Marco Polo the Second

_{Photo by Taylor Flowe}

I've come to realize that people like to show power no matter how little their position is. It's in the human nature (or at least in most human nature). I've once spoken about the one time I almost lost my admission in school and the one person who I thought could save me then decided to become an ass and made the whole thing much more stressful for me. This person was a lady, a mother (like she said), and yet when I spoke to her the way a son would speak to his mother, she had sent me away, not caring about the damage her refusal to help me was about to cause in my life. Luckily for me, I had found some other ways to rectify the issue.

Well, on today's topic on people who loves to show power and also abuse it, I will take you guys back to my primary school.

Many of you might be wondering how I still can remember something that way back, well that is because if I had a list of assholes that have come and gone in my life, Mr Ben would be the number one on that list.

You see Ben was my class teacher and for some sick reasons, the man enjoyed being feared by us little kids. He would hit us at any slightest mistake without bothering about any consequences and that was because Nigerian parents are those kind of people that are wired in a way that they believe that if a teacher flogs a child, then it's probably because the child did something wrong and deserves it. They were a huge fan of the saying "spear the rod and spoil the child" and none of them wanted their child spoilt.

So knowing that no parent would come question him for the way he maltreated their kids, Ben went crazy. And the most saddest thing was that he rarely flog the girls. The man had a soft spot for them and back then, aside from getting angry at that, I never really thought much about it but now that I do, I just hope Ben wasn't doing nothing to those girls because the man was really sick in the head.

And as if he wasn't satisfied with the torment he was giving to us, Ben decided to take it a step further. One day, he gathered us in class and told us a story about a man called Marco polo. He said a lot of things, none which I remember but then he had ended his long speech with an order, Ben wanted us to call him Marco Polo the second and any child who refuses to do so would be punished.

We all thought it was a joke because back then, what we called our teachers was uncle or Aunty if she was a lady, and now he wanted some title to his name. A friend of mine had raised up his hand to ask a question and he had mistakenly said the word "uncle" and the man pounced on him with his cain. And when he was done, he asked him to carry on with his question.

I remember getting really scared because it wasn't even ten seconds ago when he told us about his new title and now he was flogging my friend because he didn't call him his new name.. I remember thinking to myself "Wait, has the title thing taken effect already?"

My friend had asked a brilliant question by the way, he had asked if we were to call him the name only in class where it would be just us or everywhere, even in the presence of other teachers. And the man had instructed us to say it everywhere.

When we finally graduated from that class, we never saw Ben again and we honestly have no idea what happened to him, but if God by any chance answered our prayers, then Ben is probably dead or suffering from an incurable disease.