Opinion: Our tuwo shinkafa school days

As I am writing this, I am not too sure if my Hausa spelling and pronunciation of shinkafa is correct. Is the correct word shinkafi? Or is it shinkafa?

Of course, I am hundred percent certain of the spelling and pronunciation of tuwo. Both words, tuwo shinkafa or tuwo shinkafi meant ‘pound rice,’ a Hausa delicacy we ate jolly well with okra soup in our primary, that is, elementary school years in Sapele of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties before we encountered the Nigeria Biafra war or before the Nigerian civil war encountered us and caught up with us.

We were urchins who always enjoyed our short recesses or break periods when we went to Hausa female sellers of tuwo not far from our school, the best school in the beautiful boisterous coastal town that shared boundary with three streets as a “junction school.”

Let me spare my readers the names of the three streets that ‘encircled’ Council Primary school or simply Council School or Government School as different persons, of different generations, experiences and decades would differently call it depending on whether they have outlived the temptations, vagaries and tragedies of the years and decades of their respective generations.

Mine perhaps could be called the pre-Nigerian independence generation. Some observers of the time and period might not even be wrong to term our time and period the Nigerian Independence generation.

Let me not over-labour this point and history of recollection of our tuwo shinkafa school days and years when I say without any inhibition that the teachers who taught us were committed teachers in every sense of the term.

Looking back now, because we relished immeasurably our handy tuwo-with-okra cuisine containing well measured, satisfactorily cut to different sizes pieces of cow meat or beef quite beneficial to us on account of their nutritional value, I am not off the mark now to call our then teachers “tuwo shinkafa teachers.”

They were fabulous disciplinarians and splendidly splendid teachers in the class-rooms where we were fabulously taught.

Believe it or not, right from infant one and primary one we knew what a poem or poetry was through recitations, songs and memorizations of different verses and tales in impeccable English and our vernaculars, in some cases.

And our vernaculars were essentially Itsekiri and Urhobo, even though our teachers in the main cut across different ethnic groups of Itsekiri, Urhobo, Isoko, Benin, Igbo, Yoruba, as far as I can remember.

How I enjoy this autobiographical recollection! By the time we entered primary four, the majority of us could write, if not impeccable, but clearly near impeccable sentences in the almighty English language.

We could read and actually read authors such as Rider and Robert Louis Stevenson. King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quartermain, Ayesha: The Return of She, Child of Storm, all by Rider Haggard were known to us.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and other titles I cannot now recall with glee were similarly known to us in their simplified and un-simplified versions.

They helped to polish our spoken and written English especially. They also improved a great deal our comprehension and its skills.

Then the versions we had and read compulsorily had questions which we attempted after our reading.

By the time we entered our final class the majority of us were ready for college.

Oh! I remember beautifully our dictation sessions! I, in particular, looked forward to them and mental arithmetic classes when we were given less than ample time to spell words and to tackle sums by ways of multiplications, subtractions and additions.

Then who knew of calculators as we have in the present time in our primary schools?

We were positively mentally alert and sharp in every nice way. Hardly do we see anything like this primary school experience now.

Our teachers never complained of salary problems.

They never went on strikes. They never sold vegetables in class or in the markets to make ends meet in our popular slangs and clichés.

We had ample electricity all the year round. Of course, there were candles, to light the house, when there were exceptional or rare disruptions of power, but one lit candle could last a century!

So also were the matches that were produced then. Nothing was fake or counterfeit in our pre-independence and independence years of things that were things, of joy that was joy, of friendship that was friendship and of decency that was decency.

Am I deviating? Not at all, I think.

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I am simply trying to adumbrate and enhance my tuwo shinkafa school years by this small dig into the then days, the then years and the then decades of our alluring preindependence and independence education every passing Nigerian government since the military political interventionists has simply decapitated in different manners and guises despite our so-called advancement in this 21st century of our sixtieth independence anniversary! And you know what?

I don’t eat tuwo-shinkafa anymore. Everything about it and its production is artificial and fake and hardly of nutritional value now.

The condiments of then used in the preparation of the cuisine are not the condiments of now that our tongues know.

Damn our sixtieth year anniversary. Phew!

Those who are building castles in Spain can go on building castles in Spain. Phew!

Damn our sixtieth year anniversary.