Surviving SAJOMACO: A Nigerian Boarding School Odyssey

Question: What do you do when the kitchen wall collapses into the vat of beans being cooked for a horde of hungry schoolboys? Answer: You serve it up anyway! Why let a few lumps of clay and the odd metal screw spoil a decent meal? When Bunmi Asaolu arrived at the grand gates of St. John/Mary's Unity Secondary School (SAJOMACO) as a first-year student, you'd be forgiven for assuming he was swapping life on the serene university campus he grew up on for another of equal civility. Wrong! Behind the gates of SAJOMACO lay a world of contradictions – unspoken but strict codes of hierarchy juxtaposed with utter chaos. Asaolu presents a wry, satirical and at once serious look at a Nigerian public boarding school in the 1990s through the eyes of a sheltered child navigating its brutal corridors. In Surviving SAJOMACO, Asaolu’s experiences and those of his contemporaries are laid bare, giving the reader a raw and at times jarring insight into the incongruencies of school life, whilst subtly tracking the story of Nigeria itself.