The Prefects

*This blog is a personal account of the past, an exorcism of sorts, and does not seek to target any specific individuals.

Power:

They were only 16, give or take a year. But so powerful were they their mere appearance caused dread in girls no matter what we were doing. You could be sitting quietly during study hour and see a red sweater pass by from the corner of your eyes and your blood pressure suddenly rises. Most of us have forgotten that dread, but the effect of bizarre, unfair and extreme punishments remains, like an old scar that has created a limp in our personalities.

They carried around power like a hammer that was too heavy for their untrained muscles to carry. So it often came down and smashed the fingers of those they felt needed to be punished. They did not mean to be cruel. They were only 16. They were just being true to the duty of prefecthood that had been placed on their small child shoulders. They were used by an administration that somehow thought cruelty shaped character.

The prefects were the victims of adults who never taught them the nature of power. They were only 16, and that was too heavy a burden to place on a child without proper training. It is not fair, because no child at the age of 16 should be given a chance to test out the drunken joys of unhinged power. Some turned sour and punished their way out of their own pain. There are many adults in power right now who are clueless about how to handle power, and they wreak havoc on citizens every time. How on earth were 16 year-olds expected to know?

Punishments:

They had girls kneel on hot tarmac cooked to a boiling point by the tropical sun, their hands raised up as the punishing prefect kept a hawk eye on them, daring them to drop their hands. They had girls sort sacks of rice for endless hours, their eyes getting into a blurry pain as they flicked through grain after grain like sorting out sand on the sea shore, removing tiny black stones so that it felt as if the mind was drowning, backs broken from the pain of bending over a sea of rice at the end of the day.

They put girls out in the field to clean a long drainage all day long on empty stomachs, and forced to redo the punishment if the inspecting prefect so much as saw a smudge of imperfection. They forced some girls to travel back to school during holidays to do punishment for a whole day, no matter how far you lived, failure to which you were punished for five consecutive days when you got back to school, and you missed all the classes for those days.

I did all this, even the holiday punishment part. My dad asked me, “Why do you have ‘Holiday Punishment’ marked on your report form?” I said: “A prefect crossed me.” I had challenged a prefect and her ego had caused her to give me maximum booking. Minus 50. Dad said, “You mean she crossed this way and you crossed the other way?” I knew right there and then that my dad was secretly always on my side. He made it funny and it lifted the weight of being a disappointment off my mind. He wasn’t going to get me on a bus 7 hours to Nairobi to do punishment for crossing a prefect. I ended up doing five days of slashing grass when I returned to school. My desk mate took notes for me for all those days.

I could handle being punished, zap it off with a joke. I couldn’t handle seeing my sisters being victims of overzealous prefects and cold administrative power. We were three sisters in the same school. I had seen my big sister cry over being unfairly punished, and to me there wasn't a more conscientious human that her. I had seen my other sister sick with malaria for days in the hostel, neglected without doctor's care. I remember how angry I felt when I learnt that one girl had chipped her tooth and quickly been whisked home for special care because the deputy Headmistress was her relative. Meanwhile, my sister lay sick in bed for days. Of course it wasn’t the chipped-tooth girl’s fault.

Looking back, that was a great deal of anger to bottle in for a child. I carried those sorrows with me like an open wound in my chest. I was only 15. Since my first protest at the age of 10 over black kids being forced to drink all milk that Indian kids did not want – that was in Aga Khan Primary School in Mombasa – I knew I internalized injustices easily. I had taken all my “maziwa ya nyayo” packets and poured them down the sink in the hallway, all the time hoping the teacher will see what I was doing and confront me. She never noticed. It’s not that I didn’t need the milk, but that I hated the obvious discrimination. Indian kids were the “whites” in our black lives. One of the best experiences of Precious Blood was the administration’s deliberate creation of material equality while in school. We never knew or cared who was rich or poor. Traditional bullying was non-existent. The excessive punishments by prefects were a product of untrained power.

Surviving:

When I was barely 14 and in Form 2, the deputy Headmistress told me I was provocative, a word I first learnt from her. When I was in Form 3, I was suspended for sneaking out to buy a pack of Marie biscuits. A prefect had spotted me that early morning down at the gate and sounded the alarm, leading to a sudden stampede by other prefects hunting me down like hound dogs hot on the heels of an escaped criminal. When I was in my final year, the Headmistress, a German nun, summoned me and told me my graduation testimonial will not be good. I have never picked up that document, good thing she warned me.

I also came to the brink of leading a strike when I stood at the window of the school's top-floor hostel rooms and shouted my voice hoarse over the Nazi-style running of the school. As I spoke, some girls gathered down below and listened, and I felt a strange kind of power. The story made it to other schools, I don’t know how. I know this because years later a Starehe Boys alum said to me, “I heard about you! You led a strike!” I wish I had, I said.

I was tired and angry over seeing students faint so regularly. Acute stomach ulcers became a common ailment. The stress was overwhelming. We were vessels being seared in the furnace of cruel academia so we could get As. Sure enough, the school was always right at the top in academic ranking. What parent wouldn’t want their kid going to this exclusive school! I think I did not catch the fainting and ulcers like so many girls did because I didn’t bottle up the stress. I resisted, I complained, and I developed a wicked sense of survival humor.

Heads held low:

One day, a prefect who had graduated came by to visit no one in particular. She was idle and I suppose missed the school. But she was powerless, and I think unprepared for the feeling of being a nobody. She had been one of the mean ones. I noticed how she constantly looked down. When she had power, it had not fazed her that she was disliked. But they weren’t all power-drunk. In fact, I hardly remember the prefects from our senior year. Mostly, I remember the ones from when I was in Form 2 and 3. I remember the one who said to me, “Who do you think you are, the queen of Sheba?” I swear she said that! I was so tickled. I must have confronted her.

When we got to senior year, Form 4, the prefects were my classmates. Either they were uninterested in the games of power or I had become too immune to their ways by then. Or perhaps they punished the lower classes more. I don’t know. Some, I remember clearly, did not reflect the dark nature of wanton power; they remained friendly. They breezed through that heavy responsibility of prefecthood with a quiet discomfort. Years after graduating high school, I ran into another mean one at the airport. She had been a class ahead of me. I’ll never forget how she looked down, just like the one who had come to visit. Ashamed. Power had scarred them too.

Excelling:

Fast-forward. Most of these girls have done phenomenally well, in spite of Precious Blood. Getting A’s gave many the advantage of climbing a very steep Kenyan academic ladder. But I think resilience, discipline (yes, the school can take some credit for making us perfectionists) and a sense of competitiveness that came with simply having attended a certain school, gave us the drive to become who we are. We have bonded, even with some of the prefects.

Years bring wisdom and maturity. But so much else remains. That emotional limp that never goes away. Memory about neglect and overreach that should never have happened, some that destroyed lives. Only recently, I've heard one of the teachers has been offering profuse apology for his role in gleeful torture-discipline of the girls. I don't know if this is true, but it's enough relief to imagine it being true. Years bring awakening to those who have a heart.

Perhaps in my next blog on Precious Blood chronicles I shall talk of the music we made, the food we shared on parents’ day, the hockey games we won and celebrated through the night, the depth of sisterhoods we built, and all the old jokes that still floor me with punch-drunk laughter whenever I sit down with an old friend. We were only 16.

Precious Blood's music program can be traced back to a revolutionary nun called Sr. Mary Dominica (later left the convent and reverted to her name, Catherine Belmore), who first got us into the music competition, taught us how to play the guitar, clarinet and melodica, then in her own way, fought to change the stressful way the school was run. She suffered for it and quit.