MUSTARD III – Ch. 3 | KT OLLA

BANJI was at the age when boys take a part of their father’s farm, and take a wife.

It was about this age that Morrow left his own father and plunged in the wild. It was about this age, also, that his son was.

Still, Banji’s father suddenly had this change of heart about his boy’s future. Just when folk people claimed he had grown.

He wanted him to try schooling. Plung in the new wave called literacy.

Maybe this thing is better than owning a farm!—he’d thought one day.

In the days I could boast my sons would inherit me! That they’d take my farms and grow.

But it seems this new thing is the future. This something called ‘books’—.

‘And what if it’s the future?’ he’d blurted out. ‘What if it’s the next big thing?

‘I think Banji should try! He should go there and see!’

So, Morrow walked to the British church in his town Ede, and enrolled his son at the preliminary school there.

But then this was 1942, and the father was 73; his son, 17...

Even life paused to mock.

Still, the country boy picked things quite fast that he got promoted to skip the immediate next class...

Twice, in fact.

So he read a thing of six years in four. Now it was to be primary education, but it was preliminary.

Meanwhile, that first school became replaced with what they called ‘Standard Schools’. A new form of primary grade school at the time.

The form arrived in the boy’s town in the mid-40’s, as part of a movement for Day Schools then. And it was the American mission there who ran it first.

So Banji immediately enrolled for their final class, to bag a Standard-VI Certificate.

He finished in the first set of graduands from the school. The only native son, too.

For students from far places lodged in his town to school there, as the town boys worked afeild.

Therefore Morrow’s promise son finished primary schooling. And ought to be some bridegroom at his age—

Yet he was no more than a school leaver.

Still, Banji became the very first Ede-born to bag the ‘Standard-Six’. That priceless precious paper.

But then again, Joshua Banji Morrow was 22. And even life had stopped to mock.

It just felt too weak to.