As we waited for the decision on who was going to be the Kirk head of house Victor Wangai and I reflected on just how wrong our grand plan had gone. Our studies in Kirk house faced each other and we talked a lot. He was in the study that had been occupied by Nesbit Wesonga the previous year.
Actually late in 1982 when we both knew that there was a good chance (25% at the very least because there were 4 school prefects announced) of me being HOS, Wangai had decided to go for the Sixth Form Society chairman’s post. At the time it looked like a piece of cake and Victor was very excited about the idea of Kirk dominating things at the top. We would then have a head of house from Kirk and that would bring the tally to 3 powerful Kirk guys up school.
Chairman of sixth form society in those days was NOT a small man. For starters he shared in the triangles in tower at tea break with the school prefects and the headmaster frequently looked to him for advice on various issues involving sixth formers. That was apart from all the high profile social functions he was in charge of including the sixth formers day where the school would be flooded by tons of mostly giggling school girls and all kinds of crazy things would happen.
Now this is where the politics got really ugly because unlike school prefects who were appointed, this was an elective post. Sixth formers needed to be swayed to vote for you. Victor planned his campaign and on paper he was definitely going to win hands down. But his opponent had other ideas. His opponent who seemed to be a minnow at the time was one Kiprono Kittony.
I had known Kiprono Kittony since our primary school days at Lavington primary school. In 1982 he had hosted members of the 1st XV in the expansive family farm in Kitale when we went there to play West Kenya XV. He had even driven me around town in the family Volvo. Victor and I were puzzled because his campaign seemed to be so low key. Was he really serious about wanting to win, we wondered. It looked so obvious that we were going to win. On election day Kiprono shocked us by comfortably winning the election. We were very puzzled until some fascinating stories starting coming in. Apparently shortly before election day Kiprono had hosted quite a number of very influential sixth formers for an all-expenses paid plus pocket money night out at the Carnivore, Nairobi. Now in those days a night out at Cani, as we used to call it was just it. And if you wanted to convince a sixth former to do virtually anything for you, that was just the place to take them. He had outsmarted us, albeit with the kind of campaign funds we could never match and so he became sixth form society chairman 1983.
In the end Kiprono’s ascension to sixth form society chairman proved to be a blessing in disguise for me. We consulted frequently and he would sometimes tell me what sixth formers in block 1 and block 4 were saying which proved to be extremely useful especially when the things got really ugly for me (as I will describe shortly).
The headmaster announced Victor Wangai as head of house Kirk and Pekos was livid. For the rest of first term he was hardly ever seen in Kirk house and opted to send messages instead. Even the weekly pocket money which had always been disbursed by the house master was sent with different messengers giving out the cash. I tried to stay out of his way as much as possible and in his Geography classes I moved several rows away from the front.
To naïve observers who were not interested at looking at the saga more deeply this was confirmation as to how powerful the head of school really was. But more significantly the repercussions of this incident spread far and wide. A small clique of house masters closed ranks against school prefects and “the power” the headmaster was giving to the boys. Apparently Pekos was very influential and very easily able to incite people. This development was going to come back to haunt school prefects shortly.
Personally, Victor’s appointment made a huge difference for me. I now felt much more confident and secure knowing that whatever happened, I had someone watching my back. He even proved to be a great school prefect so much so that we even ended up having a discussion with the headmaster once that was inspired by Victor’s capabilities where he said that it was unfortunate that the school frequently overlooked very capable leaders in appointing school prefects and wondered what could be done to improve the system for identifying students with leadership capabilities.
I had only been HOS for slightly more than a week and yet so much had happened already. What I did not know was that there was much more to come. I was going to remain pretty much in the boiler room for the whole of first term 1983.
On the surface of things the other school prefects gave me the support I needed to be HOS but deep down I knew that the Lugard incident was not forgotten. I also knew that a section of the school prefects were of the view that had the Lugard incident not happened things would have been very different and I would never have made it to HOS. From what I discovered later nothing could have been further from the truth. But then in politics the truth hardly matters and is mostly irrelevant. It can never overshadow perception which is everything.
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