Trials of a Boarding School Boy

Life in the boarding school was a completely foreign experience to me. My first visit to Ochaja had lasted only two days, just enough time to attend the admission interview. That brief encounter didn’t allow for much interaction with the existing students, though I did notice a few other candidates from my local government area who spoke the same dialect as I did. Still, that visit gave me no real glimpse into what life in boarding school was truly like.

When I arrived for the school term, I was received by the House Master, who directed me to my dormitory and showed me my bed. It was a double-decker bunk, with mine being the top. I had barely settled in when the school bell rang. I didn’t know what it signified. A boy hurried past me, shouting something I couldn’t quite make out. The student on the opposite bed told me it was time to go to the stream.

I remembered the stream from my earlier visit. It was about a 10-minute jog from the school and served as the primary place for bathing, especially for junior students who weren’t allowed to use the school showers. We were expected to jog there every morning and evening.

The stream itself was small but clean and fresh. It didn’t feel strange to me, as I had grown up around similar streams near my father’s farmland. I loved swimming, and it quickly became a place of escape and recreation for me. That evening, the student opposite me, likely in his second year, told me to grab my bucket and towel and join the others. I did, and before long, I found myself jogging to the stream among a group of old and new students.

New students were called “freshers.” As a fresher, part of our responsibility was to fetch water for senior students, who enjoyed privileges we didn't. They didn’t have to jog to the stream. Instead, each senior was assigned a junior student, called a college brother, to serve him. These duties included washing plates after meals, ironing clothes, running errands, fetching water, and tidying their beds.

I found this arrangement deeply strange and demeaning. While I was open to respectful friendships with seniors, I refused to be anyone’s servant. This defiance marked the beginning of my stormy relationship with not only the prefects but the school system itself. Fortunately, I managed to avoid major trouble in the early months, and in time, none of the seniors wanted me as a college brother anyway.

But conflict was inevitable. I once accused a senior prefect of tribalism, which was a serious charge that no non-native student was expected to make. That particular prefect already had issues with me. One evening during dinner, he decided to make an example of me. He climbed onto a dining table. With his diminutive status, he began a dramatic speech, full of moral justification for what he was about to do. He called my name and ordered me to stand on the table in front of me and place my plate of food on my head. I saw it as the ultimate humiliation and refused. I continued eating as if he didn’t exist. He yelled, but I remained silent. When he stormed over to confront me, I braced myself. If he hit me, I was prepared to fight back, even if it meant expulsion.

Thankfully, another senior prefect diffused the tension. Later that night, the Head Prefect summoned me to his room. He insisted I apologise, regardless of the circumstances. I shared my perspective, but he wasn’t moved. As punishment, I was ordered to fetch ten bundles of firewood within a week. I complied—but each bundle was deliberately half the required size. In the end, I lost three prep sessions, but I made my point.

From then on, that prefect seized every chance to punish me. He inflated minor infractions into major offenses. He loved climbing dining tables to deliver long-winded speeches, revealing a student’s “crime” with dramatic flair, never mentioning names, just demanding the culprit stand up. I always refused, until he called my name directly, and even then, sometimes I didn’t move. Though small in stature, he had a big ego—arrogant, aggressive, and talkative. I became his favorite target. But I never gave him the satisfaction of public humiliation. I resisted him consistently. If he thrived on power, I thrived on defiance. It was a constant game of cat and mouse. I stood firm in my belief that students had a right to speak up about issues affecting their well-being, a belief not shared by many prefects.

What hurt most was how my peers would secretly agree with me but abandon me when it mattered. In the end, I became the scapegoat.

Yet not all senior students were the same. I developed a friendship with a fourth-year student, a tall, slender boy around my age. He wasn’t like the others. He didn’t have a college brother. He fetched his own water, washed and ironed his own clothes, and jogged to the stream like we did. He often came by to chat, and we got along easily. One Saturday, I offered to help with his washing. He was surprised and initially refused, but later accepted. He was so grateful that he began to bring me gifts.

Firewood became a recurring theme in my school life. Every student from Forms 1 to 3 was required to fetch a specific number of bundles weekly, sometimes five, sometimes ten. Those who often got into trouble, like me, fetched even more. If not fetching firewood, you’d be out cutting grass.

But one strange incident has stayed with me ever since. It happened shortly before the Easter holiday. The school had just welcomed young boys who came for next year’s entrance exams. Among them was the son of a distant relative, my mother’s cousin’s child. He had travelled all the way from Ogidi. When he arrived, he handed me a tin of fried beans (ẹwa), one of my favorite dishes. My mother, he said, had sent it through his mother. I was thrilled and quickly hid the tin in my locker.

The next night, hungry and unimpressed by the school dinner, an awful combination of akpa and badly prepared akraw soup, I decided to eat the ẹwa. Eating in the dormitory was forbidden, but we all broke that rule sometimes. I opened the tin, scooped half into a plate, and then noticed something odd drop from the tin. It didn’t look like food.

I switched on my torch, another offense, and examined it more closely. I froze. Inside the tin was a small, round object with black thread wrapped around it, a needle, a razor blade, and strange black particles. Terrified, I packed everything back into the tin and hid it.

The next morning, I took the tin with me to the stream. On the way, I ducked into the bush and opened it again. The contents confirmed my fear. I wrapped it in my towel and told no one. Not even the boy who had brought it. I wrote a thank-you letter to my mother, pretending all was well.

Two days after the boy left, Pa Augustine, my father’s younger brother, arrived unexpectedly. Sent by my father, he came to check on me. I shared the whole story and handed over the tin. I later learned that the tin had indeed come through the boy’s mother, who had told him it was from my own.
To this day, I believe that moment was a powerful act of divine protection. Normally, I would have eaten directly from the tin in the dark. But something made me act differently that night, scooping it into a plate and using a torch. That simple deviation may have saved my life.

God, in His mercy, had a plan for me. And that night, He reminded me of it.

Extracts from my forthcoming memoir, Grace and Resilience—a journey of endurance, hope, and transformation.