A lie.

Twenty years ago I struck a boy and lied about it. He was black and I was white; he, a high school student; I, a college graduate. He was expelled and I went on for a doctorate. He was African and I, American.

It is the hubris of the former Peace Corps volunteer to believe that one who has not survived a two-year stint in some remote corner of the third world has missed out on a basic life experience. For the young volunteer, the Peace Corps can be a harsh, prolonged initiation into adulthood. Along the way there are setbacks and regression. Hitting a boy and covering it up was certainly my low point.

Corporal punishment was common in the schools of Niger, a former French colony in the poverty-stricken Sahel region of West-Central Africa. African teachers often resorted to physical rebuke when their charges posed exceptional problems of discipline or dimwittedness. We enlightened Americans, of course, were initially horrified by such retrograde pedagogy. Gradually, however, we adapted to local conditions and procedures.

Eight months into my assignment at a high school, I too was resorting to the severe practices of my Nigerien counterparts. In a first instance, I had one student slap an obstreperous other; another time, I myself thwacked a habitual troublemaker. This second episode both surprised and scared me, for the blow made the boy's head hit his desk with a dangerously loud thump. Yet not for a moment did he lose his silly, challenging grin.

These were exceptional incidents. For the most part my students were good kids and eager learners. As any teacher will tell you, though, it's the few insolent ones who get under your skin. And skin was the basis of the taunts that maddened me. For a white to understand the plight of blacks in America it is helpful to live in the West African bush for a couple of years.

Anasara! Anasara! went the cry, as I walked in town or strolled through the market, "White man! White man!" It was not only the mocking tone that I heard in the hoot that boiled my blood but the literal meaning of the word: "Christian, man of Nazareth." At first, unaccustomed to thinking of myself in terms of skin color, and not being Christian, I took the jeers in stride. When little children played by darting out of a corner, yelling Anasara and running away in delighted fright, I might accommodate their game by pretending to chase them. When old men and women would call out Anasara and wave to me in the marketplace, I'd rationalize that they didn't mean to be obnoxious and just didn't know how to hail a foreigner except by his religion and color. But when students screamed out Anasara at the top of their lungs, that was another story entirely.

As school let out one day a couple of students started in with the "Anasara, Anasara" chants, then headed down a side street. I took a parallel lane, surprising them as they turned a corner. "Vous etes dans quelle classe?" I demanded of the bigger one. "Whose class are you in? What is your name?" He refused to answer and defiantly turned to walk away. The series of events that followed has haunted me.

The next day, the assistant principal in charge of discipline summoned the rogue. No sooner had I mentioned that after I tried to restrain him the boy hit me, the assistant principal began raining his own blows on the student. But our head principal pooh-poohed my demand for disciplinary action against the student, dismissing the incident as "a town matter." I insisted on my right to call a staff meeting. There the other teachers backed me up and voted to expel the boy. As he left the grounds after learning of the decision, he stopped in front of my class and threatened me.

The following day the school PTA converged en masse at the school and requested that we reconsider. "Allah will punish the boy," declared their spokesman. "We even intended to beat the boy in front of Monsieur Bill's home but Monsieur Bill was not there to witness it....'If someone asks forgiveness,'" he concluded, invoking a local saying, "'you must forgive him.'"

I responded by giving a little speech in French. "It is not I alone who is aggrieved," I said. "It is as if this boy has struck every teacher present here. And where is the remorse of this boy, who threatens me again after his expulsion?" We voted again. Not a single teacher changed his initial stand. The boy was expelled.

In Niger, tribal scars of identification are common. The Peace Corps imparts mental scars of maturation. Mine include this little secret: When the boy refused to divulge his identity and started to walk away from me on that dusty streetcorner, it was I who landed the first blow.

Bill Meyers teaches in the department of political science at Northeastern University in Boston.