Chapter 1: My Primary School – The Introduction

I am a boy from one of those generations caught in between two main generations of counter opposing views. My life has been filled with lots of stories. All in all, it is one I live to the fullest regardless of the hurdles and challenges I have had to face and still face. This however isn’t a story of pain and frustration, but of hope because like the Holy Scriptures says, ‘Hope doesn’t disappoint’.

This story can not start without going as far back as my early life as a child. My dad is a civil servant, and one of the evils with his kind of job is that your superiors sometimes don’t expect you to have a peaceful, stable home. So occasionally, they hope to help spice up your family life with what is called a WORK TRANSFER.

It is like waking up to see you have been awarded a work vacation. At first guess, the picture that comes to mind would be scenes from Hollywood movies, with a large and beautiful resort and happy-looking couples partially dressed and beautifully naked, scattered around with big yellow hats. Well, snap back to Nigeria.

Two things about this kind of transfer are that the location, ninety percent of the time, is the last place one would ever gladly want to go and unlike actual vacations, there’s no return from whatever hell you get sent to.

So here we were, a family of seven, uprooted from our lives in the city and sent to another state far away from any known face. We had just landed at this new place, and the only semblance of our old life was that we were in a similar settlement, THE BARRACKS.

I was really young at this time, maybe around 3 years old. Luckily for us, we got some help moving into the new house, and though it was a two-bedroom block of apartments, we knew we would work our way around making it work. How we did that is not today’s story.

They say if life throws you lemons, you make lemonade with it. Life was throwing us a big pot of beans, and here we were trying to make the best use of it, BREAD AND BEANS. If you have ever experienced this kind of life, one of the hurdles to cross is getting into a good school, except there wasn’t any in the hole you previously crawled out of. So the hustle to find good schools for five children began. We eventually got through this, and here I was, enrolled in what looked like my dream school – Police Children School.

For aspiring parents or parents who at this stage in their family lives are in a similar phase trying to secure a good school for their children or ward, this is a little trade secret and insight. Throughout my life, I have come to realize that school logos, insignias and mottos tell a lot about a school. You don’t get it? The elements that make up a school’s logo or insignia have a lot to do with what goes on in the school most of the time. Elements like a book, pen or any symbol of power speak to the fact that the school prides itself in academic excellence. Where this is good, the ones that have these elements in combination with other elements like cutlass, a cane, matchet, gun or the like – this combination suggests something a little extra. Yeah, you’re thinking about it now, and it is all adding up, right?

The motto of my new school is ‘knowledge through DISCIPLINE’ and the school took the latter part too seriously. Nowadays, the trending wokeness allows parents to storm a school and harass a teacher for whatever happens in school, but the case wasn’t so back then. Our parents believed in the saying that ‘whatever happens in school, stays in school’ and that no one dies from discipline. So I excitedly found myself in a school whose core values ranged between fifty percent academic excellence and fifty percent discipline.

I know you are thinking discipline is good. Discipline keeps everything in control. Yeah, it does, most especially when it is in combination with a good caning. The first experience that opened my eyes to the trouble I found myself in was an incident that happened in my first season in school. Back then, the school assembly started at 8.00 am, but you are expected to be there at 7:30 am. At first, you’d almost think it is about having an early head-start, but nope!

The school wouldn’t pass for your typical public school, well, to an extent. We had staff responsible for ensuring the school was clean; they were known as cleaners. It is very ironic that a school with cleaners still expects you to come to school 30mins after the cleaners to ‘ensure the school is clean’. It makes one wonder what the cleaners do thirty minutes before the pupils are expected to arrive at school. The simple answer to this question is ‘GOSSIP’, full fledge big gossip and nothing but gossip. Well, a little credit to these women is that they help clean the classrooms of the creche and prelim classes. Still, other than that, the school ran in a reversed scheme that kept the pupils as the cleaners and the cleaners, just like most civil servants in government and local government offices, only have to show up to get paid.

Anyways, on this very unlucky day, my very young self, still less than 5 at that time, got to school late with my elder brother, who was in a higher class at the time. We knew we were late that day, and there were 2 lines leading up to the wickedly looking teachers with ridiculously big canes hanging from their huge, long arms. It was like the biblical separation of the sheep from the goats, one line had the really small pupils like myself who were given a safe right of passage into school without any punishment, and the other lines had the goats, the older pupil whom the teachers deemed ripe for punishing.

I remember my brother urging me to join the sheep into a safe haven, but I chose not to leave my brother’s side as a committed younger brother. I guess I was too young to understand, or I had hoped the teachers would look at me mercifully and ask me to join the sheep, but what happened was the opposite. By the time we got to the front of the teacher, I had looked up at him with my innocent small face hoping for mercy and redemption. Still, this hope was quickly thrown out and replaced with a loud scream as the cane landed on my very small back, wrapping around my sides. Rivers of water, not living this time, gushed out of my small eyes as my little self writhed in pain and anguish.

There and then, it dawned on me that I was in trouble in this school of mine. It only took five years for me to realize how much trouble it was going to be. My school took academic excellence seriously and had several means of ensuring such excellence, whether by conventional means or unconventional ones. However, there was this one time we had a mix of both as one, and we called him SIR IBRO.

Chapter 2: Sir Ibro