Colossus in the Veld
At first it seemed like a fight. It was so much more than that. An essay from Michelle Chikaonda
One day early in my second year at a small, rural college preparatory boarding school in the heart of Malawi, one of the girls living in the room next to me, Ruth*, heard from a friend of a friend that one of the new girls at school, Miriam*, had been talking smack about her behind her back. Having generously extended the blessing of her friendship to Miriam on her first day of class that year, Ruth became enraged upon learning that despite these diplomatic overtures Miriam had been dragging her name through the mud, and, reportedly, for several weeks at that. Ruth, however, was not one to be so casually messed with as to be back-talked without consequence, and so a message was sent from her friends to some of Miriam’s other new friends, letting Miriam know that she was to meet Ruth at three o’clock P.M. — as soon as classes ended — in Ruth’s room.
“Just to talk,” Ruth’s message said.
Miriam then lived in the school house at the other end of the girls’ hostels, so we knew that even if she left class a little early it would still take her a while to get to Ruth’s room by three o’clock. Nonetheless, a bunch of us who also lived in Ruth’s corridor made sure to sprint from our own classes back to the hostels the second that our teachers let us out of classes that day, so as not to miss anything if for whatever reason Miriam happened to be on time for her meeting with Ruth.
But Miriam, much to our collective irritation, chose not to show up. Perhaps it was partly to do with being new at the school, thus not knowing the rules, but one didn’t simply not show up when one was summoned, whether it was for a good thing (a boyfriend who wanted to talk to you) or a bad thing (a teacher who unexpectedly needed to see you). That’s not how things worked. Ruth was infuriated. So she sent another message, telling Miriam that the new meet up time was now five o’clock — thirty minutes after the end of our twice-weekly sports practice, netball in that season — and that she wasn’t messing around: Miriam had better be there. By that time, however, more people had heard about the impending altercation (juicy boarding school gossip is like a spark in a drought-parched bush — it never stays small for very long), and so between four-thirty and five o’clock P.M. the corridor began to see an unusual amount of foot traffic, at least for that time on a mid-week day. By five o’clock there was a healthy crowd assembled outside of Ruth’s room, waiting for Miriam to show up and the event to begin. At least, we figured, she’d be freshly showered before getting dressed down again.
Five P.M. came and went — Miriam, however, did not. Once again, she failed to appear, and moreover no one actually seemed to know where she was, so she couldn’t be dragged over to us even if Ruth and her crew had decided this was the only option. At five-fifteen P.M. we all realized that Miriam wasn’t going to show up, because dinner was at five-forty P.M., and new as she was to the school she would have still been well aware that nobody would be trying to miss a meal over some personal beef. Grumbling and disappointed, we slowly dispersed to get ourselves ready for dinner. Right before heading to the dining hall, though, Ruth ordered a final message sent to Miriam, letting her know that the last chance meeting time would be eight-thirty P.M. that night — right after Prep Time, designated quiet time for homework between six-thirty and eight-thirty P.M. each weekday night — and if she wasn’t there, serious things would go down later. Except there was really only one serious thing in that category: being masula¹-ed. With venomous words from an unforgiving crowd, being taken completely apart.
Reflecting back on this episode, it does seem a bit like a boarding school version of a gladiator fight at the Colosseum. However, unlike the Colosseum fights of Rome, which were underwritten and supported by the government itself, we had to keep these incidents relatively contained rather than allowing them to become overly public: the teachers would never have allowed such a thing to proceed to completion were it ever to rise to their attentions. Our school wasn’t one of those schools where the administration quietly accepted students’ needs to just duke it out on occasion — we were regularly informed that we were supposed to be cultivating ourselves into future leaders of the nation, not into hoodlums, vendors and other societal detritus. It was for good reason, then, that each of the meeting times were scheduled for times when we were out of our teachers’ sights and minds — after classes, between sports practice and mealtime, between prep time and quiet time — and the corridor prefects never intervened, not if they intended to keep orderly halls for the rest of the year. In my time at that school, in fact, I only observed one such masula-ing ever happen in a highly visible and accessible place, on the campus’s main social meet-up area about a year after the Miriam episode (aptly named by the school’s founder, in an homage to classical Rome, the Appian Way.).
There was, therefore, a peculiar precision about the masula-ing procedure. Unlike regular street fights — the kind one sees glorified on World Star Hip-Hop, for example — these altercations were not merely about impulsively settling scores or personal grievances, and, unlike targeted bullying campaigns, any single individual could really only ever be masula-ed once in one’s lifetime at that school (it is unclear to me why this was the case — either we deemed masula-ing to be too brutal to do more than once to someone, or because people tended to aggressively course correct after one episode and so a second showdown was never required.). Thus these episodes were far larger than merely the interpersonal conflicts they arose from — these episodes were about the highly public sanctioning of aberrant behaviour, or at least behaviour deemed aberrant according to our rarely spoken aloud but nonetheless universally understood social codes. These episodes were also about righting upsets to power structures we had all silently agreed to abide by — whether these structures served us particularly well or not. And if the purpose of the masula-ing was not merely to put someone back in their place or to inflict pain, but making sure the whole community observed these transgressed rules being reinforced — then a masula-ing, by definition, had to be necessarily and cruelly unforgiving.
Miriam, then, had not merely crossed Ruth. Miriam had suggested in her actions that our small boarding school community’s agreed-upon thrones and court appointments could be effortlessly toppled. Critically, she had also implied in her actions that this could be done without earning the clout to do it — she had just started at the school, after all, and while I recall her hair and make-up being on point I don’t remember her having the kind of naturally compelling aura that could otherwise catapult new girls quickly to the top of the A-list despite no prior history at the school. Furthermore it was one thing, if one didn’t particularly like one’s place in the social order, to slowly but diligently climb the ladder by way of upgrades to one’s hair, clothes, vernacular and alliances: it was quite another to attempt to single-handedly overthrow the order outright and proclaim oneself queen, without having taken time to really understand the order to begin with. Miriam, it appeared, had attempted the latter coup. If she hadn’t been masula-ed by Ruth, then, it would only have been a matter of time before someone else decided that it was time for her short-lived glory to end.
Academically resolute and socially irrelevant as I was in those days, I had already decided for myself at dinner that evening that I would not budge from my room’s desk until the very end of prep time. At eight-twenty P.M., however, I began hearing a rising cacophony in the corridor — feet slapping over concrete, doors squeaking open and slamming shut, more and more girls whispering and giggling — and at eight twenty-five I finally gave up my pretense of disinterest. I opened the door to my room just in time to observe the leader of my year’s most popular clique, who otherwise lived way on the other end of the hostels, strolling into the corridor. Flanking her were the rest of her crew, all looking smug and defiant: they could have been given fatigue (manual labor) or even detention if they’d been found outside of their rooms before eight-thirty, but that night they didn’t care. This was too important. At any rate even some of our teachers were afraid of them, and I did have to admit that their social authority at the school was impressive, despite occasionally ending up on the wrong edges of their shoes.
“We heard there was going to be a fight,” the clique leader declared, not to anyone in particular, as she breezed by.
“Entertainment, ekse³,” piped in one of the girls in the back of the formation, pattering quickly behind her crew.
By eight-thirty P.M. the corridor looked less like a school dormitory and more like a party. Granted, a single-sex pajama party — what with all the girls with their heads packed in rollers or tied in scarves, waists wrapped in chitenjes² if they’d walked across the hostels and in their nightgowns if they’d come from nearby, flip-flops so hastily slapped on that a few pairs were on the wrong feet — but a party nonetheless. Everyone was trying to get a place in Ruth’s room for a front seat to the drama, and she and her crew eventually had to start kicking people out. “Only the people involved can be in here, only the people involved,” Ruth asserted with a slightly dramatized annoyance, like a concert MC might, waving her hands dismissively as she started turning people away from her room. My roommate, a good friend of Ruth’s but not actually in her crew and thus not involved, began playing bouncer, directing traffic through our room and the room on the other side of Ruth’s so that people could instead situate themselves in the small yard on the other side of the corridor, to eavesdrop from there instead. All of the rooms had garden doors and long windows facing this yard, and on weekend afternoons we would sit outside in the sun, doing each other’s hair, studying, or just hanging out, listening to music and goofing off. That night, though, the back garden became the overflow auditorium to the biggest show that most of us would have ever witnessed until then. Someone was about to get masula-ed.
FThe possibility exists, and it perturbs me now to consider it, that Miriam was not quite a categorical deviant to our social order. Rather, there is a dimension to her actions for which she instead might have symbolised the most deeply-protected fantasies of those of us who had become sick and tired of being under our peers’ heels for no reason other than simply being ourselves, but were too frightened to really do anything about it, and thus briefly glad to see someone else take that lead. After all — didn’t we all secretly wish we could finally tell the social patricians where to stuff it? Weren’t we exhausted of being picked on, laughed at, made fun of, humiliated, ignored (or much worse, if some of the analogous tales from the boys’ hostels are to be believed)? In retrospect I know I was fed up — though I had bad hair, glasses that were, according to a friend, “more like windows,” and no particularly notable wardrobe to speak of, it seemed unfair that those externalities alone were sufficient to send me to the laughably invisible corner of the social heap, with no recourse to visibility unless the doors were graciously opened by the rulers themselves. Were we all just implacably mired in our precise locations in that social sphere, then, never to be permitted advancement unless enough players left the web by circumstance (new school) or consequence (expulsion for finally crossing lines that teachers couldn’t possibly ignore)?
So then Miriam came along, a new player in a years-old game, and resoundingly declared, “Screw this.” And, for the fleeting moment in which she upended all the major players’ beliefs in their infallibility, she soared, in so many ways we social plebeians had privately dreamed of. Yet, when she was violently called to task for this, we not only didn’t intervene to stop it, but instead cheered it on — eagerly, even furiously. Perhaps in order to remind ourselves never to dare to dream so far, or, perhaps, in so ruining Miriam, seeking to destroy the niggling thought that we could never fully banish from our minds: that maybe things did not have to be this way after all.
Miriam’s masula-ing took place beginning eight forty-five P.M. that evening. It thus lasted only fifteen minutes — since free time ended at nine o’clock — and not the full thirty minutes that had been carved out for it. Partly because she had arrived late (smart on her end, certainly, but a further sign of disrespect and insubordination to everyone else), and partly because it just ended up taking that long to determine who actually had reasonable claim to taking a front seat to the spectacle in Ruth’s room versus who was decidedly only at observer status, and so needed to get out and allow space in the room for those who Miriam had acutely injured. Though I was friends with Ruth I was definitely not one of the involved folk, and so I traipsed out to the back garden with the rest of the garden gazers, and took up a spot near the corner of the window to Ruth’s room that was closest to my own. Across from me was my roommate’s best friend, and behind me was another girl from the same crew as her, a cousin of one of my classmates. Though most of us took care to keep at a healthy distance from Ruth’s room doors — in case someone came flying out in a fit of emotion, or if a teacher made a sudden unexpected appearance and we all had to quickly clear out — my roommate’s best friend defied this unspoken parameter completely, and instead leaned so close to Ruth’s window that I was afraid that she might trip over the bushes beneath her and crash into the window, disrupting the events or even making us new targets of the ringleaders’ vitriol that night. I certainly didn’t have the stomach for being turned on like that, and I don’t think anyone else in our bootleg amphitheater did either.
Once it finally started, however, the masula-ing went ahead without interruption, and everyone in attendance mostly got what we had all come for. The last thing we onlookers saw before Ruth drew her curtains across her windows was Miriam standing completely alone in the middle of the room, surrounded by all the people she’d wronged and then various crew members angrily backing their friends up. Soon enough all we could hear was a chorus of people passionately cursing her out, sometimes one by one, sometimes in tandem with each other, leaving no opportunity for Miriam to attempt to defend herself. That ship had sailed five and a half hours earlier, at the ringing of the class-end bells at three o’clock.
“You guys, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Miriam pleaded intermittently amidst the din.
“Shut up!” All the people surrounding her yelled in return each time, as they continued their barrage of verbal assaults. Spitting unbroken streams of bile about her mind, her looks, her character, demanding to know who she thought she was to start issues like that with them — to us, the audience, this whole thing felt wild. We eavesdroppers simply stood there silently shaking our heads as the screaming and crying went on, alternately pitying Miriam and feeling vicarious vindication through her targets, now her captors. I had never before then heard the surrounding hostels at free time so silent, save for that shouting; normally, between eight-thirty and nine o’clock, there would have been multiple stereos blaring that week’s chart-toppers from Channel O, faucets squeaking on and off as girls brushed their teeth and washed their faces pre-bedtime, raucous peals of laughter as someone down the hallway held court dishing the day’s nkhani⁴. Not this evening. That night it seemed all of the hostels stayed respectfully soundless, so we could all clearly hear and partake in the verbal bloodbath, even if some of us only passively. And we needed the silence in order to absorb as much as we could: tomorrow night we would either be re-telling the story, or find ourselves still in it.
Given the level to which the masula-ing had been built up to prior to its occurrence, its long term coda was, to say the least, unexpected. For one thing, Miriam had not been cowed into silence and permanent shame, as the intended effect of the masula-ing had been: on the contrary, we heard that she eventually spilled to one of the teachers about what had happened, or at least that’s the rumor that went around. Regardless of how the knowledge of the masula-ing had made it to school’s faculty, in the days that followed several of the event’s instigators were summoned to the second floor of the main administration building, for questioning by the school’s higher-ups. After a round of interrogations for which I later learned all the people called up had mutually agreed beforehand not to snitch, thus being completely unproductive, Ruth and her crew — plus anyone else reportedly inside that room — were promptly suspended for a week anyway. Their parents were notified the same day, and requested to come pick them up before sundown. The suspensions really didn’t do anything to scare us or them into not doing something like that again, though: if anything, Ruth and her crew returned to school emboldened, and at even higher social statuses than before. For in a twisted way the suspensions meant that their loyalties, at least to the student-determined social order, were unimpeachable, even on threat of the withdrawal of their schooling — that they would gladly take bullets for themselves and their peers before they would let themselves be crossed by anyone without consequence, especially in the ways they felt Miriam had crossed them.
Secondly, though — Ruth and Miriam actually ended up becoming friends, eventually nearly best friends. As clichéd a page out of the Teenage Friendship Playbook as that sounds — becoming best friends with someone who was once your mortal enemy — it seems that their likenesses had simply brought each other’s identical barbs out before generating the sympathies toward one another that they eventually discovered. It also likely helped that in an effort to force Ruth and Miriam to make amends, the three housemistresses of the girls’ hostels made the decision to move Miriam to the room next to Ruth’s. Ruth and Miriam turned out to love the same music (Monica, All Saints, Backstreet Boys) and took glee in telling the same kinds of jokes (really bad jokes centered around groan-inducing puns, that somehow became funnier and funnier as the trains of terrible jokes continued). They both favoured heavy layers of eyeliner and face powder for their daily make-up regimens, and, having the same taste in jewelry, regularly swapped their varying types of sleek hoop earrings with each other. Most importantly, though, they had the same fatal personality bent: at once the most loyal of friends and the gossipiest too, capable of fiery, destructive explosions of hatred if openly crossed. We all learned to take care to stay on their good sides once the two of them forged their alliance. Within a few months we became accustomed to walking into Ruth’s room to find Miriam hanging out on the bed while Ruth sat at the desk, chortling between themselves before turning to invite us to join in that afternoon’s news reporting session, as though the explosive start to their lives as friends had been barely a blip on a monitor screen. Some kind of demolition, indeed.
And yet — maybe a blip in our lives is all the masula-ing could have necessarily been. If indeed the masula-ing had taken place not quite because of Miriam personally, but because of what Miriam represented to myriad dimensions of our social landscape, then it stands to reason that the fight, in a sense, was not actually a real fight. Rather, it was a series of moves on a community chessboard, that was both all of our own design and way bigger than any of us at the very same time. A game that needed to be played to its necessary conclusion, in the same way that opposing pieces on a chessboard might force conquests of one another in order for a side as a whole to try and secure advantage in the game; but still a game that wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for any of the players, not even those who appeared at surface level to be the victors. Perhaps, then, as real an experience as the masula-ing felt at the time, we all nonetheless understood, at day’s end, that none of this was fully about any of one of us, even in the fevered midst of our glee at the fall of a new aspiring queen. Maybe, despite our various social privations, we were, in fact, completely at home in our places in this web, secure in the familiarities of our stations in this Colossus in the veld.
* Names have been changed.
- Masula: To take apart — can be used in both the literal and figurative senses
2. Chitenje: A brightly colored wax print cloth wrapper, commonly worn by women throughout Sub-Saharan Africa
3. Ekse: Sometimes also spelled phonetically “eksay” or shortened in speech to “aisay,” an expression common throughout southern Africa used primarily to punctuate a point made before or after it.
4. Nkhani: News (formal sense) or gossip (informal sense)
Michelle Chikaonda is a nonfiction writer from Blantyre, Malawi, currently living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has won the Literary Award for Narrative Nonfiction of the Tucson Festival of Books, the Stephen J. Meringoff Award for Nonfiction of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers, and the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship for writers of color from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently published in The Globe and Mail, The Curated Body, The Zitheka Monthly, and in the Oracle Fine Arts Review of the University of South Alabama, an essay for which she received a Pushcart nomination. You can find more of her on here website: michellechikaonda.work and on Medium Michelle A. Chikaonda. You can follow her on Twitter @machikaonda.
