CHAPTER 1

THE TRIGGER

“I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!” said the scruffiest boy, throwing his bag on the ground. The boy, who stood to his left, stared at him in disbelief. However, unlike his bag-hurling comrade, he wisely held onto his school bag, which hung from his right shoulder on a single solid strap. A third boy ran up to where the first two stood, and with his hands resting on his knees, stopped to catch his breath.

“You guys are wicked o! I told you to wait for me,” said the boy who just joined them. Then, as soon as his eyes settled on the abandoned bag lying in the dust, his face wore a questioning look. Not quite two seconds later, questions tumbled out of his mouth in no particular order.

Pointing to the bag, he said, “Kanmi, is that your bag? Are you mad? Do you want someone to steal it? What’s your problem?”

Adekanmi or Kanmi as the bag-hurler was called, momentarily turned his gaze to Francis, the asker of questions. He regarded Francis with a scorching glare, but said nothing. Then, he resumed staring at the bag on the floor.

Not to be ignored, Francis spoke again. “Kanmi, I know you’re not deaf. What’s wrong with you? You want your bag to walk to your dorm?”

Perhaps, the ridiculous image of a school bag marching from the classrooms to the dormitories was all that was needed to jumpstart Kanmi’s tongue back to life. It was only after this second round of questioning that he spoke. Kicking a pile of dust into the air, he shouted:

“I’m fed up! This rubbish must end!”

Fadehan, the one who had witnessed Kanmi throw his bag on the ground before Francis arrived gave Francis a layman’s translation of what the pouting, kicking and shouting by Kanmi was all about.

“He’s angry about that teacher,” said Fadehan. “He punished him today.”

Francis had missed this important event because he was part of a select group of students representing their school at an inter-school quiz competition in Ikeja. The competition which they lost to the host school took most of the day, and he returned just after the closing bell rang.

“Again?” asked Francis, in a tone that suggested that this was not the first time this particular teacher had punished Kanmi.

The teacher in question, and the source of Kanmi’s frustration on a dusty Tuesday afternoon, was Mr. Gbenga Adesoji.

It was the third and final term of their first year at St. John’s College, a private school on the outskirts of Lagos, where they were boarders. Being an all-boys secondary school meant there were absolutely no female students. Older boys regularly bullied younger boys, used them to perform distasteful chores and run all kinds of errands. In short, the senior boys regarded the junior boys as glorified houseboys, and treated them likewise. But it was considered a rite of passage, the sort of treatment junior boys had to endure till they became senior boys, and then they could do the same to lowerclassmen.

If a senior boy was not demanding an unreasonable number of buckets of water in the middle of an obvious, publicly-acknowledged crisis of water scarcity, he was commanding junior boys to clean filthy toilets, sweep dusty floors, cut grass with blunt cutlasses, iron wrinkled clothes, and power through an array of chores the juniors probably never did at home.

Someone has to do it …

Inasmuch as the junior boys dreaded being harassed by senior boys, there was one person feared most by every single student in the school: Mr. Adesoji, the Mathematics teacher.

Because the school had been in existence for close to eight years, the population of students enrolled was under 600, far lower than schools that had been around much longer. Only four arms of JSS1 and other classes existed: A, B, C and D. The size of each classroom ranged from 20 to 25 boys.

Now, Mr. Adesoji, along with the other Mathematics teachers taught a cross-section of students in both lower and upper secondary classes. In particular, he was the teacher assigned to JSS1B where Kanmi, Francis and Fadehan were classmates.

As if teaching boys under 12 the essentials of solving equations was not challenging enough, Mr. Adesoji also balanced on his shoulders, the physically demanding roles of Physical Education (PE) teacher, and football coach. So, he grilled boys in class and on the field.

Football, a sport which the boys had enjoyed with so much passion before Adesoji’s appointment as coach, became the least desirable of all sports in school. Why? Because Adesoji treated the players like a herd of goats, using a combination of soul-crushing verbal abuse and merciless flogging in an effort to transform the boys into champions. Perhaps, if his questionable tactics had worked, the boys may have swallowed their complaints. However, they ended up losing more games than they did in all their past seasons combined.

To add insult to injury, he blamed them for their string of defeats.

But, in all fairness to him, Mr. Adesoji was a man of good ambition. His ambition for the football team to win championships was something he was very vocal about. And if that ambition had kept his excesses in check, Adesoji’s many sins might have been overlooked. Unfortunately, he himself was a terrible football player, and an even worse coach, leaving the boys at the mercy of the one person who had no business on the football field.

Due to their growing hatred for Mr. Adesoji, the boys on the football team began to defect one by one to other extracurricular activities. Specifically, less popular sports like badminton and cricket saw an increase in try-outs and membership.

But what was most surprising was that the majority of the former football players boycotted sports altogether. Instead, their interests changed altogether, and one-by-one began to join the school choir. The result was that while Mr. Kalu who was both the choir director and music teacher, saw the choir explode in numbers with more tenors than he could have hoped for, Mr. Adesoji saw the football team shrink. And because the school gave students the freewill to choose what extra-curricular activities they wanted to participate in, Mr. Adesoji could neither coerce nor strong-arm students to stay on the team. Rather, he watched helplessly as they chose music over sports.

Bearing witness to this conscious choice infuriated him. And his anger grew daily revealing itself in the classroom. Mr. Adesoji just couldn’t stomach the reality that able-bodied, strong athletes had chosen to lend their voices to a choir, something he deemed fit for only girls. One day in particular, he was confronted with hard evidence as he walked past the music room.

Seated in a corner was Omoefe, who used to be the main striker on the football team, eyes closed in rapturous delight as he plucked the strings of a violin with one hand, while the other hand gracefully slid a wooden bow across metal strings.

That was the trigger.

After that day, Mr. Adesoji’s meanness skyrocketed and in the coming weeks, the boys felt the upsurge of his anger.

One Tuesday morning close to the middle of the term, which was the final term of that school year, Mr. Adesoji strolled into the classroom of JSS1B. He ordered Kanmi, the brawniest, but certainly not the brightest boy in JSS1B, to come to the white board, an upgrade from the black chalkboards, to solve a problem.

“Our formula for finding the volume of a cylinder is V = π r 2 h. If the radius is 6 inches and the height is 10 inches, what is the volume?” said Mr. Adesoji scribbling the figures he was reciting furiously on the board as he spoke.

Kanmi, who was now on his feet, still standing at his desk, stared at the board in confusion. What was this man saying? Why couldn’t he just solve it himself? Yes, he had provided some elements to solve this problem, but for the life of him, Kanmi did not know whether to add the radius twice or multiply it by itself. And what was pi again? The picture of a cylinder which the teacher hurriedly sketched as an after-thought did not help either. It would have been a lot easier to ask Kanmi to pick out a meat pie from a sea of jelly-filled donuts.

“Please sir,” said Kanmi in a low voice amidst snickering from his classmates. “I don’t know.”

As Fadehan told Kanmi later that day, he would gladly have suffered a thousand strokes of cane than openly admit that he could not solve a Math problem.

Judging solely by his strong build, Kanmi fit the description of a class bully. In reality, his gentle nature made him seem more like an overgrown baby. One look at his soft, pink palms suggested that this was a child who was not used to doing many, if any, chores. But two terms at St. John’s had given Kanmi a crash course in hard chores. To be certain, one year at any boarding school in...