On......boarding school days

“Atutu” said my mother “it is time”

I languished in the bathtub for a little while longer, knowing that my love affair with clean, running water was about to be brought to a halt. It was time to go back to boarding house.

I contemplated the three hour journey that lay ahead of me and contrasted it to the same ruminations I had twelve months ago before my first year in secondary school. Where there had once been hope and a sense of adventure, there now lay dread in their wake. The only strand of salvation that availed itself to me was the fact that I was no longer the most junior of junior students. Anyone who has gone to a federal school will tell you that your JS1 year is the single most painful, humiliating and downright depressing twelve months that you will experience during the course of your natural life. In fact, a year that consists of a job loss, house eviction and divorce would pale in comparison next to it. I thanked God that at least in JS2 I can now begin inflicting the same sort of misery that I suffered in my first year.

The three hour drive was scarcely long enough. I made a last ditch attempt to feign an ailment of some sort. I spent the majority of the drive racking my brain for any kind of disease that would force the immediate curtailment of the journey. Trypanosomiasis? White malaria? Yellow Fever nko? There had to be something I could convincingly pull off I thought. By the time I settled on kwashiorkor of the brain, we had already reached the gates of hell. The most depressing thing about those gates is that once they were closed, you knew that for the next three months your ass belonged to Federal.

I had arrived just in time for dining hall and, this being the first day, supper was going to be a particular treat. For starters we had entrée of nada with cream of zilch. The main course was a particular favourite; weevils and stones with a small side order of beans. This was garnished with three small black organic substances which, at some stage of their gestation, were known as ‘plantains’

I found the evening’s dinner far too rich for my palate so it meant a trip to Blockys (Bloh-KEES) Island had to be arranged. Blockys Island was an area about 100 metres or so from Dodan Barracks (the dormitory) and was a playground for amoeba, maggots, bacteria and just about any other microscopic organism you can think of. It also had a part time job as a toilet. In my first term, I refused to shit for one week in protest of the sanitary conditions. By third term, I was not just shitting there but I was on a first name basis with all the maggots living in Blockys. The flies did not move when you swatted them, they just perched there and stared back at you. I still grieve to this day over Okoro, my favourite pet maggot, who died in the second term after consuming Senior Okechuckwus shit.

The seniors – CHAI!! - the seniors. They owned the school. Once upon a time, Federal had been run by the principal and head teachers. When incidents of teacher beating started becoming rife, the shift in power became very apparent. Now the teachers just taught, packed their bags and ran to hide in their homes. There was one senior in particular, Senior Nwokedi, who was like Abacha before even Abacha himself. The guy was evil personified. There is no doubt in my mind that had he lived in the Western world, he would have been withdrawn from all educational establishments and evaluated for psychological purposes. He was the kind of guy that would rip off a pigeons head just to watch how it died. As you can imagine we juniors were often the target of his sadism. I will never forget the three boys that he locked inside Blockys island for four hours forcing them to clean the place with just a bucket of water between them. By the time the boys came out, one had practically passed out from the stench of the place. Despite all of them bathing twice a day thereafter, the smell of faeces lingered on their skin and hair for weeks after.

Then there were the girls – or rather the lack of them since I was at an ‘All boys’. There was, fortunately, an all girl’s catholic school not far from us. Every day the girls would pass by the main gate on their way to Mass. If you timed it well you could catch the girls for a chat on their daily sojourn. The older you got, the more confident you became in arranging dates with some of the babes. There was no local shopping mall or cinema nearby so your date consisted of eating groundnut and mango under the evening sky. Sometimes you would rain insults at some of the girls as they were passing by; “Your small breast like five kobo groundnut” “Your scatter-scatter teet like machine gun bullet” – and so forth. It was just good banter and usually the girls gave as good as they got -“Your small prick like James Bond rifle” but one particular day we picked on the wrong girl to fuck with. I don’t know if she was on her period or just having a bad day but before we knew what was happening the girl had scaled our fence and was in hot pursuit of me and three others. She caught two of us and delivered the kind of beating that even an angry mother would struggle to replicate. She later became known as ‘Flo-Jo the husband beater’. Don’t let anyone tell you different, FGC girls were the hardest of a hard bunch.

Garri – almighty garri. It was classified as contraband but people still found a way to smuggle it in. If you had garri to trade then you were the Bill Gates of Dodan Barracks. Even a half cup of garri could fetch as much as two of those Kellogs variety packs that ajebota children used to bring. If it was famine period then the going exchange rate was three Kellogs variety packs. People used garri for everything; they smoked it, sipped it, drank it, ate it – anything you can think of. They made garri burgers, garri sandwiches, garri cakes and even garri stew.

Every night was fight night. We invented pay-per-view. If you could afford the gate fee of NIDO milk or Cabin biscuit then that was as good as a Visa or Mastercard. The gladiators were randomly picked juniors who had no option but to fight against each other or risk the wrath of the seniors. It was pugilism at its worst and I regret to say that witnessing a fellow junior’s head been pummelled in form part of my best memories of boarding house. Then one day it was my turn and they put me against one boy whose nickname was kpako. He was a junior like me but I suspect even some of the seniors feared him. The events of the brushing are a haze but all I know is that I woke up in sick bay the next morning. My mother arrived in the afternoon and swore to the principal that her son would never come back to this school of vagabonds. Despite my pain I managed a smile because that word always conjured up memories of Josco, the vagabond of Eko bridge, from Basi and company.

I was transferred to one Ajebota school in Lagos and it made me laugh that there I was one of the hardest boys in school. I often wonder what became of some of those boys from back in the day. I don’t imagine that they will be on Hi-5 or Facebook anytime soon. Looking back it wasn’t really that bad and if anything instilled some character in me. Unfortunately I still cringe when somebody mentions kpako. It just brings back too many memories.