Beyond the Wall's Gaze

I left home for boarding school when I was 12. Although I was the youngest kid in my class, there was no novelty in that for me. It was something I had become comfortable with after primary school. My parents made my brother and I skip some classes, seeing that we had the right prerequisites for secondary school. I passed my entrance exam at the age of 9 and left my classmates, but this is not the story I want to tell you today. 

I have always found myself in the company of people or friends that were older than I am. I have lied about my age several times, and only recently stopped doing that. You can't blame me, I grew up fast, and I learned to cook and take care of myself and other people at an early age. Although, of course, you could say the same for most kids like me who grew up in Nigeria. In my parents' house, play was not encouraged, you had to be serious and studious, prim and proper. This was followed by the many chants of how lucky we were. "Many of your mates are on the streets or at the market selling things," my mom would tell us. "I never knew my father and I had a hard life," my dad would follow. Our home was run like the NAVY seals. We were made to understand the sacrifices that were being made for us and told not to waste them. We were told not to play with the neighbor's kids, that our time was best spent studying and reading. This was before social media and home internet, so we didn't have many distractions. The birthday of other kids was also a delicate affair, we were reproached whenever we ate the snacks and sweets that were offered. The expected thing to do was to bring them home for my mom to pray over, bless, and purify. This was an effort to prevent us from being initiated into what they believed was the 'occult kingdom'. My parents and their friends had a bag of tales about kids who flew at night due to confectionery and pastries that were offered to them.

We did not have the games other kids talked about in school, save for the digital arcade games that came with the TV. Once, I bought the disk for a PC game, and it was seized by my dad. Our guaranteed window for entertainment was the period between when we came back from school and when our parents came back from work. That was our opportunity to watch cartoons and other things on our free-to-air cable TV. I remember watching Harry Potter on TV one day and my mom stormed into the sitting room to express her disgust about what we were watching and how evil it looked. She told us to change the channel or put off the TV, so as not to "corrupt our spirits". Even the books I read were monitored; we were discouraged from exploring certain books or authors. Looking back, I can confirm that I was an extremely bored child, and I would occasionally express how boring our home was. That boredom, coupled with my curiosity, fueled my quest for novelty.  I would read anything I could get my hands on: books, old magazines, and newspapers, love letters my parents exchanged in their youth, even old invoices, receipts, and documents. I was a devourer of information. At some point, my mom began to skillfully hide confidential documents, concerned that I might read things I wasn't meant to. As a child, I always felt like a mere observer of the world, never an active participant. Confined and left to observe people and things behind windows, balconies, and walls. I recall many days and nights standing close to the parapet wall that guarded the roof side of the two-storey apartment we lived in. I had an obsession with observing the neighborhood. We were advised not to leave the house, but I  yearned to see everything and everyone beyond our walls. From that vantage point, I had an unintimidating view of Zuma Rock, and I would go up there to watch the sunset in the evening. On idle days, I whiled away the hours trying to synchronize my heartbeat with the pulsing red light atop a radio mast near our apartment. My parents would come back home and tell each other about their adventures in the outside world. It felt like the world was a playground for adults, while we children were meant to sit and wait for our turn. Most days felt this way.

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