memoirs from a time past

Part 2

Its amazing how much you bury deep in your subconscious for one reason or another. This morning I just happened to be dusting some inner recesses of my archived thoughts and I found myself humming some song that was sang in my childhood at sports games. It brought back a plethora of memories which I just had to record. You see I grew up as “mwana waHeadmaster” (The Headmaster’s daughter) and that came along with a lot of priviledges mostly, any negatives my still-developing child mind did not immediately decipher I can explore those another day. Anyone who grew up and learnt at a rural school will know that the “teachers’ children” are always treated differently at least that’s what happened where I grew up. For starters, most of the other kids would clamor to be your friend thus they will bring you wild fruits which they picked on their way to school, they brought you delicacies during harvest time. And they would generally be nice to you because they thought that (1) that would make them get liked by the parents a.k.a teachers (2) that you would share with them the luxury items your parents could afford that they could only dream of. Well of course that never worked I will tell you why.

Looking back now I realize that in our own innocent way we were major snobs. You would find that no matter how much the other kids tried to impress you, invariably your friends would be other teachers’ kids, if not then you would choose your friends among the “smart kids”. I shall define those, they were the kids whose parents (mostly just the father) was working in the city so they had nice (clean) uniforms and proper school shoes and socks. That also meant they had been to the city at some point so you had stuff in common like television programs. Besides it was just better to play with the clean kids! Secondly the reason why most of my friends were the teachers’ kids was because when school ended at 4 I still had a lot of energy to play and the only people available to play with were the teachers’ kids who stayed at the same compound with me, same goes for weekends as everyone else went home. It all sounds very cruel and nasty but I am just telling it like I remember, I guess class divisions one way or the other come out no matter where you are.

The other advantage that being a teacher’s kid had was this; during the “general work” period when everyone would engage in manual labour, the teachers would always give the lighter, easier and less dirty jobs to the teachers’ kids, even those that did not have kids themselves. It was like an unwritten code, though I must admit that once or twice I would run into a teacher who had a bone to chew with my mother or father and they would give me hard labour. But those were rare occasions, after all I was the headmaster’s daughter and everyone wanted to suck up to the headmaster one way or the other.

I grew up in a rural setting but I must say I had a very sheltered childhood, not very much different from my urban peers in more than one way. Of course I had the typical rural bit like the following: my mother would always make sure that my brothers and I helped in the strips of fields that she had such that during the appropriate seasons most Saturdays you would be woken up very early to go and cultivate the field. Of course because I was the only girl sometimes (only sometimes) I would get spared and have some extra hour or two of sleep. Also, we did not have electricity so by the time I was 8 I knew how to light a good fire and cook over it, something which my urban peers never mastered even up to now. That also meant that on occasion I would go with the other girls in the compound to look for firewood (my mother was always uneasy about me going but I did go enough times). That was an adventure in itself it meant that you could climb the mountain and fetch various wild fruits while you are at it. Another thing was we always had to go and fetch water at the borehole. Now this is one chore that I would rather have been spared. You had to go at least twice a day or more if mama wanted to do her laundry. You had to carefully balance a bucket of water on your head and be careful not to let it splash all over your clothes. I don’t believe I ever learnt how to do the proper balancing without holding on to your bucket. It was only fun when you were going there to do the laundry because that meant two hours or more of gossip and listening to stories from the other girls.

As I said before a lot of the things that happened made me feel no different from my urban peers. My parents always made sure they bought us plenty of toys (well they seemed plenty then) in fact more than most of our friends. We would watch cartoons after school or during the weekends so as a result I can happily join in when my urban brewed friends get into reminiscent convos about TV back in the day. I would go into town a lot with my parents, my dad had a nice Renault 12 and the nearest town was only 37km away. We always had new clothes especially around Christmas. Speaking of Christmas every year my parents would buy us the ever popular “lucky dip” which my mom always hid until Christmas morning together with our new clothes even though we had seen them being offloaded from the car! The funniest bit was when she would ask us to try on some new clothes just in case they needed to be returned for size. Then she would say “I am not saying they are yours, just for some other girl your size!” duh I was the only girl in my family! Then she would proceed to hide the clothes only to produce them on Christmas morning! And we always had a huge feast on Christmas and New Year’s Day complete with cakes and lots of meat and those Choice Assorted biscuits!

Ah life was good then!