Birth of a Dream Weaver Read online

  I never met the affable Foster, the expert on the black mind, in class, so for me, Payne and Ehrlich remained the exceptions, not the norm. In English and history, at least, I encountered a faculty tolerant of conflicting views, but who nevertheless made it clear that learning was a discipline, not a series of opinions. There were things called facts, evidence, citation, logic, comparison, and of course organization of material into a coherent argument.

  At the other end was Emil Rado, from economics, who in my last years would form a semisecret club of thirteen, drawn from faculty and students. It was a club for those with unique talents, supposedly. But the number had to remain thirteen. Why thirteen? I wondered. Thirteen was supposed to be the unlucky number, for the English at least. When recently I told my son, Mukoma, about this and my puzzlement about the number, he said it was probably derived from Jesus and the twelve disciples! Was Rado the Jesus to our twelve disciples? Probably not quite, for, on leaving Makerere, one ceased to be a member automatically, even the founder. The other members would then elect a replacement from among faculty and students. The thirteen remained but their composition changed. Apart from the exclusive secrecy, I never saw anything out of the ordinary in matters discussed or in the depth of the discussion, nothing different from what prevailed in ordinary nonexclusive gatherings. But that was in my last year at college.

  The most consistent in encouraging diversity of views was the pipe-smoking Peter Dane. He also stood out for his close reading of texts. On Dickens’s Great Expectations, he made the characters, especially Magwitch, the convict, come alive for us. Australia was a penal colony where the English undesirables were deported for life: they could never return to Albion’s shores without facing arrest, conviction, and prison. Dane’s delineation of Magwitch’s elaborate attempts to create his own gentleman in the Pip character, and the temptation to come back to enjoy, though surreptitiously, the sight of his creation, was moving, and without his saying so, Dane made us see the novel in terms of class exclusion and empire. He brought Dickens closer home to us. Colony and Crown, prison and palace, they produced each other. Great Expectations became a favorite, and a group of us adopted the name Pip.

  When, after the terminal second-year Preliminary exams, I was admitted into the three-year honors program in English, I looked forward to having more time with Peter Dane. But he disappeared from Makerere; later, we heard that he had moved to the University of Auckland, New Zealand, which puzzled me immensely. How could anybody leave Makerere, which we took to be the most highly coveted institution in the world, for an island?

  Years later I would meet him again, twice. First in 1984 when at his Auckland University I gave the Robb lectures, which became the book, Decolonising the Mind, but I don’t recall any interactions on that occasion. The second time was in 2005 when he delivered the encomium on the occasion of the honorary doctorate the same university bestowed upon me. In his talk, he recalled the Makerere days, forty years back, which had a special meaning for him, the job being his first as a university professor.

  Over lunch I learned a little about the amazing life journey that led him to that first academic job in Makerere. He was born in Berlin in 1921 to a German father and a Jewish mother. He fled Hitler to the United Kingdom in 1939. The eighteen-year-old youth was interned as an enemy alien in Australia in the 1940s at a camp near Wagga Wagga. After the war, he went back to England, where he met his future wife, Gabriele Herrmann, who nursed him with love back to life and belief. They married in 1945, and in 1956, with her support, he graduated in English from the University of London. She remained the love of his life for fifty years, till he lost her to an illness. At the time I met him in Auckland the second time, he had retired, married the second love of his life, a Maori lady, and still lived in their home in the Bay of Islands.

  At lunch I couldn’t help but go back to our classes on Dickens’s Great Expectations in Makerere. I recalled the magic of his Magwitch presentation, but I also recalled that he never said a thing about his own sojourn in Australia. The encounter made me realize how little I knew the Makerere Dane; I had always assumed him to be of English stock, an academic whose life had been books and books and more books.

  Though the faculty was largely white, it was actually diverse in cultural backgrounds. In the Department of English alone, there were the Irish Alan and Phyllis Warner; the South Africans, D.D. Stuart, Trevor Whittock, and Murray Carlin; the Scottish Margaret MacPherson; and the taciturn Englishman R. Harris. The English David Cook and Geoffrey Walton would come later.

  My encounter with Dane made me look back to my early days in Makerere and wonder what hidden and complex histories my professors may have carried behind the masque of black academic gowns, stern faces, and measured words. It was one of the chroniclers of Makerere, Carol Sicherman, who recently told me that Murray Carlin fought in North Africa, very much animated by a wish, as a South African Jew, to fight the Nazis. The pro-Nazi leanings of some Boers must have been a powerful incentive, and yet at the time of my studies of D.H. Lawrence with him, you could not read this drama from his inscrutable face.

  Sometimes we wear masks

  Not with deceptive intent

  Not even to shield faces from the sun

  But the within from the without

  Or save the day from the gaze of yesterday

  We wear masks

  The better to dance the big masquerade of just living

  VII

  The other inscrutable, on the face at least, was Principal Bernard de Bunsen. We hardly ever interacted with him; we caught only glimpses of him at important ceremonies, so he remained a mystery. But I felt that I already knew him: his name reminded me of the Bunsen burner we used in our labs in school; the initials B.B. could stand for both the burner and the brain. Was he related to Robert Bunsen, the nineteenth-century German chemist and designer of the burner named after him? No way of knowing. It was only when I read his autobiography, Adventures in Education, that I learned of his birth, not in Germany, but in the environs of Cambridge, though he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford. His first major job was as director of education in Palestine, not in the Ottoman Empire he had heard about from his mother, but in the British Mandate, “the scene of endless conflict between Arabs and Jews inflamed by the new waves of postwar Jewish immigration from the ghettos and concentration camps of Central and Eastern Europe seeing not only the Homeland that Balfour had promised, but also a Jewish state.”6

  Three months after the end of the British Mandate on May 15, 1948, he was on his way from Jerusalem to Kampala, first as reader and head of the Education Department, then later the principal during my years at Makerere.

  The opposite end was one we all thought we knew. Hugh Dinwiddy joined the department and the college in 1956 as lecturer in English. But he made only a few appearances in class; he had more than a handful as the warden of Northcote Hall.

  Northcote7 was one of the six halls of residence, the others being Mitchell, New Hall, Livingstone, and University, all for men, and Mary Stuart for women. Outside the classrooms, departments, and faculties into which the academic learning was organized, the halls were the center of student life. They had their own traditions, cultures, and values, forged in rivalries in social activities, theater, and academic achievements. Identities were in terms of halls of residence.

  The rivalries would at times express themselves in the vocabulary of the colonizer and colonized. When New Hall was built, it shared the same warden and administration as the older Northcote. In the parlance of the time, New Hall was spoken of as a colony of the latter. The tension between them was seen as a case of New Hall continually seeking and asserting her independence from Northcote’s colonial shadow.

  Another “colonial story” involved Mitchell and University halls. Mitchell was one of the oldest residences for men, one of the hostels of its original incarnation as a technical high school. It was named after Sir Philip E. Mitchell, governor of Uganda8 between 1934 and 1940, who s
upported the school’s early development, envisioning it as a future center of higher education for the East African group of territories, “a place where there shall be provision alike for the sons of the greatest in the land and the poorest,”9 a vision realized in the Makerere I was now attending. The old Mitchell symbolized the continuity from school to college.

  Without a lockable common entrance to the scattered buildings, the newly imported Oxbridge tradition of midnight closures of outside doors by porters or custodians and the exclusion of visitors after the witching hour could not be carried out effectively. The night guard, armed with a stick only, could not apprehend all the curfew offenders. So Mitchellites moved freely at all times of night and day.

  Michellite freedom was a comment on the unfreedom in the other halls after midnight. We heard scary stories of students who, coming after the curfew hour, would try to scale the high walls of the modern halls, resulting in death in the case of Northcote. Modernity had its price, it seemed, and Mitchellites were reluctant to embrace it.

  When in 1962 it came to shutting the old to build a new, modern Mitchell, it was decided to spread out the residents to the other halls. Mitchellites resented the loss of freedom but more the joke that they would have to undergo orientation because they had never really been civilized. On the night of March 29, 1962, wearing their old gowns, they ate their dinner early; then they ran to University Hall, planted the Mitchell flag on the central table, captured the chairman with a popgun, and forced him to sign the charter of surrender they had already had drawn up in gothic script by Glennie Dias, who would end up a Northcoter.

  The conditions and terms of surrender stipulated that Mitchell Hall, “hereafter referred to as the colonialists,” had conquered and consequently colonized University Hall, “hereinafter known as the natives.”

  Aware that the natives had acquired only the outward form of culture, the colonial government pledged to impart the essence of civilization to the natives. For this purpose, the colonial power had decided to send 40 (forty) expatriates to live among the natives on condition (a) that the conquered country offer adequate inducement to the expatriates and (b) that on retirement the expatriates shall be entitled to full compensation by the natives for the loss of their career. As part of the overall colonization policy, Mitchell Hall had sent officers to New Hall, Northcote, and Livingstone as part of the AID program to backward countries.

  The Makererean, the student newspaper, headlined the facetious incident as University Hall being “invaded, conquered and colonized by the ever expanding Mitchell Hall Empire.”

  Whatever the sensibilities of the High Table—apparently its members were not amused at the dig at colonialism—the Mitchellites were determined to assert their Mitchellness by going to University Hall as conquerors, not supplicants.10 They had character to protect and reputation to keep.

  Mitchell’s case exemplifies the obvious, that each hall had evolved traditions specific to itself and a communal spirit unique to itself. It was not just the students alone: the character of the warden also contributed to shaping the overall direction of the residence. Welbourne’s freewheeling character and that of the hall he led reflected each other, some even claiming he was in on the planning stages of the invasion.

  Dinwiddy, who had taken over the Northcote wardenship from John Coleman in 1956, was a Roman Catholic who, unlike Father Foster, embodied a truly catholic culture. His character was forged in the academy and in sports. A graduate of Cambridge, he was a first-class cricketer, having played for the Kent County Cricket Club (KCCC), played for Cambridge University CC in the 1930s, won blues for Rugby, played for the Harlequins, and even trialed for England in 1936. He loved literature, music, and people and was always fascinated and drawn to individual stories. His hearty laughter was infectious.

  Northcote under Dinwiddy attracted all sorts of characters, the enigmatic, the tragic, and the eccentric. The enigmatic, call him Dr. Scout, was a brilliant student of medicine, moreover an Alliance product, a scout leader, Queen’s scout even, who used his room in Northcote Hall as headquarters for a vast vehicle theft and robbery operation spanning the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanganyika. When years later Dr. Scout’s thieving ways caught up with him and ruined his flourishing medical practice, those of us who knew him at the time wondered how he could have been able to pass his medical exams while masterminding robberies across international borders.

  J. Njoroge was the case of tragic genius. He was probably the most widely and deeply read student of my time on the Hill. He joined Makerere a year after me, and within months of his arrival, he was challenging third-year honors history students on facts and interpretation of European thought and history. He talked of Kant and Hegel and Aquinas and Marx to puzzled students years his senior. Taking the search for truth literally, he talked of doing research and wanted to visit missionary archives in Kampala. He approached the Institute of Social Research at Makerere for help but was dismissed as an upstart: concentrate on your classes and class requirements. He refused to confine himself to English history and argued that it was important to see it in the context of European history. He went to the senior professors, who told him to concentrate on passing his exams in English history. J. Njoroge never studied for exams: for him exams were a test of what he already knew, not of what he had crammed a few weeks before. He always got through with Distinction. He published one paper, “Christianity and the Rise of Nationalism in East Africa” in the journal The Undergraduate of March 1962. By then he had become frustrated by what he took to be the intellectual narrow-mindedness of Makerere. He wanted to get out. Privately, he applied and got a scholarship to what he thought was a college of higher education in Paris but on arrival in Paris found it was a kind of vocational college for the French language and flew back. Then he left for Dar es Salaam, enrolled in the newly established law school without officially withdrawing from Makerere, but he became even more frustrated. He returned to Makerere, was expelled for having broken the university regulations, but Dinwiddy fought for him and managed to have the ban reduced to just a three-month suspension. His was the restless mind of a genius, and Dinwiddy seemed to understand. But Njoroge never came back. He fell to a car accident.

  I really missed him. He and I used to engage in heated debates over just about everything, from politics to literature, history, journalism, and philosophy. Although I was not his match in European history and philosophy, I more than made it up with my vast knowledge of literature.

  The eccentric was Babulal Patel, a brilliant painter who had no formal training or coaching in art. Half deaf and not much interested in the usual academic curricula required to get into college, he found help in Mr. Manohar Lal Sood, principal of Kisumu High School in Kenya, who, recognizing Babulal’s unique talent, appealed and got him admitted to Makerere Fine Arts Department. Patel readily found a home in Northcote, but he chose to work under the shade of a tree, stripped to his underwear. He would paint multilimbed figures inspired by the Indian epics, with bold green or blue colors that one could not erase from memory. Sometimes he would disappear without telling anybody, but Dinwiddy would somehow find him, mainly in the bushes around, and would lure him back to the hall. He was the perfect example of the Platonic “mad” genius.

  That was Dinwiddy! He brought the friendly but competitive spirit of sports into Northcote culture: he was chief coach, motivator, cheerleader, counselor, and consoler in chief. He was there to see his fighters off, and he would be there to receive them whether they had lost or won. His generous personality helped forge a special Northcotian community spirit to which we became loyal.

  He and his pianist partner, Yvonne Marie née Catterall, were literally the head of a Northcote family nurtured by private and public rituals, with Dinwiddy as the chief ritualist. He would personally call on those in difficulty and listen to their problems. He also published the Northcote Newsletter, through which he reported and highlighted all aspects of life in the hall and touted our achievements i
n sports and academic fields. It was written with wit and littered with literary and sports allusions.

  Sometimes he would invite the conquering heroes to his house, directly opposite the main entrance of the hall, for a homemade meal, but more often than not, he would invite the student achievers to dine and wine at the High Table.

  Northcote’s dining hall was multipurpose: a daily eating space, a dance arena for socials, and an art gallery, walls covered with art by hall artists, the most famous being the murals by Sam Ntiro and Ignatius Sserulyo’s rendering of the wars of religion in Buganda.

  The resident faculty dined at the High Table always, while we students ate from lower tables. But once a week, the high table was a formal affair; the diners dressed in suits and academic gowns. The guests included important players in the Uganda Protectorate administration or any dignitaries visiting from outside Uganda. Among these in my time were Abiola Irele, a budding Paris-based Nigerian intellectual who years later would bloom into one of the leading lights of literary and critical theory; the Kenya governor, Sir Patrick Renison, who infamously described Kenyatta as the leader of darkness and death; and the ex-governor of Uganda, Sir Andrew Cohen, who once exiled the young kabaka (king) of Buganda to London before being forced to bring him back. Dinwiddy was at the head of the table, the adorable Yvonne always at his side.