Rian Malan

Happy Christmas from Jo’burg

Rian Malan gets ready to celebrate Christmas in South Africa and predicts a new year full of insane overspending on the 2010 World Cup

Once upon a time, in the desolate Great Karoo, my father pointed out a distant line of bluegum trees marking the route Father Christmas was likely to follow when he came to deposit gifts under our Christmas tree. I was around four at the time, but even then I sensed something odd about Christmas in Africa. The cards on our mantelpiece depicted snow, but we’d never seen such a thing. Our windows were shuttered against heat, not icy blizzards. Even our Christmas tree was not a real Christmas tree, just a bough hacked off a thorn tree and draped with shreds of tinsel. But the four-year-old is a foolish creature, so I sat there for hours, peering hopefully into the sun-blackened immensity, waiting for Santa Claus to materialise. He didn’t, and Christmas was never quite the same again.

That was sad, because there was initially something quite magical about the strange goings-on depicted in Christmas carols — holly, ivy, reindeer, sleighs, the snowfield outside King Wenceslas’s window and candles glowing in the manger.

But magic fades in the harsh light of day, and Christmas Day down here can be very harsh indeed. The sun is at its zenith. Trees droop. Dust devils dance across the plains. Sweat drips down your temples onto your plum pudding.

The only yuletide whiteness we knew was the whiteness of apartheid, which reserved certain jobs for whites only. It was well-known, for instance, that God, Jesus and Father Christmas were white men. This created a dilemma for department store managers, who struggled to find whites to play Santa Claus in their jolly storefront tableaux. Older and wiser white males cautioned against it, but I applied for such a job when I was 16. They sat me down in the burning sun, wearing a suit of the heaviest, scratchiest red serge and a hood of the suffocating same.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in