Christmas in French-Speaking Africa

Burkina Faso: the nativity you build in brick

This is where we found the most, and almost none of it is online in English.

As Christmas approaches, the news site Libre Info reports on nativity scenes for sale in several neighborhoods of Ouagadougou, especially around the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. They’re made of granite, cardboard, paper, wood and plaster. One seller sums up the skills you need: “you have to know how to draw, measure and cut.”

But the most interesting part is what families build themselves. Studio Yafa tells the story of Innocent Kafando, a twenty-year-old civil engineering student who turned nativity building into a seasonal business. He doesn’t sell nativity scenes. He sells plans: “I draw, and people often come to buy the plans from me to go and build their nativity.” A small plan costs about 3,000 CFA francs (around $5), and a detailed one 5,000 to 10,000 CFA francs. Customers sometimes provide the bricks.

Cameroon: a straw stable

In 2021, the national newspaper Cameroon Tribune described Christmas preparations at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Victories in Yaoundé. The nativity there was set up with “a hut, a hurricane lamp, bouquets of flowers and straw roofing.”

It’s a perfect example of what the Church calls inculturation: telling the Gospel in the local culture. The stable of Bethlehem becomes a thatched hut, and Joseph’s lantern a hurricane lamp. Nothing is added to the story. It’s simply set in the world of the people looking at it, exactly what the Provençal crèche has done for two centuries with its farmhouse and fountain.

One important detail: that year, priests and nuns set up the nativity, not professional craftsmen. We found no reliable source for any Cameroonian nativity workshop or cooperative. The local-style nativity exists, but there’s no documented craft industry making it, at least not yet.

Ivory Coast: the “Christmas tree” that isn’t a tree

In Ivory Coast, arbre de Noël (Christmas tree) doesn’t mean a tree. It means an event: a Christmas party for children put on by a company, a government agency, a foundation or a community group.

You see it all the time in the local press and from the Ivorian Press Agency: “the 12th edition of its traditional Christmas tree” for a Bouaké mutual aid society, “a mining company gives a Christmas tree to its staff’s children,” “more than 2,000 children celebrated at the great Christmas tree in Kononfla,” “Christmas tree 2024: nearly 400 children of SODEMI staff showered with gifts.” The Chamber of Commerce, the National Assembly and the president’s office all throw one.

Senegal: a shared Christmas, and a debated one

Senegal is an overwhelmingly Muslim country where Christmas is widely celebrated, including by many Muslims. That’s true and often reported. But it’s almost always only half the story.

A report from the Swiss Catholic news agency describes gift shopping, the Yule log cake, the holiday meal, special radio and TV shows, and parties for young people. Then it mentions something you’ll rarely read elsewhere: Muslims there debate it among themselves. Some imams say Muslims shouldn’t celebrate Christian holidays. More moderate leaders point to the shared belief in one God and the place of Jesus in Islam, while still advising Muslims not to take part.

A note on our sources: the press talks about this a lot, but scholars have barely studied it. We found no academic research specifically on Christmas in Senegal. What’s out there is personal accounts, not research.

Congo, Togo, Madagascar

Democratic Republic of the Congo. The news site Actualité.cd collected accounts from Kinshasa. Midnight Mass is the heart of Christmas, and one mother put it this way: “The whole family was at Mass, where we praised God, sang and danced to celebrate the birth of our Lord.” So Mass with singing and dancing is well documented. The article also points out money worries: rising prices make the holiday harder, starting with the cost of chicken.

Togo. The Togolese press has noticed a recent change, which is rare to see reported: “the tradition of the meal after Midnight Mass is fading. More and more of the faithful now choose to have dinner before going to church.” A custom changing in real time, seen up close, is worth more than a tired cliché.

Madagascar. Vatican News shared the story of a missionary who served for twenty-seven years in the northeast: “For children, Christmas isn’t about presents. It’s the feast of the Savior’s birth. Christmas is celebrated with song and prayer.” In villages where no priest can come, catechists lead the celebrations, and the priest uses nativity pictures to teach. That’s one person’s account of one region, so it may not apply to the whole island.

What we don’t know

We should be clear about what we don’t know.

For Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville and Benin, we found nothing we could use: no documented customs, no nativity scenes, no local reporting we could access. Of course Christmas is celebrated there. We just don’t have sources to go on, and we’d rather say so than copy someone else’s list.

We also found no official heritage listing (UNESCO or national) for Christmas or the nativity scene in any of these countries.

As for the African nativity sets sold in Europe and North America (figures in ebony, soapstone or bronze), the only information comes from store listings, with no named workshops and no way to trace where they’re made. So we don’t really know where they come from or who they’re made for. What we do know is that where African family nativities are documented (in Burkina Faso), they look nothing like those sets: they’re small brick-and-plaster structures in a courtyard. Two very different things with the same name.

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