Rebellion Against Punishment

Rebellion Against Punishment: Turning The Tables!

Nothing quite prepared me for the harrowing experience I encountered in my first year at GCI. Before this time, I had lived a relatively sheltered and pampered life in Lagos. Now, if the endless punishment from the senior boys was somewhat manageable, not the severe Apata-Ganga cold that we all had to wake up to very early in the morning for road work, House work, or worse still, grass-cutting.

I did some self-introspection and I wondered that my parents surely could not have deliberately set out to punish me this way. Or could they? Could there have been an infraction on my part which I could no longer recall? Frankly, the answers eluded me. I was overwhelmed. One day, I simply broke down. I could not take it any longer. I walked briskly to the back of the junior toilet in Field House to achieve just one goal � get a release by crying, and I really cried that day. I was relieved.

Interestingly, while I was crying, I noticed that I was not there alone. Just across the flower hedge was BA, my friend and classmate. He was not there to catch any fun at all. �Catch fun ke? Lai lai!� Like me, he had come to quietly cry out his sorrow. Now, that made two of us.

Instantly, I began to appreciate and understand the meaning of the saying that there is strength in numbers. With just the two of us present to bemoan our similar fate, there was nothing else to hide from each other and nothing further to be ashamed of. We simply bonded and we jointly and individually cried our eyes out. Thereafter, we encouraged one another, and united by adversity decided to fight back. Our anger was not directed against any school system. No. It was directed at our tormentors, the senior boys who victimised us.

Given that we could not openly challenge them to avoid being beaten up, we came up with an idea to punish, in our own peculiar way, any senior boy who dealt with us. Did we succeed? Yes, we did. We did not do anything devilish or anything that could immediately be traced to us. Our tracks were cleverly and admirably covered . . . our modus operandi was very simple and practical. But it was sweet revenge all the same.

If a senior boy tried to oppress us, we had no problems with that, but he would have to spend the rest of the school term looking for his pair of sandals. Did we help in the search? Sure, if called upon to join the search party.

But if imperially ordered as those seniors were want to do, no way. By the time the �oppressor' found his sandals, if ever they did, the sandals would be gnarled and useless, having spent their useful life on top of the zinc roof, serially and repeatedly getting sunned and rained on, without regard to the elements. As the clich� goes: 50: 50 No cheating. Or alternatively, do I say it was a case of � �Do me I do you, God no go vex!�

BA and I had a lot of fun watching the harried senior boys as they frantically searched for their footwear. A couple of them suspected we were the culprits, but there were no proofs and, of course, no idea where the assets were. �Which one concern us?�

Did it gain us respect? Yes, it did. Did it check the highhandedness and excessive punishment? I bet it did!

Submitted by: OREMODU Babatunde Israel