I was going on sixteen, and fed up with Our Lady’s College for Girls which I attended from the age of ten. I had outgrown the place, I wanted to spread my wings and fly away. There had been an incident one morning while I had been studying that made me feel I no longer belonged.
Exams were imminent, and I had been lying with my books under one of the massive flame trees in the oval lawn which faced the school, revising geography. I loved it there, a few degrees cooler in the shade of the old branches than in the direct sun-light. Under the trees was the best place to study, there wasn’t much noise from the school, just a vague background rumbling no louder than the humming and buzzing of insects. The peace of a tropical morning.
As I sat sweating slightly over North American imports and exports, memorizing intimate details of a country yet unseen, my concentration was distracted by a baby’s cries, high pitched, incessant, like a child with toothache.
The child was crying and screaming and mewling and whimpering then screaming and crying anew.
There was a meeting that day in the Assembly Hall behind me, something to do with the Old Girls Association, so there were more cars than usual in the car park and quite a number parked on the lawn. I could see the child, she was on her nursemaid’s back, an elite infant, frilly dress, beribboned plaits, socks and shoes, all dressed up by her mother to show her off to her other Old Girls. The maid had put the baby to ride piggy back and was jigging up and down, ostensibly to calm her, but she screamed and screamed.
Eternity ticked by, under the tree, as I wrestled with the trade routes and optimum climatic conditions for wheat growing. I would have been lulled by the rasping of grasshoppers, the occasional twitter of birds, and the soft rustling of the tree as the hot breeze played about its leaves…but for the fervent squalling from the child. Eventually completely distracted, I looked up, and saw, about thirty feet away the nursemaid pacing and dancing up and down with the baby on her back. She was squat and wiry, maybe a teenager, short, with a shaved head, muscled like a beast of burden. A yard of two of faded cloth was wrapped around her waist, as dingy as her ecru nylon blouse. She’d knotted an oily scarf about her head; she looked so dirty! She paced and jigged too jerkily to lull anything to sleep except perhaps a baby kangaroo. The baby howled and screamed while I tried to go back to my books.
The grass tickled my legs, and the tree whispered above me, secrets about how serene life was to stand snoozing in the heat all day. The wind caressed me, and I almost wished were a tree, and have the sun to feed me, and the cold earth to massage my tired roots and give them tit-bits of nitrogen and phosphorous. I wished I didn’t have to study geography or Shakespeare or Maths. The child cried on.
The baby’s frilly dress of red and purple checks was lively contrast to the maid’s dowdy rags, and she howled at the top of her voice, her screams coming out in little jerks as the nursemaid jumped about, her little head bobbing up and down against the broad nylon clad back. I noticed that the girl was supporting the baby with her bare arms; she had no iborun (the sash women use to tie babies to their back in traditional Yoruba dress) to tie her with. The cries grew less shrill; the baby seemed very tired as it whimpered a couple of times, then slept.
‘Thank God for that!’ I thought.
But then I saw the maid look over her shoulder at the little head nestling on her back, and I heard her say clearly in the Yoruba language, “Heh! You think you’re going to sleep do you?” With that she gave the baby’s bottom several hard slaps.
Of course the child woke up immediately with shrieks of protest, and the maid continued to prance about with her, singing a little song, and hitting the baby in time to the music.
"You nasty little girl” she sang, “it will never be better for you…(smack, smack…), it will never be better for your mother (smack, smack)…it will never be better for your father… (smack, smack)…the more I suffer in the hands of your mother… (smack, smack)...the more you will suffer in mine... (smack, smack)…” over and over. The child screamed on.
By now the books lay forgotten on my lap. We were secluded here in the school, protected from the outside world, isolated in a cocoon for catholic teenage girls. The nuns had planted huge trees on the periphery of the compound, to screen and soundproof the compound from Ibadan, to protect us from the hustle and bustle of the city. The strategy would have worked if the school had been on flat land, but Ibadan is a suburban metropolis spread-eagled over seven hills, so from where I sat on the lawn there was a view of part of the city that rose above the roof-tops of the boarding house; a checkered pyramid of rust coloured corrugated iron plating presided over by the Mapo hall, the highest point in the city, vaguely Grecian with its high columns and gabled roof as it towered above the ancient city. The mud buildings with their zinc roofs fanned out below the city’s Town Hall like so many subjects prostrating to their king.
That was the real world; that was Ibadan. In school we lived in a cocoon, and this intruder, this stalwart girl had come from the outside, from the real world, and was being cruel to a defenseless baby.
“And this is for your ribbons… (smack, smack)…and this is for your shoes and socks, and this is for your mother, the witch who said my hair had lice and took me to the barber….”
Alarmed, I looked back at the maid jumping frenziedly, beating the child’s legs as she pretended succor, the child screaming in chorus to the vicious lyrics, too young to speak, but not too young to receive payment for her mother’s crimes.
I noticed a sleepy driver in the new red car nearby sprawled out in the front seat. He had woken with the noise and had been eyeing the girl for sometime. Now he got out of the car. “What do you think you are doing, you foolish girl?” The girl stopped dancing about, and the baby immediately fell asleep.
“Aha,” I thought. “He’s going to stop this!”
“Me? I’m not doing anything. I’m looking after the baby. I’m doing my job…” she shrugged, with a flat sullen look.
“If your madam catches you, you’ll be in real trouble”, he hissed “any one can see you beating the child”. He gesticulated, opening his hands and looking upwards “What in Gods name has this baby done to you?”
“The child is restless. I’m comforting it!” she snarled defiantly, then looked behind her back at the little head, the tear stained cheeks and the wet closed eyes. “Hey, you! Child of a monkey! What are you resting for?” She struck again at the babies’ legs, “You’ll not sleep until I say so. You can sleep when I’m allowed to sleep. When I wake, you will also wake. And this is for your ugly father … (smack, smack)...and this is for your evil mother…”
The child howled on, piteously; eyes closed, as if by shutting out the vision of her torturer, the blows to her bottom and legs would feel less severe.
The driver spat at the ground in disgust ‘Na you sabi!” he growled as he slumped back into the new red car.

A smart young woman approached them from the assembly hall, I noticed her polished sophistication evident, her elegant suit and modish shoes and bag, her straightened hair ‘European’ styled. The maid stopped jigging about and faced her.
“Welcome, madam” she said, eyes lowered demurely. I couldn’t stand it. Left the books and rushed over.
“Is this your baby?” I panted out of breath. She turned to me, surprised
“Yes” she smiled.
“This girl”, I pointed at the maid “this wicked girl’s been beating her!” The maid looked me with animal eyes, all round with the whites showing, like a goat about to be slaughtered; completely mute with fright. I felt if any sound would come from her, it would be a terrified bleat.
The lady looked from me to the baby, now fast asleep, to the maid, then back to me.
“Oh, no” she smiled, “she’s been looking after her. Look she’s sleeping”
“But she’s been crying! Surely you must have heard her screams from the assembly hall?” I was indignant
“Oh, yes, I did; and I looked out. My maid was giving her a piggy back and dancing with her to make her stop. We do that you know..” she said kindly, her tolerant condescension telling me at once that she thought because I was not black enough, I did not know why babies were carried on women’s back’s in Africa.
She thought I was too white to know that babies were calmed and soothed by the proximity of their mothers’ heartbeat, she thought I was too foreign to understand the warmth and comfort afforded by the traditional method of holding. And now this cultured Westernised lady described herself, her maid, and her baby as ‘we’; I was the outsider, the intruder looking in.
“But she was beating her!” I had tears in my eyes. “I saw them! She was beating her! That’s why she cried so much!”
“Oh, I’m sure you were mistaken” the lady explained kindly. “The baby cries a lot these days, she’s teething you see. But thanks for your concern all the same, Goodbye…”.
They all got into the new red car, slouching driver suddenly deaf and mute (he must have seen the situation as none of his business; or maybe his ‘we’ included the maid, but not madam or her daughter) and departed.