My days in Bariga were filled with fun.
Yes, I can say that with all sense of responsibility.
Let’s start from home. We used to live in Itire, then. I was a day student in my junior forms. I would have collected the transportation fare from home. But once I left the house, I would meet some others who were also pupils.
Of course, some of them would be pupils of my school. We would then be moving like a flock of birds. Sometimes, we may not be less than twenty.
Each of us would then branch out at his school. We would pass through Lawanson, the LEDB flats, the Kalakuta Republic at Mosalasi, Ariya Club on Ikorodu Road, and then Jibowu. On reflection now, I think only the Bariga and Igbobi boys would be the last to reach their destinations.
We normally embarked on the school bus at Jibowu Street. The bus used to go to the place thrice daily – Monday to Friday.
There were times we would miss the bus. We would then go on trekking like the famous Christian soldiers. We would go down Jibowu Street, through WAEC, the Armed Forces Medical Barracks, Igbobi College, Ladilak, Somolu before we got to Bariga.
The bus used to be a molue, nicknamed pako, because it was built with wood. The pilot was the fantastic Unle Joe – his spelling of uncle. The school later bought some Toyota Coaster buses.
And Unle Joe could be brutal!
No teacher in the school escaped the pupils’ nicknames. Starting from the principal, whose nicknames were about three, I will only mention KBK, which meant kondo-baba-kumo.
That nickname came from oga’s long cane. The cane was almost as tall as himself. He, being of modest height.
And he could use the cane.
Then, the first vice principal usually went around the school to see if things were in order and whether teachers and students were in class. But the pupils nicknamed him loafer. I was later to know that he was the one who gave Chief Segun Osoba a link that led the latter to the corpses of late Prime Minister Balewa and Finance Minister Okotie Eboh.
The second vice principal was named Oyinbo. She was an English lady married to a Nigerian.
There was the fine arts teacher, who, because of his wrong pronunciation, was nicknamed Chachachu. The music teacher was named Baba Mose, and his inevitable cane was called Opa Mose. The Indian biology teacher was called Jako. The French/Yoruba teacher was Oje. The mathematics teacher, who much later became principal of the school, was Jemi.
The pretty English teacher was called Satina, after a bleaching cream of those days. The T. D. teacher too did not escape, she was called Tawa. Our literature teacher then was called Lady Macbeth. We were reading Shakespeare’s Macbeth in school then.
How could I ever forget the other mathematics teacher, an eminent Igbo who was simply called Okoro? To this day, I can’t forget his teaching us from the Joint Schools’ Mathematics Project textbook two. We were in form two then. ‘If I were you, I would say that the rain that fell at Mfantisinpin School, Ghana..,..’ He Igbonised his English.
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