UK Friends of Nyakasura
Principal of Makerere College, 1929 to 1939, a former District Commissioner of long-standing. In his retirement he performed a number of temporary duties for the Uganda Education Department, including the Headmastership of the Bugishu Local Government’s first secondary school. It has been said of him that he was one of those men of whom one can truly say “Whatever he does, he does it with all his might”. Uganda owes him a tremendous debt of gratitude.
Some of these people are still alive today (2007), living in retirement, but others have long passed away: Professor Lucas at Limuru, Kenya, in 1990 and Murray Hicks at his home, near Winchester in the 1960s.
District Headquarters Office.
At the King Alfred Teacher Training College, Winchester, where he became a fully certificated secondary school teacher, with specialist qualifications in mathematics, music, and physical education, and where he shared in the home life of Mr Murray Hicks.
The old man confessed his amazement, remarking “we have no word for such a thing in our Lutoro language”. Accordingly he invented one, “Amazzi Amakwafu”, meaning “grasped water”, not a bad name for a piece of ice
Frank Stevens and Rev. Perrens are still alive in 2007, but Edward Batchelor died some years beforehand.
Some Anecdotes of Life at Nyakasura between 1948 and 1954
(as recalled In 1991)
Contributed by Mr E.C. Cooper, M.A., Headmaster
From 1936 to 1948 I had been an Assistant Master at the Alliance High School, Kenya, and most of my time there was under that great Headmaster, Carey Francis. He made the Alliance one of the leading secondary schools not only in Africa but also in the whole of what was then called the British Colonial Empire. I was fortunate. His combination of godliness and good learning with the need to do your best at everything, whether digging your garden, playing football, striving for a new one-mile record, or studying for a place at Makerere was what I hoped would undergird my time at Nyakasura.
On arrival I was met by Douglas Tomblings, a splendid man, who thoroughly approved of all Commander Calwell of the Church Missionary Society had set out to do. The school was now in the hands of the Uganda Protectorate Government. The C.M.S. had felt unable to carry on after the death of the Commander. Their resources were too stretched. The Uganda Government Education Department, or some members of it, however, found it difficult to accept their new responsibility. About two years after my arrival, I sent the usual monthly bill for payment to Kampala only to receive it back with “no payment as this is not a Government School” written over it!
Nyakasura, like most institutions at that time, suffered from the effects of the Second World War, notably, a lack of equipment, books and staff. The most important tool on my arrival was an Allen Motor Scythe to cut down the elephant grass and thus let everyone see the buildings. The next thing was to find exercise and text books and some office equipment. I was told I would have to order all these through the Crown Agents in the U.K. on “the proper forms”. At that time the shipments from the UK were few and far between. I took my needs to the Education Department and a kindly official issued me with a letter giving me authority to buy locally. This was a great privilege and was rarely granted. Armed with this I raided the Indian dukas and returned with enough materials to enable us to start a new term. That letter worked magic buys for the next two or three years until the Director of Education put a stop to my little (big?) game.
When it rains at Nyakasura it pours. In my first term I went up to school to begin the day. It was raining. There was no one there. I went to the dormitory attached to my house to find everyone in bed. “We don’t get up when it is raining”, I was told. “Oh, don’t we”, I replied, and rushed round stripping blankets off sleeping bodies. We introduced a morning run, rain or shine, before school after that.
One night we had a severe earth tremor and from that same dormitory the boys rushed out in panic. Only the Batoro remained calm. They were used to this. The Head Boy, a Mutoro, went round taking the names of those outside for detention, for being, as he said, “out of the dormitory without permission”.
Near the dormitory, not far from the Commander’s grave, there was a large gum tree. It threatened to fall and flatten the dormitory. We decided to cut it down. To avoid it falling on the dormitory, the school tug-of-war rope was tied round it and eight or ten workmen hung on. Unhappily, as the axe severed the trunk, and the tree swayed, the rope snapped and the tree fell and cut the dormitory in two. At one end, a sick boy thought his last moment had come and made off, miraculously cured, into the bush to avoid further danger. It was a fortunate and narrow escape.
At another time, a boy delirious on account of a very high temperature from malaria, in that same dormitory, suddenly stood up and shouted, “I must kill so and so”, naming a boy in the next bed. This boy stayed not on the order of his going and it was rumoured that he was still running several days later!
We were fortunate in our staff at the time having men like Mr Musgrove, Stan Acton, Alan Baxendale, Frank Garvey Williams, Tony Irvine, Mr Baguma, Mr Bujenja, Mr Kabuzi, Mr Mugerwa, Mr Ruhweza, Mr Nkojo and many others. There was also Professor Lucas**, loaned from Makerere College and Mr Murray Hicks. Murray had just retired from Winchester College, in the U.K., and came out to help us. He was a remarkable man and added much to the joys of life. Amongst his teaching assignments he took boys to swim in the crater lake. In his view, costumes were unnecessary. On one occasion the District Commissioner for Toro at Fort Portal was taken to see “the boys swimming”. He stood on the brim of the crater, looking down on a sea of naked bodies in the lake being watched over by an elderly European, and muttered “By jove, you do see life out here”. Later, Murray started to build a swimming pool near the school, the origin of today’s (2007) pool. Earth was moved by filling buckets and pulling them up out of the hole beginning to take shape as a pool. Unfortunately one careless boy on returning the empty bucket to the boys digging let it fall on Murray’s head and he was knocked out, but, mercifully, only for a time.
We had a period of food shortage and a lorry had to be sent out into the surrounding counties to collect the makote for the boys’ meals. A school lorry rather than a hired one was needed. The Education Department in Kampala told us one was ready for collection. Murray went in his car to do this. He was told he would have to wait a week or so for the arrival by sea of a new member of staff from the U.K. who would be travelling via Mombassa and coming up by train. Murray said he could not wait. The Headmaster had instructed him to bring the lorry back at once as it was desperately needed to collect the food and that he must do so. The official in the Department (very senior) was thus overruled and I fear we got a black mark. Our official popularity was again undermined when, in seeking to have a laboratory built, we engaged the help of a Member of Parliament in the U.K. who asked a question about it in the House of Commons. Why the delay? The Secretary of State for the Colonies asked the Chief Secretary of Uganda, who asked the Director of Education, who asked me what did I think I was doing? After suitable apologies to the Chief Secretary, our laboratory was sanctioned and built.
Our hydro-electric scheme was one of Commander Calwell’s masterpieces. A deep trench allowed water from the river to flow on to a wooden wheel with corrugated iron “cups” which, when it was rotating, ran the generator. One night, slowly but surely, electric lights dimmed and finally went out. Prep. was over. On going to investigate, I took a Tilley lamp. The wheel was stationary. A hippo had fallen into the trench and stopped the flow of water. It was decided not to disturb him! Later, to our great joy and even greater surprise, a generator was shipped out from England for us. Tony Irvine, our Maths Master, was a man of many parts. He at once set about unpacking the machine, housing it and attaching it to the school’s somewhat antiquated wiring. In a few days we had light, but alas, only for a week. Again the lamps went slowly dimmer and dimmer and then out. The generator had stopped. The main bearing had burnt out. The instruction had stated “Under no circumstances grease the bearing: this has been done in the factory and the part sealed”. It hadn’t in fact been done, and so the disaster. No light: back to oil lamps and candles. Tony was angry but not defeated. He went to the metal workshop, ruled by Mr Bujenja, where, amongst a host of this and that, were the Commander’s old tool boxes. Rummaging in one of these Tony came across a main bearing, ex-Royal Navy. Could it fit? It looks as if it might. It did; and imagine our joy when the lights came on again. In the meantime, however, I had informed our local Public Works Department of the disaster and had urged that they compel the makers to fly out a new main bearing. To everyone’s surprise, a month or two later, a package arrived. The Public Works Department man came, beaming, and said “Now you’ll be able to use the generator again”. I had to explain we had been doing so for some weeks. The air grew blue, but I consoled him by saying it would be splendid to have a spare generator in stock. He was not amused.
We played football to a high standard for a School XI. One year we reached the final of the local cup. Our opponents were an old enemy. After an exciting see-saw game, we scored in the final minutes, and won. The 2000 spectators went wild. The next morning, however, I received a letter explaining, with a drawing to prove it, that, from where our centre-forward had shot, it was impossible for the ball to have gone between the posts (there were no nets). Over 2000 witnesses disagreed and the results stood. Our cricket was fun and our games against Budo, Buganda Kingdom’s leading secondary school, greatly enjoyed. A highlight was when we beat a Boma XI captained by a District Commissioner who had played for Oxford! A hard cricket ball, however, took time to get used to. One of our boys, now (1991) a graduate of some eminence, was being given fielding practice. The ball hit him in the bread-basket and he collapsed, moaning “no one told me it was made of iron”! And we made our name in athletics too, as the exploits of Ernest Oluo were to demonstrate, for he did a great deal to put Uganda in due course on the Olympic map. I was grieved to learn of his death and the circumstances of it last year. Mention of Oluo, reminds me that he was one of the first of our Nyakasura Boys to come to the U.K. for higher education and training. Others followed. Many of them came to see me at the School to whose Headmastership I had succeeded in England in 1954. My wife and I were delighted to see them again and to offer them hospitality.
Swimming in the crater lake was popular. Boys were encouraged to swim by being awarded points for their House if they could swim across the lake. Beginners were accompanied by a master in a small wooden boat. One evening, five set out to cross the lake followed by the master in the boat, with the head boy and myself swimming. Four quickly gave up and had to be collected by the master in the boat. The fifth boy went on and soon was halfway across the lake. The boat was coping with the four. The head boy and I went after the swimmer and to our horror, when we looked up, he had disappeared. Then he came up and quickly sank again. The head boy reached him. The swimmer tried to climb on to the shoulders of the head boy and pushed him under. Minor panic. I arrived. He tried to climb on to my shoulders. Life-saving instructions were of little avail. A senior boy and good swimmer, seeing our predicament, swam out from the shore and together, somehow, we got our fifth boy to the edge of the lake. The moment he touched the vegetation, he started to swim round the edge to the grassy bank where the diving board was and climbed out. Without a word, as if there had been no crisis at all, he walked back to the school. We all carried the taste of the slightly sulphurous water for weeks afterwards. The depth of the lake was never ascertained. No one had a chain long enough to measure it. The swimmer became a well known Government Official and in playing cricket for Uganda against Ghana scored more runs than the whole of the Ghana side put together!
An expedition up to Ruwenzori mountains was remembered by a Head Boy who on coming down told his father about the snow and ice at the top. The old man said he would believe that water could be solid when his son brought a piece down to show him! Such a piece was in fact brought down and displayed for him, although it was a small piece compared with the one cut from the snow line, just before our descent began on account of the warmer weather on the lower slopes of the mountain. A trek on another occasion over the end of the range, down into the Rift Valley, ended in a lonely part of pygmy country. It was very hot. We were all very thirsty. A local mud-hutted shopkeeper offered us “spiced tea”. “No milk”, he said. Then, suddenly, as an after-thought, he wondered if we might “like some of this”. “Some of this” turned out to be a case of pepsi-cola. We knew “civilization” could not be far away! We were so thirsty we would have drunk anything.
Someone had once told the boys of the curious English custom of April Fool. This was religiously observed. I turned up to their class room to find all their desks had gone. We had a young building supervisor living on the site. He had an Alsatian dog which proved a nuisance by chasing boys and snapping at their ankles. I warned the young man to keep it under better control. At 5.45am on April 1st, I was awakened by a very agitated young man who said the boys had told him his dog had attacked one of them and he was so badly injured he had to be taken to hospital in Fort Portal. The young man was very sorry and asked me if I knew where his dog was. He promised nothing like this would happen again and he would be happy to compensate the injured boy. I rubbed in how serious this incident was and then asked him what date it was. He looked puzzled and then slowly said “They wouldn’t do that would they?” “You never know”, I said, “but if you ask them kindly, I think you’ll find they will let you have your dog back”.
Life was not all fun, of course. The staff and boys worked hard. We attained Cambridge School Certificate status. Standards improved and exams were passed. We were able to offer mathematics at School Certificate level for the first time because the wife of the local Church Missioner had studied the subject at Cambridge University. I employed her the moment I heard about this and earned a strong rebuke from the Education Department for appointing someone without the Director’s permission. The chance was too good to miss. However, and after all, we were over 200 miles from Kampala and letters took over a week or so to get to and fro.Government Departments are wedded to forms and these have to be routinely filled in monthly, annually, whatever. One of these contained enquiries about needs for future staff. I automatically asked for one more member each year, as the School gradually rose to full School Certificate status. We certainly needed him or her and the chances of getting someone from the U.K. were remote and in any case would take a long time. One Saturday morning I was locking the office door when, to my surprise, a huge Italian lorry slowly headed into view. It was a prize from the Second World War in Ethiopia. A man jumped out flourishing a bunch of forms. “Your furniture”, he said, “for your three new bungalows”. “We have no new bungalows”, I protested. “Never mind”, he said, “this is the furniture all the way from Entebbe. Sign please”. In the end I took one lot and returned the rest. Someone in “the office” had seen the accumulated indent for three new members of staff and assumed that it meant three new bungalows. So he reasoned that furniture for them should be sent.
We sought to carry out the Christian tradition started by the Commander and to maintain the standards and values that he held dear and strove to impart. Chapel was a vital and important part of the life of the School. As a Government School, we had boys of Muslim faith. Of course, arrangements were made for them, and they kept Ramadan and other festivals throughout the year. They rose in the middle of the night to cook a meal during the fast. I remember seeing a few Muslim boys anxiously waiting to see the sun sink below the Ruwenzori Mountains so that they could dash in and join the rest of the boys for their evening meal.
Our chapel services were helped by the organ which Tony Irvine built and played. This led later to more bureaucratic trouble because the Education Department claimed the organ belonged to them as it was installed in a Government building. Tony had other ideas and I fear (1991) the organ is no longer there.
We took to putting on Shakespeare plays and this did much to help the boys to understand them. They were natural actors and they loved it. One great Shakespearean tale stands out, however, the open-air show of the Olivier film of Henry V. We invited everyone around. They sat spellbound in front of the screen and went wild with excitement in the battle scene when the bowmen of England let loose a rain of arrows against the French. I have no doubt there are those who still remember that night and talk about it.
We tried to prepare for the future. Little did we realise how dark, ultimately, it would turn out to be, but we must take encouragement from the many old Nyakasura boys who at school learnt something of not only how to earn a living but also how to live and are still able to pass on these important lessons.
I am in my anecdotage now and could go on telling many tales of things that happened in the few short years I was privileged to be at Nyakasura. We made all our own uniforms. Who remembers the famous stocking machine? Who remembers the tree snakes and the boys who studied at night with lamps preparing for their exams, sometimes secretly beneath their bedclothes with the aid of small electric torches? Who remembers blocked drains that had to be emptied? Or Bishop Balya coming barefoot to take a service? Or Saturday morning visits to the hospital in Fort Portal? Or being motored in to the hospital to be dealt with at night because of some emergency? Who remembers the visit by the Governor, Sir Andrew Cohen, who, on being offered tea, replied “I do not usually partake of farinaceous food at this hour”!
Ah well, they were good days shared by us all. Everyone contributed. You remember the famous West African educationalist who said “You can play a tune on the white keys of a piano and you can play a tune on the black, but if you want full harmony you must play both black and white together”. That is still true, doubly so in the Nyakasura of my day when pupils came to the School from all over Uganda, and from all kinds of homes and Uganda ethnic backgrounds. They all learnt to work and play together and they as individuals and Uganda as a whole were the better for the experience. May the School live to enhance this harmony and to continue to set a good example of it from which today’s Uganda can profit. It deserves to do so and Uganda needs an example of this kind for its recovery. People in the U.K. will be contributing to its appeal for funds to aid its rehabilitation, and I wish the appeal every success. The School will for ever remain in my affections.
ADDENDUM
Contributed By Alan Baxendale who served as Assistant Master under Mr Cooper
The School in Mr Cooper’s day was a pioneer, the first Central Government managed secondary school in Uganda, the precursor of many others which have since come into being. It set a good pace for them. It exemplified the moral and spiritual beliefs of its founder, Commander Calwell, and his own very practical outlook on life and how to sustain our personalities throughout our lives. It drew its pupils from all over Uganda and from all religious beliefs and cultures. In this way it focused attention on Uganda as a whole, underlining the importance of the unity of the nation, making the point that the whole is greater than the parts. And it did the same thing by bringing together all the pupils and all the staff into common activities, showing that whatever differences there might be amongst them they could in fact all work together as a team, and that in unity lay strength and successful achievements.
The School under Mr Cooper, of course, was a small one, consisting of 3 junior secondary (post primary 6) classes and 3 senior classes leading to the Cambridge School Certificate Examination, entrance to Makerere (a four-year Arts/Science Degree course in those days, underwritten by London University, not a three-year one), to trade and professional training courses, mainly situated in Protectorate Government Departments, and to employment. All the staff and pupils in consequence were well known to each other. The School was rather like a family and this was one of the keys to its success in Mr Cooper’s time. Nowadays the School is a very large one and ways and means have to be found for enabling it to achieve the team spirit which was more easily achieved when it was a small school, for upon that the future of the School now depends – the future, indeed, of all Schools in Uganda, and in particular the future of Uganda itself.
Schools are places of teaching and learning, of breaking down barriers, and of understanding and coming to terms with differences, in short, of preparing for adult life and that cooperation amongst everyone upon which all worthwhile adult life depends. The Commander and Mr Cooper understood these circumstances very well and it was upon the foundations they laid that subsequent Headmasters, Mr Stevens, the Rev. Perrens and Mr Batchelor, in the days of British Headmasters, were able to build, and afterwards to hand on the School as a going concern to their Ugandan successors.
The troubles through which Uganda has gone in recent years have set back the School’s development, but it is good to learn that there are people in Uganda with its welfare at heart who are determined to rehabilitate it and to get it moving again in the way it was originally going. There are great strengths in its history, to which pupils, teachers and a wide range of ordinary people have all contributed, and it is to the rediscovery of these strengths it has now to turn. As they are rediscovered so will come that sense of fun, of happiness, of goodwill, of standards, of disciplines and of all that Mr Cooper in his memoirs calls “godliness and good learning”, which made the School the lively place it was in his day, a place which everyone who went through it can look back upon with great affection and thankfulness. I hope one day I may see it again. It is always in my mind and I am delighted that I am still in touch (1991) with so many of its pupils from my time there. It made a tremendous impression upon me as a young man. I owe a lot to the boys I taught – they may not have known it at the time, but they taught me a great deal for which I shall always be grateful; and the boys and staff of those days, in their turn, owe a tremendous lot to Mr Cooper. He was a father to us all and it is magnificent that, now in his eighties, he and his wife, Mary, who was a tower of strength to him at the School, as she still is to him now, (1991) are still with us, alive and well, and delighted as ever to hear from their former pupils and to see them when from time to time they visit this country. And that goes too, I am sure, for Frank Stevens, the Rev. Perrens and Edward Batchelor
Floreat Nyakasura!