![]() ![]() Their enthusiasm had climaxed at the end of term talent show, when one of their number, a confident boy with a mango-shaped head, had performed War to raucous acclaim, beating into second place a fifth form boy who had produced a fine performance of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, complete with a flawless moonwalk. The pupils had been riveted, the entire class committing the lyrics to memory, a particular line their favourite: until the colour of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes. Doc Mo had managed to secure smudged photocopies of the speech on yellow paper, which he had distributed through the class. On another occasion, he made the pupils listen to the Bob Marley song War, which had committed to music the speech of the great Ethiopian Emperor, Hailie Selassie. His first such lesson had taken the form of an attack against Christopher Columbus: he had used the lyrics of a song by the reggae artiste Burning Spear, which pointed out that Columbus, was a damn blasted liar for claiming to have discovered Jamaica, a land on which the Arawak Indians had lived long before he arrived with his disease-ridden ships. After spending half a candle-lit night poring over a worn copy of the national syllabus for ordinary level history, he decided to jettison the class’s unit on European History from Vienna to Versailles in favour of a focus on lessons he considered more in line with the pupils’ hue. Upon being ordered by the new principal to also teach history, the tape recorder became Doc Mo’s most valuable teaching aid. His roommate had called the tape recorder a ‘jalopy’, although Doc Mo later found out that such a term was reserved for cars. He had inherited the recorder from a distant uncle and it had been invaluable during his university days. He was a massive fan of Peter Tosh, Bob Marley and Joseph Hills and on the odd occasion when he was paid for delivering private lessons to neighbourhood children, he allowed himself batteries and listened to reggae on his wheezing tape recorder. ‘Until we develop a mind-set that sees us turn our backs on Babylon and these foreign Western societies where oppressed and displaced black people are treated like dirt, our own countries will always remain backwards,’ he had pointed out one lunchtime, jabbing the air with his red pen for emphasis.ĭoc Mo had lifted his theory from Jamaican reggae music that often lauded a return to the African motherland, whilst rejecting Babylon, a system built on a legacy of slavery and oppression. Unimpressed, he had sneered at them, before launching into a tirade about ‘the crippling brain drain brought about by the craven migration to white countries.’ Teacher salaries had not been paid for four months and there had been banner headlines and convoluted press conferences, with the military government claiming that it would not pay ‘ghost teachers’ until they were sure that they existed, and regularly came to work.ĭoc Mo remembered how at least six of his colleagues had been filling out the forms a couple of months previously, mini-clusters of the desperate huddled around stacks of printed paper. The green card lottery scheme had seeped into the school and set up camp in the yellow staffroom. ![]()
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