A Thing Of Identity...

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Growing up, I never really liked the idea of uniforms. That is, having to wear the same clothes over and over again when going to school. We went to school five days out of the week and as such, we had to be on our uniforms.

However, with time, that changed because we soon had sportswear and Friday wear. But when I went to my secondary school, we didn’t have that option anymore. It was strictly the uniforms. And if you had only one pair, you had to wear the same one over and over again. If you weren’t too conscious of your hygiene, you could wear it for days without bothering to wash it. But for many of us, it meant washing the shirts every night so we could wear them the next morning.

As we all know, constant washing is not good because it depletes the quality of the clothes and causes them to fade and wear. So, by the end of the academic year, the uniform is already too bad and the student would be in need of another.

For that reason, many of us opted to have more than one uniform. Some had two while others had as many as four pairs. Our shirt was especially important because it was a light color and could easily show dirt. I know a girl who had five different shirts for every day of the week that she came to school. It was more work, I know. But on the good side, she only got to wash them on weekends, while we who had two had to still wash them every night. But we were switching from one shirt to the other, and that reduced the stress on the uniforms.

During this period, when I watched foreign high school movies, I usually got angry because many times, their students didn’t wear uniforms. They could dress whatever way they wanted and didn’t have to go through the hassle of stressing over uniforms. Because for us, the uniforms didn’t just stop with the shirt and trousers or the blouse and skirts; it was also the socks that had to be pure white, it was the hair that had to be low-cut for boys and braided for the girls, it was the uniforms themselves that always had to be clean, fingernails, teeth… everything seemed to be a part of the uniform because everything was always under scrutiny.

I’ve always had bushy hair. My hair literally grows like a weed. If I cut it today, in less than two weeks, I’ll be facing the same problem again. This made me detest going to the barber’s shop and during my days in school, the only time my hair appeared neat was in the first few weeks of resumption. After that, I’ll have this thick head of hair, that was so stubborn because no matter how much I combed it, it just refused to look neat.

There was a time when I used to think that all these were pointless, and we could simply go to school wearing what we wanted and we would have no idea. But as I became older, I began to see the wisdom in having uniforms and how they provided a sort of identity, not for the school, but for the students themselves. It’s the way you see a police officer or soldier and know better than to try to mess with them. Once you see a student, you can know at once where they are coming from or where they’re going, depending on the time of the day. That is why when you see some students in place students shouldn’t be, you’ll know that something is wrong.

I experienced this in real life just a few days back. Where a neighbor told me that in the school she worked a child had gone missing. He had simply gone home from school on Thursday, but he never made it there. That same night, the parents called the school proprietor and reported it. By Friday, there was still no report of the missing kid, so they took the matter to the police.

It wasn’t until Monday morning that a stranger miraculously brought the kid back to school. How? The school uniform the kid had been wearing! It turned out that she knew the school very well because her kids also went there a while back, however, they had relocated to an entirely different city in Lagos, which is where she saw the small boy. So, seeing the small boy there, wearing that school uniform and all alone piqued her interest.

According to her, she found him roaming on the road, somewhere close to her shop. She had noticed him walk past several times when the uniform finally clicked in. She tried talking to him, but he wasn’t coherent. But luckily, she still had the proprietor’s number from when her kids schooled there. So she called and that’s when she learned that they had a missing child case on their hands. She took pictures of the boy and sent it over and it was confirmed that he was the one. At once, she closed her shop, took him on a bus, and to the school where she handed him to the parents herself.

At the time my neighbor told me this story, the boy was still yet to say what really happened and how he got to be so far away. It could be trauma, or something else. He was taken to the hospital for a proper check-up and I sure hope that he’s okay. Till today, I don’t know what happened to him, but what matters is that he’s back and he’s with his family once more.

However, it reminded me that indeed, uniforms were important. It was the boy’s uniform that led to his rescue. If he had been wearing a mufti, the woman would not have been able to place his location so easily, and it might have taken longer to locate his parents because the police she would have handed him to was different from the one handling the missing child case.

So, uniforms are important! And now, as an adult, I don’t think I’ll ever support any move that tries to stop it. We don’t know when it might end up saving a life.

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_{Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, I would love to know what you’re thinking. Till we meet in the next post.}

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_{N.B: All images used in this post are mine. The thumbnail was designed using Canva.}

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