The advantage of being in boarding school is free time especially by the time you’ve configured your schedule to make sure you do as little as possible when it comes to school activities.
Without immediate family, I was feeling all alone, now I’ve got to make new friends and perhaps get connected because I’m not one with doing chores as boarding school was advertised to me.
The only friendly face was our family friend’s son, Yomi who schools there, his parents suggested me coming here. Back then, Ogun state was still fairly good with education towards the end of the 90s’.
The school and its environs looked nothing like Lagos, there was a lot of bush but funny enough, I never saw snakes more than once or so.
That was also my first time knowing people’s names began with Osanyin-something. Osanyintola and the likes, I was shocked people’s names were this close to Orishas. In Lagos, I know some people have names of the popular ones like Ogun, Egun, Ifa, Oya and the likes but the first time hearing Osanyin, so all of this culture shock hit me in the face like Mike Tyson’s right hook to the jaw.
One such culture shock is the new found freedom. So, it’s possible for some students to decide to willingly stab classes and there weren’t any repercussions like flogging or anything.
How marvelous!
I could stab classes, stay in the hostel, go back when I please, sleep off in class without anyone waking me up. Choose to write lesson notes or not. There was a valley difference between education in Lagos and Ogun state, my mum visited once a month, she would look through my notes but with the proper arrangement, she won’t notice a thing.
The accommodation system there is pretty much deregulated, where there is a school hostel but private hostels were also allowed to thrive. Like everything the government allows to go private, the government versions are complete shit, which is why the private hostels are doing really good. The private hostels had about 70 percent of the school students. I was lucky to be in the school hostel. The private hostels’ students are seen as Ajebos while the others were seen as Ajepako, the school hostels guy always have good stories, talking about students using jazz and stuff.
There was this story of a notorious student who used cause a lot of trouble, any event was a chance for him to cause chaos, he was pretty much like the Joker. Like Michael Caine’s character said in The Dark Knight,
“Some men just want to watch the world burn”
This guy would start trouble from everything, even at the assembly guy, and the reason was that he was looking for avenues to test his new charm because the gist around was that his dad is a very powerful herbalist, so the school is the testing ground for his charms.
There was a time he used charm to beat people into a state of trance where they would be in a suspended state of animation like the finish him/her segment of Mortal Kombat, they’ll continue to drool saliva from their mouth.
Only when everyone pleads with him before he then gives them the cure. What I will never understand is why these people continue to mess with him. A famous tale about him was when the police were chasing him, and they just couldn’t meet up with him. You would run as fast as you can, he would jog but you still won’t be able to get close to him.
The charm he used then was called, Aleeba (Cannot be caught up with). It seemed like he was jogging and the police were running after him, but they never caught up.
The stories we hear in this zones. So, I was finding all the stories interesting just glad that I wasn’t staying in the school hostel. Thank God!
My lazy survival in the new type of environment did come fairly easy though.
So, for some reason when I arrived at the school, an S.S.S 3 student picked interest in me, in fact, two of them. One of them was a family of Yomi, the bringer of this new piece of freedom called boarding school in Yewa.
Yomi’s cousin or so was called Yinka, and he was a really cool guy, the mastermind of the deviant behaviors in the hostel, the one responsible for stealing villager’s goats, the chef who cooks rice for boys inside a bucket in the bush, also the life of the party, not forgetting the humanizer in chief.
He was so influential that students will wait after the exams, for whatever Yinka is planning, parties and other interesting things, some people also rumored that he did organize orgies at the local hotel, Yinka was so cool with everybody, he was allowed into the house master’s room also.
He looked after me, in fact, he got me a bed in the room where just final year students sleep, I was happier than a motherfucker. I was among the few junior students in that room, and it was always lively in that room.
The room had privileges, nobody does pranks here. It’s peaceful, and the gists are amazing. The senior students always talk about how they have sex with their girlfriends in the classrooms, bushes and all sort of places.
I love the gists of course, but I had more benefits than just listening to gists. My school fathers were very important to my survival. Yinka is the popular guy that everyone likes, the other one is Olu, the most powerful guy in the hostel who is also responsible for Saturday morning chores. He was another kettle of fish.
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