A WALK WITH UGANDA
A Series of conversations about Uganda in the independence era
BOYS’ NAMES
My Senior One class in 1967 had 29 boys and a girl called
Susan. Now, Susan is not an indigenous
Ugandan name, it was what we then called a “christian name”. The boys similarly had names like William,
John and Steven. All European names, though
originally many were Greek or Hebrew. The
two Moslems in the class were Muhammad and Yakub. The parents who gave us these names would
probably have called you a liar if you had told them, truthfully, that
Christianity actually did not require a non-African name for full membership in
the Church, nor Islam an Arabic first name as one of the pillars of the faith. The practice was by then firmly rooted in our
culture.
In the religious civil wars of our great-grandparents’ day
religion was not a private matter; it defined who you were and who you were
allied with. The names were thus badges
of allegiance. The Catholics, even as
they do today, followed the tradition of naming children after saints. The Protestants, for some reason, initially
fixated upon the Old Testament of the Bible.
My great-grandfather was Alooni (Aaron); in his generation Noahs,
Samsons, Gideons and Gabriels abounded.
Even in the 1960s old men called
Rehoboam, Methuselah, Nehemia,
Ezekiel or Malachi were to be found in every village. By our generation the popular names were more
contemporary. Among the many Johns and Davids
one would find boys named after the English heroes of the books then read in
schools, such as Francis Drake and William Wilberforce.
As we moved out of High School a few lads, alloying
adolescent rebellion with cool Pan-Africanism, threw away the non-African names. Thus in our University years we noted, among
others, John Otunnu become Olarra Otunnu
and Patrick Mbabazi become Amama Mbabazi.
Had we all decided to throw out the non-African names some
of our classmates would have been spared the trouble. Many of them in fact, because at that time one
of the most popular names was an African name, Aggrey. My High School class had two of them and I am
certain there wasn’t a classroom in any Ugandan Protestant school at the time
without a lad named Aggrey. How did this
happen?
Dr. James Aggrey
The story started in the 1890s when American missionaries in
West Africa sent a promising boy called James Aggrey to the US to train as a
missionary. Train he did, and he ended up
with a doctorate. He was a brilliant
teacher and preacher and on return to Ghana he was appointed vice
Principal of Achimota College. It was in
this capacity that an American philanthropic foundation, the Phelps-Stoke Fund,
made him part of a group of experts they sent around Africa examining
educational policy in the various British territories. The Phelps-Stokes Commission arrived in
Uganda in the 1920s and visited, among other
places, King’s College, Budo.
Aggrey
electrified Budo. First his presence as
an equal in this group of white experts was a novelty ( this mindset is not
totally dead, as an amateur photographer I have been on safaris in Uganda, Kenya
and South Africa; being the only black face in the group of “men with huge
cameras” I always get second, third and fourth looks). Second he was deputy Head of Achimota, well
known to Budonians as a sister school.
Third he had an insidiously subversive sermon.
Budo was then one of the main sources of Junior Secondary
School Teachers for Uganda. The boys who
heard Aggrey’s sermon never stopped repeating it. It was the story of the Eagle that would not
fly. Eridadi Mulira, a Budo student of
the 1930s, came to address the school in 1968 and opened his talk with the
story of Dr Aggrey’s Eagle. In the story
a farmer found an eagle’s egg and put it in his henhouse. A hen incubated and hatched the egg, and
raised the eaglet with her chicks. The young
eagle was raised as a chicken; it would look downwards to the ground, not up to
the sky, and would scratch for things to
eat. A passing traveler saw it and was
intrigued. The farmer told him the story
and said “it was raised as chicken; it can never be an eagle”. The traveler said “no, I can show it that it
is an eagle”. The farmer agreed to let
him try but warned him that it was useless, it was raised a chicken and a
chicken was all it could ever be.
So every morning the traveler would take the eagle out on a
cliff and hold it up in the air. “Eagle”, he would say,” look up at the sky and
not down at the ground. Do not scratch
the ground, fly.” For many days he said this to no effect, but
finally the eagle looked up. Once it saw
the sky it never looked at the ground again; it flew away, free forever. You, he would say to every audience in
Africa, are eagles, stop looking at the ground, be free.
The Budo boys got the message very well. They spread it whenever they went to teach, together
with the name of the Ghanaian who preached it. But more importantly, they applied it to themselves;
they stopped looking at themselves as British subjects but as Africans who
would be free. The seeds of Ugandan independence
were thus sown at Budo. A group of teachers
resigned en masse in the late 1930s and started a new school in this spirit;
they called it Aggrey Memorial (Dr Aggrey died young, shortly after his visit
to Uganda). They did not stop there; one
of these rebel Budo teachers was called Ignatius Musaazi. He founded Uganda’s first political party
with an explicit demand for political power, the Uganda National Congress. To this day Musaazi is recognized as the
father of Uganda’s independence, which makes Aggrey, a Ghanaian visitor, the
grandfather.
A 100 shilling note issued by the East African Currency board.
A shilling with a bust of George V