The Survivors of Maseno School

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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Editor @gety_nandwa