Reflections on sunday: Hail to thee, ‘One-laptop-per-child’!

While banging at the keyboard of this computer, I cannot help chuckling when I think of what was involved in writing something before computers. I know my fingers will be sore by the time I am through with this stranger-than-fiction story but that’s nothing. People are still suffering the agony that we went through, so long ago now. Let’s hope they too will soon be with us. For instance, it is 1956 and you are ‘ibinyoni’ (young, fat birds) – as primary school pupils were known – and have learnt how to spell. As soon as you showed signs that you had grasped the basics in “spelling”, your teacher asked you to write down names of your relatives. You opted for the surnames, knowing they were easier, pairing those of different relatives who lived far from home. The idea was that the teacher was unlikely to know them. That way, your trick would not be unearthed. To your horror, though, it seemed as if the White man had taught your teachers everything, including the names of all your relatives, however distant they were. When the punishment came, what happened is not for reliving! In addition, for every name that did not start with a capital, your fingers were hit with a ‘règle’, the heavy wooden ruler we used for making straight lines. And because even those names were not spelt correctly, by the time you went home your fingers were burning and as sore as a collection of fatally cancerous growths…… The tools of the time were no less inhuman and they exacted even more anguish. Once you had graduated from using an ‘idushi’ (‘cartouche’?) on an ‘ardoise’ (slate) to using a pencil on paper, it was not the end because you could graduate yet again to using ink. Whereupon you could be counted among the expert penmen of the time! The initiation process, unfortunately, was the ultimate slaughter. A pen those days meant either a ‘tiku’ (which was the equivalent of a ballpoint pen) for the elite or a ‘plume’ (the equivalent of a fountain pen) for others. Unlike a fountain pen that can contain some amount of ink, however, the ‘plume’ could execute the task of writing only if it was repeatedly dipped into the inkpot. So, every desk in class had a hole in which to place that pot full of ink. The rest was for you to dip your ‘plume’ in the pot for every letter and you could craft your ‘calligraphy’ and hope against hope that it would not be messed up. This, however, was a pipe dream because, as a rule, it was almost always messed up, with the result that you received the blows reserved for stray dogs. Why? You were required to always be spotlessly clean but the ‘plume’ had the ugly habit of splashing ink onto your clothes and exercise books. This made your classroom a hell-hole: any smudge on clothes or books and your teacher whipped your bottom into minced meat. Sitting became a luxury alien to your vocabulary! Still, against all odds, you could grow and become ‘umukarani’. Those days this title did not belong to the cart pusher in the market as is the case today. It meant a secretary in an office, a title you could not dream of acquiring unless you could type a minimum of 50 words a second. And because those good old days women belonged strictly to the kitchen, the job of office secretary was the exclusive domain of men. The typewriter, an antiquity still existent only here in Rwanda, has a keyboard whose keys have to be hit with energy because they lift heavy metals on which letters are inscribed. Those metals with inscribed letters in turn hit the paper neatly but noisily, and thus write the desired letter. When the typewriters are many, as you may have observed at the Traffic Police headquarters in Nyarugenge, the resultant cacophony will rival that made by a hundred machine guns. The punishment meted to the fingers is beyond words. But the worst came when you wanted to produce a picture or pattern, because that meant that you would need a stencil-plate. This was a thin sheet of metal or plastic in which you had to etch your lettering, picture or pattern. When you were through with your etching, using a metal pen designed for that, you would paste the sheet on a roller on which had been sprinkled a mixture of tar and water that formed its ink. By rolling a sheet of paper over the surface, you got the corresponding lettering, picture or pattern and could make as many copies as you wanted, depending on how many reams of paper you had. Depending on your strength also, you could turn the handle of the roller as fast or for as long as you wanted copies of whatever it was you had designed. Only trouble was, what with the tar and the noise, when you came out of the stencil room you looked like the charred remains of a suicide-bomb victim. And your ears were ringing to high heaven! E-mail: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk Blog: https://ingina.wordpress.com