Bullied at school? You're not alone

I READ somewhere recently that 77 percent of students are subjected to some form of bullying in school – be it mental physical or verbal. Those are frightening statistics if you are a parent. School-based violence has a tendency of affecting those at the face of it right up to their adult lives.

As I grew up, bullying was taken as a part of life. It was either you were a bully or a victim. My upbringing put me right in the firing line of being bullied.

Apart from the fact that ours was a Christian home, I grew up in a neighbourhood that placed middle-class and low income families in the same area. Because of the divisive policies of the time, affluent blacks could not be integrated with whites.

Coming from a well-off family gave the impression that I always had money on me. What made it worse was that my father ran a shop in the vicinity, something that made me a lightning rod for local bullies. They were mean and did not attend school. All they did was loiter around the school gate at knock off time.

It was not long before I attracted the attention of one called Loit. I never got to know his surname. His name struck fear in the hearts of my classmates and the day our paths crossed, I decided not to run. It was an act that I was to regret for many years to come.

Loit was not violent to me as he was to the others. I was his cash cow, but suffered a form of psychological bullying that seemed worse than physical assault. When I tried to buy him out, it only led to extortion, particularly when he discovered I was the son of a local businessman. I was to pay him to protect me from himself!

It began with a few sweets progressing to cigarettes and money. Sweets I could buy with my pocket money, but when it came to cigarettes, it became a different ball game. It meant that I had to steal from the shop. I was only nine years old then and being found with a packet of cigarettes at that age was deadly serious.

Loit soon left my school mates alone to concentrate on his new gold mine: me. I became increasingly exasperated as Loit tightened the noose. Once he came to my home and even threatened the house maid after I had gone AWOL. He was so daring that he would hang around even if my mother was there, pretending to be a friend. It affected my grades and soon my friends avoided me like a plague since he was frighteningly abusive to them if not to show what he could do to me if I did not comply.

It all ended when I was caught attempting to sneak out the biggest loot yet to him. It was a carton full of cigarette packets. An uncle who ran our shop had suspected something was amiss. I had started asking him for inordinate amounts of money for days in succession. It was unlike me and my father would have killed me if he knew. So a trap was set.

I was to lure my nemesis to the shop in a final gesture of forced generosity. I bargained with him that in exchange for a huge package of goodies I would buy my freedom. I personally knew that Loit would go back on his word anyway. He took the bait and came with two of his cohorts. I was scared. Loit had this aura of invincibility around him. On many occasions, people had tried to accost him, and failed to capture him.

My uncle wasn’t taking any chances and he had summoned the police. I handed over the booty to a gleeful Loit and that is the last I saw of him. Apparently they tailed them to a nearby bush where I assume they were to share the loot amongst themselves. He was carted off to a remand home for juvenile delinquents. By the time he was released, we had moved to another part of town.

Moving was no respite from bullying because at the new school I was transferred to had a strong legacy of bullying. We had characters like Cain, Mtsimana, Mafrondo and others who were involved in a frenzy of endemic bullying. When school knocked off, it was common to witness masses of pupils fleeing these little terrorists. No one was brave enough to stand up to them.

It was near impossible to avoid them because they would share stalking the school entrances among themselves and rob us of anything that was not nailed down. It was a generation of bullying because some of the older pupils who had left school before us had harrowing tales to tell. But this form of bullying affected me less because one could fall through the cracks.

Years later, when I began my teaching career in one of the most dangerous parts of the city, I encountered a different form of bullying. These boys had taken bullying to a corporate level. This was the time of the Terror Ten, the Brand New Heavies and the Dangerous National Army (DNA).

This was not Los Angeles-style gangsterism but juveniles who took advantage of moral erosion in the community and mass education in the school system. I was caught right in the middle because students at the school where I was a senior teacher consorted with them.

Things got out of hand when the Terror Ten started entering the school premises and on a number of occasions assaulted students right in front of terrified female teachers. One had to be careful on how to handle the situation though we knew that they had accomplices within the school who were using then to settle personal scores.

The trick was to weed out these insiders who were invariably girls and make an example of them through expulsion. The police would take care of the problem outside school. This two-pronged approach led to the eradication of the scourge. But not before several running battles and the gangs severely undermining the authority of teachers and local leaders.

On analysis, parents helped perpetuate the crisis by protecting their children who were gangsters. Some went to bail them out when they were arrested. Financially-burdened and helpless, parents and relatives could hardly feed these young charges, let alone educate them. This eroded their respect for them and they took to fending for themselves in any way they possibly could including through robbery and burglary.

Another factor was that at one point, the gangs saw themselves as heroes after their exploits were featured in local newspapers. By hitting the headlines, the gang members achieved what sociologists call ‘self-fulfilling prophesy’ and subsequently played to the press assembled gallery. This tended to perpetuate the problem.

Bullying is a sure way of making a child’s life miserable. They are made to feel helpless, frustrated and angry. I personally know how it felt. Parents should be on the look-out for telltale signs like falling grades and low self esteem. Take an active interest in your child’s school life. Parents should also make an effort to solve specific problems related to the bullying and develop self esteem and resilience in their children.



Seperated at birth: commuter drivers and touts

I DECIDED to take the commuter taxi here in Botswana the other day just to tap into the vibe of the moment.

It was then that I became convinced that commuter omnibus drivers (and their obnoxious touts) are born of the same mother. The difference is in the degree of obnoxiousness.

The experience took me back home to our brand of commuter drivers and touts in Zimbabwe — arguably the worst on the planet.

For lack of a better description, they are rude, crude, vulgar, immature, utterly corrupt and very loud. Their lack of etiquette is legendary and seeing them in their element would convince one that the sun shone from their backsides!

As I eavesdropped on the conversation, I realised that the bravado they display makes up for their serious deficit in elementary education.

The experience took me back to the days when the most reliable form of transport back home was the commuter taxi, otherwise known in those days as the emergency taxi. A bit of background will suffice at this stage.

With the steady decline of the public bus system, the Zimbabwe government was forced to look to alternatives in order to alleviate the crisis. And as the economy took a predictable nosedive, commuters found themselves having to scramble for transport.

A toxic combination of mismanagement and corruption was taking its toll on the Zimbabwe United Passenger Company (ZUPCO). For years, the backbone of the urban transport network, the company failed to put up any semblance of the organised ferrying of workers in the country. This called for a temporary solution that would allow ZUPCO to recover its former glory, a feat that would only find currency in a fairy tale.

Enter the ‘emergency’ taxi into the fray. Through the slight ‘tweaking’ of transport legislation, the government gave birth, by caesarean section, to a class of pseudo-entrepreneurs whose main brief was to take commuters from point A to point B, never mind how. They were supposed to be a stop gap measure, hence the complete absence of any standards under which they should operate.

This led to the resurrection of the most dilapidated of ramshackle contraptions that masqueraded as vehicles. In the beginning, there was the ancestor to the current kombis. They huffed and puffed around the city like the steam engines they were, ferrying passengers mostly between the high density residential areas and town.

The Commers and the Austins, with wooden benches for seats, caused untold damage to the ozone layer before they were overtaken by the ubiquitous Peugeot 404 station wagon which became the flagship of the taxi operators.

If we thought that this was progress in the transport sector, we were mistaken. The condition of the vehicles left a lot to be desired. This put them on the radar of an increasingly corrupt traffic police force. Add to the fact that in order to break even, the ‘tshovas’, as they were affectionately known, would be packed beyond redemption. These mobile coffins soon made their mark on accident statistics charts.

There used to be a saying those days that utshova is never full. At one roadblock, the police counted no less than 16 bodies crammed into one station wagon. They could have easily qualified for the Guinness Book of World Records if they applied. It can also be assumed that the cat and mouse relationship between traffic cops and emergency taxi drivers could have led to a complete breakdown of sanity in the urban transport sector.

As the tshovas deteriorated with constant abuse, so did the driver’s treatment of their passengers. The introduction of touts or ‘owindi’ made things worse. The touts were there ostensibly to make things easier for the driver who was supposed to concentrate on what he was employed to do. The role of touts was to ensure the car was full and that they collected the agreed fare from the clients.

The problem was the absence of any standard qualification for the job of a tout. Because of the need to cut costs and maximize profits, taxi drivers employed anything that the cat dragged in. The unfashionable job of a tout attracted the scum of the earth that included pickpockets, thugs, vagrants … just take your pick.

The obvious gap between commuters and touts soon led to inevitable clashes with the latter asserting authority by virtue of being able to determine who among those desperate for transport could climb on board.

If it came to the worst, an individual could be barred from boarding any other taxi just because ‘uyimbulu’ (arrogant). I won’t attempt to define ubumbulu in the eyes of a tout at this stage. That would require a whole article of its own.

But the truth be told, the power of touts rose quite alarmingly as transport woes increased. Dirty, scruffy and smelly touts soon ascended the totem pole, high enough to attract the amorous attentions of desperate women and silly schoolgirls. One can equate this phenomenon to the time when petrol attendants rose to the status of demigods at the height of fuel shortages in the country.

When the Peugeots died a natural death, the roomier and far smarter kombis took their place. One would have assumed that the drivers and their touts would clean up their act. Not on your life! The situation became worse as competition for passengers reached desperate proportions.

Unsuspecting commuters were lured into the kombis by seemingly polite touts only to be verbally and sometimes physically abused once inside. The police made things worse by soliciting for bribes at unofficial ‘tollgates’ dotted around the city raising tempers even further. Whatever the police levied on the drivers, it would be magnified on the passengers in the form of maltreatment.

The touts were willing accomplices in terrorising their clients. Sadly enough, no amount of complaining to the owners and the authorities has ever solved the problem. Attempts by government to arrest the rot have hit a brick wall.

It’s a social problem, says one analyst, and there are many of them in Zimbabwe. One in two people are analysts. It is a form of survival mechanism. As long as people rely on commuter transport, passengers will find themselves at the mercy of the drivers and touts.

No amount of evangelising or complaining will ever erase the problem. Unless of course the economy picks up, the government reverts to its responsibilities of providing and facilitating proper, affordable transportation.

In the meantime, commuters risk life and limb each time they step into a commuter omnibus. If the vehicle is in good condition, they do not have to imagine how it feels like to ride in a Formula One racing car. Never mind the fact that some roads in Zimbabwe have potholes big enough for one to plant a baobab tree, these drivers can do anything short of taking off like a jet fighter.

The vulgarity of commuter taxi drivers and touts is the stuff of legend. At one point I was convinced that for one to be employed, being able to deliver 100 swear words per minute was a must, that and the ability to swing a wheel spanner. By the way, I don’t think possessing a valid driver’s licence was absolutely necessary.