Now You Know Why I Hate My Boarding School Years
We had a practice: a group of buddies would come to a mutual agreement about how they’d consume the tokens our parents gave us at the beginning of the year. Or those they’d bring during the visits we had on the last Saturday of every month.
My mother would make fried plantain chips, fried groundnuts and chin-chin (small cookie-like flour based crunchies). Garri- a cassava based product best consumed with water, sugar and one of the items in the list above- was banned from campus. According to the authorities, it was the source of various eyesight problems.
Then again, it was affordable. You know what that means to African parents. Plus, I loved it anyway.
After a vetting period, one or more individuals would approach the party they’d like to merge with and have a conversation. During this conversation, both parties would agree to share a trunk. We had all our stuff in trunks with locks, given that we’d spend sometimes up to three months on campus.
In each trunk, the parties would decide where to keep what, who would have the keys, when to eat, what to eat before what time, and some basic rules. One of the most interesting rules was what we called unleashing.
Unleashing governs the the acceptable time to open a packet of sugar or any other edible product that…
