Part 1
By Prince Gora
Like it or not, at some point you have felt like an outsider. There are a couple of times that you feel awkward and embarrassed because you just don't seem to fit where you are. Yet, most of the time, that place – the one that has made you feel out of place – is exactly the place you should be at. You want to be there and you know that you must be there. How do you deal with it? How do you as survive as an outsider?
For most of my relatively short existence on Mother Earth, I’ve had to live as an outsider. My intelligence, or lack of, ambitions and aspirations have ensured that many a time, willingly or unwillingly, I have found myself in a place or a position where I am an outsider – a place where I want to be but I still feel out of place. By my own judgements (biased of course), I believe that I have largely been able to consistently overcome the outsider tag. However, I have seen many friends and colleagues fall on the wayside, which is why I would like to share part of my outsider experience and how I have coped.
From what I can remember, I didn’t have a stable childhood. It seems that there was almost always some kind of tension in my parents` marriage since perhaps the time I started elementary school. Whether because of that or due to the fact that I was constantly moving from one place to another (changing schools in the process) or something else, my early years at school were not great, but they weren`t bad either – I was just an average student in literally everything.
A taste of stability would only come when I was eleven, around 2007. I had been moved to my grandparents’ rural home at the beginning of the year when in August, my parents` not so great union came to an unceremonious end. I had dreaded the coming of such a day for a long time and when it came, I cried tears of hopelessness and despair. I had heard too many stories of the life of orphans (which at the time I considered myself equivalent to) and the cruelty of stepmothers and stepfathers. Luckily for me though, that fate would elude me until I was much older; at eleven, I had the privilege of living with my loving grandparents.
In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have cried then because that day my soul gained something - a relentless fighting spirit and self-belief. Not only did I cry that day, I also asked myself questions that were not of my age - questions about life. Who will I become? I had no clear dream nor plan then but I figured out that whatever it is I would become; I would have to do it myself and, with help from a few guardian angels, that is exactly what I have done.
Since that day, I started to stand out and be counted. I became an accomplished athlete, became more involved in club activities but most importantly, my academic performance steadily took off.
It was at school that I first tasted the feeling of being an outsider. Hitherto, I had been very content with being an average student who just listened in class, grasped the little that I could and moved on with life – never revising notes, never reading further and almost always doing homework at the last minute or at the insistence of a parent. I was content with being on the tail end of the top 10 of the class. But the moment I started asking myself questions about life, I figured out that school would come in handy at some point so suddenly I wasn’t content with being number 9 or 10 anymore, I wanted to be among the best in class.
But to leapfrog to the other end of the top 10, I had to make some sacrifices. Not only did I have to work harder, I also had to change my circle of friends (maybe that wasn’t necessary but I thought it was and I made the change). On paper, this is pretty easy and straightforward but in reality it wasn’t. To begin with, the guys who belonged to the top 5 of the class didn`t want to be friends with me. I simply wasn’t very valuable to them – I was now working as hard as them, yes, but I scarcely knew anything they didn`t and grasped concepts and solved problems at a far slower pace than they did. But still I wasn`t disheartened, I kept my eyes on the ball because I knew that in a place where even the teacher hardly had a copy of the textbook of every subject, I had to stick around the guys with the knowledge. I didn`t know the phrase then but I somehow understood that only ‘iron sharpens iron.’
My grade seven results (of the chaotic 2008 academic year) didn`t come back great. I only managed a lowly 18 units but I felt pretty good about myself. Not only was this the third highest in class (first had 15, second 17), but I had managed it all by myself because we had had no teacher for the majority of that year. In my class at least, I had been a success because in three school terms, I had moved from ninth to sixth and then to third and by the time these results came out, I was in my second term of secondary school at the end of which, I would – for the first time – emerge at the top of my class.
As with all past achievements, this doesn`t mean much now, it`s no longer so thrilling. But it instilled something in me, it taught me that I could make it even as an outsider as long as I kept the focus and the self-belief.
When I transferred to Epworth High School for my Ordinary Levels, I was put in the third class even though my results from the previous year were good. Apparently they didn’t consider the rural school I was coming from capable of measuring my true potential. Within a few weeks however, I had to change classes. My school work, which was not yet suffering from student activism and other adult distractions it now suffers from, was too good to ignore. Coincidentally, the school was also just starting a trial run of sciences subjects with its top students and after 3 months, the results hadn`t been great.
I suspect that it was precisely because of these reasons that my then history teacher and class teacher of the sciences class, Mrs. Chipoyi, approached me with an offer to transfer to her class just after break one Thursday. She had consulted with her colleagues, particularly the guys who taught Physics, Chemistry and Biology and had agreed that, if I was up to the challenge, I could make the leap. Beaming in confidence and self-belief and treating every subject with the same weight (unfortunately or fortunately, I have carried the same spirit to university), I embraced the challenge.
I will never forget the disbelief I saw on the faces of my new classmates when I joined their class at 3pm - after my athletics practice - that afternoon. One of the girls actually openly asked the teacher if I was seriously hoping to catch up with all they had learnt in three months. Almost all of these guys had been far better students than me in primary school (I had attended classes with several in the many primary schools I went to) and didn`t want to take me in their circle.
Well, I didn`t quit my athletics but kept running the 1500m race until I bowed out at provincial level that year and the next. Yet, I went on to become the best student of the school the following year and even had the privilege of heading the prefects body. I would become one of the two students to pass Physics and Chemistry from that class and the only one to pursue sciences beyond ordinary level.
Once again, I had survived the outsider tag and I would go on to do the same over and over again beginning with my advanced levels.
Part 2 coming soon.
