I was not blessed with a mathematics head; in fact, I hated mathematics class more than I hated the old white beaded man in the Bible, seriously, how can a father accept to sacrifice his son? I couldn’t comprehend or rather fall for my Sunday school teacher’s lies about the love of Abraham to his poor little son. In spite of my hatred to this noble subject, I had to sacrifice time and listen to jargon of hypotenuse, antilogarithm and other brain wrecking vocabulary.
The teacher wasn’t any nicer. He had a Bolingo (cane named after a famous Zaire music) which was placed in a salty water jag by the corner. Facing Bolingo would mean not sitting for three straight days with sore and achy behinds. Being allergic to numbers, Bolingo made sure that I was her dearest friend and my chair remained new and lonely for the better part of the year.
The teacher’s philosophy somehow worked because pain transformed us into little geniuses. The first plan was to wear extra panties sewn with a layer of slim mattress to absorb the wrath of Bolingo. The plane was a charm at first but then, the clever teacher noticed that the cane made uncharacteristically weird sound and that everybody in our class seemed to grow large buttocks overnight. He made us strip almost to the birthday suit to make sure there was nothing underneath to hinder the good work of the cane.
The second plan was hatched by the genius named Onyari. Like me, Onyari would not make head or tail of BODMAS or other head cracking mathematical riddles. Inspired by the pain, Onyari masterminded a brilliant plan of all plans there were; stealing a school bell. With this plan we will not only avoid boring mathematics class but also other classes as well. We consulted among us and identified the latrines as the perfect place to conceal the bell after stealing it. During morning preps Onyari kicked his plan into action by stealing the bell from the bell ringer’s locker and hiding it in the boys’ mabati latrines.
As assembly time approached, the cockerel (the nickname for the bell ringer) discovered that his locker has been broken into and to his horror, the bell was missing. He reported the robbery to the duty master who in turn informed the deputy teacher for the protocol’s sake. The whole school was hurriedly summoned to the assembly ground. After a long speech about hell and thieves, the deputy decided that the speech was not going to work on the nut headed fellows blankly staring at him. He handpicked a few sample of suspects to work with and sure, fate picked Onyari. After fifteen minutes of Bolingo, Onyari was singing out the plan in details we could not even decipher. He sung out the names of conspirators and we dived beside him and listened to Bolingo all day long. There were no classes for us that day so the genius plan worked.