By Chris Ihidero
My school had a bakery and bread was a constant feature in our meals time-table.
My school also had about thirteen fish ponds and a cattle ranch. We almost always ate fish, often thinly sliced like fried plantain. We all fought for the head, which was always the biggest part. (Fish head is still my favourite part of fish till this day.) We only had meat on rare occasions, mostly when a cow had died on the farm. When we had meat, it was cut like sugar cubes. Rice was a Sunday special, but Pap and Akara were regulars. The pap was often yellow and always had lots of lumps. It looked to me more like a large bowl of thick yellow phlegm. The akara was always cold and tiny, like table tennis balls. Sometimes, when we had beans or tea and the caterers gauged that what they had cooked wasn’t going to be enough, they simply brought in buckets of water and added to the cooked beans or tea, right before our eyes. (To this day, I really don’t like tea and you have to go the extra mile to make beans really interesting for me to eat it.) Alhaji A.O Sanni did not believe we should be fed fat; we were fed just enough to keep us alive.
Alhaji Sanni, my school proprietor was an enigma. He stood well over six feet and had a bounce in his strides. He had schooled abroad, I think, and his demeanour was that of a wise old man who knew a lot but said little. If you did something wrong and your issue got to Alhaji Sanni’s table, you knew you would get a fair hearing, and if found guilty, a fairly good beating. Myth had it that if Alhaji Sanni gave you six strokes of the cane, each one will land on exactly the same spot, in a straight line. Many were the tales of students who had suffered ruptures on their backs from being flogged by Alhaji Sanni.
One day, we got fed up with our uninspiring meals and decided to riot. Led by the Continuing Education students (remember those rejects from Baptist Academy, Igbobi College etc?), we soaked our bread in stew and pelted ourselves and the whole school compound. We made a bonfire in the centre of the football field with our dining hall tables and benches, sang Fela’s song and did summersaults all day. The hostel wardens and security fled. We demanded to speak only with Alhaji Sanni. The day wore on and Alhaji Sanni did not come to us. We got angry and broke the louvers on our hostel widows, broke the school bus windscreen, broke into the school kitchen and stole bags of rice, yams, palm oil and other ingredients. Still Alhaji Sanni did not come. At night we danced harder and sang louder, slapped the hostel wardens a couple of times and tied up the security men; still, no Alhaji Sanni.
Sometime around 2am, a lonely figure strolled into our midst and, speaking barely above a whisper, said: ‘My dear students, please go back to your dormitories and let’s discuss this issue in the morning.’ We all returned to our dormitories without even the slightest whimper.
We would all wake up in the morning before wondering what exactly had happened: Did Alhaji Sanni put juju in his mouth when he spoke to us? How come not even one person said no? By then, the police had arrived and forcefully sent us all out of the school premises, to our individual homes. When we returned, weeks later, we came with our parents to plead for reinstatement as students, signing an affidavit of proper behaviour henceforth.
To this day, I am convinced that while we were busy making noise and demanding to see him, Alhaji Sanni quietly sat on his prayer mat with his prayer beads in his hands and summoned powers from celestial planes. Done with this mystical exercise and reassured by the forces of heaven, he simply came down and put our silly souls under a spell.
He must have had a good laugh on his way back home, saying something like ‘Look at these silly children whose eyes cannot see further than the tip of their silly noses…hahahaa!’
That was my introduction to rioting, at barely 13 years old.
Have you seen my childhood?
N.B Next week, I’ll tell you how some incidents in my childhood led me to become irreligious.
