I stood at the beginning of the daunting pathway to the teacher’s staffroom, willing my heart to stop racing. Even while I told myself that I needed to be strong, I was a big girl in Primary Three (P.3) after all, I knew that my eyes would not heed my advice. The salty water would escape and I would be embarrassed but there was nothing I could do to avoid that. I needed to do this. I sighed and started to walk the pathway.
I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.
I chanted this over and over again as I walked. Each step was taken with trepidation, each step slower than the last. I stopped to recollect myself and make sure that my uniform was not out of place. I pulled up my already impossibly high socks and brushed away any dust from my uniform that could have somehow attached to myself as I walked.
There was a very visible ink stain on my uniform pocket from the time that I had put my pen in my pocket as I walked back home. I did not know then that when exposed to heat, ink expands and overflows. By the time I got home, there was a big stain colouring the green checkered dress. The stain had earned me a tongue-lashing from my mother that evening and a punishment to wear that same uniform for the entire year before she bought a new uniform.
I looked at the stain and tried to brush it away even though there was nothing I could do about it. I put my hand over the pocket, trying to hide the stain. I didn’t want the teachers to spot anything askew about my person. This would lead me to punishment instead of the help that I was seeking from them.
No pupil, unless they were class monitors or teacher’s pets, ever went to the staffroom willingly. It was a sacred place for the teachers. Any pupil that was found loitering around the staffroom usually found themselves on the wrong end of Mr Odong’s special bamboo stick. But there I was, on my way into this daunting place to snitch on a classmate. My life depended on it.
At the door of the staffroom, I felt all the eyes of the teachers on me. My heart was threatening to run out of my chest and my eyes were already watering.
“Amuroni, what are you looking for?” My Science teacher, Mr Okello asked.
“I- I- I- I- I am l-l-l-looking f-f-f-for Miss Nankya,” I stammered, with my eyes on my shoes. I noticed a smudge of dust on the shoes that I hadn’t seen earlier. I wanted to clean it away but I couldn’t.
“Speak up,” Mr Odong’s booming voice came from the side of the staffroom where he sat. I felt it reverberate in my bones. couldn’t look at him but I imagined that he was caressing his special bamboo stick, readying it to do the work he does.
“I’m looking for Miss Nankya,” I said a little more loudly.
Mr Okello pointed me in the direction of my class teacher who was wielding the teacher’s weapon, the red pen.
But, how did I get to this place?
The new school year had started and class 2 was in our rearview mirror. The excitement of joining Class 3 was on par with Christmas morning excitement. That excitement of knowing that I was going to wear my new dress, eat special food and drink soda. Class 3 meant joining the upper primary section of the school and leaving behind the childishness of lower primary. It meant finally putting away the pencil and starting to use the pen. It meant actually studying substantial stuff and not the basic reading and writing of lower primary. Class 3 meant finishing lessons and leaving school at 4:00 pm, just like the older kids. We were now the older kids.
I joined Class 3 at the ripe age of 7. I was excited to finally be taken seriously. Even the classrooms were serious. There were no hanging decorations that had ABCs or charts showing that A is for a fruit that you had never tasted or had any hope of eating, APPLE. And there was the fact that we now had access to the library and I could finally get away from reading about Jack and Jill who were always going up a hill for some reason.
Unfortunately, like it was in the classes before, we were assigned seats and seatmates. I had hoped that like the grownups we were, they’d let us choose our seats but they didn’t. I wanted to sit next to my best friend, Jane. With Jane, I would get to talk about dolls and the latest episode of Tom and Jerry. I met Jane on the first day of P.2 when the teacher assigned us seats next to each other. I was a painfully shy and quiet 6-year-old, the youngest person in that class, who was intimidated by all the older kids. Jane took one look at me and decided she was going to keep me. She was my defender, the one who spoke for me, and the one that helped me understand that I wasn’t weird for liking the things that I did. Books, dolls, and frilly dresses.
Growing up around boys meant that I was shamed for playing with dolls and so I discarded them, and all the things that made me appear like a girl, in favour of climbing trees and fighting rough with the boys of my neighbourhood. It also meant giving as good as I got. When they teased me for my big cheeks, I teased them back for their big foreheads. This forwardness did not hold up at school though. At school, I was painfully shy and quiet, being lumped with the strange species of girls that I did not yet understand how to relate to. And who I was much younger than. Being ‘clever’ meant that I was consistently the youngest person in the class, having skipped a class or two.
The teacher who assigned our seats had to mess up my plans by sitting me next to a boy.
When I was told that I wouldn’t be sitting with my best friend, I might have teared up a little but had to wipe my tears very fast though because I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was already at a disadvantage, being the youngest in class and having a juice bottle that was actually a baby bottle. I didn’t want to be seen as a kid. I was in upper primary school and upper primary school kids didn’t tear up when they were assigned desks and deskmates.
With a stiff upper lip, I walked towards the new boy that was going to be my seatmate for the rest of the year.
Life is meant to be filled with memories. Memories that are precious little nuggets that allow us to feel the emotions we felt at the time of the event. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I let my mind be free, and my head starts to fill up with different images, people places, events; experiences that have left a mark on my life. Sometimes those memories are classified as happy, but other times, not so much.
I was a studious little kid and Lubega was not. He was 4 years older than me and was on his second trip through Class 3. He was tall and big, not like the neighbourhood boys. It started innocently enough. It always does. Pick up my pen. What’s the answer to this number? How do you calculate this sum? I was only too happy to help. He scared me and I needed him to leave me alone. Giving him what he wanted was the fastest way to do that. Also, the concept of ‘no’ only works when you are confident that the person you’re saying no to will listen. At least that’s what I thought at the time… I was scared of the boy!
And then it escalated.
The nature of memories is interesting, however, sometimes, we will have no memory of anything happening. There are vast gaps in my memory. There are years I barely remember. When I first researched this phenomenon, I was hit with the T word, trauma. How, sometimes, our minds purposefully hide painful memories because of the trauma of the past. I have long since accepted the fact that I won’t have memories of the formative years of my life, however, out of all those memories, the escalation of Lubega’s antics sticks out like a red tree in a green forest.
It was an ask. A small ask. Do my homework for me. I remember sitting smugly, waiting for the teacher to arrive. I had completed my homework at home but he hadn’t. He had never asked me to do his homework before and I noticed how panicked he was. This was in the day when corporal punishments were a thing and the math teacher, Mr Okello, was a heavy-handed hitter. Lubega stopped panicking long enough to remember he had someone seated next to him that would do anything to get him to leave her alone. He pinched my hand, hard. I imagine he wanted to get my attention. He did.
“Do my homework for me.”
I said no, the first time I had ever refused him. I felt so grown-up saying that. Hindsight is twenty-twenty and looking back, I can see that he got more desperate. He was fidgeting in his seat and it was about 10 minutes to the beginning of class.
He tried again. “Do my homework for me or I will tell my grandmother.”
I wondered what his grandmother could do to me. So I started to say no, emboldened by the no I had told him before.
“My grandmother is dead, when I tell her, she will come and haunt you.” He had gotten me and he knew it. My overactive imagination went a mile a minute, conjuring up all the scenarios in which Lubega’s grandmother would come and get me. I quickly grabbed his book and avoided his look of triumph and did his homework the best I could. He got a 7 out of 10, a first for him. And he had gotten himself an indentured servant that could get him to the next class.
The next day, he strolled into class, plopped his book on my side of the desk and said, “ Do my homework, or I’ll write a note and place it on my grandmother’s grave and she’ll come and kill you and your family…”
Fear mode activated. There’s a lot of space to manoeuvre with an impressionable child. A child who listens to ghost stories and takes them to be gospel truth. Threatening that child with ghosts will get you anything. Lubega got my brain. With just a simple threat, I was doing all his homework and exercises. He got to play and pinch me really hard when I got the gumption to say no. He would remind me what was at stake, my life and my family’s.
It got to me, how could it not? Every day, I lived in fear of his decrepit grandmother coming for me. When I was at home, I was withdrawn. Not even the lure of fighting with the neighbourhood boys would get me to come outside. I was scared of shadows and monsters under beds. I would jump at the slightest noise and be so easily spooked by darkness, something I wasn’t before.
My mother noticed. Her once-sunny child was now a shadow of herself. And my grades had slipped. Not by a lot but by enough that she would notice. I was also exhausted. She’d ask me what was wrong and I would hear Lubega’s voice in my ear telling me that his grandmother would kill my mother if I told her anything. Fear is an effective weapon.
It got out one day. The nightmares that would wake me up in the middle of the night woke my mother one night. She asked me what was wrong and as I was refusing to say it, she threatened me with the bata slipper that she kept for when I was being naughty. The story came out stilted, in tears. She didn’t hold me. She wasn’t that kind of affectionate parent. She patted my head and told me to go to sleep. I did. I slept soundly for the first time in weeks.
The next day, she kept me from school. Told me I needed to rest. I was only too happy to get away from Lubega, even for a day. Although some fear lingered about what retaliation he would have for me when I went back to school. In the evening, when she had come back from work, she told me I had to speak to my teacher to have my seat changed. And that is where this story began, my daunting walk to the staffroom to find Ms Nankya and tell her about the seat change.
It did finally happen. Lubega was placed with another boy and ordered to stay away from me and he did. But the fear he had cultivated stayed with me long after he started bullying someone else.
Lubega’s bullying has had profound effects on me. I hypothesize that the anxiety I now suffer in my adulthood stemmed from the damage caused by an opportunistic 11-year-old who saw a way out of academic hell. Besides that, I now have an almost pathological need to make everyone around me happy, lest they do something that would compromise my happiness. There was also the issue of low self-esteem that I suffered from for many years.
In the past, we accepted bullying as a ‘rite of passage’ or ‘a part of growing up’. But, can we honestly say that we weren’t affected by the degradation and fear that bullying brought us? Research on the substantial impact of bullying on both the mental and physical health of a young person has been stark and it is something that needs to be addressed at school and at home.
Wherever he is, I hope Lubega, and his grandmother, are doing well.