ST. Augustine Primary School Onitsha 1

The Nigerian says : good morning! country people. how una dey? today's post is a bit different from our usual posts. I'm not answering any questions today, I may ask one at the end of this post.


       "Chidi you must pay N5 today! you think because you are Miss's son you can make noise and not pay? it's a lie o , you must pay that money today". we all turned around to see Amaechi the class monitor charging towards Chidi. Primary 3b had a rule : if you talk while in class, you pay N5. Our "Miss" invented that punishment instead of the usual 'pick pin' 'kneel down until your knees bled' and 'frog jump', because according to her, "you children don't have home training at all. You lack respect. Unu enwero nsopuru, this N5 will keep your mouths shut".

        In the east, in those days, most of us had only N5 as lunch money and that money was a lot of money! I remember my friends in disbelief were saying "ha! N5 ? that's a lot of money. This Miss is an educated armed robber". We all knew deep down in our hearts that we could not tell our parents; their replies would have been "and so? if you make noise, you pay the price. why would you even talk in class? is that why we are sending you to school?".

       I remember St.Augustine Catholic Nursery and Primary school Onitsha. Our school uniform was pink in colour, pink check material for the boys shirt and pink short knickers. For the girls it was a dress, the upper part was pink check material while the rest of the dress was pink plain material.. You could tell the difference between the rich, the middle class and the poor through their uniforms; some boys had very large holes in the back of their short knicker, you could clearly see their buttocks, some never wore underwear and their "pink" was no longer pink, more like a dirty brown colour. Those were the poor ones. The middle class had patches over the holes in their shorts, sometimes they will come to school with their uniformed ironed depending on NEPA. The rich ones never had holes on their shorts, they played with the rest of the kids but had at least N25 to spend every day plus lunch. The good thing then was, nobody looked down on anybody. We did not see class, of course while some of us walked to school, some rode bicycles while some were dropped off.

      Back to my story : "Amaechi I will not pay any money! if it's fight let us fight". eh? the whole class went quiet. We were all in shock, as at this time, our Miss was attending the PTA meeting. Nobody has ever challenged Amaechi in the history of our class. Common sense did not allow it. There was a very clear reason why he was appointed as our class monitor. He was the only person that could collect N5 from students in anyway possible. He was taller than most of us and he was very fat. You should have seen our faces, we could not believe it. "What did you just say?" Amechi asked as he walked towards Chidi's desk.....
(Watch out for part two!)

OK Bye!