Gone Are The Days...Phew!

Pic 1. Structure of the standard high school latrine.(This one looks even more structurally secure than the ones in my old high school!)

Pic. 2 Inside a standard high school pit latrine.

Like some (or most) of you, I hated my high school experience. From the snobby prefects (branded cops) to the shady pit latrines that we used for toilets in between class breaks since the dorms where under lock and key: so that students could not sneak back into the dorms for a mid-day siesta, after a lunch time meal that consisted of half-done ugali (made from maize flour) and a piece of cabbage that floated in a plate of luke warm water ( the stew in this case!) that left you feeling heavy-eyed and blotted.

It is the pit latrines that traumatized me the most and without them in the picture I might have actually tried to have a good high school experience! I occasionally still have nightmares* of those lats. (latrines) 5 years down the lane.

I usually find myself squatting butt-nekkid in one of those latrines and the next thing I know the flimsy excuse of a floor gives in and I find myself falling into an abyss of darkness. It is when I wake up in a sweat that I realise I was only having a bad dream.

The problem with our high school latrines is that they were not bottomless pits. In fact you could easily see the contents of peoples lunches without straining too much into the hole: This was of course with the help of the stream of light that you got into the latrine by leaving the door slightly ajar so that you would “aim into the hole” or rather “not miss”! But then again you were faced with another moral dilemma; While trying to aim into the hole, you were left with no choice but to look into it and see all sorts of colours congealing with each other and of course the acrid smell of the wee always hit you stack in the face: sometimes it rose up like vapour fumes from the hole right into the fabric of your school uniform: hence most of us would strip our sweaters before we entered the pits!

The size of the standard pit: 1m x 1m (and sometimes smaller…you wonder what was with the mincing of space because most pits were always surrounded by large stretches of land with knee-high savannah grass and no other buildings were built nearby ( mostly because of the pungent smell that emanated from the latrines.

The standard high school latrine was mostly always a slab of concrete with a rectangular or square hole in the middle (big enough to swallow your leg in!) with corrugated iron walls and roof with a wooden door made of rough sawn timber planks joined roughly together with unconcealed nails.You were lucky to find a latrine door that had a knob, more less one that could close! As for the corrugated metal, it was mostly rustic, corroded mainly by the fumes that emanated from the pit.

In the standard high school latrine: no tissue was provided. You had to carry your own or suffer the consequences!

It was even worse in the wet season because then the pits would fill up with rain water and spew out most of their contents onto the surrounding ground. Only then did the school administration think of the latrines as hazardous! After a few months, when the rain had relented and the “contents” settled back into place the school admin. would then declare the pits safe to use, without much repair work done!

In short, our high school latrines were an accident waiting to happen.

As I said before: the latrine space was tight. The only movement you could make freely was when you squatted down to align hole with hole and when you stood up after you finished your business. The rest of the locomotion required specialized skills as you navigated your way into and out of the latrine. Some students made it look so easy: the ducking in and out of the latrine,I mean…

And then talk about the mess some people left the latrine in after using them. Eish!I remember we used to say, “ Watch out for that loo , someone has decorated it!” Manze those toilets were hell on earth!

But on the other hand I have come up with a conspiracy theory about the whole Latrine System business in my former high school. It was there to instill some sense of discipline in us.

1. No student had the time to waste in a man-hole type of environment; hence there was very little or no graffiti penciled or marked onto the walls and door.But then again it did limit our creativity inside the toilet! The other thing is no one could dare smoke a fag in the latrines because it was a matter of using them out of necessity- a duck in, duck out affair or rather a less-than-one-minute affair- so woe unto you if you were constipated!
2. The art of Self-control was also instilled by default. I remember many are the times that I held my bladder-about-to-bust until the time when the dorm toilets were actually available for use rather than use the pits from hell!

Personally I think convicts in western countries get better social amenities then we did in high school!

Then, there was a kind of chaste system in high school were everyone was ranked according to the role or duty they did. On top of the list were the prefects(or cops), then rest of the student community was classed according to the school duties they did: there were the library workers, the dining hall workers, the chapel workers, the dormitory workers and lastly there were the latrine workers. You were made to feel like the lowest of the lowest if you were a latrine worker and mostly this role was given as a sort of punishment. In other cases cops assigned the prettiest girls, or the more wealthy girls such menial jobs just to bring them down. Woe to you if you were not “well connected” with the cops.

So that’s it! Something about my high school experience. It would be interesting to hear what other funny experiences people had in high school.