SAMPLE WRITING

Abdi held his breath to avoid sniffing the dust as he swept the small lot allocated to him behind the classroom with a sisal broom. The golden morning sun was hot enough to sweat in the armpits. Yusuf, the prefect of Class Seven Yellow, was walking around checking everyone was sweeping, noting absconders and latecomers in his exercise book. Yusuf had a permanent crease on his forehead, which gave him look of constant worry and which only disappeared when he was joking. This made Abdi weary of the prefect. And it made him instinctively pucker up his own face. Perhaps this was because Abdi wanted to look serious like Yusuf. Perhaps being serious meant to look worried like Yusuf, to have responsibilities over other people, to carry a fountain pen in the pocket and to fish it out expertly and purposefully often. Abdi tried to be this way, but his voice was not strong and he didn’t know how to say the kinds of things you had to say.

After sweeping and assembly, everyone sat at their desks to wait for classes to begin. There was still loud chatter all around, and sandals grated against the cement floor. Sandwiched between his two desk mates, Abdi quietly and absentmindedly doodled on his exercise book. Houses, animals, people, shapes. He wrote cheesy love poems on the back of his books and drew and block typographies. He was the only one who could do this. He felt important and special. It was natural for him to draw and write, unlike talking, which was alien to him. “Roses are red. Violets are blue. The only thing sweeter than candy is you.” His desk mates asked him to draw their names on their book covers and he did it with relish. They exclaimed with wonder. ‘It’s easy actually,’ he said, biting the tip of his pen and shifting in his seat. ‘You just do it like this and this and keep the lines straight and hands steady.’ He couldn’t understand why others couldn’t do what he could do so naturally. 

All the clamor died down suddenly, and the class fell deathly silent. There was a large, dark figure standing at the window, silent and silhouetted against the bright sunlight in the background. Everyone pulled out their books quickly and pretended to be busy reading. The tall and boxy figure of Mr. Kamau, the class teacher, was easy to identify though. He walked slowly to the door and then inside the classroom. Mr. Kamau was middle-aged with a short, caked afro, a penetrating gaze and a whiskery moustache. He sniffed the air as though trying to detect something sinister as he set his books and cane on the teacher’s desk. “Good morning Class!” Mr. Kamau said. “Good morning Teacher!” the class answered. He set his books and cane down. He called the names of students he had just seen making noise to the front of the class and the students reluctantly walked to the front. One by one he had them bend forward to touch their toes, and his whip cracked on their buttocks four times each and they jumped into the air each time the whip landed. Abdi could see the tears in some of the boys’ eyes as they walked back and he was relieved his name was not called out. 

Mr. Kamau divided the chalk board into three sections with long straight lines of white chalk. He wrote the date at the top and then, SOCIAL STUDIES. Abdi loved this class and paid attention. Mr. Kamau wrote the topic of the day. CLIMATE. He talked about highlands and arid lands and deserts and lowlands and savannahs. Mr. Kamau did not talk much about Abdi’s region, the Northeastern Province, the large, arid region their town was located in, except to note that it was hot and dry. It had livestock but it seemed to lack minerals like soda ash or mountains rain forests or major cash crops like coffee or pyrethrum or soda ash like other regions. And none of the national leaders and freedom fighters were from here too. This made Abdi disliked his region. He looked outside the window of the classroom. The land was flat except for the shrubs and the sparse thorny trees that had plastic bags clinging to them, and the thin dried-up streams with soft golden sand where water passed through when it occasionally rained. A herd of goats yawned in the morning sunlight and rubbed their skin against the walls of a round concrete water tank. Abdi could picture the dark, dirty rain water at the bottom of the tank and the empty plastic bottles and sticks lying on its floor and the greenish-brown molasses on its inside walls. 

Mr. Kamau wrote the degree symbol in degree Celsius. It was perfectly tiny and perfectly round on the board. Mr. Kamau’s handwriting was typographical, and it was clinical, like his mannerisms and his whipping. His lines, when he underlined things, were unsettlingly straight. Abdi looked for any wavering like the other teachers’ handwriting had and got distracted by this. He could not find any.

When Mr. Kamau drew a map, he drew it exactly the same way every time, in one unbroken line and he did it with speed and flourish. He then swung acrobatically around, hit the board with the whip with a ping to emphasize his point, while pocketing his other hand and walking up and down the classroom. Everything Mr. Kamau did was as though it was choreographed performance, like a dance. As a teacher, Abdi liked Mr. Kamau. But like every student he was scared of the man. For Mr. Kamau seemed ethereal, like a spirit one could not comprehend or touch.

(Excerpt from “Junior”)