The Breezer’s Chronicles

First published in the Alliance High School Centenary Magazine, on 1st March, 2026.

My mother bought the uniform two sizes too large. The consensus among mothers, arrived at through the kind of research that fathers know little about, was that boys in boarding school swell. Something about what they are fed there. So, she bought ahead, into the future, into the big boy she was already picturing. The problem was I was not yet that boy. I was still a sickly kid from Kakamega, the second-smallest boy from my class in primary school. And so, as I loitered within the grounds of the great Alliance High School, I was dressed in a uniform that looked like it was borrowed from an uncle.

They called it Bush. Named for the thickets in Thogoto, right next to the Ondiri swamp. Bush was cold, constantly cold, conspiring with the administration to freeze us to death, and I suspect it was no coincidence that jackets had also been declared by the school as illegal. The upper field was green in the way that serious, old institutions are green: not accidentally, but with curated intent. As I walked around the school for the first time, I watched as my future unfolded before my eyes, struck by the quiet terror of a boy who has just understood, for the first time in his life, that this was where it all begins.

Smith House became my new home. It was in an old part of the school. It was nothing to write home about. The bathroom was always damp. Always. I am not sure it was ever dry at any point during those four years, or the forty years before that. On the first night, lying in my bed which was closest to the toilets, I wanted to go back home. While other Form 1s were fast asleep in their newfound paradise, I envied the seniors enjoying the small dignities of rank in their cubicles: a closed door, their own windows, lights burning long after lights-out had been announced and enforced upon the rest of us. Form 1s had no such rights. We had the darkness, the smell, a sad nickname – raboli, which sounds awfully close to rubble – and the hope that our sentence would eventually end when we become Form 2s next year.

Occasionally, the travails of Form 1 felt like they were leading to early onset dementia. You would go to the hanging lines, precisely where you had aired your shirts and shorts, and find someone else’s clothes drying there instead. At first you really believed it was all you. That you were becoming forgetful, disorganised. But then after asking around, you discover that almost every Form 1 had something that had gone missing.

Then you realised you were not only in a jungle, but that you were the prey. And there was no room for ethics in the jungle. It was not theft, it was resource redistribution, and the seniors needed the resources the most. If you accepted this logic, the system worked. I once conducted a redistribution operation to retrieve a replacement shirt after I had lost track of all my other shirts. I decided to carry out the mission across the yard at the Grieve House, so that none of my Smithian brothers would suffer the consequences of my desperation. The shirt I recovered turned out to be mine. I had stolen back my own shirt across international waters.

Although the school has a beautiful Chapel, which was an architectural marvel standing at the far end of the Upper Field, in practise, the dining hall was the real church. On most days, you do not walk to the dining hall. No. The moment the bell rang, you ran. You ran from wherever you were like a bat out of hell, not because some prefect was watching, but because Captain’s Principle was real, and it was merciless. If it was declared before you got into the dining hall, you’d watch your brothers dissolve your slaos and drain your tea without mercy. Nothing personal. Unless you were a Form 4. Then it was personal.

If you still had some edible items in your locker, which was unlikely after constant raids by your fellows, you would return to the dorms to brew some cold power and put out the inferno in your belly. And if you had coins in your possession and some connections, as a member of the 1%, you would snag some rara from the scouts’ canteen, or maybe a half-loaf from Kaggs, and escape the fate of the 99%.

Kaggs was the other church. When the hunger of puberty comes calling, all negotiations are conducted in strength. Every boy made his pilgrimage to Kagina’s canteen with the same currency, but the boys who came out on top were those who had the mechanism to secure what they wanted.

Socialising required confidence, a confidence of the specific variety that is entirely unavailable to a Form 2 who has not yet grown a strand of beard and whose voice is still indistinguishable from his sister’s. And so, from funkiez to floodiez, most of us were breezers.

It was no fault of our own. Even when that lass from Across seemed to enjoy your company, the slicers were always there, circling. Some of them were Form 3s, which meant they could claim to be officials of this club and that society, while you, as a Form 2, were a house committee member at best, a custodian of brooms and slashers. Some boys had finally broken through into puberty and started sprouting like the maize plants of Kakamega: tall, muscular, with a tuft of their own on their chins. Some even had trousers. You needed a slip to wear trousers outside approved periods. The Form 2 who showed up to a social in trousers was already operating on an entirely different level of fashion.

But breezers had their ways. In response to our disadvantages, we learnt to develop our own niche economies. Mine was calligraphy and poetry. For the price of a decent visit to Kaggs, enough for a half-loaf plus a smoky, I would compose a Victorian sonnet for you to send to that crush of yours at Across. Pay extra and I would dress the envelope with a flourish of elegant letters. What happened after the envelope left my hands was not my department.

I did, once, write my own letter to Across. This was to a certain damsel I had met at the Smith House socials in the music room. I deployed the collective might of the entire Victorian era to compose that letter. I even borrowed some Brut cologne and doused the envelope with it generously. But then days went by without a reply. By the third and fourth week, even the laughter had died down. I maintained that the postal system was unreliable. A response would come. The term ended. I never spoke of it again. The postal system needs to be disbanded.

Then came Form 3, and with it, a problem I had not anticipated. Someone made me a prefect in Form 3. I want you to understand that I did not want this. I tried to resign within the first week. The Senior Lib Captain, JJ, was firm and final: resigning was not a feature of the prefecture. I was in. I wore the badge. I wore the tie. I wore the symbols of power, but they owned me.

The PCR had a picture. Old, British, decorative in the way that uncomfortable things are made decorative so they can feel useful. In it, aristocrats. A leashed primate at their feet, small, diminished, ornamental. The picture had been hanging there long enough for the white of its paper to turn cream and lose its sheen. When we were sworn in as Form 3 cops, we were asked to examine it, to interpret it. Some of us did. Some of us stood in silence. Eventually, a Form 4 cop told us exactly what it meant with the quiet satisfaction of a villain explaining his plan. I understood then that the aristocrats, the villain, was now us.

By then, a breezer at heart, I had spent too many hours in the junior and senior libraries, reading the wrong books, by Hobbes, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and others who ask inconvenient questions about power and the people who hold it. Those books gave me a conscience I had not asked for. They made me incapable of being the kind of prefect my fellows were willing to aspire to. It did not take long for JayZ, our principal at the time, to get wind of a fifth column of my creation. On one fine morning parade, he announced that he had received intel that a prefect was inciting students against the prefecture. That prefect knew who he was. That prefect should proceed, after parade, not to the dining hall but to the principal’s office and kneel at his door.

It was not a mystery who he meant. Everyone knew. Everyone in the market knows who the madman is. Just the previous day, we had discussed the prefecture at the debate club, where as the chairman and insider, I had appointed myself the bearer of the burden of reform at whatever cost. A cost that only a mad man would accept to pay.

And so, as the masses drifted to the dining hall, I marched to the principal’s office as to the gallows. Alone. Trembling. Too terrified to cry. I knelt at the principal’s door and waited for my fate.

Whatever happened inside that office requires a stronger drink to narrate than the tea I am sipping right now. What I will say is that after 15 minutes in that office, I emerged a changed man. Not broken, no. Grown. I had touched the flames of power with my bare hands and my palm was singed. The zeal of my idealism had been extracted by the school I loved the most. In its place: clarity. When power clings to you, even as you reject it, its weight is still yours to bear, and you must steer the person you are while you hold it. And so, I served the rest of my sentence as a prefect only in name.

The prefecture, as it existed then, is now long gone. I am glad it was disbanded. Its ending was not a surprise to those of us who watched it operate from the inside, who walked with it at midnight. Some lessons cost more than others. This one cost me something I have not fully named, even now. But it made me see, first-hand, that there are machines whose gears are visible only to those being ground by them, and that sometimes the choices you make when you are a child may be the toughest you will ever make in your life.

Form 4 comes like the last page of a book you forgot you were reading. Suddenly, everything you complained about for the past three years is coming to an end. Someone else is now pocketing the calligraphy commissions. The rara economy that sustained you through the leanest terms is no longer under an ally’s control. You hand over the debate club to someone whose arguments differ from yours. You pass the writers’ club to the next editor whose pen is less reckless than yours.

Then you start to notice things you did not notice before. That Bush had taken an academic scalpel to the commons of Kenya, and from it extracted a selection of the most promising boys in the country, and put them in the same uniform, the same dining hall, the same dormitories, the same classrooms. A boy in your class was the son of someone whose name appeared in every newspaper. Or maybe he was the son of someone whom the newspapers will never know, from the corners of Kakamega that no one remembers outside of an election. Maybe he was pulled out of a life that looked nothing like this and deposited into the same class as you, in an oversized uniform.

Bush did not care about any of us individually. Across 1,200 days, it processed us all through the same githeri, the same punishment parade, the same sports, the same Captain’s Principle. It subjected everyone equally to the cold of Kikuyu and the systems it had built over decades, and every week without fail, reminded us of its aspiration:

That from it may go out, men,

Strong in body, mind and character,

Who will serve their fellows faithfully.

And so, the four years of conditioning produced something recognisably similar across all of us. Something familiar. Something that fifteen years later still lifts my eyebrows whenever I see the name Alliance. Alliance made me a reader, which made me a thinker, which made me a breezer, which made me an artist, which made me a small revolutionary, which made me a strategist, which made me prepared for the world I encountered outside its walls.

I am proud to be a Busherian. Ask me on a good day and I will tell you why. Ask me on a bad day and I will still tell you, but the answer will be more complicated. And even if you don’t ask me, I will still tell you that I went to Alliance.