Lest we forget, we keep kids in school so as to keep them out of prison

I did not attend boarding school, which is to say I cannot relate to the teen angst that afflicts youngsters who are cooped in, for weeks on end, going through routines like brushing their teeth or shoes or ironing shirts, when they would rather not. Or eating steaming-hot porridge and gobbling half-chewed githeri at breakneck speed.

The latter actions, I understand, are meant to accommodate the hundreds of kids who must sit at the tight dining areas within a tight half-hour window, to ultimately serve 1000 kids.

The brighter side of this is that the young high school gents and ladies know where their next meal shall come from, which wasn’t the case in our time. We relied mainly on “air-burgers,” which means basking in the sun for the 45-odd minutes we were allowed out, before returning to the penitentiary.

I carried packed lunch before my mom’s friend invited me to eat at her food kiosk that served a construction site on Mombasa Road. Scramming to this joint and back probably burnt all the energies garnered from the food, not to mention the risks associated with crossing Mombasa Road. It was a suicidal trot.

None of that mattered. We just wanted to have a full stomach. Come evening, I’d join the pilgrimage from Nairobi’s South B to Eastlands and burn the rest of the energy.

I suspect food is at the heart of the grievance of the kids razing down their schools. They are not having enough because this is the season of so many hungers. Back in the day, even the adults within my connections seemed to be consumed with worry about food.

One of our neighbours used to walk to town and back in oversized shoes. The grizzled old man then sat outside his house to watch the sun go down, holding an outsized cup, it was a small sufuria, really, whose contents he gulped with the concentration of a philosopher working out the puzzles of life. No one would dare interrupt him in such moments, other than his youngest son, Onyanyo, or Onyi, as we called him.

Looking back, I think Onyi had all the hallmarks of a potential future school arsonist. Onyi detested the old man’s rule by fiat: he and his siblings, and they were many, were required to have showered before the uji king returned from his labours. Homework, too, should have been cleared.

But Onyi being Onyi, that didn’t always happen. One evening, fresh from enjoying his gigantic cup-pot of millet porridge, the old man confronted Onyi and demanded to know why he wasn’t showered. The old man, looking unstable in his oversized shoes, also had infirm knees from the ravages of time.

In the brief push and pull with Onyi, the old man tumbled to the ground, a dust-raising spectacle that spread through our mtaa like a fire through the bushland, with all the expected distortions and conflations. Onyi had beaten his old man to a pulp, ran the claim.

The singular element that I witnessed, and which I can report here and now, was Onyi’s grave quip: “Huu mzae ni azikwe,” he said. It was Onyi’s direct death wish for his father, before he fled.

I have no idea what became of Onyi, because it’s been such a long time ago, but I believe his father was buried in circumstances of less ignominy. And I suspect Onyi went on through schooling without razing one down, even though he was an angry young lad.

I am persuaded that the only reason we keep kids in school is to keep them out of prison. Give them room to grow and let them understand how the world works. By the time they’re done with schooling, they’d have graduated into adulthood. And they can comprehend that their actions have consequences, like consigning some to jail, as it’s happening now.