I WAKE UP AT THE FIRST COCKCROW ON THE BIG DAY and set off to school before sunrise, too excited to eat breakfast. Machebe says I look funny in my undersized white-and-indigo school uniform. I will be starting in SS1 Class. Machebe insists I am too old to return to school. But I don’t care. It is my big day, and I will not let anything soil my mood. I did my best to look younger. I got rid of the wisp on my chin with a new razor blade.
The school is a trek of five miles each way, along a path that weaves through village squares and compounds, ultimately bringing you to a signboard with COMMUNITY SECONDARY SCHOOL printed in white lettering against a blue background. Each time I pass people who know me, their whispers and suppressed laughter wither my pace. It brings a flood of relief, the sign that stands by the entrance to the large compound fenced in with wire gauze. A small man with a stern look is manning the gate. He is old and half deaf. Next to the school there is a football pitch with rusty whitewashed goalposts and two huge African olive trees on either side, under which students either watch football practice or lounge in the shade. It is the same pitch where Eke and I used to play football before I dropped out. Eke was good, almost at the same level as I was. We were a threat as a team, and archrivals as opponents, but an image that will haunt me, which almost feels like a betrayal as I reenter the school without Eke, is of us always strolling off the pitch with hands linked at the last whistle.
There are four identical classroom blocks, two either side, with stained cream walls. Their roofs and eaves have been partly destroyed by woodlice and hostile winds. Many of the windows and doors are broken. Behind the school, beyond a garden planted with cassava and spinach, is bush where villagers relieve themselves.
I am proud to be standing erect at the assembly ground with other students, facing the sunrise and singing the national anthem. I try to ignore the furtive glances and the giggling going on around me as the principal addresses the assembly from the stairway. Besides being new, my age and tight uniform mark me out. And my half ear. The other students had better get used to it, I tell myself, because they will be seeing more of me around. People always stare at first, but they eventually lose interest.
The principal is plump, short, and light-skinned. She reminds me of an owl with her voluminous wig and bulging eyes. Her teeth seem to be struggling for space in her mouth; one worries she might bite her tongue when she is talking. The vice principal is a small man with a pointed face. In his shabby coat and hat, he makes me think of the gnome in my picture book. The teachers are beaming behind the principal and the vice principal in wigs and spectacles.
After the morning assembly I walk with a sense of déjà vu into a squawking classroom that smells of chalk. It is crowded with lockers and chairs. And dominated by girls. We are twenty-one in number: seven boys, the rest girls—a shrieking flock of beautiful birds. The arrival of a teacher throws cold water onto the flames of my imagination.
There are bright students eager to raise their hands and answer questions, and dumb ones who stare and clap their hands when asked to by the teacher, and others like me who secretly pray that the teacher will not call on them to answer a question. There is a thin, awkward-looking girl who raises her hand to all the questions and answers them brilliantly, and a noisy, rascally boy sitting in the same row as me. The girl sitting two rows in front is pretty and restless. She and the rascally boy are punished now and again for disturbing the class.
I enjoy the first few classes, especially geography. We read the atlas and learn about places with exotic and rhythmic names: Antarctica, Mississippi, Pacific, Eastern Europe, Eritrea, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, British Virgin Islands, New Hampshire, Botswana, Puerto Rico, Mauretania, Kampala, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, El Salvador, Madagascar. The list is endless. I try memorizing the names of oceans and seas and lakes and rivers. My classmates make a song to help their memory: Nile Niger Senegal Congo Orange Limpopo Zambezi.
I enjoy the noisy intervals when one teacher walks out at the end of his class and another is awaited. The class has nicknamed the mathematics teacher Nza, like the bird, because of his small stature and spindly legs hidden in tight trousers. He is not the only teacher with a nickname. The principal is nicknamed Lioness for her harshness, her aggressiveness. The vice principal is called Cat for the bowler hat that never leaves his head.
The class splits at break time, everyone tearing out to the field to play. I am still a good footballer. I was once in the school’s junior team, but most of my teammates are now graduated and gone, so I am happy to watch others play.
The final lessons are slower. There’s relief in the faces of my classmates as school finally comes to an end for the day. I trek home musing over my first day back in school, the staring eyes, the furtive giggles, and me trying not to be self-conscious about my age and my half ear.
My mother’s lunch of rice is waiting for me at home to celebrate my first day. The beginning of my journey to becoming the first ever graduate in Oregwu. Beyond secondary school, I will study to earn a degree and become a good politician, and, when Biafra comes, I shall be amongst her first crop of leaders. And then I will buy back my father’s ancestral land and tenfold more.