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| Barack Obama Snr. Maseno Old Boys are Jonyathi. |
I never wanted to go to Maseno
School. I felt it was beneath a man of my stature. I felt that I should have
gone to Starehe Boys’ Center or at the very least, Alliance High School. But
Maseno? I only selected it because the school head teacher insisted that the
second choice of national school must be a school from our region. I
immediately forgot about that choice. It’s not like I was going to miss Starehe
Boys’ Center, my first choice, anyway. Those days I was clever. Very clever.
Ask my primary school teachers. Ask Ambuko the man who taught by ‘singing’. You
can even ask the Member of Parliament for Kasipul who was the school director.
He will tell you about a record that has not been broken since 2004. That’s if
you exclude Nina, the smartest girl I knew. Nina and our primary school rivalry
is an entire blog post on its own.
The results were out and just as I
had expected, I had excelled. Not that Mr. Osano would be happy I missed a
whooping fifty marks out of the total score possible! My father didn’t keep his
promise to buy me a bicycle but my mother kept her promise by committing murder
on my behalf. We feasted and patiently waited for Starehe to request me to extend
them the honour of having a royal descendant of Ramogi Ajwan’g in their
midst.
That was not to be.
Instead I received a letter
inviting me to join Maseno School. Just Maseno School. A school just two districts
away.
When I went to collect my calling
letter, there was no more need of asking why I hadn’t gotten my first choice.
My application form, alongside others were still neatly stuck at a corner in
the head teacher’s office. Have you ever
really wanted to strangle somebody?
Maseno wasn’t that bad. Actually
it turned out to be one of the best mistakes in my life so far.
I vividly remember my first principal’s
assembly. Five guys stood in a weird formation. Behind them was a short bearded
man who looked just as vintage as the school itself. Centrally, there was a well-built
tall frightening man who kept making notes as others spoke. His hands were very
huge and his arms looked really well developed. The tall giant radiated danger.
It was more than evident that the man was not a person to mess with. We would
soon learn that he was Senior Principal Paul Agali Otula and the guy he had
stolen several inches from was Reverend Kola, the man of God.
Mr. Otula would tell us the
history of Maseno and of Chief Agolla Ayieke, the man who donated the huge chunk
of land the great school sat on. He would tell us about Owiti, Onduso and Orao,
the first students of the great school. He would tell us about Jaramogi Oginga and
Achien’g Aneko, Dr. Odhiambo of ICIPE and Gerald Otieno Kajwang, of Barrack
Obama Snr and legions of prominent old boys who went through the system . He
would tell us about Raila Amolo Odinga and how he was baptized in the Rock of
Ages, the school Chapel. He would tell us about the famous Maseno spirit of not
giving up. He would assure us that though we joined as boys, the fire and
condensation will harden us into men of irrefutable standing in society.
Of course he would finish by
telling us that Maseno wasn’t the dilapidated buildings we saw, that Maseno was
the person.
I fell in love with the idea of
the Maseno immediately. Of a school with so much history and pride. Something
real Luos would refer to as nyathi.
It wasn’t always about
inspiration as we would learn later in another assembly ten hours later.
The five boys who stood in awkward
positions in the morning seemed to be running the show now. They read the riot
act that one would assume that they were prosecuting even the crimes we had committed at home. They
created and thundered all the rules one could possibly think of. The
consequences for breaking these tyranny of rules was never mentioned. The
flouting threat of “if you value your jaws” that accompanied each statement was
enough to frighten any fifteen year old boy who thought that he had hit manhood now that he had started spotting
new hairs.
“Don’t make noise in
class…………………………….if you value your jaws”
By then of course we hadn’t
realized just how vital a complete dental system was important to survive
Maseno’s coarse culinary course.
The other chorus was, “here we
don’t pamper boys”
I’ve never been more scared in my
life.
I’m lying. I had been scared that way once before . When I went on that date with a wanga.
We survived the acrobatic
punishments and the power hungry men in blue. We survived ‘kudhanywa’ na
‘kuingiwa beat’.
‘Carbon’, ‘pieceless’ and ‘heart burns’ kept us going. And the ocassional bull dance, chicken and omena.
It didn't hurt that we one woke up on the Southern hemisphere and went to class on the other side of the equator, or that we went to the canteen in Nyanza and played hockey in Western province or that the first yellow girls we saw were from the University across the fence.
Four years later we emerged
stronger than ever before, not just physically, but also emotionally, mentally
and even spiritually. (Yea, you had to cram at least 15 pages of the Modern Services Prayer book and Golden Bell Hymns)
The tall giant, who was by now
Chief Principal, kept on reminding us that if we survived Maseno, we could survive
anywhere in the world.
But I didn’t travel all the way
down memory lane just to tell you that I was an A student or that I still
remember Oliver Dan Watta’s threats.
I’m writing this because a Maseno
boy was allegedly sodomized by senior students.
I’m writing because you’ve asked
me whether during our time such brazen attacks happened.
They didn’t.
Homosexuals though existed. Not
that any had ever been caught in the act.
The burden of proof fell squarely on the accused to prove that he was
not a chichi. That he just showered
twice a day because he sweated too much and didn’t want to smell like a he-goat.
He would then have to explain why it bothered him if he smelled like a he goat.
And if he was trying to insinuate that other distinguished Maseno boys who
didn’t engage in such excesses smelled like he goats. And why smelling like a he-goat
was so terrible in the first place.
The questions would put to shame some of
these uptown city lawyers who strut in Eastleigh suits and spray perfumes enough
to make China’s emissions looks like child’s play. Those guys could cross-examine
you until you feigned an epileptic attack.
Sometimes it was just better to
be rare. (Ask Muga what that means. Michael Muga, not the other Muga).
Your life was more peaceful.
However such brazen acts need not
just be passed with time. Justice needs to be seen to have been done.
Those old boys asking what he was
doing alone in the house (we don’t have dormitories) need to stop victim
blaming and ask themselves how they would feel if a bunch of marauding smelly he-goats
descended on their ass as they skipped ‘knock’, had their moment of pleasure
and cowardly disappeared into the dark of the night, without even the courtesy
of a cuddle?
Real Maseno Boys do not feast on
the helpless. We are not hyenas. We are lions. Lions who go hunting in the Moi
Girls and the Limuru Girls of this world, display their school badges and
patiently waited for the hunted to write us letters.
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