E.G.O
Once the bell rang, I went over to Bagomotsi and gave him some money to buy me some lunch before heading on to the Times office to check on Neo and surely I did find her, only in a rare situation. She was sitting on her editorial chair as Botho, who was sitting on her desk, was feeding her some fries. They both seemed lost in each other’s eyes and I guessed Botho’s charm had stopped their almost inevitable break-up. A knock on the door was all I did to break up the romantic moment.
‘Hey, look who is here; Brandon, wassup bra?’
‘Botho, how unexpected of you to be here; I mean, it’s not surprising because she is your girl but…’
‘He is just trying to sweet-talk me and well, sweet-feed me in to getting back with him but it isn’t working’
‘You guys broke up already?’
‘No but I was going to do it before you came in’
‘Didn’t look like it but anyway, I need your help Miss Motsweding’
‘Should I leave you guys to it?’ asked Botho as he stood up from the desk but I insisted otherwise, ‘No man, you can stay; perhaps you could also help. Thing is, earlier on, Winona and I kind of got in to a fix at the girls’ toilets’
‘Wow! You guys have less than week dating and already you are hooking up in toilets?’ asked a surprised Neo and I laughed before going on, ‘Not really but anyway, I was caught by some girls and Winona managed to rescue me and they mentioned something about her and the Egos before retreating’
‘Oh, that is not really much of a shock, if you ask me.’
I sat down on a chair and prepared to listen.
‘Thing is, in school, there are two main cliques: the Egos and the Amazons. In 1989, at the turn of the naughty 1990s, there was a girl form the United States by the name of Rosanne Amazon and she was the then headmaster’s nephew. JMS was not as big as it is today and since Rosanne and most of her friends were white, they were the most popular. All the boys liked them and worshipped them, giving them goddesses’ status. This, in turn, led to black girls being treated as nothing; bullied by these white intruders. The clique was branded the Amazons, after Rosanne’.
She went through some newspaper archives in her computer before continuing, ‘On February 1990, three Batswana girls, Edna, Gofaone and One, met up in the old church building on campus and made an alliance with other black girls to bring down these whites. It was not an easy road but they fought on. It was not easy fighting a white girl in those days but just when they were close to giving up, Rosanne and her family went back to Detroit and the Amazons slowly perished. The descendants of the former Amazons fought on though and sometimes, this went on to literal blow fights against the Ego girls, E for Edna, G for Gofaone and O for One’
‘So the fighting also extends to fame and popularity in school, right?’ added Botho.
‘Yes, Botho is right; this very office we sit in is run by the Ego family, with only unimportant positions given to the Amazons. They, however, lead in sports because Serena Michigan’s father recently paid for the East Wing stand to be built and it’s an ‘Amazons-only’ zone. They fear us because of this office as we can bad-mouth them in just one Friday’
‘Impressive knowledge right there babe’ complimented Botho and I nodded in agreement before asking, ‘So…you belong to…?’
‘Ego family and so does Winona and her girls, which is why those girls ran away. We run this mother baby’
‘What about the Marrittians? What connection do they have to the Amazons?’ I asked.
‘Mark is distant cousins with Serena and he is currently dating one of the Zons so the Marrittians are more like their guards’
‘More like the Swiss are to the Vatican?’
‘Yeah, something of that sort; yeah, more like the Swiss are to the Pope’.
So this is what there was to all the rivalry: an over-a-decade vendetta. From what I also came to learn, there were over two hundred members in each clique, the Egos leading by figures though. I guess I was an Ego boy after all and just five weeks to my stay in JMS, the school was already getting to me. Oh boy!