Our new Jand correspondent Nkem Ifejika looks back unwistfully on days spent ‘gardening’ at his Nigerian boarding school.
In most countries when a visitor overstays their visa, they are jailed and then deported, or deported straightaway. In Zambia, however, the authorities choose to put the transgressors to some use, as recently happened to businessman, Charles Long, when he was sentenced to 15 days gardening and tending to the grass at the immigration department. I can hear the titters – punishment, what punishment? Some people even get paid to garden, with fancy titles like “royal gardener”.
In business, someone who is on “gardening leave”, euphemistically, means someone who has lost their job, but whose company is generous enough to keep paying them until they feel able to stand on their feet. And while the former employee’s bank account fills up with unearned money, they undertake typical retrenchment activities like attempting to break last year’s turnip record at the village fete. Gardening leave indeed.
But if Mr Long’s gardening experience is in any way similar to my Nigerian boarding school experience, he might want to alert Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross; for he shall be a victim of cruel and unusual punishment, for which his calloused, blistered, but green fingers will need treatment.
Cutting grass was always the worst punishment we were given. There wasn’t a B&Q with a steady supply of cheap lawnmowers, so the cutting of grass was done manually. All students in boarding school had to have machetes with which to cut the grass. It was included in a list of compulsory things to bring to school alongside toothpaste and bed sheets. Sensible parents got their kids the sharpest machetes, he will be punished anyway, so why not make things easier for little Alan?
The school was built within acres of land, and the grass needed to be tended, whether as punishment for student misdemeanours or as everyday chores for certain students. Since there was an army of thousands of sprightly young boys and girls to cut the grass, it made no economic sense to invest in lawnmowers. The grass would always be cut, but it depended on who would do it, and under what circumstances.
Cruel and unusual punishment came in the form of what school prefects asked us to do with the grass. No, nothing sexual, but just as humiliating. Imagine being given a matchbox and being asked to cut grass to the exact dimensions of the box, and not with a razor blade, but with our huge machetes. If the prefect deemed the area imperfect, an inch out, or an inch in, we’d get another patch of grass to cut – same dimensions again. And again. And again, until we got it right. So we ended up with a disjointed chessboard made of grass. Ground Force (gardening television program) would be proud.
For those wanting to become surgeons, it
did wonders in teaching them how to steady their hands. So every cloud has a
silver lining and all that. Actually, speaking of clouds, rain provided no
respite. When it rains in tropical Nigeria, it buckets, not some
prissy British countryside drizzle. And even those urbanites not schooled in
the art of azaleas and daffodils know that grass is more difficult to cut when
wet.
The matchbox punishment is a somewhat artisan punishment, requiring the delicate use of a huge implement to carve a small area. Not all punishments were so inclined, the worst of which was the “V” cutting punishment. Basically, the area to be cut was in the shape of a V, with the machete wielding student starting at the bottom of the V. Anyone who knows anything about alphabets knows that the V is open at the top, its shape kind of makes it obvious. When Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story said, “to infinity and beyond”, he probably never realised there were adults cowering behind sofas at the images the saying conjured up.
After about an hour of grumbling through what is called “elephant grass” with good reason, and protesting at the infringement of a child’s right not to be used as slave labour, you shut up. The protestations of Human Rights Watch, honourable though they are, never sprung anybody out from anywhere. Which is why after a couple of hours when the blisters start to show on young hands, you wish the Red Cross would offer some succour.
Before Mr Long starts to rejoice at a sentence he said he was “happy” with, it might be a good idea for him to ask the Zambian authorities what exactly “gardening” means. If I were his lawyer, I’d advise him to offer to clean the toilets instead. Students who thought that having asthma was enough of a mitigating reason not to cut grass (the rising dust would aggravate their condition) were given the toilet punishments. A dodgy smell here, a dodgy smell there, they couldn’t possibly be as scarred as I am.
Nkem Ifejika
