Chapter 3 Getting Going

GSSK Kaltungo
21 January 1972

Officially the school has now been in session for a week, but there’s still no sign of normal lessons resuming. Half the students were sent home to collect their school fees and most haven’t arrived back yet. It’s certainly less stressful than teaching in an inner London comprehensive would be! This morning there was a staff meeting which was quite hilarious at times – it consisted mostly of a verbal battle between the Principal and one of the teachers who the previous year had been in charge of student health and welfare and kept casting all kinds of aspersions on the character of the Principal, because he kept the school bus for his own private use and wouldn’t allow it to be used to ferry sick boys to the hospital.

I got my final version of the timetable yesterday and found I will be teaching 20 periods of English and 4 periods of Christian Religious Knowledge each week, divided between 2 classes (3A and 3B) which means I only have to prepare half the number of lessons. I also find myself appointed as Librarian in charge of the as-yet-non-existent library. This is a former classroom with a sign on the door saying library, with 6 tables, 30 chairs (some broken) and 3 bookshelves, plus about 60 books we bought when we went last week to Jos to get me a fridge and a cooker, a few tattered textbooks they already had, and the 50 simplified readers for the lower classes which were given me by the British Council before I left Kano. It would be good if you could contact my old school and send out a crate of second-hand books covering a wide range of subjects, fiction, science, space, transport, biology, hobbies like photography and music as well as reference books like dictionaries and encyclopaedias. They have to be not too advanced, so the students can understand them, but not so simple or childish that they think they are beneath them. The Principal in an unguarded moment said he would pay the freight costs, but as he may change his mind when it comes to the crunch, could you find the cheapest possible way to send them?

I also find myself running the “Current Affairs Society”, but don’t really have much idea of what to do, especially as after only a couple of weeks I’m starting to feel rather isolated from what is going on in the big wide wonderful world outside Kaltungo!. Posters for the library walls and any materials which might be useful for Current Affairs would also come in very handy. Also I am helping with track events in athletics – which as you know, I’m rather clueless about myself! A book on coaching athletics might give me some ideas, at least them I will be able to get the boys to do as I say, if not do as I do!

Please pray for the Religious Knowledge lessons – in my experience it was always very difficult for even committed Christians to teach this subject well. Things are quite complex here as some of the boys are Christians, others Moslems and others nail their colours firmly to the fence. Also pray for the other lessons and activities that I may glorify God in them by doing them competently and efficiently. There is a Christian Society at the school, run by the English Master, Mr Wakiti, and an Indian who teaches Chemistry, Mr Alexander. The Principal, according to Mr Alexander, was at one time a pastor but lost interest and is now on his thirteenth wife and has numerous children. One of the other staff members, Mallam Kura is a Moslem but seems to be quite liberal-minded. He was the one deputed to buy the books for the library from the SIM bookshop in Jos and he bought several titles which I would never have thought of getting for a school library, including “Peace with God” by Billy Graham.

There are four Higher School Certificate Students who have just arrived and will stay till September , waiting for the results of the equivalent of A levels. They seem to be a friendly bunch but relations with them are threatened with being impaired, because there was another group of HSC students last year who got under the Principal’s skin and didn’t work very hard, so he won’t lift a finger to help this year’s students to settle in. I, on the other hand, now have a nice house with a cooker, fridge, coffee table and chairs supplied by the school so the difference in the way we are treated could be quite divisive, as they have been left to fend completely for themselves.

I’ve acquired a boy named Benjamin to help in the house with cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing clothes. He doesn’t know how to do anything at the moment but appears to be willing to learn. In some ways the idea of a personal cook is vaguely repugnant, as he gets paid the equivalent of about £2 per week, but you can’t pay more than that or other employers of cooks and dishwashers would get upset at someone paying over the odds. It rather smacks of slave labour – especially as the way I got him was to go with one of the other teachers to the neighbouring village of Billiri where the negotiations over the future of the boy were conducted with the village headman sitting under a tree outside his compound, whilst Benjamin just sat there in silence awaiting his fate. He looks about 12 but turns out to be 16 and finished primary school a year ago. Since then he has been helping his father on the farm , but otherwise not really doing anything much. This is a serious problem in Nigeria – you can educate people but when they finish school there are no jobs for them to do except farming, and the school curriculum is very academic and completely unrelated to anything that happens on a farm. What seems to be really needed is training in better techniques of subsistence farming, how to cultivate cash crops for sale, and so on, rather than Physics and Chemistry. We have a Science lab but it has no gas or water and half the chemicals which were ordered from a company which has a monopoly on educational supplies have failed to arrive.

At present there are only six classrooms at the school, and two more temporary ones are about to be erected. However, the contractor who won the bid tendered to do it for the equivalent of £80, but now the villagers he wants to employ - and there’s no-one else – want £100 for the 18 trips needed to the river to fetch mud for the walls, so the contractor has no hope of making a profit and seems to be dragging his heels about starting the work. The classrooms will have mud walls 3 feet high, and a tin roof on poles. They should survive several rainy seasons until the Ministry of Works gets round to erecting more permanent classrooms sometime in the future. But with Kaltungu being so far from Maiduguri, the state capital, these things take time….

A generator to supply the school with electricity at night has now been on order for four years. It has apparently reached Gombe, but no-one knows if or when electricians will turn up from the Ministry of Works to install wiring and so allow the generator to be used.

I’ve just heard that lessons will start on Monday morning, so I suppose I’d better prepare something over the weekend!.

GSS Kaltungo
5th February.

Lessons have now started in earnest. I was eating a particularly tough piece of meat the other day when a filling dropped out, in spite of the dentist’s assurances before I left Engiand that everything was in shape and would last for at least a year! When I asked about a dentist here they said there was one in Jos, about 250 miles away, or one in Yola but nobody knew whether the one in Yola was any good. So I decided to try the one in Yola as this is nearer. It was a pretty excruciating experience as the drill was operated by a treadle like you see on Victorian sewing machines and it took about 20 minutes to drill the hole. While in Yola I met a Russian doctor named Igor, the only Russian in NE State. He hadn’t spoken Russian to anyone for the previous six months, ever since his wife went back to Russia with kidney trouble the previous summer – in fact he hadn’t spoken Russian for so long that when I greeted him in Russian he instinctively replied in English!

Yesterday the HSC students invited me round to the compound of the school storekeeper after lessons to play “bridge”. It tuned out that Bridge Nigerian–style bears absolutely no relation to what we call Bridge – it was more like a cross between Snap and Whist – but nevertheless a good time was had by all. I somewhat rashly promised I’d teach them to play Bridge English-style sometime.

There are great ructions in the staff room at the moment. One of the teachers, Mallam Salehu has an ongoing running battle with the Principal and yesterday it nearly came to blows when he demanded the use of the school van, but the driver, under orders from the Principal, refused to give him the key. They had a verbal set-to outside one of the classrooms with half the school looking on and the Principal then suspended Mallam Salehu from teaching. As a result, today Mallam Salehu went off to Gombe to prepare his defence, and the Principal sent one of the other teachers of to the Ministry in Maiduguru (in the school van) to put his side of the story.

I’ve just arrived back from a trip to the Market with my “cook”. As there’s only a proper market once a week, on Fridays, you have to stock up with enough food to last for seven days. By the time I get there in mid afternoon when lessons are over there’s not a great deal left to buy! We got the last papaya for the princely sum of 1/6d. Although if probably costs me twice as much than it would if I just sent the cook, it’s the main social event of the week and so worth paying the extra just for the experience!

I still haven’t been paid yet, although this seems to be normal – some of the teachers haven’t been paid for three or four months. When I first arrived the British Council gave me an advance of £30 but that soon went on buying bedding and household items. Since then I’ve been living on money I borrowed from a volunteer in Gombe. Whilst in Yola I heard of a VSO Forestry Officer working on the Mambila Plateau who had given the chap I was staying with a letter to post to the British Council in Kano wanting to know why he hadn’t been paid since last October! It seems they get you out here then they tend to leave you to your own devices!

I doesn’t seem to be particularly taxing teaching 24 periods a week, although it takes me about as long to prepare 4 periods of RE as it does all the rest of the lessons as there’s no set textbook to follow. The post here seems to be pretty erratic. Apparently the previous postmaster in the village was locked up for opening parcels and swiping the contents.

GSS Kaltungo
12 February 1972

Another week gone by and no letters at all from home this week! I discovered looking in my diary that the day after tomorrow is Pancake Tuesday so had a trial run making some pancakes, which turned out reasonably edible. I decided I’d invite some Nigerian colleagues and friends to a pancake party. The only snag is I’m not exactly sure what you’re supposed to put in them as I was using a recipe for griddle cakes, bur decided these were not the same as pancakes, so left half the ingredients out. Now I can’t remember what I left out and what I put in to make a passable pancake!

I’ve just recovered from a brief attack of what I can only assume was malaria, although I have been taking my Paludrin tablets every day and even ticking them off on the wall-calendar to make sure I don’t miss any. I had a very high temperature on Wednesday morning but went to school as I thought it was probably just something I’d eaten which had disagreed with me. In the afternoon I dragged myself off to the hospital where the Egyptian doctor sounded my chest then prescribed aspirin and an injection of nivaquine. It seemed to do the trick as the next day my temperature returned to normal, though I still felt a bit weak at the knees and took the day off school. Apparently you can still get suppressed malaria, even in spite of taking the Paludrin, though the effects are less severe than they would be if you weren’t taking any prophylactics at all.

I’ve just been having a prolonged non-conversation at the front door with a Fulani milk-seller who is supposed to bring fresh milk every day, but had turned up empty-handed. I think she was probably trying to tell me that the cows had failed to produce any milk today. Let’s see if any turns up tomorrow!

The Fulani are a nomadic tribe who are found all across West Africa inland from the coast. Like the Masai in Kenya and the Batswana in Botswana, their culture revolves around cattle and they follow the herds to where the best pasture is to be found. The geographic boundaries tend to go be from north to south in West Africa, as the colonial powers who carved up the continent between them in the late 19th century moved inland from the coast, whilst the cultural and linguistic patterns and similarities tend to go in a belt running from west to east. So you get Fulanis all across West Africa, though they are know by slightly different names – Fullahs in Sierra Leone and Fula in Guinea and Senegal further to the west.

This morning, a Sunday, I went along with the Cox’s – the missionaries from Billiri – to take the Sunday School over at the school. There are usually two Nigerian teachers who help with this but both had fallen sick.

Yesterday I went to Gombe, the local town 45 miles away with the school bus and did some shopping, buying some carrots, pineapples, limes and envelopes (which they don’t appear to sell in Kaltungo) then had lunch with Carol, an English girl who is teaching at the secondary school in Gombe on a three-year contract with the State Government. She’s been here two years already and seems to be getting tired of life in Nigeria – she was talking about possibly breaking her contract and going back to England in September. She had taught for several years in England before coming here and I rather think she is missing some of the home comforts of civilisation. This afternoon I had planned an expedition up Kaltungo Hill with a couple of the student teachers. Unfortunately the major object of the exercise was to look at the view, but although yesterday was a beautiful clear day and you could see for miles, this morning you can’t even see the hill from here, its so dusty because of the Harmattan. This is a dry fog-like haze made up of tiny particles of sand which blows from the Sahara desert at certain times of the year, and makes your nose dry up and your lips crack.

I hear there are coal and electricity strikes in the UK. Here the temperature in the staff room the other day was 90F, in spite of the blinds on the windows to keep out the sun and heat!


GSSK February 16th

This letter comes to you as a kind of mid-week extra. There isn’t any news to speak of, but I do have an urgent cry for help. A tiny screw fell out of the frame of my glasses and I couldn’t find where it is had disappeared to. I’ve managed to effect a temporary repair using some Elastoplast, but its beginning to wear a hole in my nose, so could you go and see Stanley Holmes, the opticians where I got my new glasses and see if they can rush the the requisite screw. It’s the one holding the left-hand nose-piece in position. Unfortunately is so tiny that it could have dropped out anywhere, but I was lucky that the nosepiece itself slots into a tiny slot through which the screw passes sideways, so I didn’t lose that as well!.

Apparently there is an eye hospital in Kano, but that’s 500 miles away and its unlikely the Principal would let me take a week off school to go there just on the off-chance they might have the right kind of screw to fit this kind of spectacle frame – so don’t let the opticians convince you that they would – anyway it shouldn’t have dropped out after only two months!

Very little has happened out of the ordinary since I last wrote. We finally got the library set up and open to the students and began issuing books for the first time yesterday. But if all 600 students come and borrow a book each there’ll be absolutely nothing left on the shelves! The dispute over the use of the school vehicle which culminated in Mallam Salehu assaulting the school driver then driving off in the van led to the arrival of an investigating team from Maiduguri, the state capital, yesterday. They spent the morning interviewing different members of staff about each other. They seem to have a pretty shrew idea, judging by the questions they asked, about the root causes of the dispute. They grilled me and the two Indian teachers separately – presumably because we were foreigners. There was also a certain amount of aggro this morning when it was discovered that some of the more senior boys had beaten up one of the junior boys, ostensibly for telling one of the teachers that they were planning a raid on the girls’ dormitories, although in fact the boy claimed he hadn’t told anybody anything! I’m not sure what the final outcome was, as I was swept into the library by a horde of first years who needed a master to take charge of their “library period”.

Yesterday I had a long chat with Mallam Gideon, the History teacher at the Teacher Training College, who was born in a tiny village called Tal which is just seven or eight miles south of Kaltungo. He is a mine of information on local history and culture and has promised to take me to Tal to see the original arrows and shields which were used against the British. Apparently the British had a great deal of trouble “pacifying” this area, mostly because the different branches of the Tangale tribe couldn’t stand each other and were constantly at war. Villagers from the next village to Tal turned up at the District Officer’s with a spear they had stolen from a Tal villager, and claimed it had been used to kill one of their own tribe. So, without investigating any further, the District Officer, a Mr Carlyle, ordered the entire village to be set on fire. Tal was burned to the ground twice, Tula, Kaltungo and Billiri once. Most of the educated local people are highly critical of the early missionaries who had such an effective hold on this area that they completely obliterated all traces of the local culture. So local dancing and drumming just don’t exist in Tangale -Waja any longer, at least not in their traditional forms. You do however still find the occasional rock at the junction of two paths, where a chicken has been sacrificed to placate the evil spirits. Some of the teachers who had planned to go for a climb up a nearby hill the other Sunday afternoon didn’t actually go, ostensibly because the harmattan was so thick they wouldn’t have been able to see anything, but one of then added that it was a local tradition that you don’t go to the hills when the harmattan is at its height!



Rev Hall records a description of the Chameleon Dance given to him by a Tangale informant:

This is a woman’s dance. The time when it is performed is when the first wet season moon comes out. It is commenced then, and goes on until the moon is one the wane. If rain has not fallen, the dance goes right on: from sunset on (for an hour or two). Even after rain has come and the seed is planted in the bush farms, the dancing may continue in the town; for the ground in the town is not planted until many days after that in the bush. The performance is every seven years.

The performers are girls. They are given their cue by the leading men, who point out the place where the dance has always been performed, a certain open space in the village. At sunset some girls, three or four, go to the place. They take their stand at it and commence to clap their hands and sing.

At first the dancers perform in a series of pairs. All is very serious. Laughing will disqualify a performer at this point… In the performance of a given pair you have sustained and repeated groaning, their faces being tightened and their eyes made to bulge. One advances to her neighbour with the forefinger of her right hand uplifted and her body swaying. With this her neighbour assumes a bent posture and moves to meet her. They meet. They straighten and stand bracingly erect, forefingers up, eyes bulging and groans continuing. They commence to sway again, move forward to touch, knock each other with their shoulders, draw back quickly, crouch once again, and in retreat, rise once more with a bound and move forward to meet and repeat the series of movements already described. Then the dancers form a circle with joined hands and go round and round, slowly, the knees slackening and tightening in keeping time with the song. The song goes:

It swings first to one side then to another
It becomes erect and massive
It darts forward swiftly –
The kobo (penis) of the man of Bu
Koland, Kolang, Layildikirik

[ Kolang was a western Tangale man who killed many men with arrows. Layildikirik was an Eatern Tangale man who could beat a drum all the way from Ture to Shongwom (eight miles) without tiring.]

Then a singer starts the “stepping over” dance. A child is placed in the centre. She crouches on the ground, making her head bob gently up and down. The dancers are still in the form of a moving ring. The singers sing:





Jumble, jumble, jumble;
In the midst of the trees, jumble
The ting has found her, jumble.
The thing has found her, jumble;
Death comes, jumble,
Jumble, jumble, jumble;
Out and in among the granaries, jumble;
Death comes, jumble.

Each performer, as she reaches a certain spot in the ring, still going round, raises one leg swiftly and passes it over the bobbing head of the child in the ring. If her leg clears the child’s head, there is no interruption. Next moment her neighbouyrs leg is passing over. It happens to touch the head of the child who cries out, “Her leg touched my head!” Al;l stop. One takes the girl into the ring who did not clear the child’s head, and addressing her, says, “Tell us the name of your sweetheart!” She names one of her young men suitors. He questioner calls out, “Ahah, So-and-so”, repeating the name. Then all with laughter, playful ridicule and shouts proclaim the lucky fellow’s name. And the dance resumes, one after another becoming the butt.

After some time, the crowd and performers scatter and go home, crying, “Night has come. We must disperse. Let us meet tomorrow”.

Hall J S Ibid pp 187-190


When they found out I had a degree in Russian, they asked me to give a lecture comparing the Soviet and British systems of education to a conference of headmasters taking place in April. I know all about the British system, but if you can find a cheap, light, paperback about the Soviet educational system, please send it post-haste.

P.S. Five of the students got publicly flogged today during the morning assembly for whipping another student, but three others refuse point-blank to be flogged, so it remains to be seen what will happen to them.