A Christmas Story

This little 4-page story was, for me, like going home with someone you only know a little from school to their family's for Christmas, and it's not like you imagined at all:
"The Christmas Reunion," by Dambudzo Marechera, from his short story collection the House of Hunger (1978).

A young man goes home from university to his township in Zimbabwe for Christmas and talks to his sister about why he shouldn't have to kill the family's Christmas goat.
It's serious, but it's funny too, and it has a wry, happy ending, of sorts.
You can hear his likability in this interview with Marechera.
"I was reading all these books from the rubbish dump, and I knew there was another world out there. There was another world out there."

I read Marechera when I was working on Zimbabwe, the second geography book I wrote for kids, a dozen years ago now.

Below: "Nuit de Noël, Happy Club" (Christmas Eve), 1963, by Malick Sidibé, in Bamako, Mali

 































^ "The residents of Marechera’s house of hunger were growing up in the era of Malick Sidibé’s early photography." 
--Tinashe Mushakavanhu, [photo & article @ okayAfrica]