My Belgitude My Leopolditude

Today is Saint Nicholas Day, a very important day in Belgium. It used to be the Belgian kids' Christmas, in them days that were. In normal times, it still is done to go see Saint Nicholas who's out and about in his bishop's outfit and a donkey to carry the goodies, visiting schools and the good people's streets, and to hope for a few sweets if you have been a good kid, and if you sing the song ''C'est Saint Nicolas patron des ecoliers'' (You Tube it). I was given sweets even when I was too grown up for that, and I didn't mind if I did - it was even more important to me as a migrant, so that tradition would live, or at least survive for a few more years. It was a bit of the old country that mattered much to me.

I remember queuing up with other kids to see Saint Nicholas in one of the department stores of a certain industrial city, year after year. It was more important to see the holy man than to get a handful of sweets. Of course they'd place him right at the farthest end of the toy department, behind red plush curtains. We knew it was a guy wearing a costume and a cottony beard. But it was Tradition, a tradition for kids. There was this memorable day when I mistook for a toy the fluffy pink feather duster a shop-assistant was using around massive display of electric toy trains, with landscapes and tunnels and bridges and what have you, whole circuits on large tables as of yore. ''I would like to have that'', I said, pointing at the feather duster. The women laughed. Three generations of mine who would always accompany the kids on their outing every year. It's not a toy, it's a feather duster, said the dusting lady. Ma Vie en Rose the Belgian way. It's all gone now, the generations, the industrial city, the stores. I'm gone too.

Until late in life I was given a Belgian choccy Saint Nicholas every 6th December, if my relatives could find one. Over the years, they complained there were more and more Americanised Father Christmases with ruddy cheeks with the red and white outfit on supermarket shelves, but not many, if any, Saint Nicolas. The real deal was wrapped in red and gold foil imitating a bishop's outfit, slightly oriental in its style, complete with the mitre, the curled crozier, the long white beard and hair, and the Pontian eyes. The last one I received I kept, because I was sure I wouldn't get another one like that, because I felt it was the last one of the proper sort. My world is dying.

I am not interested in unholy colour-obsessed controversy. The most important should always have been the Pontian Greek bishop who lived by what he believed in. The saint of my youth was a rescuer, the saviour of three kids/students/pilgrims depending on different versions of the story, who had been murdered and put in a salt barrel like meat pre-refrigeration days by an evil butcher/innkeeper with dark motives - he was also rumoured to have become the Dark Companion of the saint after he revived the victims of that foul murder with European-bred cannibalistic undertones (it did occur during sieges and famines), repentant of his criminal deeds, skin colour need not apply: crime doesn't have a single nationality, no matter what Nazis may have wanted us to believe. Are we going to white-wash Greed or Othello next? I'd rather have a think about what extreme behaviour desperation brings to the mind. Not something sweet, soothing and healing. Saint Nicholas among many other exceptionally good deeds is credited with the moral salvation of three young maidens whose father was so poor he thought of selling them off as sex slaves, as he couldn't afford dowries to marry off any of them. The saint threw three golden balls under cover of darkness in the young ladies' shoes that were drying before the fire. a dowry for each. That is the origin of the oranges in the socks pinned to the mantel, or left in shoes the night before Christmas. The saint was clearly fighting slavery of any kind.

It is so in the Walloon anthem Li Tchant des Wallons that a good Belgian North South East and West does good under the cover of darkness, not to embarrass the recipient of charity or themselves, ''li po kon donne, on nel donne qu'e catchete'', the little you give you give whilst hiding, discreetly, under the cover of darkness, just like in the Book, so that what your right hand gives to charity, your left hand doesn't know about. And so it is that Leopold Sedar Senghor did a lot of good under the cover of his darkness, writing famous poems about his Negritude that were still taught and known by all in my day, a long time ago, when anybody who went to work came back from the fields, the mines and the factories the same dark complexion as everybody else's.

For the record, I do have Esan and Northern Indian very active genes in my make-up. It's done in the best families.