Kumbuka. That is what we used to call it.
I was a Njuka (ruble) in one of those bush schools after having performed dismally in my O levels at Kabau.
During my first regional inter schools soccer tournament I discovered (later) that bad boys had been preparing for the event and other subsequent events by harvesting cannabis sativa leaves and mbegu, drying them and storing them.
On the evening before the tournament, the dried stuff, a whole 50 kilograms plus suck was usually mixed with about 20 kilograms of maize and taken to a posho mill owned by one of the bad boy’s dad.
At around 3am in the morning, when porridge was being prepared, the bad boys would pour the “flour” into the miambo cooking the porridge through a metal grill in the kitchen using funnels made from newspapers just when the cook was preparing to add sugar.
The cook would then proceed to stir the sugar into the porridge using a long mwiduriu. The result is that any student, including the teachers on duty who eat the porridge that morning also took a heavy dose of the drug, if your porridge had more sugar than the others, it meant you took even more of the drug than the rest.
Woe unto you if you were the greedy one and took more than one mug. This was between 6:30 am and 7:30am.
After parade, the school truck (we lovingly called her Sicily) carrying the soccer team would leave through the gate and then the rest of the mboys, those that were flying anyway, would as one leave through a hole in the fence (gate B) and proceed to the tournament hosting school about 10 kliks away.
No other school dared cheer when we got to the school for it was known that Kambi Mboys were in the house we would scream them out of the field. My favorite moments were how the girl’s team who was our favorite treated us with awe for we would out cheer for them during their respective ball games.
I discovered the source of the euphoria on those occasions when I left the Kambi when one of the mboys gave me the 411.
Funny though that I am a teetotaler and I have never taken non medical drugs since.