Memoir: Perish the Thoughts of an Angry Young Man (Episode One)

 By Newton-Ray Ukwuoma

He is a Nigerian

Goof! My name is Newton-Ray Ukwuoma Udechi. The last two names are Igbo. Ukwuoma, my surname, means good luck, and Udechi is translated God’s cream and some say it should be God’s anointed one. I have an Igbo origin. My father and mother came from Imo State. I was born in Onitsha, Anambra State in the late 80s. All of these states are located in Nigeria which undoubtedly makes me a Nigerian. Indeed, I am Nigerian. It is but a statement of fact to say that many who meet me for the first time are always tempted and sometimes think otherwise on the account of my first name.

And for my first name, I never gave a pickle to that name until my Inter-Science teacher fished it out of her textbook and then my seniors. If the reader happens to chance upon the gift of discernment, they could probably tell that I made my debut in the public eye as a result of this.

I attended a boarding school at the early stages of my secondary school life. This naturally meant that the school was responsible for my welfare while my parents merely supplied the means.  However, the school had a lot of us to cater for that it sometimes fell short of its primary duty. Well, suffice me to state that we did not become such a great burden in one day. When we weren’t scrambling for the daily portions from the school’s refectory, which we often did three times daily, we were down with our own private supplies, called provision. We had other names for it but the one that stuck was “Provy”. And most times anyone who found out that he was becoming particularly bored with the very popular one, “Provy,” was at liberty to be innovative back then. So names like provim, pro, mmachiafo rose and fell year after year. Provy, however, remained the people’s choice.

Food! We scrambled. And nothing took away or added to that fact until much later. We also scrambled for anything that had no particular claim to it. The whole Europe knew no better use of the act of scrambling than we did in my days. For it was a make or break crossroads. Food brought the worst out of us in this respect. Any time it was meal time, we adopted more serious even fierce approach to life. There simply was no order. Well, there was, just not the one the reader might be familiar with. What happened was that the school always left us to serve one another. There were elected refectory prefects, male and female. These people in turn selected their junta officers to serve tables. But people, feeling and acting the way people do, always kept a measuring eye on every plate during sharing. Any plate that hits on good luck was an apparent suspect of favouritism. Someone verbally googled it instantly and located the owner. Soon it was discovered that luck wasn’t responsible for bigger rations, but the server’s natural proclivity for satisfying self, friends and well-wishers. And nothing destroys a man’s faith in another better than a bias discovered that does not accommodate the discoverer. Bam! An angry boy will gavel a mountain on his plate from the large pot of food and everything came down to muscles and greed. Survival was the most important ingredient for innovation we knew.

To be honest, and I would really have loved to tell you, my reader, how a macho man I was in the scheme of things, but I am ashamed to admit that most times I scraped the leftover after the gladiators had conquered natural order. And now when people commend me for growing some flesh here, there and in some other areas apart from my big head, I often look back at my days in the boarding house with some revenge thoughts. If not for “Provy”, I would have died. But this is not the matter for now. I shall return to this topic shortly especially on how it led me to Deborah.

It was in Junior Secondary School One (JSS1) that I was interposed with my first intellectual confusion. How did it happen? You would ask. But how can a senior student seek to derive from me the Newton’s First Law of Motion? I was only ten. At that age, I did not know myself any more than what my parents and relatives told me; and to really think of it, it was never a conceivable enterprise at that early stage of life to establish laws of any kind not even of my own naming, except the ones my parents handed over to me and they didn’t burden me with any of those. But as I waggled and cringed in search for an intervening answer, I discovered that he in fact did not seem to expect any response from me much as he seemed to feed himself and his wanton group of friends with amusement on my apparent state of mental commotion.  My consternation did not cease when the senior and his bully friends buzzed off merrily and mockingly, it (I must confess) became, and has long been preserved as, the encounter that woke the consciousness of my existence in the universal scheme of things.

For instance, on several occasions especially during Inter-Science classes my name would mysteriously appear on the black board. And being among the few who would rather give in to their good natures in public, I was often and only stupefied. The first time it did and I had seen it as well as others, it brought some seizures to the entire class. The class was filled with the blaring, chorusing and murmuring of N-e-w-t-o-n, some were clattering, laughing and mimicking too. It was such a chaotic episode to which our teacher was obligated to pacify by hitting an unlucky desk with her mahogany cane.

(Cane, you know what it is! Cane. We had enormous respect for it. A cane was a necessary appendage of any good natured teacher and also the choicest instrument of our up-bringing. We grew by it, learnt with it and feared it greatly. Indeed, we had come to grope our affections and respect with canes and behaved ourselves wisely whenever one good cane shows up. Any teacher who had no self-esteem was soon accorded reverence in the company of a good looking cane. A cane to us was like the magician’s wand of wonder. Perhaps it was far more revered than the magician’s instrument. It was a doctor of goodness. For a wand needs great practice and study and sacrifice to inspire a great emotion such as awe; but a cane is mainly a well-made intellectual. Self-styled, brave and handsome, it needs no extra education for maneuvering. Talk of its outputs, very far-reaching: when it settles on a body it extends dominion to the veins and then the cells giving them something to really dance and twist about. More importantly, a cane need not work itself at all to arrest an entire class in an awful demeanor. The most industrious of wands may first require a good laboring to get an audience, otherwise, it was quite an insignificant thing, but not the cane. Phew! The wonders of a cane are yet to be tongued. I can’t do it any justice here. So we return.) While she was hammering away at the poor desk she was momentarily taking scores of the situation as well as the living being who was the object of this storm. For tempestuously it raged. There seemed to be a uniform in the affair, for the most time, all of them looked towards me or at me.  And I was not in any form better for it. Imagine the demeanor of a new dog in a hog of wolves that was about how I viewed myself: ashamed, inordinate and misplaced. And for a long time I was very much so. Later on in life when I had managed to find some courage and had found time to rehash most of my childhood events, no sooner had I struck a thought on this particular incident than I began to remonstrate albeit to myself: I should have done something other than to cower away; fought back, broken a head or two to punctuate a permanent resolve to be left out of public ridicule.

Consequently, after that class, I thereon pledged with my lunch to find out what this law was about and who made it. My heart retained only one goal for the adventure despite teeming others (such as to know who Newton was, where he came from, how he came about a very dumbfounding law). I was to reserve a space in my memory where this law would be stored and ready to be vomited upon any slightest inquiry. 

(See Episode II)