LEARNING ENGLISH WAS NOT EASY

 

We started learning to read and write in English in class three at Consolata Primary School. We used the New Oxford English Course East Africa Book One. It was not easy learning how to pronounce this and that, it was much easier to say zis and zat,  and it took a lot of beatings to be able to say those words correctly.
I remember a group of student teachers came to our school and one of them taught both class 3A and 3B an English song,  The teacher then held a singing competition between us Class 3A and Class 3B, I remember our comrades 3A won. This is how I remember singing the song, please don't ask me for further explanation about the song;

My way, my wayz cloudy my way

Godsend ze chelenjes down,

Zeaiz Faya in ze is and faya in ze wes, 

Faya in the chelenj down

For God has send his chelenjes down God send his chelenje down

Not lovely

That's that for our English then.

I did not like arithmetic at all, the book we used was Hesabu za Kikwetu book 3, and it seemed that all our arithmetic teachers loved using the cane, which made Arithmetic more difficult to understand. Arithmetic was the reason why I first skipped school.
 We had an arithmetic lesson every day, on Monday the lesson was in the morning, on Tuesday it was in the afternoon.
One Monday morning our teacher gave us homework which we were to submit on Tuesday afternoon. I did not do the homework, I knew that meant getting the cane, so I decided not to go to school on that Tuesday, instead I went down to the banks of Ruaha river to swim and play and spent the whole day there. Back in school one of the teachers asked my younger sister why had I not attended classes that day, she answered she did not know, so she was told to tell my mother that I did not attend school that day.

Ruaha River

The next morning I went through the usual procedures of being a nice boy eager to go to school, although of course, I had no intention of going to school, going to school would mean I would get punished for not doing the arithmetic homework and also for not being in school on Tuesday. Just as I was leaving my mother called me back, and she said ‘Today we are going together to your school, clean my bicycle I am getting ready.' This was terrible news, I knew my game was up. And so we went to school, silently, at school, I was taken straight to the teacher’s staff room. All teachers knew my mother and some were even her friends. The moment they saw me, they started laughing, one shouted ‘Mama Kitime you have brought this hooligan back good, we will straighten him’ One teacher started, ‘I have a class to attend to but please I will give him 6 strokes as soon as I am free’ and he left the office,  another teacher promised to give me twelve strokes and left the office and so on, I could already feel the pain of the beatings om my bottom. And I remember Mwalimu Daudi saying to my mother, ‘Mama Kitime, we need to cane him like they do in prison. We get a piece of cloth and dip it in salt water, that we put on his buttocks and then give him about six canes he will never miss a class again’. The sad thing is my mother was happily agreeing to all those suggestions of practically killing me. After my mother and the teachers discussed several ways that they would torture me to stop me from skipping classes, I was told to go to my class and I will be called later to take my punishment. I don’t know how I got through that day, as I was waiting to be called any minute to go and receive my punishment, nothing ever happened but I was so scared that it was many years later when I was in secondary school did I ever dare to miss classes again.

Consolata Primary School as it looks now, the assembly ground is on the forefront

When I mentioned some of the students I remembered from those days 1963/64 in Consolata, I mentioned a student called Macdonald. I just cannot forget him because of the incident that happened that caused Macdonald and several of his friends to get canned in front of the whole school.
There was this boy called Shaibu, it seems he told some friends that his grandmother had told him that if you can get sand from someone’s footprint and fry it in oil that person will die. This group of boys decided that this was a perfect way to get rid of Mwalimu Daudi, the most feared teacher. So they began tracing him so that they could get his foot print. It seems one of the gang members ‘chickened’ and decided to tell Mwalimu Daudi of the plot to ‘kill’ him.
We were in the middle of classes when the bell suddenly rang, and that meant we were all to assemble in front of the school. Mwalimu Daudi arrived with a bundle of canes, this meant there people who were to be caned in front of the whole school. Who were they? What did they do?, We had never seen such a big bundle of canes being brought at such an assembly.

Mwalimu Daudi stood up and told us the story of these people who were planning to kill him, we were all shocked, a student was first sent to bring a bucket of sand. Then Mwalimu Daudi had the sand spilt and he made a foot print in the sand. Then he announce he was going to call one by one the culprits and after getting six canes they would have to take sand from that footprint and do what they wished with it.
The first guy to be called out was Macdonald, as soon as he heard his name he let out a loud cry and continued to cry out loud, mentioning all his accomplices' names. And they were cries everywhere and the canning hadn’t even started. And so the poor guys got their punishment and were forced to take sand from Mwalimu Daudi’s footprint.