It's amazing how much I've grown this past few years, how I now see the bigger pictures of things without even trying so hard, unlike the past where I had to sit and really think about things before they come to me.
If you read my previous blog, then you'd know that yesterday was a day of celebration for me, a day that was filled with so much joy and happiness because it was a day I got to graduate from the university, but that wasn't the only thing that happened yesterday.
During my last paper yesterday, some group of guys had driven into my departmental examination center. One look at them and we all knew these were guys not coming to write an exam but were there to celebrate with their friends who were probably graduating yesterday. But then, I started to feel a bit suspicious when I noticed these guys putting on nosemasks and tying piece of clothing around their nose, only displaying part of their faces.
Then just as we were getting to the end of the exam, they all started chanting and making different kind of noises. All of a sudden, a course mate of mine, someone I had spoken to on different occasions, stepped out of the exam hall and these guys in masks immediately went after him, not to attack him but to protect him instead.
Apparently he happens to be a member of their cult group and that became obvious when we saw him putting on a colored beret and also holding a colored umbrella. The guys on masks immediately walked him out of the premises, almost as if they were running out of time.
And then we walked out of the exam hall, now finished with our last and final paper and were about to begin the celebration in full, when another person that I know so well was being escorted out by another set of guys all dressed in black this time, the name of their cult pretty obvious because they made sure to yell it out every three seconds. At the end, the school security had to come chase everyone away, even handcuffing students and shooting bullets in the air to scare people away.
Cultism in Nigerian schools isn't a new thing to me, but the fact that these guys who I could call my friends were into it and I had no idea made it even more scary to me because these were people that I would occasionally get mad at and even say mean things to without thinking twice about it, meanwhile if they wanted to "take care of me" with the help of their friends, they easily could have done that (I think).
This was when I fully got to understand the Nigerian saying "You don't know who is who". The whole experience taught me a very vital lesson, that we should always show people respect no matter who we think they are, because we never know the full picture of things until it gets shown to us.