a short distant away from us, and everyone knew everyone else. The small talk over, Iris gave me a stern look and told me to be a good boy, ‘you hear?’ I nodded, promised to be good and said goodbye to her.
I entered the school with my head spinning like Mother Earth had gone off its axis. Automatically the other boys and I followed the teacher like new born ducks. Where was she taking us? I had no idea, but I was neither shocked nor surprised to find myself being ushered into an un-partitioned classroom. The classroom was on the ground floor where a classroom a collection of battered and carved wooden desks and benches were packed together to form a square, and within that specific square every child was allocated a desk.
My education had begun; but not before the inevitable prayers of praise had been showered on the Lord thy God. Immediately after the prayers were completed, I heard a cacophony of shrilling voices emanating from the children in some class or other; they were learning who-knows-what by heart and then, after much repetition, silence. It was now question time. Questions were being asked and questions were wrongly answered and squeals from kids being punished for delivering the wrong answers were the sad songs of the morning. The teachers, all female and all thorough in their methods had gone to great lengths to teach properly. Properly meant that everything taught had to be soaked into the brain like a sponge. Properly also meant that for those of us who had been unable or unwilling to grasp a certain subject after being told so many times, the cure-for-all-ills, the divine strap, had to be applied unsparingly to our hands and sometimes to our backs.
Soon the ABC’s and the 123’s were a thing of the past. We children had now progressed to a higher class and there, in spite of our small age, we were thrown in the deep end of the lake, thanks to Miss Grimm. She had ruled, in spite of her honey-sweet disposition, by her own personal philosophy. According to Miss Grimm’s philosophy, an empty head was like an empty room, it screams to be filled with ‘furniture’, and the more furniture that is stored into that vacant head, the better.
As a child, Miss Grimm had been poverty stricken and much deprived of the material things of life. Thanks to her ambitious mother, every spare penny – not that there was much to spare – was spent on second hand or third hand books and, before too long and with the encouragement of her mother, Miss Grimm’s head had become a storehouse of knowledge. The lady, now that she was the headmistress, had a plan. Using her unquestionable authority she encouraged the teachers under her wing to teach subjects that we children were hardly prepared for, and so the history of the kings and queens of England – the likes of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and many more besides – was rammed into our heads like iron balls into a canon. Not only that, but mere minutes after being tutored, our teacher, an enthusiastic soul named Miss Mary, would question us. ‘Tell me,’ she asked to no one in particular, ‘how long did Henry VIII reign?’
To impress, hands darted through the air like flying fish. ‘Yes, James.’
‘Thirty eight years, Cheecher Mary.’
‘Good boy, good boy. But the word is teacher, not cheecher.’ She paused for thought. ‘And Elizabeth I, how long did shereign?’ With an eagle’s glance she scanned the entire class searching for signs of any eager boy willing to answer the question.
‘Yes, Earl.’
My eager hand had drawn her attention and I was more than willing to supply the answer. ‘Forty five years, Cheecher ... I mean, TeacherMary.’
‘Correct, and I’m glad you corrected yourself,’ she pronounced, making me feel as proud as a peacock.
Another day, another lesson. Aside from Christopher Columbus, the class learnt about the adventures and exploits of Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Oliver Cromwell and Guy Fawkes. In this outwardly insignificant building our brains were also burnished with knowledge of the tea planters of Ceylon, the Maharajas of India, the Yangtze River, the Nile, and other general knowledge questions. Then, without warning the teacher would ask, ‘Earl, how long is the Yangtze River?’
‘3602 miles, teacher,’ I answered.
Contented, Miss Mary complemented me then lectured about the Great Wall of China. Minutes later and again in random fashion, she asked the class, ‘How long is the Great Wall?’
This time Charles the Clever responded, ‘Umm, four hundred yards, Teacher Mary?’
‘Four hundred yards!I see! You haven’t been paying attention, eh?! Come here, boy!’ Charles crawled up to the teacher like a frightened toad. ‘Now repeat after me! The Great Wall of China is four thousandmileslong!’ Nervous, farting and on the verge of watering his pants, Charles repeated what he was told. But was Miss Mary happy? Man, far from it! An example had to be made and her strap or the edge of her ruler, depending on her mood, would act as a reminder to Charles and the rest of us that school was there for the purpose of learning.‘Put your hand out, boy!’ The frightened boy hesitated. ‘Don’t make it worse for yourself! Put your hand out!’ Charles reluctantly complied and with the punishment completed Miss Mary ordered him back to his seat and ‘pay attention next time!’
As we climbed the slippery stairway of knowledge, our heads were stencilled with the adventures of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan; the Pyramids and the great pharaohs of Egypt and so on, and once again we were expected to keep the information permanently pasted on the walls of our skulls like the graffiti that adorn the indestructible walls of Pompeii. Learning knows no barriers, so we were also taught Aesop’s fables: Tortoise and the Hare, The Boy who cried Wolf, etc. Lessons of that kind were all well and good, but later in life,when I had become more aware and had learned a tiny bit more about my connection to Africa, I wished that I had been taught about the Limpopo River as well as the Yang Tse River; the coffee growers in Kenya as well as the tea planters of Ceylon; the humble mud huts of Uganda and Kenya as well as the great Pyramids of Egypt; the great Zulu kings of South Africa as well as the majestic kings and queens of England and France and Spain. It was then I noticed that something was missing: where was my history? Where is the history of Africa? In fact there had been times when I actually doubted that Africa existed at all. Why? Because in my history book the history of all nations existed except that of Africa. I felt cheated. I had not felt as if I belonged. I had felt disconnected to the land of my ancestors, and all because of England.
England, I had been told, was my mother country. To show loyalty to England, on the monarch’s birthday I and the rest of my peers were made to participate in the celebrations. Well-rehearsed songs we had sung with gusto and, as a reward, we children were generously rewarded with tons of yummy cakes and gallons of sweet drinks. To cap it all, at the end of the treat we were reminded yet again: you are the subjects of England and England is your Mother Country. But what my carefully crafted history book had not taught, Hollywood willingly taught and had taught in an amusing fashion.
Every Saturday morning when a cowboy movie was not being shown in the local fleapit it was almost certainly because a film about Africa was being flashed on the silver screen. In those films, - or flimsas we kids had erroneously pronounced the word – I and my friend, Ben, observed the natives of Africa holding spears, wearing grass skirts and dancing wildly to the sound of beating drums. Why were the natives so joyful? The natives, or the savages as the Africans were called, were about to have a ‘banquet.’
The banquet was fundamentally a one course meal, and the meal was a succulent healthy foreign female. The female had been bound and dressed in a khaki safari outfit and ready to be cooked in a large black pot. Hollywood was about to educate me about my people, and just as the action was about to begin, Ben, my innocent friend, interrupt by idiotically asking, ‘You mean, dey goin’ to cook de woman?’
‘Yeah Ben! Now shet-up an’ watch de movie!’
Ben paid no attention to me and continued, ‘You mean, dey really goin’ to cook de woman wif her clotheson?’
It had not dawned on me that the woman in the large industrial pot had been clothed, and like an industrial washing machine I agitated vigorously and told Ben again to shut up and watch the film.
Meanwhile, the woman protests, she weeps buckets but to no avail. The natives are under the spell of the drum and the fire is seconds away from being