It always amazes me that, these days, kids eagerly wake up at five in the morning to carry their overloaded rucksacks and happily rush to school! But then compared to the schools of the 1950s, today’s schools are joyrides. When the Belgian invented school for the Rwandan kids, he had perfected the tools of torture to go with it. And he didn’t use those tools himself. In the true sense of indirect rule, he had trained your Rwandan brothers to do an even more sinister job for him (‘brothers’ because no lady was allowed to indulge in the complicated exercise of thinking those days!). Those horrendous old days, a teacher was not worth his miserable chalk if he did not whip your young bottom into minced meat. Or crack your innocent skull with an ardoise, the slate we used for writing on. Or remove your eye with a règle, the ruler we used for making lines.
In my case, our teacher was my own uncle, Selesitini (R.I.P.). The man had really mastered the art of teaching! Which meant what, especially if you were unfortunate enough to be his nephew? I am sure you don’t want to hear it, unless you are given to sadistic tendencies yourself! Even then, I think it will go beyond your most malicious imaginations! So, what exactly did he do? To set a common understanding, the first day in school as ikinyoni (infant pupil) was used to explain to you in no uncertain terms what he was capable of, which was everything — everything bad! Apart from having an extra eye at the back of his head, he explained, his other two eyes could both turn 180 degrees, not only sideways but also up and down.
So, tell me, what mischief could you do that could escape his punitive eye? He assured us that he was such a sharp shot that he could hold a glass of Primus beer, toss up a drop of the civilized drink from the glass, and it would fall right on his tongue. He bent down slowly and opened his bloodshot eyes wide, then dared you to look straight into his eyes, as he breathed yesterday’s stale beer fumes in your face: “You see!” he barked, “I can see your small, dirty brain. You are wishing me ill, you small devil. You are praying that my yesterday’s doze of beer kills me here and now, you imp!” Amazing! Indeed, it was true, I would be thinking exactly that, praying to God Almighty that the character drops dead, that his hangover kills him right there! Of course, my prayer – and everybody else’s – was never answered, and the man was there again and again to make our young lives unbearable. The slightest shift on your stool saw the man turn from his blackboard and grab the nearest slate, then he would hurl it at your face. He would then grab a ruler and hurl it at your neighbour, pick the ever-ready cane and work on somebody’s backside, and so on. So the class was general pandemonium: missiles, canes, screams from the pupils, falling chairs and desks, etc.
It would be some time before we went back to our rote lessons, chanting like robots. This usually went something like this: “Two and one is two, two and two is four, two and three is six …” The chant of mara, multiplication table, would go on until our teacher got bored and sat on his table. Then he would settle down to recount to the class how life would be impossible to some of us fellows whose heads were impenetrable to Mathematics. How he could not imagine life for fellows with fat pumpkins on their necks, carrying porridge in the name of brains, and they are the sons of Surushefu (of course the sarcasm would not be lost on his hapless nephew with the big head, the miserable Ingina, son of the local chief!)
He would go on to recount how there used to be such a fat head called Georges Banete. This Banete fatso used to have no inkling of Mathematics because his head had nothing inside but air, we were told. One market day this Banete was asked by his mother to go and buy a clay pot, because the mother was unwell. The fellow got a beautiful pot and paid for it and took it home. The way other people were taking home their merchandise — only these others had bought goats! So the fellow had tried to lead his pot home by the rope, the way the others were pulling their goats. When he reached home, he looked back only to find he was left with a small piece of the pot on the rope! The mother was mad and wondered aloud how the nincompoop could fail to think of putting the pot on the head. As fate would have it, on another market day the mother was unwell and had to send her son to the market to buy a piglet. The numbskull, thinking he had become the wiser for it, bought the piglet and put it on his head. He reached home minus the piglet, minus one ear and plus a few scratches all over his body! Which goes to show you, our teacher told us, that little knowledge is dangerous. Little knowledge, especially in matters of addition, multiplication, subtraction, etc. was very dangerous, he assured us.
That is why, very often, we used to hide in maize plantations, instead of going to school. We preferred treating ourselves to à la carte menus in maize and sorghum plantations, chewing imisigati (maize and sorghum stems) inopfu (no translation!), washed down with inkeri(wild berries), inyanya/impuhu (wild tomatoes?) as dessert. On such days we would wait until the foolish ones came back from school, then we’d join them and go home as tired, hard-working pupils. Most of them went to school, however, not because they were foolish but because we had to alternate so as not to be caught. We would cut the school today and they cut it tomorrow, but if you were wise you could cheat on them and cut it for a number of weeks! But as I said, every good thing has a bad side. And the bad side was that the teacher would come visiting, and would chat with your father as they shared a drink. As the teacher warmed up to his precious Primus beer, he would get to asking how seriously sick the son was, since he didn’t come to school yesterday. Your father exclaimed and said that the little brat hadn’t missed school the last two months. And to assure Porofeseri, he shouted out your name to come, but you were nowhere near. That’s when he sent his errand boys to look for you. As I was saying, you had gone into hiding at the sight of your teacher because you feared exactly that: being asked how you missed school!
Since the errand boys knew all the nooks of the bushes around, they unearthed you from the deepest corner of the bush, looking like Sadam Hussein after being smoked out of his ‘spider hole’! Your trembling, little, bigheaded body stood in front of your father and your teacher in a daze. What happened next didn’t register in your mind. You only found yourself later in bed, feeling as if you’d been run over by a tractor, your mother on your side, nursing you. After this experience, you would think nobody in their right mind would repeat the mistake of dodging school, right? Wrong, because we did it with renewed zeal!
