DOFORA’S DANGEROUS HAIR

When it was time for us to be baptized, her father didn’t have a ready Christian name for her. He didn’t even seem to care. Aunt Jerusha, always the loud one, then landed in the compound, a song following her. She noisily blew into her foggy glasses, wiped them with the hem of her worn-out maxi dress and perched them on her nose. She then flipped through her tattered Bible, her thick thumbs making the pages wrinkle even more, before finally stopping at a name for the chubby girl—Deborah.

But the villagers couldn’t say Deborah without biting their tongues. So, they twisted it into Dofora. She was always Dofora. When we joined Class One where she taught me how to wipe my nose as we learned the 3Rs, she proudly wrote “Deborah” on her school books. But to the villagers, to everyone, she remained Dofora, as if her real name didn’t matter.

And then we were in Class Six West, Deborah and I. It was around that time when every kid had an unending attack of mashilingi or ringworms and the radio talked of far off war between Saddam Hussein and Amerika and aunty Jerusha talked about the world ending in a few days.

Our science teacher burst into our class foaming at the mouth, his leather belt cracking wildly above his head.

“Who drew me on the blackboard?” He thundered. Our little fingers scratched the mashilingi on our mango shaped heads. The teacher’s whip cracked again kwa kwa! Kamanja, the boy with the guava-shaped head who had actually done it stood up, trembling. He pointed at Dofora.

“Sus me teacher, it was her!” We had been taught to start every sentence with “excuse me” but Kamanja was too scared to get it right.

“Is it true?” The teacher asked Kamanja.

“Yessah!” The whole class of a hundred scared kids shouted back in unison in English.

“Forro me!” The teacher told Dofora.The girls giggled. The boys clapped. I stood up to follow the teacher to tell him it wasn’t her. Kamanja dipped into his pocket and waved a small knife at me. I hesitated, then turned back.

All morning, all we heard coming from the staffroom was the whistling sound of the teacher’s cane landing on someone’s palms. I covered my ears not to hear that sound. But I couldn’t close my mind so I could still figure Dofora recoiling with every cane. Later, when she came back to class, she covered her calloused hands. When I saw them, a lump formed on my throat. I swallowed hard so that it could go, but it refused to go away.  When Dofora looked at me, I looked away.

The next week, someone put a three legged chair where our teacher used to sit. Mr. Chege tumbled to the floor, his new Pepe jeans getting soiled with red dust. We all knew it was Kefa, the boy who had repeated Class Six three times. But when Mr. Chege asked who did it, a hundred little fingers pointed at Dofora.

She followed the teacher to the staffroom and when she came back, she had a black eye and her pullover was torn. This time she covered her chest, like something else in there that we couldn’t see was torn too.

I must admit that life was not easy for all of us at primary school. Trouble always followed us like a shadow. But for Dofora, her trouble came in twos-like a double lesson. So the term that followed, someone farted loudly in the class, and all the fingers pointed at her. Once again, Mr. Chege called her to the staffroom. When she came back, she didn’t cover her chest like before. Instead, she held her pullover over her head all day, like she didn’t want to see the light.

Our class was full of mischief, always up to something. The following week, someone spat on the teacher’s chair and Mr. Chege asked who it was. We all turned to look at the back of the class where Dofora used to sit, but her seat was empty. We searched everywhere for her—the toilets, Class Three where her sister was, but she wasn’t there. But it had to be her, didn’t it? She was the only one with that rebellious strand of hair we called “gacuiri ka uturika,” the hair that extended into the forehead like a curse, marking her as different, as trouble. Somehow, this  ‘hair of naughtiness’  mostly affected girls.

We waited for Dofora to turn for school the following day so that we could wrongly accuse her of soiling the teacher’s chair. She didn’t. We waited for her the next week and the next term, she didn’t. We had to look for another girl with hair that extended to the forehead to blame for the mischief in class.

We finished primary school and childhood, the most beautiful of life’s season, ended. Instead of stealing mangoes that grew on trees by the river, we discovered more luscious mangoes. Years later, when I was in high school, I saw Dofora again. She wore a tight headscarf around her head, and walked with her eyes cast down. I stopped her, wanting to tell her that we never meant to hurt her. But my words felt hollow, like offering last week’s bread to a starving child. She looked at me for a moment, her eyes shadowed with something I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t face her so I turned the other way.

When I looked, she had disappeared again, just like she did in Class Six.

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Even now, years later, when I remember Dofora like this, a big lump forms in my throat-and refuses to go away.