I have been thinking about you a lot lately. Not as before—I reassure myself that this time is different because in my thinking, I chastise myself and atone for the sins I committed against you, such as in the confession that now follows.
I imagine you knew little of the things for which you stood trial; the tenacity of gossip as an instrument of violence lies in the miserly means with which it allows you to control your narrative. We, on the other hand, believed ourselves to know everything about you; at least about the person that you were within the gates of Stella Matutina. Fourteen-year-old omniscients, we engineered your character from excruciating scrutiny. And how hideously compelling the stories were: Teacher Rita leaves this besotted lover for that one. The scandal! The mouthwatering debauchery! None of it was true, and yet we could not turn away from the contrived spectacle of your life. God knows we knew it was wrong; something in those mind-numbing 6 a.m. masses and daily 9 p.m. prayers should have formed within us a conscience to repent the sin of slander, yet we were so absolutely consumed by the fervor of our collective immorality.
You were the thing we could not give up. The only female teacher in a Catholic boarding school of 500 girls, you were the shimmering gem in the desert that makes travelers run mad. You had no right to anonymity. You stood out because we all looked to you for cues on what it was to be a woman.
Perhaps this is no consolation, but the scandals we made up about your life were a refuge from the monotony of our own lives. “She is coming!” one of us would say, spotting you meters away as you emerged from the staff room, your crimson matte lips coated with the residue of laughter. It was small things like this that served as evidence for allegations formed against you. What could you have possibly been laughing at, so carelessly unbridled?
“She is leaving her husband for Kavi, you know.”
“It’s true! Hm, don’t you see the way they drag along together in the compound like a
pair of goats, giggling about who knows what?”
“The woman has no shame!”
We would watch your generous silhouette in the reflection of the classroom windows glide through the compound like silk on smooth skin. And when your scent—so strong, it flavored the water at the backs of our tongues—announced that you were close enough, and we would pretend to look away. You would teach, never begging for our attention, and we would follow with a curiosity for the secrets that lay behind your chalk-freckled face, reading your body with a thirst and speculating wildly about hallway rendezvous.
Of course, none of this was helped by the stories you liberally shared. How before you were Teacher Rita, you were Janet, femme fatale with the lithe honey legs for whom suitors toppled on hand and knee, only to be glamorously rejected. How you refused to marry the first man you ever loved because he insisted on joining the army. You would never be with a military man—it was more proximity to war and loss than you could bear to relive in one lifetime. How you settled for your husband instead. You had enough in common: he had also been orphaned at a young age, loved music, and was a teacher at another school. The most cherished of the things you shared was your daughter. We reveled in whatever bits and pieces of your life you offered, and how lucky for us, for you were such a gracious sharer. You told us how you loved being the only woman in the teaching staff, but not for the reasons one would think: you had always preferred the friendship of men and enjoyed the way they spoiled and fawned over you.
Naturally, this was added ammo to our arsenal to be used however and whenever: restlessly lined up at the toilets during break time, round circles in the séchoirs after class washing our uniforms, through tired whispers in the dormitories. By third term, the rumors had legs of their own. You had been seen with Totoma, the A-level Chemistry teacher, disappearing into the labs all the way down by the Rusizi classrooms.
“The gateman caught them right before they did the thing, you can ask him!”
And sure enough, one of us did ask, or so she said. “It’s true!”
Your husband came to school to confront you—people saw him. He swarmed in calling out your name, a raggedy tall man, eyes taut with madness and hair sparse on his head like sun-drying sorghum—no wonder you cheated. None of us had actually witnessed any of this, though we would have played out how he sobbed like a child as if we had cradled him with our own hands.
“Egoko, all the teachers were there, even the headmistress.”
“Do you know how she looked at him? Like a dog who’s had its fill!”
“Honestly, I don’t know what she gives those men, they would probably follow her to earth’s underbelly if she wanted them to.“
The gossip blazed; you couldn’t tell the truth from a lie, there was only what was said. You must have known something, passing by blood-thirsty hordes of girls in the compound, hissing and laughing at you. Yet you said nothing. Silently persecuted.
Thinking of you now, I realize that I know nothing about you beyond these collective creativities, tactlessly splayed on the canvas of your life. You existed insofar as our gaze and the juries that formed at whatever expression danced across your face. You will ask yourself, as I do now, why we had such a cruel appetite for your life; perhaps it was boredom peppered with ressentiment. Perhaps our obsession with your womanhood was part of a cataclysmic need to understand our forming yet repressed adolescent desires. Whatever the case, we reduced you to a caricature, rejected your personhood, exiled you. I would like to believe that none of the things we said about you made any real impact on your life—I know that this is probably not true. When we talk about you now, we do not remember wisdom or inspiration, though I am sure these were the things you hoped would stay with the girls whose lives you sought to touch. These half-truths are what you are to us, and that is a great violence.
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Image: MS Co-Pilot AI remixed