A Reckoning With Remo Secondary School at 80

A Reluctant Beginning

It is a part of my history I cannot ignore: a ploy by my parents to move me from the privileged environment of international primary schooling to experience integration into their culture, norms, and values, in order to foster independence and resilience during secondary boarding school, within the context of their tribal roots.

In the 30th year of the founding of Remo Secondary School, Sagamu, I gained admission after sitting the common entrance examinations and arrived from the north, ill-prepared, ill-equipped, and scarcely excited by the prospect. At age 10, my only options were between this school and Odogbolu Grammar School.

A Blur of Survival

The five years of being a student are a blur; I do not retain any particular friendships or bonds from that time. The people I considered friends were probably just fellow survivors trying to cope in a hostile environment, as we have scarcely maintained those connections since graduating.

If my memories are to be recalled, they would be in the names of the teachers rather than my classmates. The principal during my admission was Mrs Adebambo, a stoic lady who seemed to have eyes everywhere; you could hardly hide when not in the designated student assembly.

Yet I do remember hiding in a cavity behind the shrubs backing Falode House hostel as she walked by. I broke that myth.

Houses and Early Years

I was in Adedoyin House, and for my first three years, we took the wooden spoon at the Inter-House Sports Day. I was never a sportsman, but we cheered just for participation. Mr Abiona, I remember him as a kind housemaster; one of his sons was my classmate. The other two houses were Igimisoje and Mellor.

Remo Secondary School (RSS) was founded 80 years ago today by a Methodist missionary and community leaders as the first coeducational secondary school. Reverend William Frederick Mellor died in my first year at RSS.

Teachers Remembered

Of all the people who taught me, I remember most fondly Pascal Housenone, my mathematics teacher from the neighbouring Benin Republic. He taught me in my third form. Mr Adekoya taught English; he tarnished my school report that year by remarking that I was a truant. No one wondered why I was bothered, disinterested, and distracted in class; I preferred being in the library.

Of the malevolent lot was Mr Okonji, who earned the nickname Study-Study but was never able to enthuse us with his French lessons. He failed at imparting knowledge, relying on the cane; a sadist whose gratification was inflicting pain. With Mrs Odutuyo, the Yoruba teacher; the only lesson I learnt from her tutelage was adding diacritical marks to Yoruba; they both personified wickedness and abuse without accountability.

Collective Punishment

In my final year, we attended summer classes, and some classmates, intent on meeting girls one night, ran amok and caused damage and injury in the girls' hostel. Instead of investigating who the real culprits were, the school decided on collective punishment, expelling us from the boarding arrangements for the final year.

I remember the vice principal coming to the hostel and saying loudly that she knew these boys were not involved, but the decision had been made. That shaped my view and experience of RSS since the summer of 1980. I graduated in the Class of 1981; I have not returned since.

A Distance Maintained

I have observed activities of the RSS Old Students' Association from afar but have never been persuaded to join, as some of the leadership in the UK are reliquaries of memories I’d rather forget. For the record, I post this note.

A Google NotebookLM AI Audio Overview Discussion of this blog

For Healing and Forgetting

Abandonment and Healing

I suppose everybody hurts in different ways, and the path to healing may never be a prescription like a pill to deal with a simple headache. Over the past year, as I have lived in the expectation of turning 60, I have also relived memories and events from my early childhood that exude all kinds of pain.

On several occasions, I have shared my experience of secondary boarding school and how the lasting impact meant I have no enduring relationships from that time, neither with friends nor teachers. Whilst there are occasional messages from old schoolmates, I received only one congratulatory message representative of my time in secondary school.

The Trauma of Boarding School

Whilst I was aware of the broader decision-making process my parents engaged in when putting me in boarding school far away from home, it was only recently that I began to appreciate some of the trauma associated with that phase of my life. The privilege of going to boarding school should not mask the lifelong consequences of that experience.

It was meant to toughen me up and give me a sense of independence, but it also destroyed my trust and willingness to confide in them about other aspects of exploitation and abuse that I had suffered before, during, and after the boarding school period. I internalised so much when I should have been screaming for help.

Even when I took therapy, it was limited to addressing the catastrophic loss of status, means, and livelihood after my first encounter with cancer. I still had to fight for that service because I presented none of the indicators of ideation that people typically display with depression or even suicide. Yet I was hurting and suffering, coping mostly through what I learnt in my religious beliefs.

Understanding Boarding School Syndrome

The psychologist Joy Schaverien, who died in 2025, described the hidden trauma from early boarding school experiences using four key elements: Abandonment (separation from parents), Bereavement (grief from loss of family), Captivity (powerless feeling in an institutional setting), and Dissociation (detaching from feelings to cope).

She termed this the ABCD of Boarding School Syndrome, though it should not be limited to the boarding school experience in England alone. I was in boarding school in Nigeria, and it extends beyond those institutional settings to family and life in general.

Abandonment came in many forms: the early months of incubation, being left with foster parents (a norm in the 1960s that acquired the term "farming"), even one 'caring' family starving me, the mental torture of being threatened with reliving a dreadful experience to buy my silence, the lack of curiosity when abuse was reported, and obviously the boarding school experience itself.

This was compounded by the refusal to bring me back after realising my coping mechanisms were highly stressed. [The Guardian: ‘Farmed’: why were so many Black children fostered by white families in the UK?]

Given time, I could develop the other elements of 'BCD', but there is enough in Abandonment to see how it can be the root of additional trauma. None of this has found any means of discussion between the affected parties, except in the catharsis of my writing over the last two decades.

Love and Protection

This is not to say that I am unloved. I am deeply loved, but trauma can set you up for feeling both unloved and unlovable. Love cannot be passive; it needs expression and the conveyance of tangibility and feeling.

Much as we do need a hedge of protection around us in all the issues of life, that hedge can easily look like prison walls, giving you the earnest desire to escape because you are caught in a claustrophobic enclosure that suffocates every facility of self-expression. Their protection becomes your prison, an overcompensation that does no one any favours.

Faith and Letting Go

In three situations, this aspect of hurt has been challenged: from preaching tapes I have listened to, in a sermon at the crossover service I attended on New Year's Eve, and from Brian. "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past." [Bible Hub: Isaiah 43:18]. You wonder, how do you let go of the past when it still has that much of a hold on you?

It involves taking your eyes off that and looking to see something else that God is trying to catch my attention with. "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland." [Bible Hub: Isaiah 43:19]. This would suggest I do not need therapy, but belief, trust, and faith. A bit of empathetic counselling could help build that trust too.

Finally, much as it is difficult to explain, there is healing in reconciliation: just reconnecting and carrying on rather than raking over the coals of angst and trauma. Let God handle the broken wings, as we get beyond the narrative to become more than just Boarding School Survivors of childhood and adolescent trauma. The eagle will fly and soar again.

References

The Guardian: ‘Breaking our spirits was the plan’: the lifelong impact of having gone to boarding school

Bloomfield Health: Boarding school syndrome

LinkedIn: Boarding School Syndrome: Understanding the Hidden Trauma Behind Privileged Education

Hope Therapy and Counselling Services: Did Boarding School Shape Who You Are?

A Google NotebookLM AI Podcast on this blog

My boarding school story still affects me

Parents in the know

I have been watching with rapt and engaged attention the developments on the Nigerian Twittersphere about boarding school life and bullying, that began following the unfortunate death of Sylvester Oromoni, a 12-year-old pupil of Dowen College in Lagos as a result of an apparently coerced initiation into a cult. [BBC News: Sylvester Oromoni: Nigerians demand justice over Dowen College death]

My boarding school experience which started over 45 years ago was a decision by my parent to give me a grounding in our culture and traditions, as we lived in the north of Nigeria and they were from the southwest, I was born abroad with a good few things well-formed, language and speech, mannerisms and attitude, I was somewhat a stranger not integrating enough into what should be a Nigerian.

Back home to black out

On the other hand, they also wanted to toughen me up as I began to relive the separation anxiety that I experienced in England. For I was preterm by 10 weeks and that was spent mostly in an incubator in Birmingham whilst my parents worked and studied in Walsall. I also had a bit of fostering and being moved around foster carers as they progressively could not find suitable ones, one even starved me that I took to stealing food out of the refrigerator when I was back with my parents. Odd behaviour, my mother thought until she found out what was happening.

Just after my 10^th birthday, the common entrance examination season for secondary school admission started, my parents were not looking for any schools near home, I was in taking exams in the old Western State and Lagos to the extent that I was away from home for over 4 months living with relations mostly met for the first time when they came to pick me up from the airport. For a while, I was with my cousins when the February 1976 coup happened.

Blog - Childhood: Shocked into adolescence

On my return home in late May, I already had another baby sister, amongst other things too distressing to talk about here and then as a listener with wild tales about paranormal activity between my aunt and our new house servant, I began seeing things, apparitions of otherworldly figures that my father dismissed as fantasy. My parents weren’t listening to me.

Blog - Thought Picnic: The reality beyond the augmented

A misfit adrift

I prepared for boarding school with much of what I needed to fit in wrong, my shorts should have been light green, they were grey, I could not tell if that was a typographic error on the part of the school or something my mother misread. I had a hefty machete to cut the grass when what I needed was the equivalent of a scimitar. This introduction to boarding school life was brutal and harsh, so I left essential personal health things undone and resumed bedwetting that rarely ever happened in the past year or so.

Soon, I was seeing things in the night, ghosts, I thought, and recited Psalm 23 all through the night until I was completely tired out. Amongst my classmates, I was in the younger cohort by an average of 2 years and were it not for my early development, I would have been picked on more, just as I was the butt of jokes and extreme ridicule.

That first term was torture and when news of my situation reached my parents, I know that my mother’s best friend tried to prevail on them to bring me back to the north, which they refused to do, confident in their reasoning that the boarding school experience was essential to my education and tough education it was I found ways to adapt and survive whilst keeping counsel of my own situation. My parents weren’t listening.

New terms of engagement

The Christmas holiday was spent in the village with my grandparents and my father came to visit for a week. In that time, we visited grottos and medicine men, had incisions in all sorts of places, drank concoctions, some too vile to describe. All to the goal of curing me of my apparent ailment or psychological illness, but never once did I see a professional, a specialist or a paediatrician in psychology or psychiatry, which with hindsight might have done me a world of good.

The first half of the second term, I spent as a day student living with my aunt because the boarding house could not endure another half-term of nightly disruptions from an apparently unstable child.

I returned to the boarding house in the second half of the second term and appeared to settle down to school. To my parents, their planning was working, I was becoming more independent and may be responsible. Responsible for some things they probably would not have liked me to be responsible for.

You get by even with the injustice

There was bullying and abuse, much that I try to forget, and I made friends with similar backgrounds, though I was more privileged in that when they were returning home for holidays, they got on trains to the north. I was picked up and taken to the airport to fly home, there are things where my parents really did lay out the red carpet for their son. Even when we moved from Kaduna to Lagos, at half-term and the end of term, the driver arrived in time to take me back home. No fuss.

In the last year at school, we returned for summer school which was going well for a few weeks when some amongst us looking for fun in their riotous youthful exuberance raided the girl’s hostel causing damage to property and harming some of the girls. Many of us were oblivious of what had happened, but rather than investigate, the Parents Teachers Association imposed collective punishment on all the boys, and we were expelled from the boarding school for the fifth year.

The vice-principal came to the hostels to see us pack up to leave, and she said to my hearing as she looked at a few of us that she knew we were not involved in that melee. I spent my fifth year as a day student, and it is a huge upheaval to my early education. For that unjust act, I have not forgiven Remo Secondary School (RSS) for that injustice from 40 years ago. I believe I would have had a better leaving school result had I stayed in boarding school.

My education was searing

The result of my boarding school experience is more far-reaching than I sometimes realise. For whilst, I am in contact with some of my school and classmates through social media, I have no enduring friendships. That time represents when I seemed to fall into clinical depression from which I did not recover or find any bearings for 5 years. It also took completely leaving my parents’ and home too. The boarding school experience had schooled me into preferring to be away.

I have not participated in any RSS old student association activities or offered any support for first the reason I gave earlier and out of the fact that part of the leadership has some of the people who bullied me in charge. It is strange that a couple of years ago, one of them attended an event I was at, I would not have recognised him and if I did, I most definitely would not have approached him.

Not another chance to do that again

The most consequential part of this boarding school experience and I was speaking to Brian about it is Nigeria. When I left Nigeria, I left for good. I have family and relations in Nigeria, my father, an octogenarian and my mother a septuagenarian, I have felt a bit shamefaced about not seeing them in a very long time, but the truth is we broke those strong affinity bonds much earlier in life when they were being strong parents.

I can forgive them the boarding school experience, but the result is the result, I am not inclined to get on the plane to see anyone, much as I love them and would probably miss them when they are gone. I do the necessary in supporting them as much as I can and that is where we are at. Boarding school shapes you, marks you, scars you, if you have a child in boarding school, be prepared for the unintended consequences. Yes, I am well into my fifties, and it is a wound that never healed, I just learnt to tend it and live with it.

Blog - Childhood: Ghosts and ghouls of my past

Blog - Thought Picnic: A child has memories that last a lifetime  

RSS Mischief V - The gods with no balls

Mayflower, our nemesis

Traditional school rivalries are inbred, there is rarely an alternative frame of reference that the negative ones so easily begin to define you. Up the road from our Methodist roots Remo Secondary School (RSS) was the humanist strong Mayflower School, Ikenne.

The competition for entry into Mayflower School was stiff that some who attended primary boarding school there did not make the cut and defaulted to RSS.

We seemed to always play the second fiddle to them, in academics and quite evidently in football games. I never knew of a time that we ever beat them, no matter how we tried and that called for extraordinary measures not predicated on our Methodist provenance or the motto of our school, For God and Fatherland.

Pleading to clueless gods

Apparently, the gods, animist, fetish and dreadful had the answer to the nagging big question: How do we defeat Mayflower School at football?

We were woken up by seniors who had consulted oracles and shamans at 1:00 AM and coerced at the threat of violence and severe punishment to contribute funds to procure kurubé (fetish) services of a medicine man to gain advantage of Mayflower School at our next scheduled match.

Why this urgent need could not wait until during the day escaped me, nor did I believe there was any way we could beat Mayflower School without both the luck and the skill, and I was just annoyed that someone was ready to take money from gullible and impressionable students promising something to us that was too farfetched and unreal. Besides, what is to say Mayflower School had not procured similar services and so cancelling the presumed advantage we had purchased?

Snitching for justice

All that together in my mind fired the sense of injustice that led to my writing an anonymous letter about this nonsense and dropping it in the front car seat of the vice principal’s car. They no doubt took it seriously because the principal talked about it the next morning at the school assembly and put out a notice for whoever wrote the letter to come forward without fear of exposure.

Thinking long about it, I visited the principal the next afternoon about the matter, he assured me nothing like this would happen again and the seniors involved will be told off. Then he gave me 5 Naira and send me on my way. For the rest of my time at school, we were no more harassed for fetish seeking contributions and we still lost to Mayflower School anytime we met at the game of football.

Blog - RSS Mischief I - Yikes! A snake

Blog - RSS Mischief II - The fundamentals of fluid mechanics

Blog - RSS Mischief III - Swimming like crabs

Blog - RSS Mischief IV - Post the pots

RSS Mischief II - The fundamentals of fluid mechanics

Angelic babies, we were not

When we were sent to boarding school, it was presumed we were innocent, unaware, unspoilt, and undefiled. Yet, nothing to be further from the truth about the kind of knowledge we all had as adolescence and puberty had hormones raging in our bodies that the more precocious and adventurous amongst us found outlets for.

Rumours abounded of boys meeting girls, seniors finding impressionable girls to exploit in the dark classrooms late at night, there was even one instance though unconfirmed of penis captivus where the parties could not be separated after intercourse for a while, the male participant allegedly the son of the principal.

Denial and hypocrisy around us

Sometimes, the girls disappeared for a while, recorded as ill with apparent tuberculosis whilst most definitely, a pregnancy was terminated. The female teachers in school were matrons of ovulatory expertise, they could tell if a girl was pregnant from the whites of her eyes, her continual spitting, and some other natural sign of divination before inquiring wether the pregnancy was caught by contagion if no name of the sexual partner was forthcoming.

I do not think any male got called out for sexual intercourse except in our last year when two girls were gang-raped by a group of boys with whom at least one had provided times of intimacy years before.

All ready to do something

For those of us who were not daring enough to approach the opposite sex, we were not entirely sexless. My first exploration was when a classmate during a moment of being alone together asked if we could copulate. I did not know what copulate meant even though from an earlier age I seemed to have some excitement looking up words that began with sex. I had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from 7 and after that, pederasty did occur at home with people employed to care for us.

He soon left the boarding school as he just did not cope with the environment. In terms, it was harsh for many of us leaving home for the first time, but we found ways to adapt. Being one of the youngest of my class, I was quite developed for my age, taller with pubic hair that others thought I had acquired by the application of methylated spirit. I do not know where the idea of hair growth by methylated spirit came from.

The fundamentals of fluid mechanics

Soon, there were partners my age mates were in a lower class but full of sexual needs and seeking some partnership in which I found a few to fumble or frot. Later, there was one, a classmate, with whom fumbling led to fellatio with the experience of ejaculation, he called fluid. That even went on until two or three years after we left school.

I never met with the ones who had homosexual inclinations, at least, not until I began seeing them in pubs, clubs, and parties in the UK. I cannot speak for their experiences as they all seem to want to avoid engagement even as it was quite obvious, they did not miss their way into those places of encounter.

All the others are married, the ones I still remember and are even grandparents. We can agree that those days of our youth were just experimenting in practical fluid mechanics; the physics, the chemistry, and the biology of it, the subject of memories of old mischief.

Blog - RSS Mischief I - Yikes! A snake