My Best Childhood Memory
There are a lot of memories from childhood and I find it hard to pick one as the best. Is it memories of when I trekked with my siblings and friends from Police Children School, Jimeta, to our houses in Yola town? Times we went to swim in the stream that wound its way through several parts of the town, joining the Benue river? Or the chase we got from farmers when we plucked unripe mangoes from trees in their farms? Well, my best memory of childhood may be the one that taught me how to tell stories.
Image shot by me
For most part of the year, the air in Yola is hot and humid, so it was not uncommon, in the days before the insurgency in the North-West and North-East, to see families sitting outside of their houses. As children, we leave our homesteads to gather in sheds that serve as food stalls during the day. Here, we tell stories; real stories, imagined stories and everything in between.
Image shot by me
Because there were so many of us, not every child gets to tell a story. Only the best storytellers, the ones who have mastery of language, impressive descriptive powers and strong imagination to fill in parts where the truth was not really needed and we can use some good laugh… only those get to tell stories. It was on one such night I told a tale that was very close to my heart; the story of the bully that beat me and my friend.
Danliti was the biggest boy in our class. He could beat every other pupil in Primary 4 without breaking a sweat, and he often did beat us. One day he told Sam, my friend, he would beat him up after school. Sam told me this and I decided to stand by my friend and face the big bully. And we did beat him. Hol’ up, we beat the bully but not in the way you think.
The story I told my friends the night it was my turn to tell a story was that we fought him but he overpowered us even though we tore his uniform. They marveled at my honesty in admitting that we did not come out victorious from the fight. They marveled at the way in which I described how we held the bully by the scruff of the neck while we braved the blows he landed on our faces, until we ripped his shirt in two.
The story was true. Yes! He beat us. Yes, his uniform got torn. But it was all me. Sam had gone to execute plan B. See, the plan was that I would engage Danliti in a fight, get him to drop his school bag and chase me to the other corner of the school fence. The bully was as dumb as he was as strong, he did as we expected. While he rained blows on me, Sam had carried his bag and dumped the content of the bag into the pit latrine.
I held back the real details of the fight because the dumb bully came to school with his stepmother the following day to report his missing books. He was crying with snot running from his nose and across his mouth. He had received a beating from his mother. The headmaster flogged him in front of the assembly that morning for being careless. Nobody must know the whereabouts of Danliti’s books, else we would be punished as well. Danliti had no idea what we did, for two weeks he got thrashed by the headmaster everyday.
I did not tell the whole truth because I did not want Kasim, a classmate, to broadcast it to the whole school. After I finished telling my version of the truth, Kasim smiled with a twinkle in his eye.