Founded in 1902, Namilyango College was established by the Catholic Mill Hill Missionaries. JANE JUSTINE MIREMBE has been speaking to some alumni, as they reminisce about the coming 115th anniversary.
As a young boy, a timid Gawaya Tegule got out of his father’s car and made his first step into Namilyango College School in 1984. The first welcome came from one of the older students. However, the welcome sent chills down his spine.
“Come to my house when your dad leaves. I will teach you boxing,” a young man, clad in a muscle-revealing sleeveless shirt said to him. The then 13-year-old Tegule was shaken at the thought of having to fight this Goliath. He wondered if this was the bullying he had been warned about before leaving his father’s home in Jinja.
A few days into the school, he came to learn that what he had received was not a bullying threat but, rather, an invitation to participate in one of the school’s greatest traditions at the time; boxing.
“Students of Namilyango were crazy about boxing. The school was like a boxing auditorium. We had so many boxing competitions. The school was synonymous with boxing,” said Tegule, now a radio talk show host.
According to Kavuma Kaggwa, an elder and former student, Namilyango had long history with the sport, until it was abolished in the early 1990s by the headmaster of the time, Gerald Muguluma.
Kaggwa was a student at Namilyango College from 1953 to 1955, and is now documenting the school’s history. According to him, the school’s abolition of the sport was intended to encourage more academic prowess at Namilyango. Indeed, the boxing hall has since been turned into a library. But the boys have since adjusted to the loss.
“To make up for the loss, the boys have developed great love for rugby and have won the national schools’ rugby title more than any other school,” Kaggwa says. The school has also sent numerous players to the national team. Currently, the national side has six players, including Brian Odong, Davis Kiwalabye and Justin Kimono who are Namilyango alumni.
HUMBLE ORIGINS
When Kabaka Mutesa I invited missionaries from Europe to educate the people of Uganda in 1875, the first to arrive was Bishop Alexander Mackay of the Church Missionary Society in 1877.
He was followed by the White Fathers, led Fr Simeon Lourdel and Br Amans Delmas, who arrived here in 1879. Ssekabaka Mutesa I passed on in 1884 and his son Ssekabaka Daniel Mwanga succeeded him. Seeing that the White Fathers were French, Mwanga assumed there was no Catholicism in England.
However, White Fathers quickly communicated with the Catholic Mill Hill mission in England to send British missionaries, which is how Bishop Dr Henry Hanlon arrived in Buganda in 1895.
Bishop Hanlon set up at Nsambya hill, with the jurisdiction of the Mill Hill missionaries covering the whole eastern Uganda, up to Mombasa in Kenya. On his arrival, he was quick to set up relations with the Buganda monarchy, particularly Stanislaus Mugwanya, who was the regent of Ssekabaka Daudi Chwa.
By 1902, Mugwanya was the head of the Catholics in Buganda. It was Mugwanya who requested Bishop Hanlon to build Namilyango College as a high school for Catholic princes from Buganda, Bunyoro, Tooro, Ankole and Busoga.
The school was started under the supervision of the then Catholic Bishop Henry Hanlon, who decided to build the college and turn it into a high school for all Catholic Africans from Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Sudan. The headmasters, who took over in the later years, however, allowed students of other denominations.
PROUD ALUMNI
Kaggwa says the school has lived up to its initial billing, producing several alumni over the years. These include Prince David Wasajja of Buganda, Democratic Party President Norbert Mao, Chief Justice Bart Katureebe, author and playwright Austin Bukenya, businessman Emmanuel Katongole, who is also the proprietor of Quality Chemical Industries and Vero Mineral Water, as well as Lawrence Mulindwa, proprietor of one of the best schools in the country, St Mary’s SS Kitende.
He cites the school’s insistence on a two-stream system; the academic stream and the commercial stream, for students to choose, which area of life they wanted to attend.
“The academic stream was for science subjects; Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry and Physics, leading one to study Medicine at Makerere. The commercial stream was for one to study commercial subjects like office administration, accounts, marketing and salesmanship, secretarial, public relations, architecture and mass communication,” Kaggwa explains.
Gawaya Tegule adds that the school instilled in them a sense of independence. The students were groomed to be self-reliant, he believes led to a superiority complex.
“There was no spoon-feeding. We had to do research and so we passed without teachers,” Tegule says. “Everybody wanted to excel; so, we worked hard. We did not fear anybody because we knew we were better than anyone else.”
He says that this attitude has helped many of the former students make it in life.
jjmirembe@gmail.com