Dar es Salaam Students Aren’t Criminals!
- Category: Education
- Date 19-12-2004
- 345 views
Believe me or not, the children of Dar es Salaam will one day quit school! There is such a host of vagaries ranged against them that personally, I have started to doubt if I would have coped with schooling under such circumstances. Moreover even under the relatively friendly conditions of my time, many people left school; I still remain the only son in the entire village and its neighbourhoods who weathered the storms of education a little longer. In their early thirties, my erstwhile classmates are tottering old men and women; parents to eight or so malnourished children, and utterly no means to salvage their families.
Don’t blame them! Almost everyone in my community had no education at all, so those of us on whom the white man’s gods smiled cannot claim to have been so sagacious. Yet the older folks would mention, albeit in passing, that education was important and that the well-known government servants as well as priests had all been to school. I had preferred priesthood, admiring the bespectacled man who used to drive a Volkswagen to visit our village church once in months.
Yes, the elder members of the community encouraged us to study hard, though they knew next to nothing about education. Yet what sense does it make to stay in a city in modern times and harass school-going children? The illiterate inhabitants of the remotest villages, generations ago, never insisted on education but spoke highly of it and consequently encouraged one or two children of the village to go to school. Everyone in the community would be interested to help a student, because “they would be useful to the society after school”.
It was a honourable thing to go to school. Having been one lucky village child to taste the white man’s opium, I have become so addicted to it that even at this great age of mid-thirties, I still harbour secret lust for more. However, if you asked me to be in the shoes of these children I see in Dar es Salaam, I would opt to stay away from school. I hate to be treated with contempt and disproportionate harassment.
At peak hours, the daladala world runs according to the law of the jungle – it is survival for the fittest. Your Dar schoolchildren are not allowed on board, as the operator prefers only the passengers with enough money for the fare. Apparently the children turn up with little money. I seek to know whether paying less than other passengers is a favour or consequence of being born to parents who are too poor to provide enough for the fare. As students, we used to walk for miles back home after school in order to use the fare for the benefit of some people’s daughters, so perhaps the reason these students are withstanding the hostility is to save for sweets and ice-cream. Thus the conductor pushes them hard away from the daladala, but what is doubtful also is whether these students have internalised and accepted this mistreatment or they feel impotently frustrated.
Allowed into the daladala, still the students face absolute discrimination. A school child is expected to surrender the right to a seat whenever a grownup non-student gets on board. It still remains unclear whether this is government policy or a matter of social etiquette. My school time experience informs me that we used to enjoy standing as we travelled by lorries or pickup trucks, but your Dar children cannot even stand. Rather they travel with their backs curved like bows; which I consider to be a health hazard. Even though this may be their preference, the practice should be banned.
We need to hear from the parents, by the way, if they consider this as normal treatment of the “leaders of tomorrow”. The teachers should give us their take of this scenario too. Not least, the students should speak out on this humiliating treatment. Of course I am not thinking about the lucky few children who travel by school buses to and from home. And someone in authority should perhaps be listening.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizens