A few months after starting my first job ever, I tendered my resignation. It was a teaching job. When I told my elder brother I was resigning, he asked if I was really sure. Who quits a job without an alternative? He asked. But I was done with the school and I was never going to retract my intentions. I told him I would now fully focus on writing.
There’s a kind of desire that dwells in me when I teach. I love sharing parts of myself with people because it gives me a sense of purpose. I loved teaching so much that I couldn’t believe I was going to resign from my first job as an employed teacher.
“Why?” My brother asked again. I didn’t tell him the actual why. There are decisions you make on your own and keep inside, even if they crack a pit in your heart. Leaving the job wasn’t the bad story; what led to the leaving was. I told my brother I wanted to go back to writing full-time, but I was sure he didn’t believe me.
It never occurred to me to resign until I arrived early at the school at my usual time one morning. There is an ignorance that comes with mornings. The day started well, and as I finished my first class, English language, I went to the staffroom to check my next schedule. It showed that my next class, Islamic Studies, was in the third period. So I was free for the next half hour. Being a Muslim school, there were copies of the holy Qur’an on the shelf. I picked one and started to read. I had not read more than three lines when a student brought the message to me; I was needed downstairs at the management’s office.
When I entered the office, beside the entrance, one of my female students in Junior Secondary School (JSS) 3 was standing with her back leaning on the wall. Some inches beside her, a young man and a woman sat. An elderly man, who sat wriggling on a chair, one of his hands on the principal’s table, was shouting, “How did you employ someone like that? Is that even a person of God? You must take the necessary steps today or this school will run down.”
I just stood there, at the entrance, trying to fathom what caused the stiff yet loud atmosphere. The principal, whose eyes were already filled with tears and discoloured red, gestured at me with two fingers to come sit. My mind was jumping in and out of thoughts because I could remember encouraging the particular student to read an excerpt from a composition passage the day before. Was it because of that?
I looked at the girl. Her eyes held still, beaming strange words. She stared on with her head relaxed against the blue wall. At an instant, water started to settle on the lower tip of her eyelids. Shortly after, they could no longer hold the water, and it fell down her cheeks. More water started to settle. The girl’s hands were hidden behind her, but her legs trembled like a frail man staggering on his walking stick. Her body expressed a language of emptiness.
The elderly man faced me. His cap covered his entire head, but it was obvious to see the vein bulging on his forehead. His face was stamped with rage.
“Do you also work here?” He asked, and just as I was about to respond, the principal cut in, said yes, and mentioned the subjects I was teaching.
“Is that what you do, too, that your secret has not revealed itself?” He asked.
“Do what?”
“Do you know this man?” He pointed to a corner, and it was at that moment that I saw that the Arabic teacher was squatting and crouching there.
I nodded affirmatively, and the man asked again, “Are you both friends?”
We were not friends, but he’s a Muslim brother, and we worked together and exchanged greetings anytime we encountered each other in the staffroom. I told the man that I knew him.
“He’s a rapist,” the elderly man said, and settled his back into the chair.
I took the words as plain and ordinary. And gradually it started to process in me. Then it became unprocessable because I could not place an image of a rapist and the Arabic teacher side by side. I turned to the principal, and he could read on my face that I was searching for unasked questions. So he pointed to the female student and said that’s the girl he was trying to rape.
The girl was roughly between 13 to 14 years old, and I was wondering if they could not find the right word because, considering the age gap, he’s not a rapist. He’s a pedophile, which is worse. None of it made sense.
I was finding it difficult to understand what my anger was rooted in: Was it because an episode like that, that doesn’t deserve to exist anywhere at all, existed in a school environment? Was it because the pedophile – call a spade, a spade – was a Muslim like myself, and my consciousness couldn’t withstand the image of me being compared to something of such? Or was it generally because of the obscenity of everything?
As I was trying to pack up my anger in my stomach, the Arabic teacher’s wife arrived, and the episode was properly narrated to her:
Usually, the Arabic classes were held after the students had completed the conventional Western education classes. To strike a balance, the students spent two hours every day studying Arabic. It was Monday, and they had just concluded the day’s Arabic sessions. Every student dispersed to pray and go home, but the Arabic teacher asked the female student to wait behind. When the class became empty, he started scolding the student, telling her she was not performing well. He offered to retake the just-concluded session with her alone. Then, he asked her to sit on his lap and hold the textbook in her hands, and as they revised the Arabic lesson, he started stroking the girl’s laps. She asked him what he was doing, and he told her he wanted to know the colour of her underwear.
I stood up and stumbled out of the office. There were still plenty of hours left before the school closed for the day, but I climbed upstairs to pick up my power bank and went home. As I climbed down the stairs, several “SubhanaLlah” fell out of my mouth.
The following day, as I was climbing up the school stairs, the Arabic teacher was the first person I encountered on the steps. He extended a greeting, and I responded. The day after, I met him again. I inquired about his situation several times from the principal, and he said he was waiting for the school’s founder to say the word or when he came around. The founder was in Saudi Arabia and could arrive only in a month or so. I couldn’t stay that long. I went to the staffroom, wrote the resignation on a plain sheet, and left.
Ahmad Adedimeji Amobi
Ahmad Adedimeji Amobi is a Nigerian creative writer and journalist.
Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash