Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

By the time I joined, the school was in one of its confused phases. I liked it. There was no parent-teacher association to collect money, augment teachers’ salaries and keep an eye on things. The staff was divided. A very weak headmaster had just been brought in, and he had decided to do nothing. He let the reverend address the students, going on about his son and his political friends and what he had done for the parish. It was noted that the parish had retired him for committing adultery and siring children with parishioners’ wives, but the old man had discovered early on that shame was a sentiment unfit for politicians. He acted as though the charges were merely malicious fabrications.

For a long time, the school had no library. There were about four hundred students, most of whom did not have the money to buy the necessary textbooks for themselves. Teachers used their own books or borrowed some from other schools or from friendly teachers elsewhere. The few available teachers’ textbooks were kept in a big cupboard. One day news spread that the school’s bad days were over, for the reverend’s American and Canadian friends had sent all the necessary books. The excitement was phenomenal, not least among the teachers. But it was all dampened when a load of useless books was delivered one early morning: blueprints of 1940 computers, books on the rudiments of aeronautics, zoology, Greek, marine fish and the American army. The reverend made a long speech, showing off the gravid boxes. He collected a number of well-dressed students, made them wear their best smiles and posed with them for a group photograph, with the boxes in the foreground. “Toilet paper,” the teachers said when they saw the books. The students felt cheated. Word spread. Reverend Toilet Paper became Igat’s nickname henceforth.

The parents were generally happy to have a nearby school to take care of their offspring during the day. We were their nannies, making sure that no harm came to their sons and daughters before the end of school. The classes were crowded, because the policy was to recruit as many students as possible and not to disappoint eager, hardworking parents. There were some very keen students in the lot, boys and girls who would have performed well in better schools. Some had come from the Triangle. They worked hard at first, but lethargy eventually set in.

The choice of a deputy headmaster always says volumes about a school. Ours was a licensed teacher who had done some teaching when SIMC, as we called the college, was still a primary school. Now he did all the headmaster’s dirty work. He opened and closed the school. He collected the fees, saw to discipline, caught latecomers, did some accounts and doled out money to teachers. He checked breast pockets to make sure that the school badge was well sewn on, not just affixed with pins, as adolescents liked to do. He checked girls’ faces for makeup, for tiny, sexy earrings and forbidden hairdos. He also checked girls’ fingers for nail polish and faddish artificial claws. He was a man dizzy with his role, out to top himself and justify his position to all.

The headmaster, an evasive elephant seal of a man, spent most of his time on the slide rule, figuring out theoretical mathematical problems. He had little to do, because his deputy literally ran the school. On many days, he did not put in an appearance at all, preferring to attend meetings and see to his business interests in the city. His trick was to assure the reverend that he was not a threat to him, while he did his own thing. The headmaster, like the Invisible Man, acted and moved incognito. Sometimes he entered his office and no one knew that he was even there.

This cavalier spirit extended to school accounts. They were a mess or a maze to the average eye. It was as if a mathematician were creating work for himself to fill his lonely hours, or a crook were disguising his hand. To begin with, most teachers had financial problems. They would go to the headmaster and explain their positions, and according to the need, he would decide how much to give them as a supplement to, or an advance on, their salaries. He would dole out the money and write the amount on a piece of paper. In the meantime, the deputy was writing his own pieces of paper, which ended up on the headmaster’s desk. There was such a big heap of famous pieces of paper that many got lost or confused. The only conclusion one could draw was that the headmaster was exploiting the system for his own good; otherwise there was nothing to stop him from acquiring an accountant or a better system. Consequently, clever teachers always had a problem — with the children, the wife, their health, anything — and drew whatever money they could. Sometimes the deputy referred these cases to the headmaster, who, being a nice man, could not find ways of denying them and ended up giving them money and writing on pieces of paper.

The headmaster liked me, because I never asked for money. My guess was that he was writing somewhere that he had given me so much and pocketing it. Whenever I went to his office, it was to ask for permission to go home, ostensibly to the clinic or hospital for my headaches, which later became migraines. This headmaster did not mind a sickly teacher as long as he did not ask for financial assistance. So whenever I had business to settle in town, I would ask for permission to leave. And I would get it. This of course meant that students were suffering, but ours was not a student-oriented school, at least not in the academic sense. There was no use pretending. Most teachers taught in other schools to supplement their deficient pay, and others had jobs in town. As long as one came and taught, one was not obliged to stay on campus. Sometimes teachers came, went to the staff room, had tea, conversed and left, as though their lessons were over. It was a free-for-all, with many students also dodging and staying home to fetch and sell water or do other things to earn money to support themselves and pay school fees.

The old system of sending school inspectors to keep an eye on teachers had died an excruciating natural death in the seventies, and the new government was too busy fighting guerrillas to bother about such banal things as school inspections. Teachers got paid three months late, and in order to appear to be fair, the government did not put them under pressure.

The best thing I could have done for our boys and girls would have been to teach them sex education — we were, after all, keeping them there to grow up before going out to become parents — but that was taboo. Our biggest problem was not alcohol or drugs, but unwanted pregnancies. Strangely enough, many parents believed that sex education would only exacerbate the problem. Most parents did not want their daughters swallowing pills or interfering with the procreative process in any way, and they resented anybody who divulged such information to their little ones. The good reverend, supported by the conservative element among the parents, resisted the introduction of “godless information” into his school with all his might. That just about sealed it.

Under the circumstances, the school could only expel pregnant girls. The culture of shame and secrecy had a lot to do with it all. Most parents never talked about sex to their children — good Christians left such matters to sort themselves out. In the past, paternal aunts used to take their nephews and nieces aside and tell them everything, but with the breakup of extended-family structures, the gap had been left yawning. For the majority of youths, peers were the educators. I now and then intercepted chits and cuttings from pornographic magazines and love letters as they changed hands. They reminded me of Cane lecturing us, and making us complete sentences with words like “penis” or “vagina.” I was not such a hypocrite as to feign anger or shock. I often made one student read a chit aloud. Then I would ask if there was anybody with questions on the subject of sex, pregnancy, contraception or abortion. Suddenly everyone would become alert. Once, the deputy took me aside and requested that I not corrupt young minds. I bowed my head, but did the same thing when I intercepted the next chit.