I went to a public school where the walls were cages and the students had to make their own seats with shit-stained broken planks and crooked blunt nails. The teachers taught mathematics and English in Yoruba and our bodies always came home with regular hoofs of dust, wood, and cane.
We never had a lunch break and sometimes we would go a whole week with teachers munching gossips and side dishes in the teacher’s office while the students threw tantrums and broke wood to make seats. I used to think my early days in secondary schools were horror stories until I heard tales from my peers who were thrown into boarding halls from ages as premature as ten.
The lucky ones were the ones who suffered the sharp edges of punches and words from their senior hall mates. They were the ones that spent their Saturdays washing a mountain pile of clothes from twice a dozen senior students who slept until dusk. They were forced to share their monthly foodstuff with their senior students. And then they were others, who were asked to pull down their shorts and close their eyes as horrors unfolded underneath their waist. The ones who were asked to open their mouth or their hands and take in the hardness mixed with sweat. The word ‘unlucky’ would not accommodate the voiceless trauma that accompanies such an experience.
More scathing than the memory that stalks the victim is the face of the ones who plant the experience. The ones that never get punished. The ones that society has camouflaged and institutions have excused in the guise of not airing out dirty laundries. This is how corporal punishment in schools has been exploited by the little powers of different levels. How effective is a pain in the face of correction? How effective are words in the face of immorality? And even if we excuse the shortfalls of these methods, why do we safeguard the ones who manipulate powers in the name of punishments?
It was in November 2020 when I first heard the case of Don Davis, an eleven-year-old boy torn apart by the menace of his seniors and his hall master in deeper life secondary school in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. The news bore with it the resounding horrors of the corporal punishments that boarding schools in Nigeria employed in a bid to instill discipline. Don Davis, who suffered from the spell of bedwetting went through rigorous levels of punishment from his hall master who used stone, belts, sticks and even punches to restore the boy back to normalcy.
And at night, when the hall master Akpan snored through the hallways, Don Davis’ roommates woke him up and plunged their fingers into his arsehole and manipulated his bowels. I cannot help but marvel at what human beings would do at the little pinch of power they grab. Is the next agenda on the list exploitation? When did abuse become the order of the day? More horrifying than Don Davis’s experience is the school’s attempt to bury the issue without returning a sniff of retribution. Religion has eclipsed justice. Perhaps if this incident had happened in the ’90s, influence would have misinterpreted the facts and Deborah Okezie would have lost in her honesty.
But this woman had the wisdom to record the atrocity she saw with her phone, securing her truth and her alibi on the internet where nothing is ever lost. With her constant videos regarding the update on the case, we have seen her maneuver her way through the school’s wit to drown her case, keep her truth afloat, become the strength that her son desperately needs, disbound the fake media provocations, and stand on her own truth to find justice for her son and reject the familiar religious poke at her to let dead bones lie. Very rare do we find society on the side of the victim, especially when the victim is powerless.
In Nigeria, being powerless does not mean that you are poor. You could have money in Nigeria, but still powerless. Power is influence. This is because in my country every opportunity and almost every area of living is controlled by influence. The church has influence. The church is powerful. And albeit the religious disposition of the church, they do not mind leaving god’s presence to manipulate their influence so that their dirty laundries would not be mockery to the public gaze.
Perhaps that is why a doctor from deeper life was sighted sneaking into Don Davis room to steal his DNA and manipulate information as regards it. That is why a pastor can stretch out the rod behind his shorts on a lady and an observer would ask people not to judge the man of god. Even if Mrs. Deborah Okezie is nothing but a story teller and she has miraculously developed a skill in computer manipulation and is currently leading our visual senses on a one-way train to lyingsville, we cannot dispel the whispers of victimization and harrowing experience that lurks the hallways of boarding houses in Nigeria. Outside the halls is not as safe as inside the halls for the young Nigerian, especially if you are a female.
Even in the comfort of your homes, around your friends and families, it seems no one is safe from abuse. Even if Renua-Giwa had not told us about the events that dragged down her mental health before her death, it would still not be a new story hearing about fathers sleeping with their daughter’s friends, uncles touching nephews and cousins gangraping the visiting family friend from the village. Where in Nigeria is it safe for kids who cower at the footsteps of abuse?
The topic of sex education in schools is highly ignored because of the fallacy that we are a nation of morals? Boys and girls are left with the personal knowledge of whispers and rumors to help them thrive with puberty. Hormones are felt and exploited. Happiness is misrepresented by ecstasy. The game of choice and consequences is left in the hands of pullouts. At what points do we air out our dirty laundries on abuse, so that our girls and boys would be able to trust us and cry out for help when they see a stranger on the porch of their modesty.
CC: Taken from “I am not angry. I am just a Nigerian”
A collection of Essays written by Festus Obehi Destiny