Thursday, 4 April 2019

"primary school was fun, right? ".I don't know for how long a friend had repeated that question. We were In a middle of a discussion  ,talking about  anything  and nothing.  Somehow, this discussion had led to each of us going through what school had been to us. I didn't notice, I had drifted into my own world, thinking deeply  and smiling to myself  .I went through my reverie and I must confess I felt nostalgic. I think I mentioned something like yes it was fun. Honestly, all I remember from my  primary school life is Radio citizens Lincoln Njogus voice ,especially when he presented the 6am news. His voice signified an impending danger to my circadian rhythm. My love for sleep has not just developed recently .I can sleep for 24 hours while praying for my gluconeogenesis to be effective I admired how he presented the news with such fluent kiswahili  that intrigued me. For those of us who schooled in the village mother tongue was a national language  to us. Kiswahili was another subject just like science. We could only write it and answer some questions here and there, but if you had to speak some sentences  then they had to be written down at least for them to sound like sentences. I remember there was this time, our deputy headteacher decided there was no speaking  in mother  tongue.That was torture. I faked illness for two days at home because  I Couldn't speak in Kiswahili. I was one of the school prefects and this meant the leading by example criteria applied to me. On the third day when I went to school (you can't afford to be 'sick' for  more than 2 days, utaskia acha tumpeleke adungwe Dawa za malaria,and injections was a near death experience to me).You can only imagine the Kiswahili the whole school  was speaking. It was something  between mother tongue  and Bantu😁  .The deputy was dumbfounded, he announced that he had decided to call off the Kiswahili speaking period. He had discovered the project needed to be piloted first. It was a relief to everyone .Basically, there was a great misunderstanding between the teacher's and the pupils .We had just experienced what happened during the  tower of Babel. We needed recovery  time😂