Colonial acculturation in elite boarding schools has been the subject of the memoirs and school stories of a number of first-generation Nigerian writers, including Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, T.M. Aluko, and the children's literature writer Anezi Okoro. However literary critics and cultural historians have remained remarkably quiet about the intricacies of these representations of colonial education, which reveal interesting insights into literary awakening, the making of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities in educational settings, the psychocultural tensions resulting from the simultaneous pull of indigenous and colonial/modern expectations, and the counter-discursive use of Western literary genres, formal elements, and conventions. This chapter examines the ways in which Chukwuemeka Ike's The Bottled Leopard and Chike Momah's The Shining Ones: the Umuahia School Days of Obinna Okoye – both of which are set in Government College – critique the educational arm of the colonial enterprise, and interrogate the complexities of self-definition in the liminal space between the British school and the indigenous homestead. My argument – informed by the work of the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha – is that in these stories, the intricate negotiation of identity at the crossroads of cultures is embodied in the protagonists' colonial mimicry, as well as in the very creative acts that produce these school stories, which replicate and subvert the generic conventions, colonial ethos, and exaltation of Englishness of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century English school story. I am interested in the ways in which the protagonists – and by extension the authors of these stories – negotiate the psychopolitical tensions exerted by the simultaneous pull of the colonial school and the indigenous community beyond. This negotiation takes place by opening up what Homi Bhabha calls a ‘third space’: ‘a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics’.