Everybody was proud of my brother, Mark Owhin. Almost six months in the same school, Salvation Army Primary school, there was no negative report or complaint about him. As for me, I had not spent a month in school when I became popular. I was accused of punching a boy who called me “Olori Gbeske”( a physiognomic abuse).
I guess that was what his mum or grandma jokingly called him whenever he did something wrong at home. He was now looking for who to confer the title on and he thought I was the appropriate person. I rejected it forcefully. You know mothers and grannies and name inventions. For instance, my grandma (Iya Olojojo) would call me “lemomu” when I had nothing to do with any mosque. Six months in the school, Mark had not been invited to the headmaster’s office. GOD forbid. I was dragged to the headmaster’s office by my class teacher three weeks into resumption in primary one. I was accused of coming to school habitually between 9 and 10 am when my house was just 200 metres away from the school.
It was only on the first day of resumption that my mother came from her husband’s house at Palm Avenue, Mushin, to take me to school. I recollect very well that on our way to the school, she was telling me to study the road very well because I would be going to school on my own as from the second day. I almost told her that I knew the road to the school and even beyond the school. I instantly suppressed my geographical arrogance when I remembered that my mother was a specialist in “colour riot and birding slaps”. When she slapped you, you would see different colours with imaginary birds flying around you. All the same, I considered it an insult that a Mushin resident would be telling a Surulere street navigator like me how to get to my school which was just a 5-minute walk from my house. If only she knew that I could tell her the number of streams and ponds between the school and the national stadium that was still under construction then, she would yell in awe. That was my own amusement park. I was always there to look for freshwater snails (isawuru) and all kinds of fish from streams and pondscums. That’s where we used to do our own fishing expedition and swimming competition. At some point, I thought I was going to be a fisherman. Honestly, if some parents knew what their children know about geography and Biology, particularly the anatomical part, they would be shocked. When you bark on your child: “Don’t go out”, “sit down there”, “get inside” “let me see you outside peren”, you are wasting your time. As you are stepping out, they are also hopping out. The game of checks and balances between parents and children is all about strategic creativity and not barracks mentality. Mark was a very quiet boy. He was too gentle for a boy. One day, he had an altercation with one of his classmates and I had to intervene. The two of them were in the Entebbe class. That was like an English-speaking section of the school while ours was the “Bade dé adé Oba section”.
In short, the Yoruba department of the school. The Entebbe class was meant for the nouveau riche of the society particularly, the rich people in Surulere who didn’t want their children to mix with people like us. Their break and closing time was different. They always did their own programmes 30 minutes ahead of us all because they were “special children” that must not play with us. I wished they knew that Mark and I used to sleep on the same mat which we spread in the parlour every night after packing the chairs by the side. Yet, they said we should not mix. Mark’s dad brought him from Palm Avenue to school in Surulere when he heard about the Entebbe section of the school. He would stay with me and Iya Ibadan from Monday to Friday and go back to his father’s house on Friday to come back on Sunday. In the Entebbe section, they were forbidden from speaking “vernacular”. But in our own section, the attempt to ban “vernacular” did not work. When the authorities saw the enormous blasphemy and verbal massacre we were doing to English language, they quickly reviewed and reversed the policy a week after its introduction before the Education authorities shut down the school for linguistic genocide. They obliged us the right to flow with our local communication and everybody was happy. This particular day, I was in my class when a friend of mine Godwin, came to inform me that somebody was beating my brother. I ran out of the class with vengeful fury. On getting there I saw that the two of them were laughing together. But because I couldn’t control my anger, I still went to threaten the boy that I would punch him like mad if he should touch my brother. I made him realize that I don’t joke with my brother. I was surprised the following day when they said the headmistress of the Entebbe class wanted to see me. Thank GOD they had allowed us to speak “vernacular” because she was a white woman. The only thing I could pick from her question was “why…” Automatically, there was a communication breakdown.
When I didn’t reply her, she asked the boy I threatened to narrate what happened. He spoke in English. It was an embarrassing day for me. A boy in Entebbe one narrating in flawless English how I held him by the shirt and threatened to hit him. Then the headmistress asked me again: “Why did you bully him? Three years as a primary school scholar, I didn’t know the meaning of bully. Anyway, I explained myself in a way that was convenient for me. Talk of linguistic concoction and grammatical assassination. Eventually, she warned me not to stray to that section again. As I was leaving her office, I heard the boy saying in English: ” He can’t even speak English”. I just muttered in Yoruba without looking back: “Iya e”. I didn’t forget this episode because it was one of the reasons I became so determined to speak and write good English. There is no self-disappointment that is as painful as one’s inability to clearly express himself in proper communicative context in a critical situation when you are expected to defend yourself with conviction. The strength of your defence, the power of your conviction, and force of your explanation are all packed in your communicative dexterity. The second day, I was at the Entebbe section to see my brother. Unfortunately, they were on break. They commonly served them their food in their class. They were eating jollof rice and chicken using a fork and knife. After the food, they would serve them fruits or fruit drinks like Tree Top and Bonheur Syrup. I understand they were paying for the food as part of the school fees. In my own section, nobody served us anything. If you didn’t bring money to school, you wouldn’t eat. It was queue and buy. Sometimes, you could still be on the queue when they would ring the bell for “break over”. If your food should spill on the floor, just look for how to salvage some part and eat and then drink plenty water as “added supplement”. As beneficiaries of free education, we were denied the benefits of epicurean entertainment. It was these discriminatory culinary arrangements that first introduced poverty to me with all its divisiveness. My own brother was eating a sumptuous meal and all I could do was to stand by the corridor louvers to look at him with sorrowful admiration.
Once in a while when his class teacher was not watching with keen attention, my brother would use his fork to drop one or two portions in my stretched right hand across the window. Pray, what sane society would make the feeling of superiority so obvious to two kindergarten brothers from the same mother, living and sleeping in the same house yet being separated by a wedge of inequality. Mark was completely different from me. Aside from our striking facial resemblance and voice similarity, there was nothing about him in terms of character to suggest that we were brothers from the same mother (not the same father though). He was an Itshekiri boy. I am a Lagos boy and a Lagos “born”. Sadly, his father didn’t let him spend more than two years in the school before he was taken to another school in Ibadan with boarding facility.
I was woken up by a nurse and a hospital attendant to have my breakfast. It was bread and two boiled eggs. There was tea, there was juice. In all my 9 years on earth, I had never had such a sweet encounter with this kind of luxury hence the confusion about the reality of this setting -the nurse, the attendant, the bread, the eggs, the environment and the three strange people with me in the room but on different beds in plaster casts popularly known l the nurse and the attendant decided to support me so that I could sit properly. That was when I felt some terrible pain on my left leg followed by an advice from the nurse to the attendant in Yoruba: “E rọra gbe ese yen”, meaning lift the leg gently.
Suddenly, I gave a harsh shriek like a barn owl when I saw that my left leg was also in a plaster cast, possibly heavier than four combat boots. Confronted by two contrasting scenarios-the pain in my leg and the food on the table -I needed to decide as quickly as possible what to do immediately. I decided to eat first and come and face the issue of pain later. No doubt, I was hungry because I had no idea when last I ate. Still sobbing solemnly, I adjusted myself positionally to consume a rare delicacy. While eating, I could see my mother, Iya Folake and Aunty mi Silifa. Just the three of them. Needless to say that I already knew I was in the hospital but which hospital? My eyes just went straight to the card hung on the headboard of my bed and I saw “Igbobi Hospital”. I knew I had heard about that hospital from somewhere. I couldn’t recollect if it was in a movie or from some of the people that we used to play football together at Paddington field. But somehow, I had a feeling that the hospital had something to do with my legs because it couldn’t be by accident that the four of us in the room had leg problems. The only place I knew that served as a hospital for my area was Vita Chemist on Tejuosho street. For me to have been taken beyond Vita Chemist, it must be a serious case. After cleaning up the plate of every crumb of bread, I now settled down to interrogate my presence at the hospital. I didn’t know who to ask questions. Somehow, my mother suspected that I was wondering what I was doing in a hospital. She came to my bedside and started telling me how she was informed of my accident and how she had to come to the hospital from her husband’s house. I then asked her why Baba Mark was not with her. She replied that my father was already around. “My father is here?” She was about to respond when my father was wheeled into my room. “What happened to him?” was what came out of my mouth. Immediately my father received the message that I was taken to Igbobi hospital in the school ambulance, he came straight to the hospital but, because it was so dark, he fell into a ditch while searching for my ward. He had a jagged wound which required some stitches meaning that my father too was hospitalized on the same day I was admitted into the hospital.
When I heard that I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance from the school, my mind just went to my last activity in the school. It was on a Friday. We usually close at 2 pm every day. But on this particular day, we closed by 12 noon so that we could wash our chairs and desks. We brought everything out and started washing. I remember that I was in the group of those fetching water. Abayomi Jìnádù who lived in Hogan Bassey was in the group of those washing the desks and the chairs. Sunday Amosu whose house was opposite my house in Ilelogo street was assisting those of us fetching water to bring down the buckets. Everybody was excited to be involved in the washing exercise. It’s been a while since we did that. We were all in this ecstatic mood when we heard an explosion in the forest behind our school. The Civil War had started then and we had been taught what to do anytime there was an explosion around us. We were told to lie on the ground. I recall seeing everybody scampering and falling on one another. While I was down, chairs, desks, buckets and other implements were just flying around. I was surprised that it was my leg that was in a plaster cast not my head because I felt more weight on my head than my legs. I didn’t know the particular time I went blank but I heard the second explosion. It was deafening and capable of being responsible for my unconsciousness. At Igbobi Hospital, I had a nice vacation as I sojourned there for about two months during which the promotion examinations had been conducted in my absence. By the time I went back to school, I was given a celebrity reception. It was during the morning assembly that the headmaster announced that I had been promoted to primary 4 on “Compassionate Ground”. Third promotion in the school coming with a different qualifier. I must confess that I didn’t know the meaning of “compassionate” but was that necessary again when I knew the meaning of “PROMOTED”? No wonder my best hymn in the SOP was ” I’m Pressing On The Upward Way…..”
I was in Primary 4 when Henry Nwosu, yes, the same Henry Nwosu that became a soccer idol in Nigeria, crossed my path and I showed him that his soccer artistry was nowhere compared to my gangsterism.
*To be continued*
