The Boy Who Called Them Stupid

I was a teacher of Civic Education. That is the joke I did not see coming. Every morning I stood before a classroom in Jarra Jiffen and explained the state to children who had never asked for it, n the constitution, the rights of a citizen, the duties of government, the arms of power that were supposed to hold a country together. I taught it well, or well enough. I drew the three arms of government on the board; executive, legislature, judiciary and somewhere in that diagram, almost as an afterthought, sat the institutions that were meant to enforce all of it. The police were a paragraph in a textbook to me. A clause. Something you mentioned and moved past quickly, the way you move past a subject you don't feel like defending.

I believed in the state in the abstract, the way you believe in a river you have only seen on a map. The theory was clean. The constitution said this, the law said that, the citizen has this right and that duty, and if everyone simply understood the document, the country would run itself like a well-tuned engine. That was the version I taught. It cost me nothing to believe it, because I never had to enforce a single line of it myself. And yet, outside that classroom, I carried the same opinion as everyone else around me: the police were fools.

Not fools in the way you insult a stranger and forget it by evening. It was quieter than that, and more settled, the kind of belief a community holds without needing to argue for it, the way you might agree that the rains are late this year, or that fuel prices only ever go one direction. If a crowd gathered in the market and word came that the police were on their way, the reaction was never curiosity about what had happened. It was a kind of tired certainty. Here they come, to make a small thing into a big thing. If someone was arrested, our first instinct, before we knew a single fact of the case, was that the police had gotten it wrong again; too rough, too slow to understand, too quick to assume the worst of the person in front of them. We watched them through a civilian lens only, and through that lens they were always heavy-handed, always the last to be trusted and the first to be blamed.

I remember sitting with other teachers during break, cups of attaya going round, and someone would bring up a story; a checkpoint, a dispute at a lorry park, an officer who had supposedly overreacted somewhere down the road and the table would nod along before the story was even finished. Nobody asked what the officer might have been facing in that moment. Nobody imagined the other side of the uniform. We were quick with our judgment because judgment cost us nothing. It was easy to be certain about a job none of us had ever done. I did not question any of this. I inherited it, the way you inherit a family's opinion of a neighbor you have never actually spoken to.

My own future, meanwhile, was drawn out in a very different direction, and it did not have a uniform in it. I had studied Development Studies, and in my head I was already halfway to becoming a development agent, sitting across from communities with a folder of proposals, listening to women's groups talk about their gardens, drafting reports on livelihoods and access to water, standing at the intersection of a village and an NGO's budget. That was the picture I carried of myself in government service: composed, consultative, a little bit of a technician, a little bit of a diplomat. I imagined myself in an office with a ceiling fan turning slowly above a desk stacked with proposals, not standing in the afternoon heat redirecting traffic or wading into a market dispute that two grown men refused to settle like adults.

Government work, yes, I wanted that. The stability of it, the title, a pension somewhere far off that I could not yet picture clearly but liked knowing was there. But in every version of that future I had built for myself, I was behind a desk, not behind a uniform enforcing an order I privately doubted the intelligence of.

If you had told me then that I would one day stand at attention on a parade ground and answer "Yes Sir" before I had even finished hearing the question, I would have laughed at you the way we laughed at the police in the staffroom, instinctively, comfortably, and without a shred of evidence to back it up. I would have told you that a man who had studied the state as closely as I had was not about to go and stand at its rougher edge, in the sun, dealing with the very disputes I preferred to theorize about from a blackboard.

I did not know yet that the form was already on its way to me. I did not know that somewhere, without asking my permission, life had already begun making a different plan, one that would take everything I thought I understood about "them" and hand it back to me, piece by piece, as "us."