There is never a dull moment in an African classroom, at least of yore. An African classroom is full of music, dance and folk lore. It is a theater but only when you have the best impresario. An African teacher is a father, priest, musician, thespian and an artist all rolled into one. Nobody embodied these qualities better than my lower primary school teacher Mr. Joseph Kosgey aka High Court (he was so judicious you could not spin a yarn and get away with it).
Those days, one teacher took you from class one to three. If your teacher was good, you will hesitate to join upper primary and wish you could follow him to class one all over again. That was what we felt when we were suddenly ‘orphaned’ after three years with Mr. Kosgey and tossed to the unknown world of upper primary. I shed tears when in class four a different teacher came and said good morning. I didn’t even answer.
I didn’t even stand up as it was the tradition when a teacher blitzkrieg in. Two sticks of the cane greeted my buttocks that morning for failing to answer those greetings.
Teacher-pupil greeting was an elaborate affair. I didn’t know then it was a salutation at all. We didn’t understand English so we just sung the words without any inkling that it was a form greeting at all. I reckoned it was a form of routine punishment. The humdrum rendition went like this:
Teacher (upon entering the room): Good morning
Pupils (standing up): Goooood morninnnnnnnng sir! (At the top of our voices)
Teacher: How are you?
Pupils: We are quite well thank you sir (pronounced in our case thus: wi arr kwel kwel kwel tenkyu sa)
Teacher: How do you do
Pupils: How do you do sir!
Teacher: Sit down
Pupils: We are sitting down thank you sir!
And the teacher would proceed to the chalkboard, write the date and ask, “What is the date today?”, and we would shout, “The date today is…” We sung dates in three languages –English, Swahili and Kipsigis, after the teacher.
The African classroom was a theater, but the curtain raiser was always a circus of mimes.
I have digressed long enough (I would be pinched if it was a story telling session in Class Three East of Rotik Primary School for losing the thread). I was talking about Mr. Kosgey our teacher. This particular teacher was so highly regarded that parents could delay their kids from joining school till it coincided with his cycle after three years!
In upper primary, teachers could tell who was taught by Mr. Kosgey and who was not. The former were brilliant, confident and engaging. The latter were of course the exact antithesis.
That was my teacher and at home he was my uncle for he was a step-brother to my dad. He didn’t regard me as such in school. I was a pupil like any other. Only disadvantage was I could not hoodwink him to skive school, he of course checked with my mom. (Whenever he came home, we would run and hide for a teacher was revered more than anything else I can remember).
Mr. Kosgey (High Court) as a thespian was a sight to behold. In our CRE (Christian Religious Education) lessons, we would run to the shade of a big tree at the corner of the school field, far removed from the noise from all the other classes. When we were down there, he became Jesus or Moses or any other character in the bible as the topic may demand. There, we were not pupils again but the children that Jesus said to be led to him.
I remember when he taught us this topic about Jesus asking Peter and other would-be disciples to abandon whatever they were doing and follow him. He donned a wig of long hair, slippers and a long dress. Carrying a bible and a shepherd’s staff, he ordered us to follow him in a thundering voice. We went round and round the field slowly following him as he occasionally read us a verse from the Bible and taught us what it meant. There we were, excited kids, surrounding him, listening to him and part staring at him for he was so changed with the wig and long false beards we thought he was Jesus.
The whole school could not help but abandon their classes and witness us following ‘Jesus’ at a safe distance.
(He donated me this very bible when I passed and was to join High School, it was NIV Bible, dunno where it is now)
Another episode that is still etched in my mind is when we acted the story of Joseph of the Old Testament who was sold to Egypt by his brothers. We acted this story so well the school chose a day to suspend classes and invite our parents to watch us. I played Joseph and for one year I had to work hard to shake off the name from sticking to me. I remember foretelling famine on the land and telling people to store food in the act.
All the bible lessons we were taught was not complete without acting. We acted every story in the Old Testament in the three years he taught us. All the stories I know in the bible are attributable to him for I have never been to church since then.
The story of Moses ( I cried when Moses died before reaching Canaan) and the Good Samaritan are still fresh in my mind for we acted every bit. We would go to a hill nearby ( overlooking ‘Canaan’)to stage the story of Moses and the burning bush, striking a rock for water and receiving the Ten Commandments. These are my fondest memories of that teacher. (He is retired nowadays and a bit broken owing to strong village bootleg he imbibes with my dad in the hills of Takitech)
Mr. Kosgey could describe Jordan, Bethlehem, Damascus, Jerusalem, Egypt and such biblical places when we were at the top of the hill that one day, in our childhood fancy, we asked him to take us there. He would show us the distant Manga hills as Canaan and we believed we could actually go there and eat manna.
Nobody has ever impressed in my mind vivid images of Canaan and such places as he did. Nobody.
When the 12.45 pm bell rang, it was time for lunch and sadly, was the end of our CRE lesson. We would feel bad it was over, sing one song, ran to class, pick our books, and dash home. There were no afternoon classes so we reported to school again the following day.
(It is lunch time for me too; there are no afternoon sessions, so let’s meet again tomorrow for Mr. Kosgey’s music lesson)
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