Chapter 4 Bureaucracy and Bribery

GSSK Kaltungo 27 February 1971

Last weekend I went to Gombe, 45 miles away and stayed over on Friday and Saturday nights, because there was supposed to be an Agricultural Show on the Saturday with traditional dancing and other cultural events. I had to borrow a motorbike from one of the teachers to get there, and by the time I had go going on the Friday, I arrived to find everything was over for the day. Then on the Saturday morning I had to visit the bank, post office, shops and vehilce licensing office. I’d promised the owner of the bike I’d loan him the money to buy a new tyre till the end of the month, and buy it for him while I was there. The result was that by the time I had done the rounds of the shops and other places I’d missed everything on the Saturday as well! You always have to allow ten times as long to do anything here as you would in England. I remembered to take the shopping list with me, but when I arrived back in Kaltungo I realised I’d left my precious packet of bacon (it costs 6 shillings a sixpence for a quarter of a pound!) and a packet of cheese (virtually my protein ration for the week) in my friend’s refrigerator. However it didn’t seem worth a ninety mile round trip to go back for them.

I’m still trying my best to get a Nigerian driving licence. The only time I can go to the vehicle licensing office in Gombe is on a Saturday, as we don’t finish school until 2 p.m. and everything in Gombe including the vehicle licensing office shuts by 3.30 to 4.00. But although the ,censing department is supposed to be open on Saturdays, I’ve been there three times so far and there’s never anyone there to issue licenses. I rather gather than most of my fellow VSOs give up trying to get one in the end and just drive without a licence.

Mr Olorunmonu diappeared in the middle of last week bound for Kano, apparently to have something done either to his spectacles or his eyes, and hasn’t been seen since – nor has the school van which is used to p[ick up tyeachers from the junction with the main road and take them the two miles down the road to the school.

The Sunday School I’m now involved with seems to be going well. About half the boys and girls at the school are nominally Christian and most of these come to the Sunday School which takes place every Sunday morning. From next week Mrs and Mrs Cox from Billiri, who usually run it, are going away to Jos and so I’ll be left holding the fort. Theer is another Sunday school teacher from the teachers’ College whose name is John, who has been coming along each week and taking the 3rd form ( which I take for RK during the week. Mrs Cox was teaching Form 1 and Mr Cox Form 4 , and previously I had been teaching Form 2. But now we will have only 3 of us, John, a third year boy who is a student at the Teachers’ College, also called John, and possibly a pastor who is supposed to start this week teaching RK at the school. This may mean re-shuffling the teachers. I’d also like to reorganise the Sunday School a bit, and have a time at the beginning with everyone together, rather than teaching them in separate groups the whole time. But I’m not sure whether this is a good plan or not, so pray for wisdom! Also the Cox’s had a benefactor in the US who used to send a year’s supply of leaflets to give out each week to the students, but the supply ran out last week. Apparently the anonymous donor was a supporter of some previous missionaries who have now moved and nobody knows their address to write and ask for more. The students however really enjoyed reading the leaflets and answering the questions and have been clamouring for more. Maybe you could ask around if to see if anyone would be interested in sponsoring Adventurers leaflets for Forms 1 and 2 and Pilot leaflets for the upper classes? No word yet from the British Council about the oan they are supposed to be giving to buy a motorbike. The sun’s hot and my arches are falling from too much walking around the village.

GSS Kaltungo March 13th

Quite a lot has happened since I last wrote. Last weekend I went off to Jos, 250 miles away, to buy my motorbike – a Honda 175cc, quite powerful and heavy. It cost £295 and I can’t leave till I’ve paid off the debt! The British Council gave me a loan of £245 and I managed to get a 10% discount, but then I had to pay £30 for tax and insurance. Its already overdue for its first service – at 200 miles – but just the ride back to Kaltungo from Jos was 250 miles! I’ve change the oil and done all the adjustments I could myself, but didn’t manage to check the tappets as the inspection cover is stuck on with a Phillips screw which refused to budge. So I plan to take it to a mechanic in Gombe tomorrow to get that checked. Only 250 more miles to go and I’ll have run it in.

Whilst in Jos I went to see an Indian film at the local open air cinema. Cinemas in northern Nigeria seem to show only Indian films and spaghetti westerns. The film itself was awful, but the experience was fascinating as the audience chattered none-stop at the tops of their voices throughout and more fights appeared to break out in the audience than appeared on the screen. Most of the audience was down below but you could pay extra to sit upstairs on a small balcony. On either side of the screen were the toilets which had no doors but that didn’t seem to deter people from using them. I managed to avoid the experience as I didn’t fancy peeing in full view of the entire audience! The following night eight other volunteers and I gate-crashed somebody’s party (only one had actually been invited) but by the time we arrived no-one seemed to care. All the big wigs from Jos society were there – the manager of Leventis where I had bought my motorbike, the manager of Holts, who I’d bumped into that morning while enquiring about boats down the Benue - they used to run a steamer service but apparently they’ve sold it recently, and the Deputy Minister for Education in North East State. He seemed to know all about me – he’d been studying the file on the school – although I’d never heard of him! On the Sunday night I stopped over in Bauchi, half way between Jos and Gombe as I was hoping to get the bike registered there on the Monday morning. When I tried to register it in Jos, the capital of Benue Plateau State where I’d bought it, they were refusing to register anything, as they’d reached BP9999 and were still awaiting instructions from Lagos on which number ought to come next. In Bauchi they happily agreed to take the money and register it, but they had run out of registration books!

Back in Kaltungo the week’s work passed fairly quickly, though I had a great stack of books to mark as I’d left them plenty to be getting on with whilst I was in Jos. It’s not easy marking books by the light of a Tilly lamp – a pressurised lamp which runs on kerosene and has a very fragile element which gives out a lots more light than the light of an ordinary bush lamp but also gives out a lot of heat too! I had supper on Wednesday with some of the Nigerians in the town, a teacher named Alhasan, his brother and girlfriend and a girl named Beatrice who teaches at the school and seems to be very nice.

I seem to have got myself landed with helping to run the Boys Brigade, so I’m studying their drill book in my spare time. Next Saturday we are planning to take the Current Affairs and Geography societies on a combined trip to visit a mechanised farm near Biu where they grow tomatoes commercially, a waterfall and lake where you can swim, a cotton ginnery and then a historical site near Billiri on the way back.

This morning I went with Mallam Gideon, one of the Teacher’s College teachers and his wife to a remote church in the bush where a pastor was being ordained. About 700 people had turned up from 20 or so miles around and the tiny village church was packed to capacity. To get there you had to go down very precarious forest tracks which were extremely sandy in places – rather terrifying when you’re still a novice motorbike rider. After the service was over we went to Mallam;s Gideons’s friend’s house for a meal of millet soup, guinea corn porridge and bananas. We had just about reached saturation point when word arrived that we had been invited to go and eat at the Chief’s house, so we had to make room for a second meal of liver and rice, doused in sauce of groundnut oil tomatoes and hot peppers. Every time I eat Nigerian style I have visions of succumbing to some dire disease, as they don’t usually boil the drinking water or wash the pots, but so far I seem to have survived.


Dan Crawford in Thinking Black describes how “one cook I knew, having run out of wash-up-water for his dishes, calmly sent in to his master two courses, all the plates of which had been washed (dare I write it?) with his own African saliva.”


Yesterday I went to Yola with most of the teachers in the school van to spend the remainder of this year’s allocation for the school library. They are allowed about seven shillings per pupil per year for library books but until this year it hadn't been used, so was lost altogether. If you don'’ spend the budget before the end of the financial year on 31st March then it’s too late! One the way back I bought enough freshly caught fish to completely fill the freezer compartment of my kerosene fridge, just as they were being unloaded at the edge of the river by the ferry, for a mere 5 shillings.

The book you sent on the Soviet Educational system arrived safely, but now its looks as if I’ll be on holiday in Ghana during the Easter holidays when I was supposed to be doing the talk. I’m hoping to go to Yankari Game Reserve with another teacher from Yola who has a Suzuki 100 motorbike around 1st April, when they change from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right, keeping a low profile until the chaos which everyone is predicting this will cause has subsided. Then we plan to drive on down to the eastern Region to Calabar on the Cross River, then via the Niger Delta and Port Harcourt to Lagos, before visiting Benin, Togo and Ghana. That’s probably as far as we’ll get in a month! The National Geographic magazines you sent arrived safely – please send the drums of books to Port Harcourt and tell them to inform us when they arrive – and make sure they are insured for their full value, as they’re quite likely to go missing.

GSS Kaltungo March 23rd 1972

Thanks for the birthday card, which arrived safely along with a letter saying you were sending it! Most mail seems to arrive eventually, though there was one letter I sent to KR about a week after arriving here which had been “returned to sender” and took 3 months to arrive back. I thought it was a pity to waste it altogether, as I’d spent time and thought composing it, so re-addressed it correctly and sent it off again! Thanks for all your efforts to send books and magazines for the library. The students really seem to appreciate having a library and are making excellent use of it, though no doubt sooner or later the novelty value will wear off!

Life is rather hectic here at present as the school breaks up next Thursday. I’ve been landed with the task of supervising the 11+ examination on Saturday in Billiri, with 11 invigilators to watch and around 400 candidates sitting the exam. There seems to be quite a lot involved, including briefing invigilators who may never have seen a computer answer sheet before.

Not a lot out of the ordinary happened in the past week. On Tuesday I went to Tula for the first time with Beatrice, one of the teachers from the school. This is a delightfully picturesque village perched on the edge of a mountain about 20 miles from Kaltungo. We got quite carried away in the gardens there and came back loaded with enough paw paws, grapefuit, lemons, lettuce, beans and cucumbers to last at least a month!

I keep mentally threatening to sack Benjamin, the cook because he is so incompetent, but actually it would be quite difficult to manage without him. The other day he threw out all my Paludrin anti-malaria tablets because he wanted the empty tin to keep his ludo counters in. Yesterday I arrived back at the house from school to find flood of water pouring out from under the front door. When he’d gone home the water had been off and he’d inadvertently left the bathroom tap turned on, so when the water came back on it flooded the entire building with six inches of water!

Last Saturday, along with another teacher, I took 40 boys on a school trip to Dadin Kowa and Kuraya Terra (near Biu) to visit a tomato canning factory and irrigated farm. Then we went on to a charming waterfall at Kuraya Terra. The water drops around 100 feet and at the bottom there’s a huge pool, about 100 yards across which because the water is fast flowing is ok for swimming in, and free of bilharzia and other nasty tropical diseases which you can catch if you swim in slow moving or stagnant water. On the way back we were just about to run out of petrol when we reached Gombe. The lorry driver decided his truck needed the attention of a mechanic, but forgot to tell him the tank was almost empty, so the mechanic drove off towards his garage then ran out of petrol about a mile down the road and had to send someone off with a jerry can to fill the tank. As a result the boys got the night out on the town in Gombe which they had been clamouring for, and we didn’t arrive back at the school till nearly midnight.

At the school they are building a new reservoir. Things are pretty desperate at present – the sole well is totally inadequate for 300 boarders and the students have to go and dig in the muddy stream bed and scoop up what little water they can collect with cups and buckets. For 300 students that’s no joke! Not surprisingly about 50% of the students have bilharzia and various other tummy problems because of the bad water. It seems rather doubtful whether even this new reservoir will provide sufficient water to meet the needs of the whole school and the servants etc as well. Fortunately in the Teachers College where I am living such problems don’t arise.

They’ve now officially made me the patron of the Boys Brigade. The boy in charge, James Kano, is in my form and is a very capable leader with his heart in the right place. At the moment they have no uniforms and very little in the way of equipment. But it’s amazing what they can do to play a marching tune with a single drum and assorted desk lids, tins, bottles and chairs. I recorded their efforts and will send a cassette. My portable tape recorder is regarded in the village as magic – most of the villagers have never seen a tape recorder or heard their own voices before, and it really freaked them out the other day when I recorded a group of village children dancing a planting dance then played it back to them.

GSS Kaltungo 28th March

I’ve just about survived my first term here, but this last week has been more hectic than most! Half way through last week I had a visit from the local Inspector of Education. After humming and harring a bit - no-one here ever gets to the point straight away, that would be seen as extremely impolite – he final revealed he would like me to supervise the “National Common Entrance Exam” – equivalent to the 11+ exam in the UK, along with one of the other teachers from the school. We were assigned to Billiri, about ten miles away, and it was an interesting if exhausting experience. The problems began on the day before the exam, when we were supposed to visit the school to make sure everything was in place , as well as meeting and briefing the invigilators. Our school turned out to be expecting 416 candidates from 10 other primary schools within a 10 mile radius, but could only muster 170 desks and chairs – and some of those were the three at a desk type you see in illustrations for Dickensian novels! We ransacked the two other nearest primary schools about three miles away and gotr the pupils to carry their desks and chairs on their heads to the exam centre, but we were still 50 chairs and desks short. As the nearest other school was six od seven miles away, we had to borrow pews from the church, which we were using anyway as a venue as the school had only 8 classrooms, and make the pupils sit on one pew and write on another. So much for the instructions from Lagos that pupils had to be seated in individuals desks at least five feet apart! Further problems arose when half of the invigilators failed to turn up for the briefing on how to conduct the exam – but these were resolved when we finally got tired of waiting for them and adjourned to the bar for a beer, only to find that they had been there all day and by that time we arrived were totally incapable of understanding the instructions anyway!

During the actual exam itself, we had to evict two candidates who were pretending to be somebody else. The rightful candidates had had their admission tickets confiscated by their headmaster for not paying their school fees on time , and he turned up and identified two other pupils, who had no doubt greased his palm well, as being the students named on the entrance tickets. The exam was just about to start when the two genuine candidates turned up, also claiming to be the same people. A prolonged investigation followed and finally the two offenders were forcibly ejected, much to the disgust of their headmaster!

During the actual exam I caught one of the invigilators in the act as he was showing one of the candidates which boxes to shade, so I dismissed the invigilator and reported the candidate had been helped with the answers. When I told them the following week in the Education Office that I’d caught one of the invigilators cheating they just told me, “Oh, that one, yes he was caught cheating last year as well!”

Talking of impersonating people, a girl was discovered to have been living at the school and attending lessons – actually it turns out she was one of the brightest students – although she hadn’t passed the entrance exam or been interviewed for a place. On the day the girls came to the school at the beginning of the term she got a list of all the things they were supposed to bring from another girl, and just joined the crowd. Nobody realised she wasn’t supposed to be at the school until last week, when the Vice Principal wanted wanted to know who had been present at the interviews for new admissions, for the school records, and when she was asked she couldn’t answer. Then the truth eventually came out!

I’ve been making plenty of use of my new Honda 175 motorbike during the past few weeks and have now run it in and don over 1000 miles. Next weekend Nigeria switches over from driving on the left to driving on the right and they are predicting it will be absolute carnage on the roads. We had a dry run in Kaltungo village last Friday and hours after the practice was supposed to be over most of the villagers still hadn’t go back to driving on the left!

We break up for the Easter holidays the day after tomorrow – so the school is now well into the end of term spirit. Most of the teachers, including the Principal, have already disappeared. I took the morning off today to climb to the top of Tangale peak, an incredible shaped volcanic plug which looks a bit like the Sugar Loaf mountain in Rio de Janeiro, or the nosecone of an Apollo spaceship. I reckoned I deserved the day off after conducting the end of term book check virtually single-handedly after the teacher assigned to do it had gone off on a grand tour of the north in search of a competent doctor for his wife who’d developed complications after having a baby.