It was a day unlike many others. A Wednesday that defied all other Wednesdays, but at the start, my seven year old mind did not notice any difference. Usually we were just about tired of school and started our countdown to the weekend. The teachers had noticed this and decided to spice up our interests with hot mental every Wednesday. I had hurriedly memorized the 4 times table that night because although we had been tasked with memorizing the 3 times table, I wanted to prove to my classmates who were always on my case, that this “upline borboh” younger than all of them in the class was also smarter than all of them.
As usual, my cousin and I made the slow scenic walk to school. We had to walk out the big compound I was residing in, one that my step grandpa had built with my grandma, two people I had known for less than one year, a period in which I had lost my house, been separated from my Mother and my brother and been abandoned by my Dad at his Mom’s. War has us all as victims, but on that day all I was thinking was how much different the walk to school was from my town in kailahun to the city Freetown.
There, in Kailahun, after breakfast, my mum usually dropped me off at my granddad’s. More often than not my grandpa would have left for the farm, but not before leaving me a tasty treat. Then my uncle, who was just a few years older than I, would walk with me to school. Roman Catholic Primary School or RC School as everyone knew it, was one of the many mission schools that plagued the interior of the country. I cannot now remember any of my classmates or even any of my other schoolmates beside my uncle, but I did remember my head teacher, Mrs Mary John, a nice and capable white woman, whose story I was ignorant of, satisfied with the fact that she was nice and that she knew my family well.
Here, in Freetown, after breakfast it was a walk to school with another cousin, whom I had to call cousin because we were both young and staying in the same house but cannot till this day for the life of me explain our relationship. Our route took us past the neighborhood market, named “Kongosa makit” (gossip market), past the house of a young lady who would become very special to me more than a decade and a half later, past a mosque and down to my school.
Church of Christ primary school, or Overlook school as it was more popularly called, was a school of the Church whose building and resources we shared. Sitting on the edge of an overly utilized stream, we were as likely to spend our lunchbreak playing by the stream as we were playing in the baptismal spot of the church. For a church surrounded by a multitude of houses constructed from corrugated zinc sheets and scrap woods the expectation would have been that we would be constantly distracted by noise but since the kids from those houses were all pupils in the school all the noise during the day was coming from us.
The school day started like any other. We had devotion conducted by the principal, with our aunties and uncles as we called our teachers, darting here and there trying to keep us in a straight line and from talking amongst ourselves. They were doing a good job too with their stern looks of disapproval and the canes as diverse as themselves. Trying their best to look formal, the baggy dress pants held together with thin multi colored belts, oversized dressed shirts and the bipolar assortment of ties for the men and the oddly better dressed women succeeded. Their task of making us better citizens and better people with a brighter future, was another question altogether as they sometimes seemed as disillusioned about our future as we were unconcerned about it. As usual we capped the devotion with the singing of our National Anthem, always the good young patriots.
As we were dismissed to our classes, we sped off as fast as our little legs could carry us, trying to get to the class early in order to claim the least rickety piece of furniture we would call our own for that school day. After the excitement of finding seats we ploughed into the school day as we did every day, with the joys of hanging out among our own kind and the torture we felt we were going through just by being there.
Not too long after, the school was abuzz with further excitement. The usually calm Principal was seen talking to our teacher whose face was more animated than we had ever seen it. Very soon parents in the surrounding houses were pulling their kids from school and we could see through our frameless and pane-less window, a lot more people than usual running by our school. Not too long after, those of us who were still present were asked to assemble in front of the class and we were told we were processing back to our houses.
The only year in our school history, when we had two “march-past”, this odd assortment of wide eyed pupils and strangely assorted teachers left the church grounds, went past the mosque, past a house that would be of greater significance later on in life, through a now empty market and continued down the road, dropping off each student at their home.
I never did quite figure out how far the procession actually travelled before each pupil and teacher got to their home and as my colleagues watched me walk up my drive I never quite knew how significant events happening around the country would shape the course of mine and my country’s future.
It was April 29, 1992. The mood in the whole country was happy. Youth was for the first time the controlling voice. The status quo was challenged at one swoop. It was a day unlike many others but when I walked through the doors of the place I called home, I was just glad we didn’t have the hot mental.
Notes:
Hot mental was a quiz like thing we grew up with, the questions were on multiplication tables and we would get whacked on our hands for every wrong answer.
"Upline borboh" was a boy from the provinces and not from the capital city.
