Small by Small
By Ike Anya
She strides into the wooden-floored classroom, sure-footed and statuesque, taking her place at the front, in the gap between the rows of desks occupied by our class of eleven-year-olds, and the blackboard. We hear her heels clacking on the concrete corridor leading to our classroom, even before she arrives. We smell her rich fruity perfume before we see her. I know what the scent is: Poison by Christian Dior. I have seen the bulbous purple and gold bottle with its crystalline cap sitting on my glamorous Auntie Mim’s dressing table.
Mrs Amobi strides back and forth in front of the blackboard, elegant in her shoulder-padded suit, the perfect scarlet ovals of her nails sweeping through the air as she gesticulates. Each movement seems to release a gust of Poison’d air that floats through the rapidly warming classroom. She asks us to open our General Science textbooks, lying neatly on our desks before us. The textbook that we use, the same one used by first-year secondary pupils across Nigeria is actually a textbook of integrated science, but at our school the subject is still called general science. It is probably something to do with tradition. Ours is one of the oldest schools in the country – the first set up by the colonial government – and a lot of emphasis is laid on doing things the King’s College way.
Mrs Amobi is teaching us about cells, how in the human body they aggregate to form tissues, which themselves form organs, and how organs form systems and systems, the body. She pauses from time to time to scribble in chalk on the blackboard, but the alchemy of her strong perfume and the tropical afternoon sun seems to induce a stultifying lethargy. With something of a sense of relief, we watch her clap her hands, releasing a flurry of chalk, announcing that the lesson is over and promising to see us again next week.
Hers is the last lesson period before break time, and we pour out into the corridors, heading for the tuck shop to buy biscuits and soft drinks at the kiosk or just to loiter, for those whose pocket money does not run to such luxuries.
After break, we settle back into class. One of the older boys, a prefect, four years ahead of us, walks in on an errand. He sniffs the air exaggeratedly and says, ‘Ah, I see you have had a general science lesson today.’
Excerpt from “Small by Small” copyright © 2023 by Ike Anya. Published by Sandstone Press.
About the book: As he works his way through his medical training, Ike Anya’s grandmother reassures him: everything worthwhile is achieved small by small. Ike’s story charts the triumphs and failures of his student days through to his first demanding year as a house officer. A medical memoir unlike any from the West, this is filled with the colour and vibrancy of tempestuous 1990s Nigeria, where political unrest, social change and a worsening economy make a doctor’s life particularly challenging.
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Ike Anya is a consultant in public health medicine working in Nigeria and the UK, most recently supporting the NHS response to COVID in Scotland. An honorary lecturer in public health at Imperial College, he teaches at Bristol University & the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. A 2007 TED Global Fellow, he co-founded Nigeria Health Watch, EpiAfric, TEDxEuston and the Abuja Literary Society.
He is an advisory council member of the AKO Caine Prize and published in The Guardian, Huffington Post, Granta, Catapult & Eclectica and in the anthology of essays by Nigerian writers on Nigeria: Of This Our Country. Co-editor of The Weaverbird Collection of New Nigerian Writing, he has an MA in Creative Non-Fiction from UEA.
You can read our interview with Ike Anya here
