When God was born under a tree 

Yes, that is what the preacher said! That God had been born as a person baby the night before and was under that very tree where we were sitting! Aya-ya-ya-ya! At once my infant brain went flying around the tree to make out exactly where baby God was hiding. But neither in my flying around with my eyes closed, nor looking around with my eyes wide open, did I catch sight of baby God. And it all seemed so strange and yet also so fabulously exciting.
Decades later as a creative writer, I would return to this childhood experience in both my fictional and autobiographical verbal compositions by way of recapturing and re-enacting an infant’s fantastical perceptions of things earthly and things non-terrestrial.

That was the tree which was a ‘classroom’ from Monday to Friday, which rested on Saturday, and which became a church on Sunday. 
Next to it was the other classroom, a one-room building of mud-and-wattle walls and grass-thatched roof, but which was too small for the many worshippers who turned up on Christmas Day, on the one day in the whole year which was known as the day of the feast. For this special day the tree provided the bigger and better meeting space under its canopy of mighty branches and thick broad leaves. 

For several days before, we the younger boys joined the bigger boys of the village to beat the drums dangling from nails that stuck out from the mighty trunk of that tree. We beat them in a frenzy of unexplained delight. And as we were beating our drums, other drums seemed to pick the cue and responded from surrounding hilltops: and so by turns or in unison, there were drums of Kikwetsi, drums of Lwanduubi, drums of Maala, drums of Makhakhala, drums of Namilama – each sending out a message of happy proclamation of something unclear to me.
Then early on the very day of what the drums were talking about, rising up with the birds, we beat the drums loudest and longest in three separate rhythmic rounds before sunrise. And when the sun was two steps up above the morning horizon, from every homestead people went streaming towards the wondrous tree, dressed in their best and most colourful attires. 

The people filled the wide space under the immense tree, while others sat in the one-classroom building. And the preacher, dressed in a spotless white kanzu, talked and talked about God being born as a baby boy! The preacher had walked in with no baby in his arms but he kept on saying that the baby was there – that happy morning. Only that he could not be seen. That he was with us right under that tree. That happy morning. Baby born to be God. And his name was Owner of Peace, Giver of Joy, Leader of Men. That happy morning. And whoever had that baby God as his friend would never die! Whoever did not become his friend was dead already, was dead already, was dead already!

At the end the people filed back to their homes, my parents and my siblings and I back to ours, where huge pots of meat and chicken and heaps of millet meal and steamed matooke on large wooden trays awaited us.
But even as we ate and drunk, what the man in the white kanzu had said kept coming back to me. Did someone take the baby God to their home or was he left behind under the tree? If God was born today, was there no God yesterday? What then is God? Was this God a sibling of the Creator who, as my father taught us, moulded the mountains and the valleys, the rivers and the trees and the grasses, the animals and the people, the sky and the sun and the moon and the stars and everything fantastic?