easily come over to the city, if need be, to join their kin for Christmas celebrations.
The discussions that Kenyans are now having is whether the sort of transportation nightmare that was witnessed along the Nairobi Naivasha road during the weekend preceding the Christmas week was actually necessary.
There are two lingering questions. One, is why must those who can afford to visit home frequently create traffic snarl-ups on the roads just because of Christmas? Two, why must every one travel on the same day at the same time thereby inconveniencing everyone? Beyond being an effort to join the rural folks in cultural celebrations, there is a huge behavioral problem among these people.
Every one wants to get home as fast as possible, and in the process, they break the very basic traffic rule of staying on one’s lane. Once everyone tries to overlap on the road, a gridlock is created, and everyone, including young children using public transport, are kept on the road, desperate, hungry and cursing, for hours on end. This unique Kenyan spectacle looks like the annual migration of the wildebeest from Serengeti in Tanzania across the Mara River in Kenya.
Many netizens have been accusing the government for neglecting the plight of common commuters plying the Nairobi/Naivasha road. What is the government supposed to do to citizens who are fully aware that their behavior will definitely lead to a gridlock on the road, but they still go ahead and overlap? This is a typical selfish mindset, where everyone wants everything for themselves.
It is reflective of post-independence leadership practices in Africa where the “big man” saw all the resources of the country as his own, and utilized them as such. The laws of the land were changed to legitimize and protect this gluttonous behavior by “leaders”. So, citizens have adopted the “everyone for themselves, and God for us all” attitude. It will take leadership from the top to have a change of mindset in order for things to get better at the bottom.
Meanwhile, the annual migration of Kenyans to the rural villages over Christmas holidays will continue, and the gridlock on the roads will persist until there is a change in mindset. When that change in mindset will occur – if ever it will occur – it is only God who knows.
May the New Year 2025 bring great tidings to all our families.
The author is currently in Denver, Colorado
