By Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha
Anyone who went through secondary school hostel/boarding house life knows that often, some seniors or some of the bigger boys or girls often bully the juniors. Yes, girls bully the junior girls too. Bullying comes in different forms – in form of depriving the junior ones of their own ‘provision’, extortion, psychological torture, and/or physical beating. There used to be the formal bullying, where all Form One students in the hostel went through what was dubiously called ‘fagging.
On that day, often at night, all the kids in Form One would be assembled in a hall and subjected to all forms of indignities, from bathing them with cold water in a cold weather, pouring food remnants on them, and beating them. After that ritual, they would now say ‘Your tail has been cut off.’ Sometimes, the young and the vulnerable ones continue to be bullied till they get to a senior class or till their tormentors leave the school. I don’t remember now whether that was how the notion of school father started, a senior student who would be one’s protector.
