PRIMARY SCHOOL CARTELS

A Packed African classroom-photo courtesy

    There is no business as profitable as the business of selling fear. And if there was a mogul merchant in this trade was our class six prefect. The prefects-I only realized later they are also called monitors- were the most feared in our school after Woti- the headmaster. The deputy was equally feared until one day he soiled his pants after an agitated mzee wielding a machete stormed his office protesting the whipping of his son. He drew back his claws until he was later transferred for allegedly pinching a pupil inappropriately. There therefore were only two groups of people in our school, prefects and others. You qualified to be others if you weren't the teachers favorite, the tallest, the brightest or fell below any other criteria used for prefects selection.

Our school was not the type you get their coordinates from a single click on the google search tab. In fact, if you wanted a glimpse into Africa’s education crisis, there was no better vantage point than our village. A village located in the impoverished hilly region of Tetu in Nyeri County. A drop into one of the local primary schools and you’d typically find more than 50 students crammed into a class. Just a few having textbooks. If the teacher was there, and they were often absent, the children would be on the receiving end of a vernacular monotone recitation geared towards rote learning.

“A nene a nini…B nene b nini” , The lower classes would be heard from kilometers away as they orally tried to differentiate the upper and lower cases of the alphabets .

 I was never shortlisted as the cleanest or the most disciplined. I was very naughty and  had ones  poisoned our class-teacher's dog for making fun of my oversized tattered pair of pants during an inspection day. i therefore had the slimmest chances of being a class monitor. Chege, our class prefect, had inherited huge tracts of hatred on me from his mother, who- according to her- I was the worst product of the village. She had a habit of reporting me to  my parents for the least of  mistakes including walking to school instead running. I think she just hated me, maybe because i was brighter than his son or maybe because her daughter talked well of me. Girls have weird attractions to dirty, naughty and bright school boys. There is this day (for example) i was canned for tuning the broadcast lesson radio to a vernacular station mid a vulgar secular song. She cried more than i did.

It could be for this  hereditary hatred, that saw my rest of std six period as tense as living in volatile neighborhood. My name on the list of noisemakers was always suffixed with multiplication signs  like drug dosage sheet.On a day when the list was not ready and the teacher on duty needed names of those who were making noise, it was always me plus a few others. All my activities were as delicate as attempting a fart after a series of diarrhea, i never knew what trouble they would get me into. Almost everything sent me in bad books with Chege, be it whispering, sleeping, breathing loudly or even remaining silent all the time was interpreted as contemplating to make noise. 

Our science teacher, Waite, had a set of notes for each lesson in each topic which he recycled since the beginning of his career. My brother who was a class ahead had taken the notes, in an awful handwriting.  i therefore used to relax in Waite's classes as the rest of the class furiously copied the incomplete sentences scribbled on the chalkboard in format similar to that of the ancient Sumerians.  So one day, a mischievous undercover desk mate noticed my little game. When the science teacher started his usual rapid-fire bullet-flying style of teaching by reciting what he had memorized in donkey's years, while scribbling fast on the blackboard, my desk mate pulled out my secret notebook and started mimicking the teacher and read the lessons notes minutes before the teacher, creating a  voodoo effect. And that's how I was suspended for exposing the rote-learning system with fixed syllabus, standard questions/answers and rewards for "mugging up".

 Upon completion of the suspension, i was handed an addition suspension for allegedly leading a group of my classmates in invading the school garden, stealing and roasting the same in the lower boys urinals. In absentia. The statement as reported by Chege and signed by the headteacher.

   "...it was reported that you, in company of other boys, invaded the lower school plantation. You further broke the school store and made away with several desks and pieces of broken timber. A teacher reported his matchbox missing from his staff-room locker. It is these resources that you used to light a fire and roasted the maize in the lower urinal."  Part of the suspension letter read.

I was therefore expected to report back accompanied by both parents and in-laws if i had any. My problem wasn't telling either of my parent of the summon -they were already used to it, but conniving a meeting between three of us and give them reasons why one parent was not enough to meet Woti. I knew if i went back home with that letter the quiet mzee would disown me.

 The best way to handle a crisis is to prevent it in the first place. Or better still in the words of Mathew 5: 25- make  peace quickly with your accuser. But for me and Chege, we were such constant irreconcilable enemies just like the people of science and the common folks. I therefore could only plead my case in front of Woti. How would i convince him that i was even absent on the said date.He would never take me serious since that day he asked us to narrate stories and give moral lessons during his Religious Education Lesson. While my classmates prepared ripped off stories from books and recited them, very lengthy that half of the class would fall asleep even before they start, I shot at the front and started off.

“Once there lived a man. He died. Moral of the story: All men must die.”

As i waited for him at his office's entrance, the bell to call the start of lessons rang. He must have been held up in a crisis meeting on the personal hygiene of teachers. It was not hard to notice him from a distance as he made noises with his dark tan half-zipped boots any time he walked around. I placed myself  innocently on the green waiting bench ready to shoot up ones i hear him do his chronic phlegmy throat clearing.  I must have been too absorbed by the young girl screaming in the new deputy headmaster's office that i didn't hear him until he tapped the nap of my neck. 

" Waiyaki, you are a time waster. What are you still doing outside while the rest are already in the classes?"

I cant remember any other words he said after, but the splint i did, would have earned me least of a silver after the mighty Bolt. I don't know whether he had dementia, diabetes, Alzheimer or being just forgetful but that saved me.