About My First Book

 On January 29 1929, Reverend Robert Fisher, acting under orders he received 2 years earlier from the British colonial government in Nigeria, opened the gates of Government College Umuahia to the very first set of students. The mandate given to Reverend Fisher, a British, Anglican priest, was to start a school where local boys would be educated following the traditions of British public school models like Eton, Harrow and Winchester.

The school, located in the south-east of Nigeria, was the first of it's kind in the region and drew students from all over west Africa and the then Southern Cameroons. Over the years, some of the greatest minds and achievers of the past 100 years have passed through her. Her list of famous Alumni include but is in no way limited to Chinua Achebe, Ben Enweonwu, Jaja Wachukwu, Peter Katjavivi, Elechi Amadi, Dr E.M.L. Endeley, Ken Saro Wiwa, Isaac Dagogo Erekosima, who would later become the first African Principal of the school, and many more.

While Rev Robert Fisher welcomed a total of 25 students in January 1929, in October 2001, few months after my 10th birthday, I was welcomed alongside over 300 other boys to this great citadel of learning. To varying degrees, we were all expected to follow in the footsteps of all the great men who came before us and make our families, societies and new school proud. In reality, not everyone who is admitted into Government College goes on to become famous or even just a decent member of the society.

In this book, I try to tell the stories of my experiences, as well as I can remember, during a period that I believe has had the biggest influence on my life. My hope is to bring people who read this book into the totally different world that was Government College Umuahia in my time. I hope that by sharing my experiences people who are not Umuahians can get an idea of exactly why and how a place like this can totally change one's life for good and/or for bad. 

Furthermore, I hope that the current school management will see these stories as the management of a great hotel might see a customer's review of their hotel. I hope that they can make necessary changes required to make the schooling experience better, continue producing great Alumni and upholding the good traditions and values of our great school.

Perhaps, this book could have had a more glamorous or attention-grabbing cover but I decided to use the famous colours of our School's uniform, complete with our brown belt. This is all part of my attempt to immerse whoever picks up this book into every bit of the Government College experience. I hope that when you're done reading this book, you will feel like you were there with me that first year, side by side, succeeding and failing together.

This is a book I have always wanted to write but kept postponing. I have always lied to myself and pretended it wasn't the right time or I that I never have enough time but the truth was that the real reason I didn't write this book years ago was Impostor syndrome - feelings of inadequacy and asking myself who I thought I was to even think that I could ever write anything anyone would want to read.

Thankfully, Impostor syndrome isn't the only thing I feel. I also feel a genuine fear of dying without exploring talents I think I have. My fear isn't of death itself but rather of living without doing anything meaningful with my life. As most of the world entered into partial or complete lock-downs as a result of the sickness and deaths caused by COVID-19, thoughts of how fleeting this life is overwhelmed my consciousness, I became more motivated to do a lot of things I had been putting off for a long time.

In April I successfully, had an overdue bilateral surgery. As I lay on that operating table, 3 doctors hovering over me, two of them sniping, slicing, cutting and pulling different parts of my body, I felt a huge pain. It wasn't physical pain, I was under heavy Anastasia and unable to feel anything from my chest down to my toes. The thing is, in that moment, I felt a level of vulnerability I had never felt before. 

I wasn't in control of anything that was happening there and when I reached down to feel my thighs with my hands, it felt like I was touching a mass of nothing. It didn't even feel like I was touching flesh or meat. It just felt like my thighs were a heavy mass of nothing. I imagined that must be what it felt like to be dead - your spirit/soul/whatever standing there looking at a sack of flesh that used to house it but now lying there empty, useful for nothing, except as food for worms or ashes to be spread or kept in a jar by living humans.

In that moment, my fear of living a useless life overpowered my impostor syndrome. Days later, as I lay around my apartment recovering from the physical injuries of the surgery, I started making a mental outline of what this book would be like. There were lots of stories to be told and my biggest worry was how to tell those stories in a way that they would be interesting enough for other people to truly understand them and feel as close to the experience as possible.

I decided it was too much to cram into a single book so I divided them into different parts based on the years. This first book will focus on my first year and introduce readers to the environment, traditions, school rules, regulations and other norms that make up the Government College experience, just as I was introduced to them in my first year.

While this is not a work of fiction, it might as well be fiction for readers who are not alumni of Government College, especially those who have never been in a total institution. Nonetheless, I realise that a lot of the characters in this book are real people with real lives who are most probably living their lives somewhere around our very small world. With that in mind, I have tried to describe events and people in as much details as possible without taking anything away from the rawness of the story while also protecting the identities of the people who the events recounted in this book may adversely affect in any way.

I also know that some of the words we used back then as school slangs may mean different things in different languages or societies and as a result may be offensive to some people. My intention isn't to offend but to make the book as authentic as possible, clearly displaying the ignorance of youth and expressing how what is considered normal in one place may be considered abnormal in other places, across different time periods.

I have to thank Aude for encouraging me to write this book when I mentioned it to her over a year ago. Special thanks to Paula who also encouraged me to write this book, recommended Brene Brown's The Call To Courage  to give me the extra push I needed, and read the first few chapters I wrote before anyone else. Huge thanks to my long-term friends, Slim Phil and Pascal for their words of encouragement and my colleague Mario who designed the book's cover. Not forgetting Fu'ad and Ope who recommended and introduced me to my editor.

Few days ago, I submitted the first draft of the book to the editor, hopefully, we can finish it up and publish on schedule. My target is to publish on the 2nd of next month, the 19th anniversary of my first day at Reverend Robert Fisher's School. Additionally, my plan is to publish it through Amazon's self-publishing so that people can easily order digital and hardback copies from anywhere in the world and have it delivered to them promptly. If anyone has a better idea, I'm open to listening. Leave me comments in the comments' section or reach  me privately through email Okoyeinnocentn@gmail.com and @centyclaus on Instagram and Twitter. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this project. Thank you.

Edit: the book was published on the 2nd of October 2020, exactly 19 years since the day i stepped foot into Government College Umuahia. It's available in digital and paperback copies here on Amazon