THEME: KNOCK YOURSELF OUT
TITLE: Echoes of Silent Resilience
Written by Judgment Moela
I found myself gazing at the expansive, folded peaks of Madikatjo’s longest mountains, a serene smile gracing my lips without any apparent cause. At that moment, a profound realization washed over me: my unrelenting quest for knowledge was undeniably validated. The journey thar I embarked upon ages ago, had now led me to this point. The genesis of this pursuit lay far back in time, its origins shrouded in the mists of history.
One might inquire about the genesis of this venture, about how I became the person standing here, transfixed by the majesty of these mountains. In a diminutive realm where cynicism, delinquents, and those merely existing abound, an individual not only survived but flourished—emerging as a beacon of what lay ahead. Amidst the labyrinthine passages of the subterranean Sehunyane village, the resonance of my name etched an indelible impression, a testament to my presence and influence.
Sehunyane birthed and raised me just before the educational trend and the internet in a place better than none, and that’s what made my upbringing spicy. Growing up as a boy, I didn’t only do ups and downs—playing with mud and water and making noise—but I gathered everything which was fundamental information. As I mentioned, my background was poverty-stricken. There was no electricity when I was getting my lowest grades. The problem was that I was a child who sought to be a teenager, a teen who after a while aspired to be an adult. All the simplest basics of kindergarten seemed dreary to me. Note that I wanted to get to something.
Childhood was the dullest and last thing to me. I made it an utterly overdosed thought, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Something peaked my brain during the first grade. I had been wrongfully slapped by a lady teacher in front of all the first graders. I wasn’t making any noise, and it was my friend. My entire awakening began when one slap became a sphere of influence. Talking more often about matters with my parents was never my style; I liked keeping quiet and talking to myself. One girl, Mahlogonolo decided without my consent to tell my mother that I was attacked unarmed. I wished there would be no drama, although everything confused me too, I just wanted dissolution.
Something odd happened after my mother visited the teacher: I started getting treated as an outsider. She treated me like a probable outlier. Phantom conversations dwelled in me, like ‘his mother is a monster and overprotective.’ I was haunted psychologically all day. That had started as the toughest year for me. Never mind our generational gap, but how we looked at each other subsequently showed agonized bad blood. I loved my lady teacher; hence, I had no room in my heart for anything else related to humans.
Although I didn’t like blame-shifting, at that time I never survived it. I blamed the go-between and my mother because they abolished my peace as a child who adored being a young man at the time. I was an average foundation-phase learner with the opaqueness laid forth by elementary education. It was the boredom of “apple mathematics” with an equivalence of two that made my school life miserable. The year to another grade came as I was waiting despairingly. I was finally a second grader and hoped for the newest foremost air. I never knew that the episodes wouldn’t stop. That time, it was because of me. I constantly started escaping from school during mealtimes and staying home; I had done it often. I knew the spot where they hid house keys, so that was how I tiptoed to my daily hideout. Which youngster does that? I did things, and for a long time—the time which I allocated myself.
Usually, when I got home, there would be no one. That was in the past when my siblings were at school learning. My parents owned a spaza shop on the other side of the village—in the distance. So, I was able to stay home alone without disruption. As a kid with absurdity, the boy with some loose screws, I saw nothing wrong, although I was not proud of it. I just couldn’t stand school and all the aspects of infancy. The fallacy of that situation became the failure of the academic year. Before failing, I was forever mocked in front of the whole classroom. In second grade, my lady teacher used to say, “You’ll get your decent feedback; you’ll deserve your results.” Instantly, learners would laugh at me, and I didn’t care much about them.
To pass to another classroom wasn’t through repeating that grade. I got a condoned pass to the third grade as an order from the Department of Basic Education to promote all kids to the next class. My mother advocated for me in the next class—everyone had hope for change. Unexpectedly, I changed over time, and I ensured it would be better than wine. As in every case, the secret was out. I got a reprimand from my father when he discovered I was bunking school mercilessly. My failure brought more attention to me at home and made me consider someone who couldn’t think straight. Among everyone, I declared myself the worst fiasco. I hated school at the time, so was my dad to convince me otherwise?
His rebuke started jiggling into my head and stuck mystically to my brain. I understood and thought of it every day. It’s true, even my cerebellum too shared the same sentiments, and I stood tall by his words. Another one: for the centres of the medulla oblongata, enhancement was that I lived his remarkable lecture. I needed just myself with an ear, and my grandchild said, “Uncle, did you change for the better?”
“Yes, motlogolo,” I said, “I had become a better man. And with everything building me, I opened my eyes to the real world.”
“Oh, I understand that.” she said, “You’re my inspiration.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll be OK.”
“Yes, Uncle. And Uncle, most of my friends don’t like books. Studying is a horror to them,” she said.
“How?”
“They just hate classes and studying. I suppose they need your motivation,” she replied.
“It might be different because I was young. But I’ll just explain further.”
My niece was washing the dishes, and I was sitting by myself, reminiscing about the past: I was nine years old in 2009, in the third grade. My father’s words stung me every time because he had different opinions about school. I’ve maintained my presence since then, and when I didn’t, I was feeling under the weather. I impressed him, and more importantly, myself. I became everyone’s promising kid and proved myself right. The single issue that was there was that the third grade’s lady teacher was the first grade’s best friend. I was her sole problem, and that’s why she shared the whole story with her—was that caring? After that, another nightmare began as she put my hand on exception, even if I could mess up deliberately. As a kid, my life peaked again!
Imagine begging for corporal punishment serenely with protruding eyes, or mates forcing you to offer your palm. As for me, I was on a fixed rejection list. Some hurting learners started disliking me for not taking beatings, but I remained unbeaten. Anxiety kept eating me until I passed Grade 3 and was promoted fairly to the fourth one. For Christ’s sake, I was done with the foundation. On embarkation into the intermediate phase, I fell in love. That’s when my vast realization came to life. I went as far as knowing how to read perfectly in both my native and additional languages. I was good at everything, including math.
The intermediate phase has proven to be my peacetime; it was the year of the dog. I enjoyed every moment and treated myself like a teenager I wasn’t yet. Fairness was not singing the Roman alphabet anymore. I became one of the class’s top learners, although above me were two brilliant girls, but only before I confiscated the throne. Through my Grade 4 teacher, I adopted a love for Sepedi short stories. Then, with the help of my Grade 5 teacher, I learned and became an exciting reader and pronunciation master. Education was taken very seriously, and in every classroom that I was in, I longed for the next one. If I got a low mark, I’d be angry at myself until I mended the issue internally and academically. With time, a lot of teachers started adoring me—was it that I was their cream?
My seventh-grade teacher groomed me for high school. I milked him for every indispensable brilliance he possessed during his ancient Bantu education and preserved it. Both his and my father’s tips on the topic’s importance subsided with me through ups and downs. I was thirteen years old, fully engrossed in puberty, at the edge of primary school. Adolescence—I was in it and who I wanted to be—and close to being in high school.
We already had final examinations written, and classmates visited Jozi to see their relatives. They had long gone for their festive season—the holidays. I was in a classroom with my Grade 7’s English teacher. He was preparing me for secondary school, but a valid reason was that we were busy with the lower classrooms’ scripts. In a moment, his words reverberated: “You’re… Seun, you’re my hope and bear in mind that high school is a mix-up. Adolescence would force you to neglect your books. By any means, resist, resist—just resist!”
My resistance sprang out of that December. I gave him a pledge, and I could remember how hard the journey had been since my childhood. By that time, I had already fallen deeply in love with education; school remained a huge premise full of deafening kids. I departed, and high school was a new thing for all of us (the least my peers and I had was new exposure). I applied my teacher’s resistance when I met another impediment. It was strictly academic: a mathematical letdown—not Apple mathematics, just pure and mind-boggling. Life elevated for the courageous! I was ashamed of myself, but I believed in the destination of that greatness. Surprisingly, only two girls passed the math. It was an obstruction to be conquered. I put in my hardest effort. My mathematics teacher’s speeches taught me two notions: “Practice makes perfect sense, and patience isn’t procrastination.”
I practiced and even had myself overtake her, but we met halfway since I wasn’t in a rush anymore. I kept consistency to keep off regression. One thing I won’t forget was how I maneuvered through chemistry. Organic Chemistry’s immense proficiency came from my educational love. It forced me and my friend to attend an advanced study of twelfth grade while we were in eleventh grade.
I don’t know how, but I was the guru of an accidentally learned study. In lower classes, I started topping the grade books. My chemistry teacher later took credit for my twelfth-grade mark. I was nationally notable as the best learner at the school countless times (once for the circuit). I was eighteen and dealing with the mature teenager in me and it’d be funny how I always thought I was aspiring before expiration.
At once in a day, standing ahead was my niece again coming towards me. She’d finished with the dishes. Another girl was opening the gate too. I never saw her in my life. I stared at her intensely. She was a minor for an adult, my niece’s size. I kept quiet with eagerness. As I was still lost in searching for nothing I knew, my niece said, “Uncle, I think it’s time you told us the whole story.”
“Motlogolo, what story?”
“Your success story.”
“Success! But I’m not successful, and even if I was successful—the simple trick is to work hard and that’s the only thing I can tell,” I said, “but how am I successful?”
“You’re the inspiration. Oh, I’m sorry, uncle. Forgive my manners,” she said delightedly. “This is Lorraine, and she’s my friend and classmate.”
“Okay, how are you, Lorraine?”
“I’m fine, uncle. How are you?”
“I’m well; thanks, my girl,” I replied, still startled.
She exuded her a chair, and they both settled down before me you’d think they were disciples at the king’s palace. Perhaps success might be defined in many forms, and I realized it through my niece. At that very moment, I knew immediately that she was ahead of me in time. I wanted to know why, don’t you? The reason was that she seized my status quo as a varsity student as success. I hardly knew or thought of that. All along, I looked up to my imaginary self throughout my years of neglecting my attainments. I cohered to too much shrinking, not realizing Marianne Williamson was right that all children shine regardless of the dimmed background. Irreversibly, there was someone who looked up to me as an elder, and that took me a whole year to figure out.
She discovered small victories which I overlooked as futile. I share stories with her like folklore, and whenever I open my mouth, she prepares her pen.
She glimpsed at Lorraine, who shortly insinuated, “Statistics must improve.”
Then I asked: “What do you mean?”
“Illiteracy against literacy weights must be uneven, with the greatest imbalance since we have everything now,” she said.
“Think about it, friend. There’s even Google,” my niece Fiona said.
PUBLISH’D AFRIKA Magazine Facebook Short Story Competition is funded by the National Arts Council, Department of Sport, Arts and Culture and Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme 3
PUBLISH'D AFRIKA 