A young boy died recently in Lagos Nigeria #sylvesteroromoni He died in his school Dowen College. It brought back the memory of when a student died when I was in high school, I wrote about it many years ago, and the news of the young boy’s passing brought it back to my memory and I want to share the piece I wrote about it back in the early 2000’s.

It was a normal day, or what seemed to be normal. I think it was a Saturday morning when we all woke up, and rumors started to trickle into our ears about the death of a student. It was only a few people heard at first, I don’t know how I ended up there, but I heard a senior tell another senior that someone told her that she saw all the house mistresses rush out in the middle of the night. At that point I did the same thing, I told a friend that I heard two seniors talking, and one said her friend heard from another friend who saw the house mistresses go out in the middle of the night that someone died.

              I don’t know exactly what point it was confirmed, but through an elimination process of all the sick girls being accounted for, we figured it was a boy in the Boy’s school. Although my younger brother was in the boy’s school, at that time I had never experienced death, so I didn’t know the fear of losing another that it leaves behind. It wouldn’t be until after I lost my father that I was in constant fear that my brother will die young. No one had heard anything but there was a lot of anxiety and questions of whom, and how. As the day progressed, more news came. Once we went for breakfast, the boys spilled, different people different stories; it only compounded more questions. One thing we were sure of was that Arif was dead. None of the school officials were ready to answer to us, they acted like nothing happened, hoping we were stupid enough not to ask.

            By nighttime, an assembly was called and they broke the news to us that Arif Arigibola died from a fever in the school’s hospital “Medicare.” The school had a sick bay within the school premises, where students who had regular headaches, tummy aches, or malaria were treated. If the sickness prolonged for up to a week, the students were taken to a hospital outside of the school, where their parents would be notified and given the option to take them home for further treatment. Arif was not sick for a long period of time, in fact, we heard he had regular malaria and later a stomach ache before he died. Malaria was one of the most common sicknesses that anyone had, and never had I heard of anyone dying from it. It was simple, if you had malaria, take two tablets of a pain killer “Panadol” three times a day, for three days and you would be as good as new. We wanted to know exactly how it didn’t make sense to most of us, and we all wondered why such an innocent boy had to go.

 Arif was friends with my younger brother Dapo. He was new in school, and he was the most popular kid by far. He was a Js1 (junior secondary school 1) student probably about ten years old, and he was very short. He wore big round glasses, and he had an adorable smile. Arif was one of those students that everyone was talking about the minute he started school; the teachers loved him, every senior boy wanted to be his school father and every senior girl wanted to be his school mother. In the first two terms of the semester, Arif had proven to be extremely smart; he always came out top of his class.  Arfi boasted of his dream to become the future president of Nigeria, like the dream of any little boy, but with his vast knowledge and his way with words, everyone believed in the potential of him becoming something really great. It was very rare that a ten-year-old boy answered questions and gave comments that challenged the way even the teachers reasoned.

It was about 6:00pm or 6:30pm after the school officials had broken the news to the school. As the girls walked back to their school, the first thing we noticed was how clouds covered the sky, and a mixture of ash grey was formed, seizing the light from coming through. In less than two minutes and rush of wind raided the school, and aggressively blew the front gates open. We heard a loud band and those who weren’t sobbing already started to shuffle faster towards the girl’s school since it looked like heavy rain was coming. The wind didn’t stop, and the rain didn’t come, instead, it set an atmosphere that encouraged tears to fall from our eyes. We attributed the behavior of nature to the fact that a great person had died. You have to understand that we grew up in a very superstitious and spiritual society, and we somehow managed to create meaning for everything, and we believed our own stories.

This was the first time a student had died in Bells. For other boarding schools around the country, death was not a new phenomenon. There were some schools where a student died a semester, which meant three deaths in one school year. This mostly happened in public schools or government schools where they had thousands of students. The general belief for some of those schools was that the owner of the school made a covenant with the devil to build the school on that land, and in return, the blood of a student had to be shed each year as a sacrifice. Even though a child dying is not a foreign idea, all around the world, children die in schools from various causes, but we always had to have our own superstitious excuse. I myself had grown to believe in most superstitions, although I sometimes knew where to draw the line. In Arif’s case, we had no reason to be worried about any covenant; this was the first death our school had experienced.

Two or three years later, there was another death of a girl Lara. She just moved to Nigeria for High School, she had grown up in Britain all her life, her father was Nigerian, and her mother was British, she was what we called “half cast.” Lara was in JSS2 (junior secondary school 2). Her case was a bit different from Arif’s. She too was sick, but her sickness was very prolonged, maybe two or three weeks, but they never took her to the outside school hospital, Medicare. Lara was a bit slow in speech; she said we didn’t understand her too well because of her heavy British accent. The Bells was no stranger to having foreign students enroll. The first time Lara said she was still sick even after missing classes for days, the nurse in charge “nurse Kemi” said she was lying, it wouldn’t be until the next day when her temperature would rise to over a hundred degrees that she would be allowed to stay in the sickbay for another week. I visited a junior in my room who was also admitted to the sick bay at the same time as Lara. I always checked on Lara. Lara was one of the sweetest girls I knew. Her ignorance of everything Nigerian was especially cute, and I made fun of her accent all the time. I still remember how she dragged all her words into a jumbled mess, especially when she was sick. The nurse on duty nurse Kemi had a reputation for being especially mean. She was the only young nurse, and rumors were she slept it most of the SS3     (senior secondary 3) boys, and that was why no boy had respect for her. She took out her frustration on the females. Lara threw up constantly and always refused to eat, I had to clean up after her sometimes because nurse Kemi would refuse to but instead showered her with abuse. Her claim was that Lara was just lazy, and not sick and that she was using the sickbay as a hideout from going to class, the word “Ode” (dumb) was thrown out a lot. Lara’s grades were very poor, but somehow, I and most other students who visited the sickbay often knew that Lara’s sickness was more than skipping class.

 Lara started to say some strange things in her final week. Whenever anyone came around, she begged us not to let the nurses send her home; she begged to be taken to Canaan Land (the biggest church in Nigeria that was across the street from our school). From our school, we would hear singing and shouts of praise like an earthquake, especially when people shouted “Hallelujah.” Our location was a spiritual war zone, we were surrounded. Aside from Canaan land, behind the girl’s hostel was a traditional shine. When I asked Lara why she wanted to go to Cannan Land, she said she couldn’t go home, that her stepmother was a witch and she wanted to kill her. She said she had been seeing her stepmother in dreams, and that she needed to go to the church to get delivered before it was too late. I was very scared, and immediately I told the nurses on duty. They both attributed it to a symptom of hay fever and said Lara was just hallucinating, especially since her temperature was significantly over a hundred degrees. The last time I remember seeing Lara, her skin was red, her contagious smile was wiped off her face, and her speech was slower. She cried nonstop and begged for us to rescue her before it was too late. I couldn’t do anything, all I did was recite countless prayers for her, as I dabbed her forehead with a damp cloth, she kept whispering save me before it’s too late as she slowly tossed and turned in restlessness.

Lara died past midnight on a weekday. The story we heard was that as soon as the nurses noticed she was dead, they alerted the school authorities who in turn took the body out of the school for the hospital, and embalmed it. Lara’s death caused a lot of trouble for the school. Her parents were bent on using the school and were very furious that the body of their daughter was embalmed without their consent. Her mother who flew in from England once she heard the news blamed the school. Nurse Kemi was fired after an investigation. From what we understood the parents requested an autopsy, but all the evidence had already been erased. While some parents planned to remove their children from the school, other parents like one man in particular I remember said (and I paraphrase) “I heard about The Bells during the scandal of Lara, and with all the press going on to tarnish the reputation of the school, I knew that this would be the perfect school for my daughter to go to, because it is obvious that the school is such a good and this is why there is a lot of effort to bring it down.” Because of Lara’s final pleas for deliverance, most students believed that her stepmother was responsible for her death. The next day, the school was back to normal; I think we had just learned to deal with death a little better.

On the night of Arif's death, we didn’t know what to do with our feelings. One by one, students found their way to the empty ironing room of the second hostel. We stayed in the dark and we all wailed together. I first went to my room, but when I found no one to cry with; I followed the sound of humming I heard until I found my way to the upper room. I couldn’t see anyone’s face, the room was pitch black with hundreds of bodies, I smuggled myself into a corner and sat on the floor. One person started to sing a ballad that was usually sung at the morning devotion. A chorus of other voices followed, and the slow melody of the song pressed more tears out of our eyes. The more we sang the more people were drawn into the room. Muslims, Christians, Catholics, and the undecided were all in one accord, united by one tune. The song “Ijoba Orun,” which was in a different language, means “Heaven I dream of you, Lord doesn’t let me miss the point of life, please let me see heaven, don’t let me die like a rat, please guide me home. The money that I have cannot take me to heaven; the books that I read cannot take me to heaven. Don’t let me miss it, Lord, please guide me to your glorious home.” After what seemed to be over an hour of intense singing, and crying, the house mistresses came and abruptly broke up our solace. We were asked to go to our rooms and sleep it off. For the rest of that semester, no one could sing that song again at the devotion. The next morning at assembly the scores for the past exam were not announced. Arif came first in his class, and no one wanted to deal with that reality.