Trying to forget Remo Secondary School at 75

Skipping around schools

Much as I would have liked to remember, it is also forgettable, and that is why I find myself writing about it two days after the event. I attended three primary schools in Kaduna and Jos, in the north of Nigeria in the early 1970s.

The first primary school, the Army Children’s School in Kaduna I barely remember apart from the fact that the headmistress was Indian, and she would walk through assembly in the morning checking our nails then striking our knuckles with the edge of a ruler if they hadn’t been cut. What a child can do about their nails when it is a parent’s responsibility, I don’t know, but that is how we all learnt to bite our nails.

The uneventful year was soon eclipsed by our move to Jos where I attended the Corona School, Shamrock House, Bukuru, and I do have many memories of my being there having jumped a class straight to class 3 through to class 5. We returned to Kaduna for my last year in primary school at the Sacred Heart Primary School where I was away for 4 months in early 1976 attending common entrance examinations for secondary school admission in the south-west of Nigeria.

Never forget the injustice

Remo Secondary School (RSS), Sagamu won my pupillage in September 1976, in it’s 30^th founder’s year. My 5 years in this school, though eventful and interesting remains somewhat forgettable, for I maintain the minimal ties with the place and the institution apart from memories tragic, sad, and unsettling besides the fact that my set in the last year of the Class of 1981 were unjustly punished collectively for what a few miscreants did because the Parents Teachers Association was too lazy to conduct a proper investigation of the issue.

Beyond that, life in the school whilst having thrills left me with hardly any enduring friendships, I have met a few of my class and school mates, even have social media connections with them, but I have shunned all old student association meetings or involvements, this is a part of my history that will be recorded but not necessarily cherished to any extent.

For the little matter

Yet, because dates hold some sort of significance to me, the 4^th of February 2021 was the 75^th Founders’ Anniversary of RSS as the 1^st co-educational secondary school in West Africa, or so it is reputed. We had the school motto of 'For God and Fatherland', the former stands strong, the latter is constantly under review.

That I have visited the grounds a few times in my dreams as it then means for all my misgivings it did have a significant impact on me, I had the nickname of Pastor for most of my time there. Anyway, I am just journaling a piece of my past, there are more stories to tell, in the 40^th year of my exiting that place.

Childhood: Driving the languages of sacrifice

Unculu drives

Continuing those stories of childhood down memory lane where I left off weeks ago. My father had moved to Jos to take up a new appointment with the Amalgamated Tin Mines of Nigeria.

My uncle who we have for long lovingly referred to as Unculu had joined us in Kaduna and I remember the many evenings when my mother took him out to teach him how to drive - suffice it to say he did not pick up that skill for another 8 or so years.

By which time, he bought a car and my father was so scared that he was going to brag his way with a drive to his office hardly 3 kilometres away - though we could see the office from our house - followed him so closely, it was almost illegal. Well, Unculu had really learnt to drive in some secret place and was doing quite nicely, Thank you.

Gave up much for us

When we were in Kaduna, my parents had both worked at the Kaduna Polytechnic, I believe my mother was also a lecturer there before we moved to Jos, because when we returned to Kaduna a few years later, at least 2 of her old students visited us as my mother proudly announced that her erstwhile students are now doing very well with their careers.

One has to be very appreciative of our parents and the sacrifices they made to keep the family unit together as much as possible.

Having left a lecturer-ship in Kaduna, my mother ended up as a secondary school teacher, not to far from where I went to primary school and she majored in teaching Commerce.

It is commendable in some ways how women in matrimony have given up promising careers and prospects for their husbands and family - what saddens me is when you get to talk to them and you sometimes hear regret about what they would have wanted to do but never got to do.

The lesson we could learn from this is to be able to have some hindsight that is not too far away from where there is still time to go after your dream.

Speaking in tongues

The many years she had spent in the North before meeting my father came in so useful, she was just as indigenous as the natives that she was referred to as Hajiya - a Hausa woman who had been on Hajj - well; my mother is quite a devout Christian and over time has become a true Nigerian polyglot.

She speaks her native Yoruba, which is spoken in the South-West, then having lived in the North for 23 years in total, is tongue-perfect in Hausa and fully conversant with their customs, but I was quite pleasantly surprised that she had mastered an Igbo dialect spoken in Eastern Nigeria without having ever been there.

I am sorry to say, I do not have the mastery of learning languages as my mother, I am quite good with Yoruba and really improving my Hausa in a way, even though I am not in Nigeria - I have no grasp of Igbo at all.

When it comes to languages, I suppose I am more like my father, he took radio and instructor-taught classes of Hausa and never really made much progress with it. His early attempts at Pidgin English were funny to say the least - he always has had an impeccable command of English - when I was younger, I could remember the number of times I needed to check out a word in the dictionary then the whole thing sinks in.

Mother-tongue of something else

I suppose one interesting thing about languages is that my mother-tongue is not my mother's mother-tongue, mine is English, it being the first language I could speak and still is the language my parents use the most in communicating with me - Yoruba rarely creeps into our conversation.

As I reached 10 my parents tried to engage me more in learning Yoruba, my best score in secondary school where the language was compulsory for the first 3 years was 38%, this was after years of being forced to read the Psalms into water in Yoruba rather than the easier English.

Much as I try, my command of Dutch is still rudimentary, it is still quite Double-Dutch and each time I string together a sentence to the hearing of the Dutch, I might as well be a clown because it brings laughs of incredulity rather than understanding - what could I be getting wrong?

The masterpieces of memory

The mind of the child

A child’s mind is like a canvas where the genius of life dabs the paintbrushes of events in the paints of personal experiences and circumstances to create the masterpieces of memory.

Memories keep flooding in as if they all happened yesterday, the smells are pervasive, the colours are vivid and the sounds are loud enough for you to turn your head in reaction to the calling of your name.

Amazingly, our parents in their assumption that they were shielding us from the evils and negatives of life must really have thought our brains worked on the shortest-term memory, like iron to magnets we were suddenly attracted to the event and then removed so suddenly, just as iron appears to lose its magnetisation when removed from the magnetic field.

Nobody told them about magnetic remanence, the ability for an object to retain elements of magnetisation after the external magnetic field has been removed - children retain just enough information to form an experience they may not yet understand or appreciate until later in life.

Yes, the kids do see it all, feel it all, hear it all and somehow, remember almost too much.

Told to go home

I have been called a coconut before and then, it was not the derogatory term for being brown on the outside and white on the inside – I slept on the same bed as my mother when she was nursing my kid-sister and I always seemed to end up on the floor.

How I came to no harm as I fell out of the bed each night, like a coconut, she said; I cannot tell, but maybe the suppleness of childhood makes the damage less significant than if I were older.

At that time too, my mother was lecturer at the Kaduna Polytechnic when my father had moved to Jos to start his new job at the Amalgamated Tin Mines of Nigeria.

We had neighbours whose kids played with me during the days, but later in life I realised that people also had hard times then – it was quite interesting to note that when they were about to gather round their table to eat I was told point blank by their mother – Now, go home we are about to eat.

My mother sometimes laughed at me and made jest of the fact that I was chased away when they were about to eat, it contrasted sharply with the kind of hospitality I was used to where friends of the child were invited to partake in meals – we had to refuse because our parents made it a taboo to eat anything away from home – when we were tempted and succumbed, we saw heaven and hell on the same day.

From Kaduna to Jos

One other memory that is etched in my mind was when we went to visit my father from Kaduna, his good friend drove us there, a good 170 or so kilometres when the roads were almost impassable – we came to one bridge, more like a ford it was; I could have sworn the bridge moved as it seemed to be made of cloth that swung in the current of the river.

Somehow, the return journey was now eventful enough to remember anything special, other events in life had brush-stroked over seemingly inconsequential events even though every second, every minute, every hour, every day and every year had been lived through with the passing of time.

I once had a van run over my foot and that was painful but when I saw a car run over my mother’s shin, I probably felt as much pain – as a child, there are just some events that are indelibly etched in my your memory, ready to surface at the most inopportune time – how it is that life is a long story that sometimes never gets told.

Even more memories of a child

Home school hell

It was horrific, probably bordering on abuse and torture; however, parents do not seem to know any better especially if you are the first or the first of a particular sex.

They all seem to have this notion that their precious pickanniny is a budding genius about to take on the world and become richer than they can ever imagine, taking them into a life of untold opulence in their old age.

How better to achieve that than to encourage the child with a slap and a whip because at 4 he cannot tell the time and he is not already reciting the 13 times table to 99.

I dreaded those lesson times with mother, surely, it could have been done better and that is my beef with home-schooling, neither the rod nor the child was spared.

Learning amongst your peers

My experience reflects on the fact that you cannot gauge the aptitude of a child against its peers if the child is not taught amongst its peers. The home lessons might expose the child to aspects of knowledge that could give the child some advantage but it is usually without structure, pace or proper assessment parameters.

For a prematurely born child, there might be some learning difficulties which are never factored into the problems the child might have in development, I was blessed and lucky, but I know others who have suffered needlessly on the premise that they needed to be tutored like mules before they became like men – the whip was the path to the brain.

Army Children’s School

This episode did not last 2 months, as we were soon to move to Jos from Kaduna, it was the Army Children’s School.

The headmistress was a terrifying woman who could easily have been the witch in Hansel and Gretel [Source: Wikipedia], she went around the kids having asked us to stretch our hands out facing downwards.

Anyone that as much as had the whites of a nail showing at the end of their fingers was as bad as a bird of prey with talons so long that they were demonic, she brought her ruler down fiercely on the poor child’s fingers and it wailed with a shrieking caterwaul.

How you would expect a 5 year old to do his nails escapes me, that is the job of the parent and it should be the teachers warning to the parents to do something about it, not the headmistress playing out her sado-masochistic tendencies on hapless little children.

That is how we learnt to bite our nails, not out of nervousness but to prevent the wicked witch from having her rotten way with us – it became a habit and every once in a while, the nail clipper is really in the mouth – what you learn at 6 you probably may not forget for life.

First and last day at school

On the first day at school, no one really told me what it was about, I was taken to school by my mother and aunt with my toddler sister in tow. I was put in a class and told to stay there till they returned to get me.

She returned probably an hour before school closed, when I saw her from afar off, I got all my things and ran out to meet her – the clash of familiarity with the discipline of school – I must have marks somewhere to show.

On the last day of school, my father did not arrive on time so I got on the school bus and sat at back, I could not tell if the bus would get me home or not.

No fuss bus

Just as the bus began to move, my father’s car came up behind us, I did not fuss or clamour, we probably did the rounds of Kaduna before my father was able to flag the bus down and get me off the vehicle – my memory fails me about what happened next.

However, I know that I never fuss about public transport, I would not run to catch anything and if I miss my stop, I patiently wait for the next then make my way back – I try to be alert enough to get off where I should and try to be at stops on time to catch whatever I need to; that is one other thing that has stuck with me from childhood.

I am glad I did not spend much time in that school, I would have been regimented into a sameness that would have robbed me of my precocious disposition, my imagination and the boldness to ask questions – even between the slaps at home school, there was always the opportunity to ask and get answers to “what”, not always for “why”.