Gloria in Excelcis Deo

As I type this, the haunting chants from the mosque fill the room and drown the chatter and squeals of children playing outside. The odd motorbike tuttuts past but the prevailing sound is one of prayer in Arabic. This is Christmas Eve and there is absolutely nothing about our life here, our routine today or the atmosphere about us, to remind us of that. This is a Muslim country.

But what a treat was the Christmas Vigil in the Cathedral. First of all Mass was said by the bishop. He was in white, with mitre and staff, thurible -  the works . But nothing, nothing , could upstage the altar. Dressed in papal white and gold, the rear of the altar had Christmas trees in coloured lights and huge plastic trees in each of the wings, dressed in red and gold streamers. The lectern looked as if it had been lifted from a bingo hall and the altar, with a white twinkly cloth dressed in coloured flashing lights, would not have looked out of place in a Soho club. It was, however, all done in the best possible taste.

The choir sang, clapped, swayed and danced in Kiswahili, Latin and, for good measure, at Holy Communion we sang Silent Night in Kiswahili. A young boy in front of us slept through the whole service, while his mum and his aunty took it in turns to nurse him, to fan him and finally to wake him so that at midnight he could queue to see the crib.

Zanzibar town comprises the old town of Stonetown which is where tourists are concentrated, where restaurants serve poor quality and expensive European food and where the very expensive hotels sports plastic Christmas trees and coloured lights. The outer suburbs of Zanzibar town is where we live, alongside a few hundred thousand poor Zanzibaris. As we walked to the taxi rank late last night, women were still cleaning the street preparing for another day’s work. Our taxi driver, Omah, knows about Christmas. He has been to England. He knows little of Muslim festivals, even though he is Muslim.

Jesus was not an African. He was mzungo. I know this because I also queued to see the crib. Bethlehem was depicted in accurate detail as a Palestinian townscape set in relief on the crib wall. Inside, the characters had been lifted from an English village scene of the eighteenth century. Even the sheep were Swaledale. Baby Jesus smiled beatifically through his golden locks as scores of Africans lined the church to kiss his feet.