Mangange Days

When I was the head master of Goromonzi High I beat up my teachers. I would line them up behind a granite dome near the school and ask each teacher to extend his hand. Then I would cane them as hard as I could. They were all males because females never joined my staff. The females had their own school, which they called Munene, and we tried to have them join Goromonzi, but they could not, unless we joined theirs first. One of my teachers, Ranga, who was taller than all of us but let me cane him, said we could not join Munene. If the females wanted, he said, they could join us to form a stronger school. That didn't happen.

Then one of the females said, "We'll see how long your stupid school will last. Soon you will see that our students do better than yours."

That's why I beat my teachers; I wanted them to produce the best students, students who were excellent in both books and soccer. I wanted my school to be the best of them all, to beat Chegato and Munene in sports. Chegato, the third high school in Mototi, was located near Chisiya hill, where its head master, Mako, was the one always beaten by his teachers because they wanted him to be as good as I was in running a school.

I remember when the head masters held a meeting on the summit of Chisiya hill. It was my suggestion to do something, after our teachers had a fist fight at a football tournament at Chegato. I had beaten my teachers up after that incident, but I wasn't sure that the other headmasters had done the same. As people in leadership, we had to do things uniformly. The headmasters agreed with me, and what followed would be a level of teacher beating never witnessed before. When the summer was over, and we went back to school, we closed our schools. That's when we lost our authority, and back at school, we would face our own beating from the same teachers we have beaten.