All in One Class

I remember Kibom. He was the classroom rogue. In a week he probably came twice or thrice. If he turned up at all, he was nearly always late. His hair was always uncombed. Many times he never bothered to wash his face. You could see the sticky deposits on his eyes. He often came in dirty with crumbled uniform. He was the butt of secret jokes in the class. No one dared mock him to his face. He was a ferocious fighter. 

Chilldren having trash weighed in a garbage-collection competition at a typical Kenyan primary school 

We got on fine. He was deeply enthralled by my stories of the Kenyan coast. He longed to swim in the sea. Lake Nakuru was far too small for him. My coastal Kiswahili was music in his ears. He listened to me much more keenly than the teachers. He would hitch a ride to Mombasa in a truck, he promised. Trains were his other subject of fancy. I had been on a train many times travelling back and forth to the coast from Nakuru. That made me a hero in Kibom’s eye. He respected me.

He had no respect for much else. He stole, never finished his homework and did not care if he was caned for anything. He just lay calmly as the lashes landed on his butt. If the teacher cared to inspect his shorts, there would three pairs of khaki covering that butt. Sometimes he shoved in an exercise book. That is when he would be caught. But it was never easy to subdue him afterwards. He would kick, scratch and bite his way out. He did not fear the teachers at all. Not once did he show up with his parents even when ordered to. Teacher Teresia would ask after him after weeks of absence following such an order. Then Kiarie his best mate would call on him at the Kwa Jack squatter village near the Nakuru Police Dog Section compound.

Kiarie was very much unlike Kibom except he never finished his homework. He was the classroom weakling. Even the girls threatened him at times. Akai, the tall Turkana girl from Abong Loweya Estate, loved to bully and harass him. She liked to drag him into the maize just outside the school. He would be crying after that. Kibom made sure no one bullied him. Maybe it is because Kiarie was never short of sweets and biscuits.

The teachers had a problem of a different kind caning Kiarie. He never kept still. He weaved about, turned erratically or sat up to plead for mercy. Sometimes the cane hit him in the head. Mostly the lashes fell on his arms as he tried to block them off. The first time I joined the class he had a bad swelling on his eye. A cane accidentally landed on his eye during one particularly tragic caning session. 

Yet he would never finish his homework no matter what. He lived with his mum at Bondeni Estate. In the mornings he would be begging us to copy our homework quickly in exchange for sweets or biscuits. There was not enough time to copy all the homework the teachers gave. 

Kiarie, Akai and Kibom never made it to Class Seven. They dropped out. You had to score an average of fifty percent to make to the final class in Primary School. Otherwise you repeated Class Six. The three plus Khasakhala were stuck at Class Six for many years. 

Luckily Khasakhala played football. He captained the school team. The teachers let him advance even though he missed the target by miles. At eighteen, he was the oldest in the class. Most of us were eleven to thirteen in Class Six. Most of the younger ones just breezed through school. The older ones seemed to have trouble with simple things. That is why my best friend Thuku was the class prefect’s enemy.

Fred, the Class Prefect had trouble with the tenses. He just could not construct a sentence in English if it looked back in time. I guess it is because English is so different from Kiswahili. Every time Fred rose to answer a question Thuku struggled to suppress laughter. 

“I didn’t heard,” Fred once said.

In Kiswahili to say ‘I did not hear’ you do it in one word- sikusikia. You 

simply conjugate the verb Sikia- to hear. It is a hell of thing to say it in English.

Thuku laughed his mouth dry. Even the Teacher was not amused. She had to give him two lashes. You can bet they were very light because Thuku was always top of the class. That did not help him when Fred drew up his list of noisemakers. Thuku was always at fault in Fred’s eye.

When Fred overheard Thuku making fun of Mr Kinuthia the History teacher, he promptly reported. Thuku called Mr Kinuthia, ‘kitumbo-mavi’. That is Kiswahili for ‘a potbelly full of shit’. You see how different Kiswahili is from English? Fred just could not make head or tail of it. 

“I am name Fred,” is what he would say.

Mr Kinuthia could not forgive Thuku even after giving him six heavy lashes. Every time the History lesson started he ordered him out. I am sorry Teacher, Thuku always pleaded. The teacher would hear not. It took the intervention of Mr Keiro to put things right between them.

Mr Keiro was the Maths Teacher. He walked into class with an engine fan-belt coiled round his trouser belt hooks. He was sheer terror. Usually he mumbled some words before scrawling a problem on the blackboard. To this day I cannot make out what he said at the start of every lesson.  Tears for someone in the class usually followed the mumbling.

Mr Keiro insisted he was not Mr Kairu as is commonly the name among the Kikuyu. He claimed a complex Maasai, Samburu and Kikuyu ancestry. Up until then it did not really matter to us what tribe a person was except for the Turkana. The Turkana lived in segregated- and poorer- neighbourhoods like Abong Loweya and Mithonge marking them out for special attention. Many wore traditional gear unlike us normal people. Otherwise, the class was very much a mix of Kenyans. If you pronounced Mr Keiro’s name as Kairu, he instantly drew out his fan-belt and rapped you on the back.

For the start of his Maths lesson he scrawled a problem on the blackboard then pointed at a pupil. You had to walk up to the blackboard to solve the problem with him patting his fan-belt. Most of us ended up getting it wrong. Even Jairus the Math’s whiz always got his figures wrong on that blackboard. The fan-belt would come out whizzing and Jairus would scream.

There is this day when Jairus had all but got his math right save for a simple arithmetic error. Mr Keiro gave him a chance to make a correction. The whole class had hands raised offering help. Jairus looked up and down the board not noticing the error. Boldly, he wiped off the working and started all over again. This time he got it all wrong. Mr Keiro brutally lashed out with his fan-belt. When Jairus got back to his seat he quickly worked out the answer. He tried to catch the teacher’s eye to make up for his error. Mr Keiro stridently ignored him. Jairus wept the whole of that morning.

Then came the day we had to register for the Primary level national exam. The teacher made you stand up to state details of name, date of birth and sex. It was really simple. Except that a few preferred to mumble details of their age. Fred and Khasakhala were part of that group.  They loudly stated their names then the voice dropped sharply when it came to year of birth.

Khasakhala tried to walk up to the teacher’s desk but he made him walk back. The older guys preferred the back row of the class. We called it the backbench. I had no idea until much later what the backbench really was. Many like Khasakhala spotted a budding moustache. The backbench became undesirable when you tried to whisper to the teacher.

Khasakhala just could not bring himself to state his year of birth loudly. Fred finally managed, giving his year of birth as 1964. Thuku loudly protested that he was actually born in 1961 well before independence. That evening Fred punched Thuku several times as we left school. Their enmity knew no bounds.

For Khasakhala, Mr Keiro just wrote 1962 but made sure to read it out much to the class’s amusement. It was all a joke. He knew our ages because they were in our registration details. Thuku, Jairus and the majority in the class were born between 1967 and 1968. Everyone else outside that bracket was too old. Well, that was my Class in Nakuru at the end of primary school.