TRIBUTE: Who was John Nagenda? (Part I)

NewvisionMar 4, 2023Read original

KAMPALA -

Nagenda has worked with the President for over two decades and was senior advisor on media and public relations. The sports aficionado, particularly of tennis and cricket, is also a gifted writer and brilliant mind with a tendency to speak his mind.

In this interview conducted by Sumaya Muwongefor Bukedde TV and transcribed by Jackie Nalubwama, he bares it all: about growing up the son of missionary parents, making his own path amidst the confines of school and surviving jiggers in Busoga.

My name is John Nagenda, but if you persuade me to reveal my other names, I will tell you that they are Mwesigwa and Robin. I don’t go by them, but if ever another John Nagenda came up, I will reconsider using them.

In Rwanda, as the first-born. My parents were missionaries who had gone there to spread the Gospel in 1938. We returned to Buganda when I was two or three years old.

I started at home, where different people used to come and teach me. In 1945, I went to a school in Namutamba called Kiwanda, which I joined in P.2. Perhaps the teachers saw my brilliance and made me skip Kindergarten and P.1, I don’t know.

Kiwanda only ended at P.4, so end of 1947 my parents decided that I go to Budo because boys studied in Budo and girls went to Gayaza. At Budo, the Headmaster, Timothy H. Cobb, said that he had cancelled automatic entry of noblemen’s sons. He told my parents to take me to another school and that if I passed the Budo exams, then I could join the school. I’d fi nished P. 4 at the time and had never sat a serious exam.

So I was then taken to Busoga College Mwiri in 1948. I went there with my brother Stephen and I did the Budo exams and passed. Prof George Kirya also did them and failed. He has always said it was because I was a Muganda. But our names were not attached to the exam papers!

I belong to(lungfish), the princely one. I used to think I belonged to Gabumba’s line of the clan but about five years ago, I was told I belong to the princely, by my cousin, the sculptor Francis Nnaggeenda (that’s how he tortures his name in spelling!).

Before Ssekabaka Kintu came to Buganda, there were about 49 or 50 kings from the princely Mamba clan. In 1911, it was rediscovered then, but our people feared that their people might be wiped out (as had been tried before) because Kintu stole our kingship. He found a King father and son arguing a lot, and suggested he temporarily ascends the throne, while they sorted out their matters, but he killed all he could find. They were stupid to let someone else temporarily have their throne.

There are also books that have been written about this. I am not sure how many we are but if you ask my cousin, Francis he will tell you.

I started with a football made of(banana fibre). The trouble was if you missed the ball, you would kick a stone and we were barefoot because we did not want to play with our shoes on.

In Budo, in 1952, headmaster Cobb saw something in me and felt that I was stubborn and lazy. He thought if he didn’t help me, they might lose out on me. He advised my parents to take me to study as far away as possible, but my place at Budo would be reserved.

Because of their friendship with Mr and Mrs Kabaza (they had found her for him) they took me to Kabale, among the Bakiga, where it was unbelievably cold, the coldest known, and that is where I spent 1953. What I remember is that I had shoes, but none of the Bakiga wore shoes, except the teachers at Kigezi High School.

I look at people like my friend Mondo Kagonyera, the Chancellor of Makerere University, who went barefoot, but he is now a big man. They were also struck that I, a Muganda, used to eat eggs, and they would call us,(those who eat eggs). But now a Mukiga can even finish 20 eggs. We Baganda taught them to eat eggs!

In Mwiri, where I had been for two years, my report once had what I thought was ‘nude’ against my name, and I had taken it to Kabaza, (who somehow was around) and he also didn’t seem to know. In fact, it was actually ‘rude’, distorted by the principal’s writing. How can a 10-year-old have that word describe him?

No, but I didn’t want to agree to something before I understood it. So, I even became known to the white headmaster, Rev. F. G. Coates. I remember still his initials. The behaviour stayed with me. Even at Budo, I always argued, the reason Cobb told my parents to take me far away for a while. I was lucky to go to Kabale, they could have taken me to Gulu (not that Gulu did not have people) but Rukiga language is closer to Luganda; and Bakiga used to respect Baganda.

After a year in Kigezi, I went back to Budo. When with my Bakiga friends they like to think that like them, I ask a lot of questions, because I lived among them, yet that is not the case. I tell them that before that, at Mwiri, the principal had written on my report that I was rude! But I am grateful I went to Busoga, though I was always being told that we Baganda used to make them carry hot food saucepans on their heads: that Baganda used to mistreat them. But how could my brother and me: less than ten-year olds!

My father was William Kyanjo Nagenda and my grandfather was large landowner Festo Mukasa ‘Mulyambuzi’ Manyangenda. He ate a lot of goats. For a period a co-Regent of Buganda, chosen by Kabaka Mutesa II, he married, first, the Mugema’s daughter. Mugema was the head of the(Monkey) clan, the one that seats the Kabaka on the throne.

Mother was Sala Maliamu Bakaluba of Kakeeka, Mengo, where Buganda University now is. She later published a short novel. Her father, Erasito Bakaluba was very knowledgeable and knew it. He wrote books like(Food of the Baganda). When I went into publishing with Oxford Printing Press in 1962, he told me we should publish it with small additions and call itbecause that would sell more widely!

Bakaluba had many daughters, who married well; for instance, ex Uganda Premier Apolo Nsibambi’s mother was my mother’s sister; another married Blasio Kigozi, who took the gospel to Rwanda, to be replaced by my father when he soon died.

Apollo Kironde married two of them, one after another. There were four others, mainly strong women, including Solome, famous bandleader Moses Matovu’s mother, who was whispered about in the family because she had married a Muslim. (Am I right to remember he lost an arm in a car accident?)

We Nagenda kids were seven but one died at infancy. He or she (I never asked which) was older than me, so I became Boss. There is Stephen, who runs our tea estate at Namutamba, Ruth, Jane, Tendo (died five years ago) and Jim. Stephen and I live in Uganda, the rest overseas.

We had house-helps, but our parents wanted us to do some chores, so we washed our plates. But our clothes were washed for us. Our parents were sent a steady supply of people to grow up in the right way by their example of being: “saved”.

In addition, the Lea Wilson tea estate beside which we lived needed a lot of labour and my parents, through their Rwanda years, were able to set up a line of supply. Many of these labourers were “saved”, therefore well behaved.

We grew up among these foreigners, and many otherwere among our parents’ dearest friends.

I can speak it and others, including foreigners, will understand. In 2007, the Queen and Prince Phillip threw a party when they came to Uganda for the CHOGM meeting to which I was invited. As I talked to them they laughed a lot.

When they left people asked me why they laughed and I said maybe because I spoke understandable English.

I remember when the Queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret came to Buganda in the late ‘50s, Katikkiro Kintu insisted he would welcome her, in English. Later, Princess Margaret said in her reply, “Listening to the Prime Minister, our languages (English and Luganda) have words which sound so similar!” Kintu was outraged!

I spent almost 20 years in exile in England, and before that, I had learnt how to speak it. The problem is people who twist their tongues and lips to sound English (better still American!) yet all you need to do is speak English normally in relaxed mode, as you would Luganda. Any other way is fake; horrible!

I walked in the dust as a child, but at home we had shoes. When we were very young, we had cloth shoes. After bathing in the evening, we would wear, sandals made of wood.

I spent three years at Kiwanda, perhaps I went to school barefoot; I don’t remember. I met jiggers in Mwiri! They say there are lots of jiggers in Busoga and other eastern parts of Uganda: they are not wrong! One day, aged nearly 11, I crowed: “Oh Basoga own jiggers”, but I didn’t know I had a jigger in my own foot. They checked me and got it out, then put paraffin on the spot. How they laughed; rightly! I am glad I left Busoga after two years; I’d probably still be beset by jiggers.

My cousins’ father, Simeon Nsibambi, was in 1920 one of the very first Born-again Christians of old, called, indeed you could call him its Founder in East Africa.

He was totally unlike most of the ones of today that I find difficult to understand. Being wealthy on his own, he wasn’t in it for the money, but because he wanted the Church to be re-born, to be on fire for Christ, as he put it.

Those who followed, like his younger brother Blasio Kigozi, my father, Yosiya Kinuka from Rwanda, Mugimba from Ankole and a host of others, spread the fire throughout East Africa and beyond.

From England there was Dr. Joe Church, who first bonded with Nsibambi around 1929, and many other missionaries.came to permeate the hitherto rather staid Church of Uganda, and spread well beyond, including many parts of the world.

Well, I will not say things that will get me into trouble, but let’s just say there was a different kind of Born-again Christians during my parents’ time. Apollo Kivebulaya went to preach in Congo and Rwanda; he died and they sent Nsibambi’s brother, Kigozi to Rwanda. He died young, in his 30s, because there were many diseases in the area. Then they sent my father.