“Gambling School Fees”

The word gambling can be used to denote a number of scenarios that involve the making of a choice between any given options basing on some unknown factors! Thought gambling is synonymous with betting or wagering, it could also be used for other forms of making choices that are not so certain. These days, times have changed, school dues are paid upfront in the banks before students can report to school. In those good old days, or may I call them the “bad old days”? Depending on what side of the fence one is standing, good and bad can be sides of the same fence. Those days, we used to receive the “Fee Slips” from the Bursar’s Office at the onset of any holiday; we were expected to take them home as proof of how much school fees we had to pay next term. No problem with that at all. We were expected to return to school with the school fees in cash. In most cases, we returned to school loaded with school fees save for the few unfortunate that had to keep playing cat and mouse with the Bursar because they had not been lucky enough to get the fees! While in senior one, the more senior guys at St Leo’s College – Kyegobe always took advantage of the new comers in all aspects of life. For instance, I was inculcated in the art of Cigarette Smoking while in S1, this was based on the instinct to survive. Not that I like the habit the least but just as the English adage goes, “if you cannot fight them,join them”, the “Abanyigara” (a group of boys or was it men that hailed from Igara County of Bushenyi) as they loved calling themselves or to be called; comprising the likes of Disson, Rumira, Freeman, etc., were among what one would have called the “Al Qaeda’s” of the time. They tortured the Lobos (S1 students) at will and introduced them to all sorts of evils! Next to these was the like of Ngango, a man from Kihihi, he stood at two metres! The “seniors” had all sorts of habits under their sleeves, drinking, smoking, gambling, womanising, etc.! Notable on the list was drinking at Gweri (a neighbouring) village. These boys were real opportunists; they made sure that they introduced the new comers to the same habits so that they could share the costs of the habits. On my part, I had picked up the smoking vice not because I loved it at all but because, it would put me in good books with the seniors! As another English adage goes, “do bad to be good”! In other words, we had to behave as the bad boys did in order to be in good books with them. At the beginning of the second term, we had begun getting used to being senior school students. We had to behave like others did. At the beginning of each term, students would be allowed to report for the whole week. That meant that, there would be no classes except idling at school. Most of the students spent the whole week in “obucharge” (story telling), while others engaged in drinking and gambling. Whoever conned the saying that, “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop”, could have never been less correct than our scenario! We gambled day in, day out; whoever got broke would relinquish the seat for the more loaded and newer entrant! Most of us gambled away all our meagre pocket money and then encroached on the school fees in a bid to retake back our cash only to lose that as well! mfashumwana@fastmail.fm