“You will have forgotten me by then,” she whispered.
“Never,” I said sincerely. “I promise.”
We were standing in a corridor between two pagodas. Suddenly she said, “Allah akbar!” The tip of a stick had struck her on the head. Padlock flung herself on me in order to reach her, but Lusanani fled. Padlock concentrated on me. She was holding a thick stick and was hitting me on the shoulder, on the back and on the legs. I could only defend my head. I did not want her to take out my eye. My arms soon became paralyzed by the heavy blows. I tried to gore her in the stomach, but she hit me with the stick on the back of the head. She won the day.
My left hand remained numb for a week. I was scared that it might wither. I prayed to all the gods that it wouldn’t, because I did not want to resort to violent retribution. As luck would have it, feeling trickled back after ten days. Within a fortnight it could lift again.
My stint with the despots had begun with blood — Grandma’s — and had almost ended in blood — mine. Serenity stopped Padlock from pursuing the Lusanani side of the business. I told him that it was all my fault. I also told him why I had done it. By now he was more or less sure that I was responsible for the Miss Singer letter and the bobbin mystery. He and Padlock wanted me out of their house. Serenity proposed sending me to Kasawo’s, but Padlock refused. The seminary was only forty days away. I was finally sent to Aunt Lwandeka’s. I was relieved.
The conflicts had worn me out. I felt brittle and cracked like an old boot. There was no time to waste. The seminary was a detour I wanted to pass through quickly in order to get back on my lawyerly track. Although my stint at home couldn’t precisely be called an explosion, it had given me an inkling of what Grandpa meant by the expression that the modern state was a powder keg which would go off in a series of explosions. My secret wish was to have nothing to do with any of those conflagrations.
BOOK FOUR. SEMINARY YEARS
THE HYDRA at the heart of the autocracy commonly known as the seminary system bore three venom-laden heads: brainwashing, schizophrenia and good old-fashioned dictatorship. This Infernal Trinity of venoms worked jointly; the erosion of old, unacceptable ideas and the infusion of new, approved ones were meant to lead to the gradual breakdown of the relationship between thoughts, feelings and actions, which would result in a malleable subject ready for use by and for the clerics in charge of the system.
In theory, seminarians were orphans, lowly bastards plucked from the dirty, sinful world and shepherded into purity by clerical fathers whom, God willing, they could one day join in holy priesthood. Therefore a seminarian’s mandate was to please, obey and be docile and trustworthy. A seminarian had to surrender his personality and sexuality and become a voluntary eunuch. He had to dedicate himself fully to his calling, and in return he would be entrusted with the treasures of the kingdom come ordination day. A seminarian was the closest thing to the ancient apprentice temple whore: he entrusted himself and his rights to Mother Church, who was free to do whatever she wanted with him, including dismissing him summarily. If he persevered and cleared all the hurdles put in his way, he got his reward: one hundred percent compensation for everything he gave up on earth, and one hundred percent reward in the life to come.
Just as in the dictatorship I had left behind, at the seminary I found myself in acting school, because survival here depended on how well you adapted to your new role and how wonderfully you performed it. You had to second-guess your superiors, tell them what they wanted to hear, show them the face they wanted to see and feed them the best cues, for they too had a role to play. The sooner you learned the stage value of fine delivery, the longer your life span in the seminary and the more likely you were to make it to the altar and to the time when the faithful would grovel at your feet for blessings, exorcism and deliverance from sin.
The seminary was like any other mildly wild school in the seventies, and certainly not a holy garden full of angelic children who watched butterflies and picked flowers in between lessons. It was true that there were no boys with guns or butcher knives in their school-bags, but the common, less lethal weapons they had, they used very well on us newcomers. For many long nights we hardly got a chance to sleep. Gangs of second-year bullies, still smarting with the previous year’s sufferings, swooped down on us soon after dark, and especially after lights-out, doing considerable damage.
This kind of attack was not unexpected. The bullies exercised their newly acquired powers by inventing nicknames for newcomers, or reusing old ones. They kicked newcomers around, whistled at them and called them “Bushmen.” That was for starters.
On the first night, boys armed with canes, mallets, electric cables and anything else they could find woke us up — we had not been sleeping anyway — and took over from where they had left off during the day. The few who pretended to be fast asleep got drenched with cold water before being pulled out of bed. We were divided into small groups and led to the end of the dormitory, where there was a platform resembling a long podium (the dorm had once been a recreation hall). We were made to kneel on the floor, raise our hands in the air and recite Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd … He prepares a banquet for me …” This was the banquet our masters had prepared for us for over a year. We were made to recite the Our Father, the Hail Mary and a number of other prayers while we knelt, sat, stood, bent, held hands aloft or spun around. Those who were slow to react were either kicked or prodded with sticks. Someone produced a huge aluminum bucket full of cold water and a fat jug. We were told that the baptismal ceremony was about to begin. We stood at one end of the podium and waited as a chair was installed at the other end. A boy in church robes, or what looked like church robes, sat on the chair with a paper miter on his head — he was the High Priest in charge of the ceremony — flanked by the bucket man. A boy in a cassock, holding a piece of paper, appeared and signalled to one of us to crawl to the feet of the High Priest. The cassocked boy shone a flashlight on his paper, read out a name, turned to the Priest and whispered the candidate’s new nickname in his ear. The Priest got the jug from the bucket man and drenched the candidate with cold water as he said the following words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. From now on you are ‘Hornbill’ ”—or any other selected name—“God bless you my son, and go in peace.” The cassocked boy then told the victim to recite his nickname once, thank the Priest and crawl back to the other end of the podium.
There were four dormitories, officially named after patron saints but popularly called Vatican City, Mecca, Cape of Good Hope and Sing-Sing. I was in Sing-Sing, the most notorious dormitory, abode of truants, rule benders and bullies, the chronic victim of negative publicity, neglect and dirt. The same initiation ceremony went on in all four dorms, with varying intensity. Sing-Sing, with its unique position at the back end of the sleeping quarters, very near the bathrooms and the acacia trees and the seminary fence, topped them all. Every bully there lived dangerously and made every “Bushman” wonder why the priests let all this happen, for surely they knew about this and other initiation ceremonies.