When I think back to 1970s, I see as if it were only the other day. I was prompted into thinking about this by a former schoolmate who reacted to my write-ups. “I stared at your photo,” wrote he in an e-mail, “and tried to imagine the face 35 years younger and in the stereo-type gaunt and haggard schoolboy style and I’m almost sure you are the one.” Problem is, those of my age have to be super imaginative to be able to connect their faded and flabby faces of today to their hungry and haggard look of the time. Nor can you believe that we were capable of what we did. For instance, our sharp sense of identifying the similarities between the characters we read in books and our fellow students. I thought about all this when I read that e-mail from my former schoolmate. For coming to Ntare School with a disability in his leg, he was instantly given the moniker of Long John Silver. Now, you’d take that to be callous, but as students then we all took that to be an amusing prank and no one took offence at these nicknames, not even the ‘victims’. If you’ve read ‘Treasure Island’ you know how we came up with the name, but you also know that the “haggard” young man was far from anything like Long John Silver. LJS was a pirate par excellence, forget about these “haggard” Somali young men you see on TV! If it’d been his time, he’d have whipped them senseless for degrading his trade. He had one eye and one leg, yet everybody on the ship and the seas lived in mortal fear of him. When the eye-patched figure swiftly hopped towards you on his crutch, you squatted down immediately and said “Your way is clear, Sir!” This was just in case he took you to be in anyway threatening. LJS was aware of this shadow of fear that he cast over everybody and often boasted that even Captain Flint, his only senior on the ship, dreaded his presence. Which is why everybody’d have been proud to be named after the man. What is even more important about our time, however, was that we were able to reconstruct a fictional character and he came alive in our imaginations. The novels described situations and characters alien to our cultures, but this ability to bring them alive in our own cultures enabled us to understand them and identify with them. That is why we can practically remember and even recite every word such characters uttered. A far cry, for instance, from what I am capable of retaining in my failing mind today, when I read something new. And that is the reason I’d not remembered the true tag of my former schoolmate. Only the nickname lit up my wires when he mentioned it. Long John Silver, yes. Even after all these years, I can tell how much whisky the real man needed to have downed before he started singing. And I can sing his song from first stanza to last. Never mind that the whole song is all of 19 stanzas! If you are of my time, accompany me down memory lane: Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest/Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Drink and the devil had done for the rest/Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.The mate was fixed by the bosun’s pike/The bosun brained with a marlinspikeAnd cookey’s throat was marked belike/It had been gripped by fingers ten;And there they lay, all good dead men/Like break o’day in a boozing ken Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum………… The good old days! A pity that some of us went with queer names and therefore posed the students no task of picking new ones. From my label, they only needed a few minutes for them to baptise me Pankuriyasi. And it was as Pankuriyasi that every former schoolmate took me and calls me today. You’ll never catch me trying to correct it. This, of course, assumed that people read extensively. You could never think of an impressive nickname for a new student unless you’d read widely and on any subject. You did not come up with names like ‘Molecular-Miracle’ unless you’d looked at Chemistry. You’d need to have looked at Biology to give a name like ‘Amoebic-Amazon’. More subjects produced more nomenclatures.Having left Rwanda with an inkling of French came in handy, too. As students of the subject, you were only few among a majority of students who only spoke English and refused to be associated with ‘Olunyalwanda’. Knowing how the students of the area had a linguistic problem of distinguishing ‘l’ from ‘r’, you knew that ‘Claude’ would sound like a humorous English word. You knew also that there was no ‘au’ sound in the community and so you could comfortably use ‘u’ and call somebody “Crude”. And were given accolades for that! There is an exciting world in reading. Sciences or Arts, no subject is inferior. ingina2@yahoo.co.uk
