For my teaching duties, I chose Sam Igat Memorial College, a newly founded secondary school crammed into two long buildings and a two-story flat. It was the brainchild of the crafty Rev. Igat. An Obote supporter, he used his political friends to persuade CARE and other relief groups to put up the long buildings as a memorial for his thirty-year-old son, who was killed during Amin’s time. The government, eager to help create schools outside the city for poor children, gave the college a grant and its blessing to get going. By virtue of its location, eight kilometers from the city center, the school had good teachers and plenty of students, but organization was its greatest problem. The good reverend did his best to meddle in the affairs of the school, in order to safeguard his position as its founder and owner. He wanted to appoint or approve headmasters and make them do what he wanted. For a long time he sabotaged the founding of a parent-teacher association because he feared that it would overpower him. Consequently, the growth of the school was blocked by the very man who claimed to love it to death. If a teacher or headmaster became very influential, the reverend would spread rumors to the effect that the individual was a child molester or an embezzler or a guerrilla supporter. The last accusation being commensurate with a death sentence, many of these individuals fled his school rather than risk the consequences.
By the time I joined, the school was in one of its confused phases. I liked it. There was no parent-teacher association to collect money, augment teachers’ salaries and keep an eye on things. The staff was divided. A very weak headmaster had just been brought in, and he had decided to do nothing. He let the reverend address the students, going on about his son and his political friends and what he had done for the parish. It was noted that the parish had retired him for committing adultery and siring children with parishioners’ wives, but the old man had discovered early on that shame was a sentiment unfit for politicians. He acted as though the charges were merely malicious fabrications.
For a long time, the school had no library. There were about four hundred students, most of whom did not have the money to buy the necessary textbooks for themselves. Teachers used their own books or borrowed some from other schools or from friendly teachers elsewhere. The few available teachers’ textbooks were kept in a big cupboard. One day news spread that the school’s bad days were over, for the reverend’s American and Canadian friends had sent all the necessary books. The excitement was phenomenal, not least among the teachers. But it was all dampened when a load of useless books was delivered one early morning: blueprints of 1940 computers, books on the rudiments of aeronautics, zoology, Greek, marine fish and the American army. The reverend made a long speech, showing off the gravid boxes. He collected a number of well-dressed students, made them wear their best smiles and posed with them for a group photograph, with the boxes in the foreground. “Toilet paper,” the teachers said when they saw the books. The students felt cheated. Word spread. Reverend Toilet Paper became Igat’s nickname henceforth.
The parents were generally happy to have a nearby school to take care of their offspring during the day. We were their nannies, making sure that no harm came to their sons and daughters before the end of school. The classes were crowded, because the policy was to recruit as many students as possible and not to disappoint eager, hardworking parents. There were some very keen students in the lot, boys and girls who would have performed well in better schools. Some had come from the Triangle. They worked hard at first, but lethargy eventually set in.
The choice of a deputy headmaster always says volumes about a school. Ours was a licensed teacher who had done some teaching when SIMC, as we called the college, was still a primary school. Now he did all the headmaster’s dirty work. He opened and closed the school. He collected the fees, saw to discipline, caught latecomers, did some accounts and doled out money to teachers. He checked breast pockets to make sure that the school badge was well sewn on, not just affixed with pins, as adolescents liked to do. He checked girls’ faces for makeup, for tiny, sexy earrings and forbidden hairdos. He also checked girls’ fingers for nail polish and faddish artificial claws. He was a man dizzy with his role, out to top himself and justify his position to all.
The headmaster, an evasive elephant seal of a man, spent most of his time on the slide rule, figuring out theoretical mathematical problems. He had little to do, because his deputy literally ran the school. On many days, he did not put in an appearance at all, preferring to attend meetings and see to his business interests in the city. His trick was to assure the reverend that he was not a threat to him, while he did his own thing. The headmaster, like the Invisible Man, acted and moved incognito. Sometimes he entered his office and no one knew that he was even there.
This cavalier spirit extended to school accounts. They were a mess or a maze to the average eye. It was as if a mathematician were creating work for himself to fill his lonely hours, or a crook were disguising his hand. To begin with, most teachers had financial problems. They would go to the headmaster and explain their positions, and according to the need, he would decide how much to give them as a supplement to, or an advance on, their salaries. He would dole out the money and write the amount on a piece of paper. In the meantime, the deputy was writing his own pieces of paper, which ended up on the headmaster’s desk. There was such a big heap of famous pieces of paper that many got lost or confused. The only conclusion one could draw was that the headmaster was exploiting the system for his own good; otherwise there was nothing to stop him from acquiring an accountant or a better system. Consequently, clever teachers always had a problem — with the children, the wife, their health, anything — and drew whatever money they could. Sometimes the deputy referred these cases to the headmaster, who, being a nice man, could not find ways of denying them and ended up giving them money and writing on pieces of paper.
The headmaster liked me, because I never asked for money. My guess was that he was writing somewhere that he had given me so much and pocketing it. Whenever I went to his office, it was to ask for permission to go home, ostensibly to the clinic or hospital for my headaches, which later became migraines. This headmaster did not mind a sickly teacher as long as he did not ask for financial assistance. So whenever I had business to settle in town, I would ask for permission to leave. And I would get it. This of course meant that students were suffering, but ours was not a student-oriented school, at least not in the academic sense. There was no use pretending. Most teachers taught in other schools to supplement their deficient pay, and others had jobs in town. As long as one came and taught, one was not obliged to stay on campus. Sometimes teachers came, went to the staff room, had tea, conversed and left, as though their lessons were over. It was a free-for-all, with many students also dodging and staying home to fetch and sell water or do other things to earn money to support themselves and pay school fees.
The old system of sending school inspectors to keep an eye on teachers had died an excruciating natural death in the seventies, and the new government was too busy fighting guerrillas to bother about such banal things as school inspections. Teachers got paid three months late, and in order to appear to be fair, the government did not put them under pressure.