
Illustration: Dadi Mohammed

This is an extreme experience in the sense that we could have been rusticated from the university community if caught, and that would have even been before we got started on the tedious task and enviable journey of obtaining degrees.
K.K SHAW, known simply as Kolawole Shaw by most students, or simply Kola Shaw was a Civil Engineering student and I was an Applied Geophysics student.
When we came in ’78, our rooms were next to each other in Awolowo Hall and he had Tony Idigbe (now a SAN) as one of his roommates. Tony was in for law. Tony and I were party going pals from the get go, because he had connections with some older graduating students through his elder brother and cousin and our party spirit was also a carry-over from our time as A Level students at Federal School of Arts and Science, Victoria Island, Lagos. So it was no surprise that Tony and I hit it off straight away on landing at Ife.
โWhenever the need arose, he’d bring his set of master keys and we would go scouting among the bikes parked by the student inhabitants of Awo and Fajuyi Halls who would have mostly crashed out for the night.โ
On the other hand, K.K and I shouldn’t have been close, except for the fact that we discovered early that we both had a similar bent for rare adventures and that we did not only love to laugh, but to create laughter at our and other people’s expense.
K.K Shaw had a bunch of keys that could open any motor bike. How, where and why of that bunch I never knew nor asked. It was just available and convenient that whenever I couldn’t get the regular party freak pals to shift me to parties in Ife town or the Staff Quarters, I would go calling on Kola Shaw and he never failed me, at least not until one eerie night that we risked rustication and a one-way trip through Road 1 when we were trying to “borrow” yet another bike.
Road 1 is the long, beautifully flowered road that leads in and out of the campus. To face Road 1 on a one-way trip means you were going out of the university without coming back and without obtaining a degree. A very terrifying prospect for all students and parents too I believe.

Whenever the need arose, he’d bring his set of master keys and we would go scouting among the bikes parked by the student inhabitants of Awo and Fajuyi Halls who would have mostly crashed out for the night. While I acted as the watchout, Shaw would confidently search out and select a bike, unlock it expertly by trying out some keys, check the fuel tank and roar it into life, off we’d go “borrowing” it to be returned in the wee hours of the dawn after enjoying the Groove.
But we could never return the bikes to the exact same places we picked them from. Too risky, because the owners may have discovered their absence and reported them to the authorities as stolen, so we’d just drop them off at any conspicuous place that was easy to be seen by anybody by day break.
On two occasions, I got lucky coming back with babes I wooed at the parties, so we rode back in threes and Shaw had to drop us off before “disposing” off the bikes.
On some occasions Shaw had to drain the tanks of one or two other bikes to fill up that of the ones we chose to use and all these in the midst of some poke nosing students shouting and raising alarms like….”What are you doing with that bikeโ; โIs it your ownโ; โEverybody come and see them ohโ. Shaw would remain calm and concentrate on the task at hand. What a guy! No wonder he ended up in the military.
He said we should go and get a bike from that storage or warehouse under the bookshop where bikes seized from students by Kongi’s (Prof Wole Soyinka’s) campus marshals were parked. When we got there at around 12.30am, the two old guards (old?….probably they were about the same age that we are now) were slumped over their chairs at the entrance snoring away and probably dreaming of merry things. Shaw quietly and gingerly picked up one of their abandoned torchlights by the sides of their tiredly slumped bodies and gingerly tiptoed into the interior of the warehouse to do “his thing”, while I stayed outside as the watch-out and to create a diversion if need be. And truly the need came to be.

I was shaking all over and was wondering where K.K got the nerve to be so calm, collected and calculative. Shaw was almost out of there with a bike he was pushing so silently and efficiently when somehow bikes behind him began to fall over each other like a pack of cards or domino pieces and making such a rather loud ruckus in the dead stillness of the night. I froze like a statue, stared at Shaw as he too froze at the inner mouth of the entrance with his hands still holding on to his choice bike’s handles.
The guards woke and jumped up shouting, “Who goes there? Who goes there?” But I could sense from their timorous vibrating voices that their challenge was more in cowardice than in courage. They began to debate with each other whether to go inside or just wait till the intruder emerged. Then one started looking around for his torchlight and exclaimed to the other “My torch, where is my torch?”, just as the other one picked his to direct a flash into the darkness of where the noise had come from.
I snapped out of my shock and immobility and threw a stone I had picked up earlier along the way for creating a diversion in another direction and as they turned to see what was the reason for the latest disturbance, Shaw ran out but still holding on to the bike and at the last minute pushed it at them with a force which made then lose balance and while they struggled to extricate themselves from the entanglement, we ran and made our escape, laughing our hearts out. We didn’t stop until we reached a spot of the road behind Moremi Hall on the Fajuyi Hall side of it.
There was no shifting that night. We went to the Post Graduate Hall buttery to drink and continue our laughter every time we relayed the terrifying expressions on the faces of those frightened guards to each other and also made jokes of our certain fate if we had been caught. It was such a dangerous and costly adventure in our first year at Great Ife.