A Short History of Zaka the Zulu
He was always a bit of an odd fish, Zaka
the Zulu, but he was the last boy any of us expected to be accused of murder.
Not a wit, a sportsman, or a clown, he was not a popular boy at our school,
where he wore his school uniform every day of the week, even on Sundays. Of
course, we could have admired him for his brains. In the high-achieving
hothouse that was the College of Loyola, which won the Secretary’s Bell Award
fifteen years in a row, we admired any boy we labelled a razor. Zaka, though,
made such a song and dance about his sharpness that you’d have thought he was the only
razor in the school.
He became even less popular when he was
made head prefect. In a school like Loyola, where the task of keeping everyday
order is entrusted to the prefects, being head can bring out the tyrant in even
the nicest chap, and Zaka brought to the position an obnoxious self-importance
that made him absolutely insufferable. As head prefect, he issued demerits for
the slightest offenses, marking down boys who did not wear ties with their
khaki shirts at Benediction, making spot checks for perishable goods in our
tuck boxes and trunks, sniffing for beer on the breath of every boy who had
snuck out to Donhodzo, the rural bottle store in the valley below our school,
and, from the strategically placed Prefects’ Room, making forays at unexpected
times to see if he could catch anyone smoking outside the library.
It seemed to us that he would not be happy
until he had taken away all our pleasures. We were sure that it was Zaka who
suggested to Father Rector that the Middle and Junior House boys should have an
extra period of prep on Friday afternoons. He wanted us out of the way when the
Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary girls, whom we called Mary Wards, took
their weekly swim.
The swimming pool was set in a quadrangle,
with the Junior House common room at one end and, at the other, the Middle and
Senior House dormitories. From the vantage points offered by the common room’s high
windows and the dormitories’ balconies, the whole school could have a good view of the swimming
Mary Wards. They were sylphs in our eyes, every single one of them, from the
fattest to the thinnest, not because they were particularly beautiful but
because they were the only girls we saw on a daily basis. Imagine four hundred
boys with raging hormones, locked away for three months at a time at a boarding
school deep in rural Mashonaland, and you will understand that even our
choirmaster’s wife, who had more hair on her chin than her husband did, was—to some of
us, anyway—a vision of beauty.
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