HIGH SCHOOL PRANKS
On the 4th of January 1988, two hundred and forty five innocent boys both boarders and day students lined out in front of the admin block to be inducted into the school that hat churned out countless great people immediately after the morning general school assembly. The boarders had resumed the day before on Sunday 3rd January and that was fun though as parents themselves tried as much as possible to assign school fathers to their wards and it was like the seniors themselves were out to shop for school sons. I vividly remember the youngest boy in our set, a nine years old boy (Mate S) that burst into tears after his parents left and was inconsolable till the next day despite being in school with his elder brother who also resumed with us on the same day.
Back to school, we were assigned to our classes and lessons started in earnest with a dose of what we were to expect both in discipline and academics. Luckily for us, it was the year and month our dear school clocked 75years and the old students in conjunction with the school had a lot of activities lined up for the month from sporting activities to academics that was to benefit our minds and brains. We dared not step close to the Osisanya block where form 5 classes were or you were sure of coming back in tears and a few beatings administered on your back that we popularly referred to as “Bom Bom”. We had the best of training in our junior years and we were the better for it as we were able to hold our own anywhere we found ourselves.
Fast forward to the future, our set was one that was closely knit and we rolled like a gang that was let loose. The competition was tense especially in academics and socials as everyone was eager to outdo the other and it turned out to be a very rewarding experience. One major incident that readily comes to mind here was that of a mathematics test we wrote on a Saturday morning, it was a “MOTHER OF ALL TESTS” as it was a straight thirty marks and one of the prerequisites for promotion to SS3. We studied all night on Friday especially those of us average students who hated and was struggling with the subject. The morning we waited for was finally here and we hurriedly had our breakfast in the dining hall and rushed to our classes. Expectedly, the test was as difficult as we expected maybe to us the average students and we all complained as usual. The real gist is that after the test, a clique hatched a plan and executed it in a coded manner that same night, they had gone behind into the teacher’s office through the louvre windows, selected their answer sheets and rewrote the tests but they were not so lucky after all as the wrong was detected almost immediately when the marks were being recorded the following week.
A popular guy in my class popularly called Jina had miraculously scored eleven marks and as the teacher was asking everyone their marks so he could record, Jina silently called out his miraculous mark of eleven but the teacher didn’t hear him well and asked him to repeat it; as Jina summoned up courage, he repeated his mark loudly to the utter surprise of the teacher. Chaeee kasala don burst and this just had to be a SCANDAL. The teacher immediately said he suspected something must have happened because as he said, he knew for a fact that only the most brilliant of us( those uwes in SS 2 blue) could score high marks and thus an investigation began and no one or clique owned up. The class that was actually suspected to be behind the scandal, SS2 purple had their punishment daily which was to all kneel down in front of the principal’s office from 8–10am and get 6 strokes of the cane every day in order to break them but my set were a rare breed and no one succumbed but there was a twist as one of us jokingly whispered aloud that we were going to riot and a teacher snitch sold us all out by informing the principal behind our backs. The principal confronted us and accused the culprit of that statement saying he would be watching all of us to know who to hold responsible if there was a breakdown of law and order and so a cat and mouse game started between the school authorities and my set. Traps were set for us at the slightest opportunity especially those of us in the hostel and they almost had a chance to get us when one of us organized a party and some of us attended scaling the fence as usual to go have fun. As usual the snitch was at work again but did something different this time; he wrote down the names of all those that attended the party and dropped it in the suggestion box by the Principal’s office window.
Then SOMETHING HAPPENED, as luck would have it, a guy from another clique who wasn’t sure of the troubles he had got himself into with all his pranks was always parading the principal’s office every night unknown to everyone and checking out the suggestion box until the day he encountered the list. This was a rare find and a clique meeting was called where we all found out about the list. Everyone looked at it and two guys, one who is now of blessed memory (Mate A) and Mate G, another silent clique agent recognized the handwriting and concluded who had snitched on us; the first snitch we were identifying (Mate I) in a longgggg time. Everyone agreed to keep mum and wait for the last day of term before teaching him a lesson. And so came the last day of term and the plan was for someone to intentionally bring up a fight with him then we pass him round with one slap each. He got a dose of the beating albeit not as much as we planned but he knew something hit him without even knowing what he had done. We had escaped a great trap set for my set and had been promoted to SS3, the seniors of the school. No one could be suspended or expelled again in SS3 where the final UNLEASHING was to take place in conjunction with willing day students who were going to join us in the hostel. A big shout out to all the cliques of Jogs 8893 set.
LESSON LEARNT. NEVER SNITCH ON YOUR FRIENDS COS IT MAY NOT END WELL.
