Lecturer and Dropout
They were SS3 students preparing for their final school certificate examination. They had been reading for it, often keeping awake all night or half-way through it. Their self-denials were exceptional and a little frightening. They all hoped to earn good credits in all their subjects or commit macabre suicide. Pedestrians striding past their school in the afternoon would stop to regard the amazing sight of a whole multitude of them, pensively revising all their subjects at the same time. They would note with satisfaction their zeal to continue reading under the oppressive heat of the midday sun, only pulling off their shirts or changing into light singlet and shorts.
However, in truth, not all of them were doing so. Not all were genuinely putting in their best in anticipation that God would do the rest. Amongst them was a sluggard, a lazy bone: a boy of about nineteen.
He was Ibo, from a well-to-do family but academically very weak. Wesley was far less than an average performer. In reality, he failed his SS2 exams dishonorably, but got promoted in the end. Wesley scarcely went for ‘Preps’ after normal classes and seldom read for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Worse still, he had the unhelpful habit of spending a good part of those minutes eating snacks - bagfuls of peanuts - or holding discussions practically unrelated to the topic he was reading. Sometimes, the discussion turned into pointblank attacks on the quality of the tuition he been receiving from his teachers and the comprehensiveness of the reading materials in the library. But on each occasion he criticized either of the two his unbiased colleagues would remind him that he had given the same excuse soon after he had failed their SS2 Promotion Exams. They would cap it with a strong exhortation to him to bend down and read hard, as he still had ample time to cover a wide area of their syllabuses.
“Nonsense!” replied the young Wesley
Wesley stuck to his self-deceiving half-an-hour-study per day, refused to discontinue his pointless talks during a class and, as much carelessly, continued to stuff his school bag with lots of distracting snacks.
Wesley’s only credit after his School Certificate Exams was in Commerce. The rest were a harvest of ordinary passes and outright failures. In contrast, most of his classmates bagged brilliant results festooned with alphas and higher credits. Much like Amphibians, which always returned to water to lay their eggs, Wesley promptly remembered to fix the blame for his dismal performance on his teachers and their ill-furnished library. But the laughing voices of his classmates anxiously waiting for him to finish his statement fought him back with a reminder that a bad workman quarrels with his tools.
By choice Wesley’s intellectual growth just stopped there.
“Good Bye, Teachers! When shall we see again?”
Wesley was The Disappointing Numskull proverbially dashing now this way and soon in the opposite direction for rodents that should end up in their maverick pots while his peers were busy catching ideas and calculations. It was to seem a great puzzle how in a space of two jobless years Wesley could succeed in winning the esteem of a university don as to be knocking off a couple of his precious hours.
On Sunday 29th December 2019, a smile already on my lips had to disappear. I had just seen the lecturer- a plump man in jacket descending the staircase of a house in front of me. At its base, a shop, the lecturer stopped to trade faintly picked jokes with the owner and simultaneously wire across a friendly punch to the shoulder of Wesley seated and smoking a Rothmans. I did not know the lecturer could do that and certainly could have sworn it was somebody else, if I had not afterwards intently gazed at him. The point was that the man had been enjoying a high profile rating for his impressive academic record while Wesley, with whom he was to spend ten affable minutes, was far from The Knowledgeable in fact - The Disappointing Numskull I had decorated him with. I must admit that I had heard it discussed before and elsewhere that there was one university lecturer with an enduring craving for the company of an unlettered far-off neighbor involved in as common place a thing as spontaneous fast business of a general kind. I remember too that the disclosure triggered off reactions of a motley from the people present. An amazed bystander could not help remarking that it would have been understandable if the fellow whom The University Don was frequenting his shop had been An Illiterate woman.
“How? I don’t understand,” begged one of the listeners.
“Oh common… Sex is a strong factor in relationship,” replied Amazed Bystander in a helping voice. “You’re forgetting that some of our distinguished scholars were taking Secondary School Leavers and Drops Outs to the alter for a lasting union.”
“Then shall we say…” enquired another voice in the discussion “The University Don’s regular visits to the young guy at the shop violated some normal behavior?”
The Amazed Bystander could simply swear that there definitely was something The University Don and Wesley had in common, for which they could not help being that much close to each other.
At first, I had not the will to find out what the forty-year-old lecturer and the twenty-four-year-old Wesley doted upon and allowed to bind them together. I had figured that I might, unwittingly, be intruding into their privacy in the course of doing so. I could only wish that God would one day hand me the secret of their fraternal relationship on a silver platter.
A couple of weeks after and no helpful clues about the bond between the two men, I reckoned that God was not interested in their business. Clearly, a good reason and signal to me to also remove the business from my own file and - for Heaven’s Sake! - stop imagining some relationship between the two men that the public could frown at.”
Overlook the two men, I did completely. Still don, without stop, was showing up at the shop, where he often sought and would collide with Wesley - their only chosen rendezvous… Or so I had thought when I was still nosing around The Two for keen information.
I was to discover by chance that the two chaps had another meeting point members of our human race would have not believed as true. A secluded part of a fast collapsing building which its owner had abandoned for the same reasoning. I had said to take a cursory look at the building with a trespasser-forbidding red band on its frontage - probably in the trespasser’s good interest.
And what did I see? Bare-bodied Wesley was on top of The Lecturer, also without clothes, pounding him according to strict instructions!
Noiselessly, I withdrew - I think - for their sake but also for the sake of possible exchange of smiles and jokes in the future between us. I could see The Lecturer was merely trying to give Dropout Wesley a sense of relevance he urgently needed.
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