Memories of an African Childhood: School Days

Waking up was not an easy task. My mom would drag me out of bed and toss me out of the house to a waiting basin of water to wash my face. Washing one’s face before eating breakfast was such a cardinal rule in that household nobody ever skipped it. I have never known why.  That done, we would herd around the hearth sipping tea.

My mom maintained such a serious countenance in the morning. You could easily earn a slap or a cooking stick on your tiny head at that particular time over a slight mistake.  We took our breakfast with such quiet all you could hear was long swigging sounds, chewing food and an occasional fart. Since school was near, the first bell would ring and the next would mean we were late.

When we woke early enough, we would wash our legs and arms ( having washed our faces before breakfast) , oil ourselves, slung our tiny bags and go running the short distance to school. My school bag was populated by only two exercise books: feint ruled for ‘writing’ and square ruled for ‘math’. It is not that they were whole exercise books; you were bought one regular exercise book and split in half. The other half for the next helping or for your sibling. The other occupant of that school bag was a small piece of pencil.  It was split into three pieces too and the rest kept at home. My pencils were made shorter by my gnawing habits when writing. Once you had all these three, you were good to go. If one was amiss, you were given an egg to barter at the local corner shop.

Sometimes when I got too late to wash my legs and arms, I simply clutched my bag, run across the dewy long grass of the cattle enclosure, emerge at the other end next to the road, rub myself with a small bar of soap and repair for school.

If you happen to get late, you were stopped at the gate by the teacher on duty, made to kneel holding your ears and crawl the hundred meters to the assembly place thus. At the assembly, you were caned four strokes or five or even ten depending on the cruelty of that particular teacher.

Occasionally, we would carry a bottle of water to water the dusty classrooms to keep jiggers at bay. They caught up with us anyway and we utilized break time to extract them. Remember shoes was not part of the school uniform. Not that we had any anyway (the way I admired shoes in some books we read!). I didn’t know how it felt to be inside shoes.

My legs to date have rugged toe nails. I lost all my toe nails to the numerous stones on the road to school. When you stumbled upon a stone and it harvested your toe nail, you simply plucked it out and cover the fresh wound with dust to stem the flow of blood. After a week or so it will form a hard crust. Ripe with pus, it was sure to rouse you up at night throbbing with pain. My mom will warm some water, wash it and squeeze out the pus. After a week, it would heal to await another date with another stone, which always came.

At the assembly, we would sing the National Anthem and the Loyalty Pledge, pray, sing a hymn and be addressed by teachers. After that, they will check whether we had long nails. In case you had long ones, you were given a good beating and send home. Then the hair check, if long with lice, (the headmaster Mr. Arumba inspected us carrying a big pair of scissors) would cut an ‘X’ sign at the top of your head. Finally, he would order us to unbutton our shirts and scratch our chests and back with a stick checking for dirt. If dirty, you would be forced to take a bath in front of all the kids.

Done with the assembly and lucky to survive all the screenings, we would run to class. There was an obsession with us kids to always run whenever we were going anywhere and be the first to get there and shout ‘one’, ‘one’. The second one would shout ‘two’, ‘two’ and so forth. Whether going to the latrines, going out for breaks or coming back from lunch (we went home for lunch and back) we never walked. We always ran.

Unfortunately, I was fat and clumsy. I never ran at all (I have never completed a 400 meter lap to this day).

Another obsession of us kids was saying everything at the top of our voices. When asked your name, you will shout it out at the top of your voice, for my case then ‘my name is Alfred Kiprotich Barusei Kenduiywo Kilachei…’  Learning was by rote so we would shout everything after the teacher. ‘Oneeee, twoooo, threeeee… Aaaa, Bbbb Cccc, Dddd…aaaa, eee,iiii,ooo,uuu ad infinitum. The only pupil who was disadvantaged in this game was a friend of mine called Peter. Such a stammerer I never got to know his second name till he dropped out of school. He could faint trying to get a single syllable out.

In one of this shouting lessons, one of our classmates called Cherono vomited a red hookworm. We ran out thinking it was a snake. We avoided that girl for the balance of that term.

The first lesson of the day was always Math which I loathed no end. We would go to the dusty road behind our school, clear a space each and write down our math. 1, 2, 3, 4...etc. Very big ones. The teacher would come and mark with his finger too. A long tick or a big cross. If not solving Math on the dirt road( there were no vehicles) we would count the sticks or bottle tops in class. That was math. It used to bore me to dead. I always scored a big zero, written and drawn ears, mouth and nose dripping with snot. To show that you are a very stupid boy. We would also count our fingers and toes.

I had a cousin, Stephen, who went by a moniker ‘Tractor’, maybe because he was huge. He was so good in Math but he hardly came to school but that is not the reason why he is stuck in my mind now. It is because of his handwritings. When he was writing say a figure ‘1’, he would draw a big one it would occupy the whole page. Ditto to everything else. He finished his exercise books in a day but thank God he never came to school often. He dropped much sooner. (He is now called ‘54’, a very interesting fellow indeed)

When answering anything in our exercise books in that class, we had the habit of protecting it with a spare hand and our heads it was almost impossible to write. This was to bar others from stealing answers from you. If anybody would dare as beep or you even imagined that he/she was doing so, you will draw the attention of the teacher to that particular culprit and was warned severely. We would also alert the teacher to any pupil who dared ‘paint the air’( to break wind in our classroom parlance.)

The second lesson was English. We would sing A,B,C,D…the whole time. At times we would be given text books titled ‘Tom and Mary’. This was my favorite subject. Tom and Mary was an illustrated book about a family of Mr. and Mrs. Kamau. Mr. Kamau was a school- bus driver. Mrs. Kamau was a housewife. Tom and Mary were pupils (Jeez! they had shoes, I admired them endlessly). They had a little brother called Peter, a dog and a cat. I remember everything like yesterday because English was my favorite subject. We would sing about these stories after our teacher. See, we could not read so everything in our class was sung after the teacher.

‘the man is Mr. Kamau’

‘the woman is Mrs.Kamau’

‘the boy is Tom’

‘the girl is Mary’

‘the baby is peter’

‘the cat is drinking milk’

And so forth and so forth.

Tom and Mary were dropped in school by bus. Us we ran to and fro school every day. They had good clothes and proper school bags. Mary played a ‘bean-bag’ with other gals and so our gals did the same too. Tom played football in that book so we played football too. Only that our balls were made of rags and polythene. But we played and enjoyed it anyway. These Tom and Mary characters became our role models. Only that some things like a bus and shoes were beyond our reach. Nonetheless, we identified with these kids.

English tests involved ‘filling in the missing words’. The ‘a’ in ‘cat’, the ‘o’ in boy and etc. It was very cheap for me and would score a 100%.

Did I tell you that we were categorized in rows according to brilliance? No. My row (I was brilliant except in Math) was called Lion, the next was Elephant and the dullest of us were called Giraffe. We sat on benches that were fixed on the ground.

Hey, it was shameful to sit with girls and boys resisted it vehemently to the extent of missing school to avoid sitting with girls. My desk-mates were my cousins Stephen ‘tractor’ and his brother Kibet who was nicknamed ‘Chepchilat’ meaning ‘squeezed’. H e was short and walked with springy steps. (we were friends up to his demise in April 2008, RIP Paul Kibet Sugut).

The third lesson was Science. We just planted beans and maize in tins at the corner of our class. Our classes did not have doors nor windows, our plants would bend towards light and that was science for us! Maybe we did other stuff but that subject was neither interesting enough nor repugnant enough to warrant a sound remembrance.

There was Home Science too. We were taught to wash our hands after and before meals and after visiting the toilet. Anything else seems to have eluded my memory (another word for I did not like the subject that much).

Other subjects: Mother-tongue, Swahili, Civics, History, Geography, Art and Craft, Music and Physical Education deserve a whole page each to recount, so I better do it early tomorrow, I promise.