Miss Gwendolyn Ajehla was both popular and notorious throughout
Government High School (GHS), Ibamakuo, and even beyond. She was a
teacher of English in the school. And she had graduated
from the Higher College of Education (HCE), Yamandé, with a First-Cycle
Secondary School Teacher Certificate in English Modern Letters some two
years earlier. Given that Miss Gwendolyn was very young and beautiful,
she became exaggeratedly proud. She was barely twenty three years old,
with a light, slim skin and of an average height.
Her popularity
stemmed from her good mastery of the English language and her unbeatable
near-native accent in the language. She had mastered her phonetics and
phonology lessons so well that when she spoke English she almost spoke
like a native of England. Among students, teachers and other inhabitants
of Ibamakuo, she was generally described as the lady who speaks through
the nostrils and can bites her tongue. The biggest flaw in her English,
however, was the fact that she sometimes confused the British and
American accents of it. But on the whole, everybody admired the way she
spoke English. And when it came to teaching that language, she did it
masterly too.
Despite Gwendolyn’s exceptional mastery of English
and her professional teaching skills, she had also earned a very bad
reputation in and around GHS, Ibamakuo. She was very, very notorious for
her immoral and indecent dressing style. Her love for skin-glued
dresses and mini-skirts surpassed a fish’s love for fresh tropical
waters. She would shave her eyebrows—as if to correct God’s errors of
creation!—and paint her lips in both red and blue, all these in the name
of beauty and fashion. Whether in class teaching or elsewhere in
public, Gwendolyn usually looked like a mermaid that has been taken
unawares by the sudden coming of dawn.
All these qualities of
Gwendolyn’s combined to earn for her a multitude of nicknames. Some
people called her “British English Madam” and others, “American Madam”.
And yet some others referred to her as “the White Lady Prof.” Worst of
all, behind her back, everybody called her “the White Prostitute”.
During her lessons, some daring students, especially boys, who occupied
the back desks, would call her some of these nicknames. They would
shorten the last of them and simply call her “White Pros.” Each time she
attempted to identify such courageous and sometimes unruly students she
failed like someone who attempts to wage a war against their entire
village. So many reasons accounted for this failure: the class
enrolments were often too large for her to manage properly, there was
usually strong complicity and collaboration among the students, plus the
fact that the students were all aware that their principal too didn’t
approve of Miss Gwendolyn’s indecent dressing style.
“Madam White Prostitute!” Julius Asaba, who was in Form Five then, called her one morning in front of a handful of students.
“I will report you to the principal”, Gwendolyn told the boy, and
making sure that she articulated all her words like a native speaker of
English.
“Better go and report me to God in Heaven”, Julius
continued, “and have the chance to see how angels and saints dress, you
White Pros. You learnt how to speak English well and forgot to learn how
to dress well…”
At this point, Miss Gwendolyn bowed her head in
defeat and walked away from the boy and his mates. She went straight to
the Staff Room of the school while the students shouted in
confusion—while some of them were cheering Asaba for his courage others
were reproaching him for having spoilt Madam’s day and some others just
went about ululating at the top of their voices.
Before midday that
same day, Julius Asaba had been summoned to an impromptu disciplinary
council. After listening to Miss Gwendolyn’s case, the council members
unanimously decided to slam a three-day suspension punishment on Julius.
The latter wasn’t given any chance to speak, but the school principal,
Mr James Gopte, addressed the council and spoke at length to his
teachers on the need for them to dress properly and avoid such nasty
situations. The funniest thing about the council’s decision was that in
the end no teacher ever cared to prevent Julius Asaba from attending
classes within the three supposed days of suspension!
Who doesn’t
know that the stubborn fly always follows the corpse to its grave? To be
very honest, it would appear Gwendolyn did not learn any lesson from
both the incident with Julius and the principal’s advice—constant advice
for that matter—on the need for decency in the way teachers dress. All
the pieces of advice lavished on her amounted to nothing other than the
act of throwing water on a duck’s back. In reality, not even an ounce of
improvement was seen in her blind rush for “fashionable” dressing. She
kept on dressing as before, always exposing her body like wares on sale
in an open-air market.
One fateful Thursday, Miss Gwendolyn had a
two-hour lesson in Form Three. The class was a morning one; it was
supposed to begin at seven thirty a.m. Miss Gwendolyn made her way into
the class at seven forty-five a.m. amidst wild cheers, shouts and
applauses. The commotion was not caused by her lateness, but rather by
her exaggeratedly indecent dressing.
From her head down to her
feet, everything was a cause for concern. For her hairdo she had long,
thick locks that came down a little above her buttocks. She rather
looked like a reggae-star from a back view. In the place of her eyebrows
conspicuously stood thick, bluish lines. There was no hair at all. The
lightness of her skin overemphasized the presence of these lines, making
her rather look like a scarecrow in a far-away maize-farm. Her lips
were as red as a fire-wound. And nobody could dare say that she hadn’t
applied a full tin of powder on her face. She was putting on a
skin-tight, blue T-shirt with a widely open chest that left her breasts
almost completely naked. Squeezed up in new immaculate breastwears, her
breasts could be compared to nothing other than two fat oranges
hand-squeezed close together into twin babies’ mouths. This T-shirt
occasionally refused to cover her little, round navel. A navel which
disappeared into a bottle-smooth, soft, light stomach-skin. Below this
T-shirt was a stubborn, very stubborn, mini-skirt. The skirt was blue in
colour too. Her long, light, hairy legs continued out of this skirt
down into a pair of blue, high-heeled shoes. The heels of the shoes must
have measured ten centimetres in height or so. What a wonderfully
beautiful, young lady! However, she managed to maintain some silence in
the class from the beginning. The students quickly calmed down because
they were already used to, very used to, her ways, but the worst was
still to come.
The young teacher’s mini-skirt was as stubborn as a
street child. Not only was it too body-tight, but it seemed to have been
made out of some slippery substance. This material would slide against
her soft skin the way prey slides on a python’s spittle. For this reason
it kept on sliding and folding upwards towards her waist. Consequently,
she had to constantly use one of her hands to help pull the skirt
downwards…
The lesson of the day was centred on the comparative and
superlative forms of longer adjectives. She taught the students that
the formula is to add “more” to the adjective followed by “than” for the
comparative and to add “the most” to the adjective for the superlative
as follows: Beautiful—More beautiful than—The most beautiful…The
students quickly grasped the formula. And for each adjective she called
out, they gave her its comparative and superlative forms at the speed of
lightning. She now fully committed herself to the exercise, and was
particularly busy writing on the blackboard and turning back to talk to
the students. In this way, she was carried away by the spontaneity of
the lesson to the extent that she forgot the perpetual war she had
initially been fighting with her stubborn mini-skirt.
Before long,
the skirt folded upwards and sat comfortably round her waist, exposing
her large womanhood. The upper part of her womanhood was so large that
it seemed to have swollen. If she were in Yaoundé, nobody would doubt
that she was a nocturnal worker at either Miniferme or Mvog-Ada. Her
stainless, white drawers were the “string-type” and thus left most of
the carefully-shaved skin of her womanhood bare. It was an awful and
admirable sight at the same time. Most boys in the class must have
wetted their pants!
What called her attention to this terrible
happening was the direction of the students’ eyes. No eyes rose above
her stomach level. All eyes were on her waist and womanhood. As soon as
she noticed the shame and disgrace her stubborn skirt had brought to
bear on her, she freezed on the spot like an erring actor on stage. She
became immobile and speechless like a carved statue. While some students
were fighting hard to suppress their uncontrollable laughter, a
majority of them had gone wild with laughter, shouts, jeers, cries and
ululations. While some banged their desks, others climbed onto theirs
and began singing and shouting all of Miss Gwendolyn’s nicknames: Miss
Prostitute! British English Madam! American Madam! The White Prostitute!
The White Pros…
The noise and disorder in that classroom soon
spread into total commotion on the whole school campus, attracting
students and teachers from other classes. In a very little time, the
door and windows of that class had been flooded by students and
teachers. This created an artificial darkness in the room.
By the
time the school principal and some powerful teachers had pushed their
way through the thick crowds into the centre of the scene they found
Miss Gwendolyn lying—perhaps seemingly—unconscious on the class floor.
Her stubborn skirt was still sitting comfortably round her waist just as
it had been before she “collapsed”. The teachers pulled down the skirt,
carried her to the principal’s Mercedes Benz and drove her to Ibamakuo
District Hospital.
Meanwhile, consternation and disorder continued
on the school campus. Classes unofficially and prematurely came to an
end for that day just like that. Both the students and the remaining
teachers carried the news back home and it kept on spreading in and
around the town like wild fire on a mountain during the dry season.
When she regained consciousness,—did she really go unconscious?— the
Principal and the other teachers present in the hospital talked to her
bitterly about the kind of disorder and shame she had brought to the
school through her headiness and indecent dressing. The Principal was
particularly very bitter to her because, as he put it and it was true
too, he had given her more than enough advice on the importance of
proper dressing. Miss Gwendolyn apologized to them, begged for their
forgiveness and promised to undergo a U-change.
It was under the
cover of darkness that she was escorted back to her room in town. The
worst error committed this time around was that she was allowed to spend
that night all alone in her room despite all that had transpired during
the day. On Friday morning, when Mr James Gopte, on his way to school,
stopped by to check on Miss Gwendolyn, he discovered that the latter had
drunk some poison and died overnight.
THE END!!! © Nsah Mala 2013
(Monatélé II, Thursday 02 May 2013)
This story got its inspiration from a dream I had in the early hours—at about five thirty a.m.—on this day.
