Back to School – Part III

Tags

dry season, English, Hausa, headmaster, Nigeria, Northern Nigeria, Peace Corps, rainy season, teaching, Terry Thomas

(Note: The archives are arranged in reverse chronological order.  The story begins at Part I, below.)

By the end of my first year, I was feeling pretty good: discipline problems resolved; teaching under control; learning Hausa; comfortable with an amiable, even-tempered headmaster.

If you’re sensing ominous foreshadowing, you’re right; our headmaster was reassigned and a new one arrived, bearing a volcanic reputation. He did not disappoint.

In our first face-to-face meeting, as we discussed the sports program, his clerk came in for a simple signature. The headmaster turned red and, in a chilling Charles Laughton/Mutiny on the Bounty imitation, sputtered, Get out! Get out! then, leaning toward me, growled conspiratorially, They’re trying to get me. They’re trying to get me. But they’ll find I’m a TOUGH … NUT … TO … CRRRRAAAACK! I wished I had fled with the clerk.

Morning assembly struck fear into the students, as the headmaster strode out of his office onto the porch above them, wrapped in his black academic gown, scrutinizing them silently, shouting, Dahiru, seize that boy and beat him! if he caught a slouch or a smudge.

This was the extreme side, regularly interspersed with mere eccentricities. Tough enough in the bell-jar environment of the school day, they even intruded on leisure time, mine especially.

The new headmaster was an avid tennis player and quickly identified me as a partner. He ordered a tennis court built, and put me in charge. I thought I could rely on the school’s laborers, who had recently produced a fair approximation of a dirt-surfaced basketball court.

The tennis court might have been a crowning success, but for the fact that it had to be dug into a moderate slope, and ended up losing as much altitude at one end as it gained at the other.

Curiously, the headmaster didn’t seem bothered that his erratic shots more often went long on the downhill than the uphill side, probably because his real passion, in tennis as elsewhere, was gamesmanship. Thank You! Thank YOU! he boomed out at his opponent’s unforced errors. HARD CHEESE!, his Terry Thomas/School for Scoundrels imitation, was saved for a well-contested point that happened to go in his favor.

His belligerence did have its uses, however. He fought hard for, and often got, resources the school badly needed, including more teachers to relieve his overburdened staff. For our field-hockey team, he even procured real sticks to replace the bamboo-root-and-shaft makeshifts that marked us as country cousins against the more established schools.

His signal achievement, though, was electricity. When we arrived at the school, there was already a designated spot for a generator, and fond hopes for it, but nothing in our first year. Then, after he came, a pad and roof got built, the generator arrived on a lorry barely able to fit through the school gate, and, within a month, we were up and running, with my friend/teacher/horse-keeper Lawan in charge.

The kids could now study properly in the evening and all of us could be a little more comfortable, rid of our more-heat-than-light-producing kerosene lamps.

Air-conditioning was still way beyond us, but we did have a clever recipe for cool naps: soak mosquito net in water; re-hang over bed; wait ten minutes for evaporation to begin; nap as evaporation cools; wake as evaporation ends and heat inside becomes unbearable; go to basketball practice, refreshed, or to tennis, apprehensive.

As hot as the summer months were, they at least brought the rainy season, a blessed relief from the long, cold, dusty dry season that was especially tough on the students. Their light cotton uniforms, even with long pants in place of shorts, were little protection. They could wrap themselves in blankets in the evening, but not at morning assembly or in class.

It was as the dry season began to yield to the rains that my two years at the school ended. I — we, actually, since my teaching partner was leaving too — said goodbye to the students and staff. Difficult, especially saying goodbye to Lawan. To the headmaster, less so, though, by the time our trusty VW Microbus was nearing Kano, I found myself smiling, just a little, at the thought of Dahiru, seize that boy! and HARD CHEESE! booming out, not quite loud enough to reach across the growing distance.

Back to School – Part II

Tags

boarding school, English, final exams, foreign language, Hausa, language study, Nigeria, Northern Nigeria, Peace Corps, teaching

(Note: The archives are arranged in reverse chronological order. The story begins at Part I, below.)

I was one of two, sometimes three, English teachers at our school. All classes, except the students’ own language (Hausa) and religion (Islam), were in English, or more precisely, in the variations of English that British, Irish, American, Pakistani, Yoruba, and Hausa teachers fired at them.

The quality of the students’ English varied. In the top form (grade) that had been the school’s first intake three years before, some were headed for mastery, but too many were not, and getting them all to an acceptable standard by the time they were to finish, in a couple years, was daunting.

Some of the problem lay, not with them, but with a rigid English curriculum, a holdover from the British colonial era only three years past, that made little accommodation to their background. As You Like It might as well have been in a foreign language (come to think of it …) but it was required preparation for the impending School Certificate exam, the gateway to sixth form (British A-Levels), then university.

The younger students were more malleable, and their curriculum more flexible. Many of them, and the adventurous among the older boys, went at English with delightful gusto. In a debate, one student concluded by calling his opponent malicious, capricious, and avaricious, a brilliant, if totally irrelevant, salvo that had fellow students cheering Shege! Shege! (literally, Bastard! but more like, Awesome, Dude!).

Students’ puzzlement at the oddities and inconsistencies of English — Sir, if we say, ‘I have never seen him,’ why can we not also say, ‘I have ever seen him’?; Sir, if we say ‘pronounce,’ why do we not also say ‘pronounciation’? — had no rational answer. New angles on old words — I spent all summer break in my village, homesick in bed — were charming, though duty demanded they be corrected.

To improve their skills, students were required to use English, in and outside class, during the school day.

Once, as I was grading papers, two boys were arguing, in English (fortunately for them), just outside the classroom. Well, fucking you! one concluded. Hmmm. What to do? but, faced with such a glaring misuse of the gerund, I had to act. I stepped outside, explained the error, helped them get it right and, since correct English is also a matter of context, advised them especially where not to use it.

Language learning wasn’t just a one-way street. As we became more comfortable with each other, the kids started tossing Hausa words and expressions at me. I tried my best. After all, if I expected them to use my language properly, they had a right to expect the same of me, in theirs.

One day, a group of students took me on a walk to see the historic rock-paintings near the school. By the time we got back, they had taught me how to count to ten, and got me started on a tongue-twister, one I can still recite, fifty years later, that uses two of Hausa’s tricky implosives. The rock paintings, too, were fascinating.

My Hausa-speaking fellow staffers were also eager to teach me. Sitting outside the stifling teachers’ room, firing Hausa words at me, beat grading quizzes. Even the bulala-wielding Dahiru loved to drill me (without threat, I should add; he was actually a gentle soul). But it was Lawan who was my major professor.

Lawan was the school’s jack-of-all-trades — part laborer, part fixer (things, not deals), part go-fer, and, most important, when we finally got electricity, Keeper of the Generator. He had been buddies with our Peace Corps predecessors, and assumed the same of us. I was lucky. He loved to talk as much as I did, could often find a break in his flexible duties, and was a patient, natural teacher.

The fact that he stabled my horse in his family compound gave us even more time together, not all of it horse talk. (Owning a horse may sound very un-Peace-Corps-like, but it was part of local life and culture, and was very cheap). I paid Lawan for his horse duties, and, I admit, occasionally helped him with beer money, but probably the most important repayment for his teaching and his friendship came when he ran afoul of the law.

Lawan’s fondness for beer and the occasional game of chance clashed with the mores of a small, conservative Muslim town, and, finally, landed him in the local jail, a small, one-room, mud-walled annex to the District Head’s compound.

I got permission from the District Head to visit him. He came to the jail’s weathered door, looking forlornly through its single-barred window. Well, what we do now? he said in English. I said I’d see if the District Head would let him go, which he did after I paid a small fine. When we were alone, I suggested to Lawan that, for his family, my horse, and the school’s precious new Generator, he might go easy for a while.

He did.

(That’s enough for now. The end — Part III — is near.)