Inside a Nigerian Boarding School

The iron pillars in the hostels not only support the building structure but also serve as a general alarm for the hostel hall. This alarm does not just wake you up from your sleep but takes it away from you immediately. When beaten with another strong metal, the pillars generate a loud noise, and you can feel the sound vibrations in your brain. The noise from the pillar is not to wake you but force you out of bed for the daily hostel sanitation, probably around 4:30 am. There was no specific time because it depends on the hostel prefect, but it must be very early while all students are still in the hostel. It will be a shame if you do not react to the alarm because it is also the sound of your final warning to wake up immediately. We gather at the pillar where the house prefect makes the wake-up call. After every student has assembled by the pillar, the house prefect will look out for students still sleeping after he made the call; if you did not react to the sound, you would react to the whip. You can never be too tired not to respond to both.

Most of the time, we jokingly tell ourselves that we have been trained to be military officers since the military designed the entire structure. However, we are not trained to be military officers; we remain "bloody civilians," as always referred to by the military. We have to align with all school activities running from when it starts to when the day ends for us, excluding Saturdays and Sundays. We only have a 45-minute siesta daily, which we mostly do not observe because we prefer not to sleep.

We wake up at 4:30 am or earlier, breakfast is served precisely at 6:30 am, and the serving of breakfast will last for only 30-45 minutes. We resume classes immediately after breakfast if there is no assembly until 2:00 pm when all lectures are over. Lunch is served at 2:30, and we will get our 45-minute siesta if we finish early in the dining hall. Almost all the students usually come for the launch, and we have over 3000 students. If we do not get our siesta, we will resume afternoon prep immediately after launch until 5:00 pm. Evening games kick off immediately after the afternoon prep as we prepare for dinner by 6:00 pm. We go back for night prep from 7:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. for junior students and 11:00 p.m. for senior students; light out starts immediately after the night prep.

In my first year, water was a serious challenge. After morning sanitation, many students without reserved water must fetch it from the general school borehole, approximately 1000 meters from the male hostel. This is why many students do not get their breakfast. However, the brain is good at adapting; we do this daily and did not find it stressful until a new commandant drilled several boreholes and water reservoirs around the hostels.

Saturdays are supposed to be the days you get to relax your mind and neutralize some of the accumulated stress from the week. But unfortunately, Saturday is one of the most stressful days of the week. Sometimes, we woke up earlier than usual to get our hostel set for inspection every Saturday. Every hostel is cleaned thoroughly because the hostel inspection was competitive, and the results are announced on Monday during the weekly assembly. All hostel prefects are responsible for protecting the integrity of their house by ensuring the house emerges as a winner at least once a month. The inspection will start at 9:00 a.m., and we will not stop cleaning until it is time.

Breakfast is served at 10:00 a.m. on Saturdays after the hostel inspection. Many students avoid going for breakfast on Saturday because, after breakfast, we are mobilized from the dining hall by the labor perfect for the general school sanitation. We call it General Works. When the dining is not full to its expected capacity, the labor prefect sounds the general work alarm across the entire school premise for students to report to the dining hall. After the notification, any student not found in the dining hall was considered a nonconformist. You do not want to offend the labor captain. The labor captain is one of the most feared prefects in the school. Bullying and brutality are synonymous with this position; they are arrogant and feel like gods. They make no room for insubordination to nurture your fear. To enjoy his pompous audacity, he can flog many of his juniors without them committing any offense. Back then, the school tradition was to lash students before giving them tasks. We call it "charging,” beating junior students so they can take their tasks seriously before being assigned. We spend more time in the hostel on Saturdays and Sundays, bringing you more trouble from the senior students. Your entire life is frustrated daily; our only motivation is that we will not always be at this level, and we sometimes rehearse how brutal we will be when we get to the top of the pyramid. It is so disappointing when we remember that we only have less than one year to be bosses in the system before we graduate after being victims for five years.

I remember the day I was punished for not going to church. How can you take roll call in a place of worship? I thought worshiping God was from the heart until I entered the facility. Fellowshipping with a religious group is compulsory; you must pick from Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism.

The teaching hours were one of our most relaxed moments in school. Once you are in the classroom during teaching hours, you are safe. Military officers also scout the area for students skipping classes during teaching hours which is another offense.

Every bell or alarm notifying you of the beginning of a particular activity comes with its level of depression. Though there is a sound that takes depression from your mind, nobody is depressed when it is time to eat. The dining hall is the largest gathering of students, both seniors and juniors. Food is good for the body; we all need food to survive. However, mealtime could also be used as a trap. It is a vantage point for disseminating information, tracking and hunting rogue students, finding missing school items, etc. The dining hall has twelve entrances; only one is used as an entry point for all students, and the same entry point serves as an outlet after the meal. No one leaves the hall until everyone in the queue is served. The food was not excellent, but we could do anything to get our ration. Discipline is the slogan of my school. The Oxford Dictionary defines discipline as “training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience.” You cannot blame the school for its rigid and hard school life; it was a brand that needed maintenance.

Aside from the poor-quality food, everything else builds us mentally and physically. We read five hours daily, exercise twice daily, at least three to four days a week, and learn the importance of timing the hard way. When we are tired, our minds are still sharp and alert. Being smart is all you need to survive; everyone is a victim, and the only people in their comfort zone are the management. The junior students need to be smart to live with their seniors; the senior students need to be smarter to live with their juniors; and the juniors and seniors need to outsmart the military officers, who are also under the authority of their superiors.

Every first Saturday of the month was like Christmas; it was the only day parents were allowed to visit. There is so much food and drink; most importantly, you will get extra cash. It is a day to recharge yourself for the long days ahead. Some students are not lucky; their parents will miss a day like this, and you can see the disappointment on their faces. We often invite some friends to join us as we eat and drink because we know their parents will not come.

In our senior year, at about 10:00 a.m., the closing bell for the teaching hours rang, which was abnormal. All the students were ordered to report in front of the administrative block; the space was wide enough to accommodate all the students. We do not know what to expect as we foolishly walk into our slaughter. The junior students were discharged immediately, and all the male senior students were ordered to sit on the floor by the military officers. Again, this was normal, but that very day was judgment day. We were grouped according to class, and the military men flogged us strategically.

There were more than a thousand students, but no man was untouched. Four soldiers made this successful. Two soldiers stood approximately five feet apart as we lined up to take our share of their whip. The military in my country enjoys proving that they are the boss; they can brutally go the extra mile to prove a point. They knew flogging us was not enough to communicate their message, and that very day we got their message through a chain frog jump. A frog jump involves only one person squatting down and jumping like a frog progressively, but a chain frog jump is more complex to initiate; it involves more than one person, and the longer the chain, the more complex the jump. All the people involved will queue up, squatting down and locking their hands around the waist of the person in front of them, except for the first man, whom we call the driver. The driver initiates the jump, which must synchronize with that of his passenger, or else the chain will not move. The jump has to be calculated by everyone in the chain so that it will not break because it is another serious offense if the chain breaks. This punishment stresses the muscle in your thigh until every step you take becomes essential; the pain sometimes lasts for days. I still don’t know why we were severely punished on that fateful day.