My most vivid memory of my secondary school Assembly was when my class mates sister got flogged. Somehow I don’t remember why exactly but I think it was because she wasn’t wearing her tie.
My school uniform felt superior for many reasons to all the other uniforms I will often saw on my commute to school. It was a pink stripe shirt, we wore a grey pleated flare skirt in junior secondary and a pleated straight skirt in senior secondary. Girls I mean. Boys wore the same shirt only with grey shorts for junior boys and grey trousers for the other boys, you know the ones I’m referring to. Junior girls wore a knotted tie with junior and senior boys but the senior girls had a special ties. Our shirts came with the buttons you would often find on some shirt collars the one you get to clasp at the vertex of the collar tip. The uniform had a very luxurious feel to it plus it had a combination of colors I had never seen before; pink, maroon, grey and white. I forgot to mention, our ties were maroon. We also wore grey socks which was different from the black or white I often saw students wear.
Back to our assembly ground,
I think she had lost her tie or something, anyway, her punishment was that she will be flogged in front of the whole school. Flogging anyone infront of the whole school was a big deal. Only two people had the right to flog in my school - the principal and the Vice Principal Academics . Princey as we called her was a very tall stout woman, she kept a short pixie cut and wore a skirt that stopped a little below her knees. She was very kind. I had liked her immediately I joined the school. I thought she was really beautiful and now I think about it, I still do.
Mr Udoh, our VP Academics was everything princey wasn’t. He was very stern, a strict disciplinarian and very not nice. My first memory of him was of him flogging JSS1B and classifying them as notorious. I was always in A class so we thought we were the better bunch, More serious too. Anytime we heard him coming, I imagined someone will get flogged.
I can’t remember for sure now but I think he was the one who flogged my classmates sister. She was flogged alongside someone else I can’t remember the person or what he did now but I know two people got flogged that day.
My school was bougie. My proprietress as we called her was a white lady who had a Nigerian dad but looked completely British. She had such lovely hair and liked to wear bows in her hair. She was a very warm lady. Aunty Rita as we called her. I had heard a story of how a teacher had once flogged a student till he fainted, the gist said the teacher was suspended while flogging was reserved for only Princey and VP Acad.
Today, I can’t help but imagine why it was so important to flog a girl for not wearing a tie. A tie. Something she probably hasn’t worn since she graduated maybe 15 years ago.
The educational system bothers on things which seem important but at the same time seem very irrelevant.
I had no true direction for this story but I remembered my secondary school assembly ground because of a book I read today and I needed to get something out of my system. I couldn’t really find an outlet but this worked just fine.
What was your most memorable secondary school assembly experience. I wonder why this was my most memorable experience.
I like this, trying to remember incidents abs events from my past.
Till we meet again
InknJak,
