Book Review: Hot Water for the Famous Seven by Ntemfac Ofege. Reviewed by Kini Nsom

ISBN 9789956558391 | 180 pages | 229 x 152 mm | 2008 | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon | Paperback. Illustrated.  $18.95.

Available from Amazon.com, African Book Collective, Langaa.com, Alibris, etc.

C heery boarding school stories, like hot furnace love tales, are often hilarious, similar and hearty. In fact, tales about renegade schoolboys, in potent fictional boarding schools, threatening college procedures and giving long-suffering discipline masters, headmasters and principals migraines, are totemic to all cultures, colour and creed. The difference, however, may just be in style. While the daredevil schoolboy in an imaginary school in Kent would set up some rocket propulsion device under the chair of the meddlesome discipline master and then stand back to watch the master become take off to the moon, the African creature in some ramshakled school in outback Mungong (no roads, no bridges) in Cameroon would conceal some sharp bamboo objects inside the discipline master’s seat. The result, I bet, is the same.

Hot Water for the Famous Seven

is a galvanic attempt by a Cameroonian writer to recount the drama and hair-raising moments in an existing Cameroonian all-boys boarding school. Picture the situation. A bunch of mischievous renegades in Form 1A, foxes all of them, with outrageously bushy tails to boot, have the radioactive cheek to gallivant about Sacred Heart College calling themselves the Famous Seven. As if that is not mortifying enough, these arrogant little confederates have the tendency of threatening and even bringing down time-tested and firmly established college rules, regulations and procedures with reckless abandon. The little rascals—Mozarts in football and streaks of lightning all of them—even have the effrontery to provoke retribution by belting their seniors—the semi-foxes of Form 2, in a rousing football encounter. But, when the Famous Seven break bounds and sneak out of campus, going after the most eloquent of all infernos, Bamanga Njuma of the Fifth, conveniently decked in his father’s army garb—spivishly borrowed—the principal of the college, Brother Hugh McGregor Jones, blows his top. “Enough is enough,” the principal bellows with stentorian alacrity.