In a 90s Nigerian boarding school, a stash of cornflakes and cocoa turned the campus rats into a swaggering, well-fed gang.
Few Nigerian boarding school memories hit like this one: dusk falling over a scraggly lawn, and rats packed six or seven deep beside a girls' dormitory. A writer who boarded in 90s Nigeria has revisited the pests that shared her school years, and the story is part comedy, part creeping horror.
The setup was simple. Thousands of girls arrived from every corner of the country, each hauling a suitcase or two stocked with a full term of provisions: cornflakes, sugar cubes, powdered milk, hot chocolate mix and more. It only took a couple of careless students tossing the rats a taste of the good stuff. From then on, the campus rodents were living on a steady supply of teenage-girl snacks and growing fat on it.
The writer compares those evening gatherings to an illegal meeting of political dissidents. Thick tails twitched, noses pressed together, and the whole crowd seemed to be whispering. These were big animals, built up by a diet most rats could only dream about.
The real shift came in how the rats behaved. At first they scattered whenever people got close. Soon the girls had to clap and stomp just to move them along. Like a working class that suddenly grasps its own strength, the rats learned their power and held their ground, and they stopped feeling like pests and started feeling like predators.
It is a sharp, funny and slightly unsettling piece of personal storytelling that captures what boarding school life in Nigeria really looked like for a generation. Behind the suitcases of snacks and the dorm-room rules, there was a whole ecosystem, and the rats had a seat at the table.
