Let them know its Christmas time!

Friday, 3rd August, Fort Portal Time: 1:59pm

So, again, I find myself sitting in the gardens restaurant, watching the denizens of Fort Portal wander past and listening ‘the winner takes it all’, which is being blasted from a nearby but concealed speaker. One of my favourite things about Africa…. and this might sound trite… but one of my favourite things about Africa is the wonderful collection of clothing on display. Fantastic as the traditional garments are, I’m not talking about the brightly coloured, high shouldered, interestingly tailored African clothes. No, I’m talking about the western clothes that seem to have ended up here by accident. Firms like Oxfam and Unicef have done a laudable job at supplying the continent with our cast-off t-shirts and coats and, I’m sure, have kept a great number of poor rural labourers and impoverished slum children dressed and warm. What they’ve also done is created one of the strangest spectacles of cultural juxtaposition I’ve ever experienced. As one drives through the rural hillside farms and winds one’s way through the patchwork-agricultural-valleys, one sees young children herding African long-horn cattle and sporting garments emblazoned with pictures of late 90s stars such as Eminem, Michael Jackson and Ali-G.

More jarring still are the seasonal hats and the ladies coats. More than three times on the two hour journey here, I saw grizzled old villagers with huge unkempt beards ensconced in extraordinarily effeminate, thigh-length women’s trench coats. Twice I’ve had to double take people swerving up hills with huge bunches of bananas on the back of their rickety bikes and fluffy Santa hats on their shaved heads. If I’d been driving, I would have crashed the car and sent both myself and the African saint Nick to an unexpected and untimely demise.

Best of all, though, are the of-cast shirts with strange slogans that seem to have made their way here in huge quantities. Today I saw a rather humble looking man with a shirt that said “I am always right!”. Last time we visited fort portal, there was a young boy in a tie-die shirt which bore the inexplicable slogan “Sexy Crab’s Shack of Fish” and, when I first got here, I saw an old, old man in a rather ragged “Condoms, not Bombs – I want to score, not go to war” tee. So, if you’re ever thinking of throwing away some clothes that are just too bizarre or inappropriate to wear, make the world a weirder place, donate them to Oxfam!