While banging at the keyboard of this computer one finger at a time, I cannot help chuckling when I think of what it involved only recently, if you wanted to write something. I know my fingers will be sore by the time I am through with this stranger-than-fiction story but that is nothing; they could be worse and, at least, only the fingers will be sore. For instance it is 1956, term one of the year of ‘ibinyoni’ (‘young, fat birds’ for nursery school children), and your energies are consumed by the effort to learn how to spell the family name of your uncle. As soon as you showed the signs that you had grasped the basics in spelling, your teacher invariably asked you to write down the name of any of your relatives. In turn, you opted for ‘Muginga’ (God bless his soul) not because you had any idea that his name was in Kiswahili and, if spelt correctly, was supposed to mean something close to what you were, but for the purely practical reason that it was easy to spell. I have intimated to you before that the schools of those days were torture chambers and that is why for every wrong spelling, your fingers were hit with a ‘règle’, the heavy wooden ruler we used for making straight lines. And because you could not spell that name correctly, by the time you went home your fingers were burning, and as sore as a collection of fatally cancerous growths. Once you had graduated from using an ‘itushi’ (‘cartouche’?) on a 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 more or less as arduous as the circumcision torture undergone by some boys and girls in some tribes. A pen those days meant either a ‘tiku’ (which was the equivalent of a ballpoint pen) for the elite, or a ‘plume’ for others. Unlike a fountain pen that can contain some amount of ink, however, the ‘plume’ did not contain any, and could execute the task of writing only if it was repeatedly dipped in the inkpot. That is why every desk in class had to have 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. Which was a pipe dream because, as a rule, it was almost always messed up, with the result that you were whipped ‘iz’akabwana’ (beaten like an unwanted puppy). You see, you were required to always be spotlessly clean but the plume had the ugly habit of splashing ink not only onto your clothes but also on your exercise book, which made your classroom a hell-hole: any smudge on your clothes or exercise book and your teacher whipped your bottom into minced meat, and sitting became a luxury alien to your vocabulary! But back to the keyboard.… Time was when that treasured item was the preserve of ‘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 minute. And because those good old days the women belonged strictly to the kitchen, the job of office secretary was the exclusive domain of men. The typewriter, an antiquity still in existence 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 Nyungwe Forest monkeys. The punishment meted to the fingers is beyond words.Still, 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! Contact: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk
