Mai Goro ( a short story) Many times I wonder what BSS would be like, without the imposing presence of Y.S Dimka. You have to be a GOSA to understand that this man is also referred to as ‘Mai Goro’, and you have to be a truant to whisper the code ‘MG’ to your peers when you are dodging preps, quiet time, morning work, assembly, or any other thing that requires the presence of the whole students of Boys Secondary School Gindiri, and they will go scrambling, hitting themselves accidentally, in order find a proper hiding place to avoid the inevitable wrath of Dimka. You know, the thrill of dodging all these mandatory activities feels just as good as the pleasure of sin - when you are not caught, or before the imminent consequences come upon you, the transgressor. You have to be a ‘made’ (refined) GOSA to address Y.S Dimka – that is Mai Goro – even in his absence, as ‘Baba’, the Hausa word for ‘Father’, and that is what he has come to represent to the thousands of boys who have been distilled in his refinery (BSS). A piece of Dimka lives in you when you have a positive impact in the society you live in; of course we all know that a tree can only yield fruits of its kind. You can never agree with Baba when you are on the wrong side of a right thing. It’s not like he would argue with you, or even coax you to be on his side, the right side. Baba would take the path of aggressive negotiation, I mean he will literally coerce you to do the right thing in addition to the punishment you will receive for breaking rules. Baba didn’t even spare his own sons, wait minute! What did I just say? Did he have any sons? All boys were the same to him, students, as long as they were wearing that odd green shirt over a white trouser, or that tolerable green check shirt over a brown trouser, or white over white on Sundays. All boys in uniforms were treated as equals; they were either commended or reprimanded as it may be required by his almost impeccable sense of judgement. He was happy when I appeared at his door last year, to tell him that I needed him to be one of my referees in an application I was writing to further my studies abroad, Australia precisely. “ That is very good, there are many rabbits in Australia, make sure you hunt them and eat them.” Now if I didn’t know his kind of person, I wouldn’t understand that he was commending me, and I wouldn’t also understand that his definition of the rabbits included ‘A’ grades. Unfortunately, I couldn’t secure the admission, that means I couldn’t go to Australia, therefore I wont be able to easily catch rabbits (unless I am a professional hunter here), and worst of all, now, I have lost the Baba who would have given me more hope of catching rabbits. What’s with the rabbit anecdote anyway? I just wanted you to know that Baba would always commend you for doing right and picking up challenges, but that is not to say he does not rebuke or punish you for any offence committed, and just like salaries that could be paid in arrears – ask JDJ to define that word – Baba could give you punishment in arrears. I can’t recall the name, but a certain ex-student, a GOSAlet, who was already in ABU Zaria back in the days, was lashed on stage in the Assembly hall when he came for his original certificate of WAEC. Did you just call it “wickedness”? No! No! I call it ‘Justice’. It just seems odd because our governments have continually pardoned enemies of the state (looters). Naturally, crime should attract punishment, and I would not be so sure about it if I was not punished, even in arrears too. Being a twin, people always say we are identical and I just nod eventhough I quite disagree with them, Baba had always had a hard time differentiating who committed which crime, when, and the punishment that person (my twin or I) deserves. Most of the time, he would pretend as if he had forgotten, then he would wait for the me to commit up to three offences, at that moment he would assume that one of us must have committed at least one of the three offences. It was quite a crude way of assumption, but trust me, his instincts (or maybe the spirit in him) were always, always, right. That was happened when he seized the steaming plate of rice I was about to devour at a ‘mama put’ during during ‘first two’ in the morning. It happened again when he caught me dodging night preps in Livingstone, hiding under senior Bakmu’s locker, and when he caught me while on exile in Mangu. Exile, in BSS parlance was staying out of school for days, doing nothing meaningful of course. After the third crime, he assembled me and my twin, and made us dig a trench on the road to his house. Was my twin brother innocent? Nahee! He was not, he was actually the one who was caught in Mangu on that fateful day, but I must admit that it was my turf. I introduced him to it, and he was caught on his premier sortie. Apparently, he forgot the golden rule of exiling (if a word exists like that), which states: Never get caught! So after the third crime, we received our punishment in arrears. Baba took everything seriously, even when he is whipping someone, the seriousness compelled him to do it with all his might. Spare the rod and…… I bet you know. That is why when people see BSS Boys soaring high they think it is magic. Magic? Hmmm let them try Mai Goro now, they will hear nwew! Sorry, it just that you cannot possibly express every experience, especially with Baba, in English. Nnew is the thing you will see and hear when you try to exceed those bounds of obedience. Now I cannot forget the first night I saw my biggest nwew, It was a Sunday evening after evening service at Ulster church, I was then in SS1, actually, I came as a transfer student but the three years I have spent with Dimka made me feel as if I have spent my entire life with him, so I stayed back to utilize the rare moment I had to talk to one of those girls I had a crush on. I won’t mention her name, before those basket mouths reading this piece will sell her at Terminus market. For now, let it suffice that she was one of the three girls who gave me nine inches nail on IBC ground. Please pardon the digression – We can’t help reminiscing love things na! As I was saying, or is it writing? I came back to the hostel, and for dinner, late, because I stayed back to just greet my crush before offloading those well rehearsed yarn or flows that would end up with the three commonest words between lovers, ‘I love you’. Unfortunately, I didn’t reach the last part, and even if I did, the response would have still been that nine inc… I don’t even want to talk about it. So I missed Sunday supper, gabza and black soup, then I forced myself to an early sleep since NEPA did their usual thing. At nine o’clock, Rotshak Daniel, who was in SS2 woke me up. “ Bizuum, wake up!” “What is it Rotshak” I had the liberty to address him as Rotshak without the ‘Senior-‘ prefix because he was my friend, moreso that his mates weren’t around. “Good news! Senior Bakmu said that we should go and cook rice for him” It was actually good news because cooking at the fire site with the consent of Baba Kwa-S, meant scooping the top layer of the rice before it is completely done, and having a plateful of the rice would be guaranteed to the chefs after the whole cooking. Morgak Gotip was the third cook. He was my junior, then in JS2, so basically, he did the main cooking while we sleepily watched and patiently waited for the time the rice would want to pop out of the largest tin of milk, now our pot, so we can subdue its uprising, by fetching the uppermost layer for ‘tasting’ on a small plate. Tasting could go on until the rice can swell no more. Now don’t ask how we got the rice, all things are possible in BSS Gindiri, even students could be found with live bullets. Let’s not go there yet, the point is, we had rice and we were almost done cooking it. It was tasting time, and as if it was calculated, Mai Goro appeared with the signal of his flashing torchlight. It was too late to use the MG-code alert. All three of us, plus the sleeping security man, were caught at the fire site, red handed (or is it black potted), seriously, English isn’t my thing. “Who are these ones and what are you doing here at this time of the night?” Dumb. No excuse could escape from our about-to-lie lips. We had no idea it was 11:30pm until he caught another junior student quietly washing, presumably a senior’s clothes, and yet he doggedly claimed it was his, only God knows what might have happened to him if he had confessed the name of that senior. We understood the same kind of naïve doggedness, that was why we maintained that the food we were cooking was ours. Senior Bakmu might have been suspended, or even expelled. Like I said earlier, Dimka was always serious and he took serious offences seriously. “Washing and cooking at this time of the night? It is totally unacceptable. What time is it?” Baba glanced at his wrist-watch and pronounced 11:30. There was a way in which he stressed the time that made us feel like zombies, or semi-vampires. Either ways, we were in hot soup, we knew it, felt it, and tried to convince him you know, with that kind of sorry look you would put on when your mum catches you stealing meat from her pot of soup. We did it, it kind of worked, maybe because he knew we were not telling the truth and it would be useless punishing the secondary culprits while the main transgressor walks about freely. However, he ordered the security man, now woken to be showered a rain of scolding and warning, to go and pour our pot of rice to the pigs at the pigs’ sty. Chai! With the hunger in my stomache, I wished I was given the rice and a hundred strokes of the cane. The security man absorbed more yelling as he found his way through the tall grass to the pig’s sty. He must have been used to it, every student knew that security man sleeps and even snores at the fire site on almost every night. Whenever he was not asleep, he would be roasting a bat, rat, something bizarre to eat before he sleeps. So we accompanied Baba on his nocturnal tour round the hostels and came back to the fire site in less than thirty minutes. We were scared but Baba’s courage, perhaps faith, drove away those cats, bats, owls, and those purported ‘bush babies’ or ‘gwai-gwai’ that we thought were existing. Now at the fire site with the security man at his post, desperately pretending to be vigilant in spite of those glaringly heavy eyes that yearned to be shut by their lids. “Have you fed the pigs with the rice?” “Yes sir,” the security replied. We wererecklessly hopeful, like Super Eagles on a penalty shootout in a decisive match, that there might be a last ray of luck, that the old man hid our rice for us somewhere in the bush, and God knows we intended to repay him with a generous share of the food. Our luck was in, the food was safely stored in some bush, at least no animal could come close to it yet because it was still hot, but our luck ran out when Mai Goro insisted that the Security availed the pot as evidence that he had disposed the food. Once again, we were sunken. All other stubborn dots of hope disappeared when the security man returned with a steaming empty pot, tin, of rice. “Liar, you just poured this food to the pigs” Baba hollered, the man admitted, and we chewed bones of regret. “Now get away, go and get some sleep” He referred to us, eventhough he knew the security would do same, he still cautioned him and, I think, he went to catch his own little sleep too. On the bed, my eyes were wide open, staring into darkness, but watching a replay of the whole scenario on my mental video. Someone has to take the blame; is it the stupid crush who made me lose supper? or the stupid princi.. no no! Ok it was the stupid Senior that sent… no! It must be the stupid Rotshak… no! It ‘s the stupid me who yielded, wait. It doesn’t make sense for one to insult himself, it’s even barbaric. Then it must be the girl. It has to be the girl, my stupid crush. Like I said, someone has to take the blame. Each time we meet as Ex-BSS boys, or young GOSAs, our discussions always touched on Baba and our misdemenour, somehow our lives partially revolve around the man who has come to be a model and a mentor to us. You may wonder why he is called ‘Mai Goro’ (Loosely translated as owner of kola nut). Well, Baba does not sell goro (kola nut), I can’t even remember seeing him chew one. Baba was seen around the hostel at anytime and at any period of the night, so it was assumed that Baba was addicted to kola nuts which made him to stay awake and monitor BSS as if it was his own property, as if it was a goose that lays golden eggs. That Kola nut was just a passion he had for the school. Make no mistake about it; that passion could only come from a heart that knows God. He may not be a perfect man, but we can say he was a very very sweet father.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 19:06:12 +0000
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