So long teacher who turned into a fisherman to save self

William Dumba did not have to flee. But he had to. Parents of children he taught at Nyenga Secondary School in present-day Buikwe District had convicted him of being Idi Amin’s brother after the fall of Uganda’s third president in 1979.

Under the cover of darkness, the then head teacher of Nyenga Secondary School fled as far as he could. Iyingo Landing Site in Kamuli District was that far. Overnight, he had become a fisherman.

According to Morgan Yeka, to whom Mr Dumba shared his eventful journey in Uganda from 1950 when he crossed in from South Sudan, Kamuli was not far enough either as the capture of Kampala by Yoweri Museveni’s NRA guerrillas had him on the cliff again.

“He was again suspected of being from Amin’s ethnicity and he had to flee Kamuli too,” Yeka, who was Dumba’s student at Kakira Secondary School in the 1990s, recalls.

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This time the educationist settled in Katooke in Kakira. Katooke, now turned into a sugarcane plantation, was a trading centre established by Indian traders in the early 1940s—long before Jinja’s townships such as Bugembe had sprouted.

At the time, much of the estate was overgrown with bushes after the collapse of Kakira Sugar Ltd following the Asian expulsion of 1972. Many people in and around the estate farmed these idle plantations. Mr Dumba was one of them.

“He spent most of his time on the farm,” recounts Yeka, adding, “He would go early in the morning and return late in the evening, and—because he wore an overcoat most of the time—he was suspected to be a rebel since this was a time of insecurity.”

But this time Mr Dumba did not have to run. Security had been tracking his movement and finding nothing amiss. 

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Isaac Dramadri, the Gombolola security boss, opted to interview him. Mr Dramadri, who was also the head teacher of Karongo Primary School—one of the Madhvani estate schools—discovered that Dumba was a teacher. He took Dumba to the Kakira education office, but his qualifications and experience were above primary school pay grade. The education officer instead took Dumba to Kakira’s general manager, who approved his appointment as a teacher at Kakira Secondary School.

Find X
Dumba did not have to flee again. Kakira’s multi-ethnic setting was a place to call home. But when he was wheeled into an ambulance that sped with sirens from Jinja to Mulago Hospital in Kampala last Saturday, he probably reflected about that one last flight he was engaged in.

Only that this time he was not fleeing from neighbours suspicious of him, but the Angel of Death stalking him. He had been found unresponsive.

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This was no ordinary flight. In his 80s, Dumba was already battered by diabetes and hypertension. And on April 4, he gave up the battle, off to the other world where Dramadri—the man who changed his life—had left two decades earlier.

Dumba was that teacher who arrived in a class carrying a long wooden ruler, at least two textbooks and a box of chalk.

Then he would spend one hour and 20 minutes trying to Find X for and with his class. When the bell chimed to end his period, he would walk out of the class dustier than the blackboard.

As his family prepares for his eternal repose in Yei across the border in South Sudan, George Acelun, a businessman, remembers his former mathematics teacher as being more into linear programming concepts than algebraic equations.

The problem is that for many who do not have a head for mathematics, even the genius of Mr Google will not help. With his wooden ruler, Dumba would draw vertical and horizontal lines, mark the point of intersection with O, the tips with R and S. Then pick blue or pink pieces of chalk and draw slanted lines from R down to S.

Other times there would be a circle with some straight lines here and there.

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These were things that drew chills in so many learners who only looked forward to Question One in the Mathematics exams, but Dumba’s job was to ensure his students looked forward to more than just the first that.

At Kakira Secondary School in the heart of the Madhvani’s enclave, Dumba was the oldest teacher, one whose grey stubs and creases of wrinkle called for respect from everyone, including the head teacher.

“Mr Dumba was a disciplinarian but he was not only a teacher but a parent to many of us. I was in the same class with one of his sons—David Dumba. So once in a while I would go to his house, he would remind me that I was a bright student and should never let him down,” Dr Robert Ojambo, a senior lecturer at Kyambogo University, said.

Being the examinations master, Dumba had a separate office. It was a tiny room but, having to keep a typing machine with which he typed tests, he struggled to keep it neat. To many students, this was the place to get chalk and paper.

“You want papers for what? For writing letters to girls?” he would ask, pronouncing what as ‘wot’.
Often, he would be so engrossed in his typing, specs hanging loosely down his nose and when a student came for chalk, he would demand to know if you were the charlatan fond of caricaturing teachers on the blackboard.

He never turned away a student asking for chalk or paper. Instead, like Albert Bwire, a teacher at Jinja Senior Secondary School recalls, he would use the opportunity to remind one to do well in mathematics.

Versatile educationist
After his university education in South Sudan in the 1950s, Mr Dumba, who was born in Kegulu in Yei, worked in the Ministry of Agriculture in Yambio, a city in southwestern South Sudan. He was later posted to Torit in Eastern Equatoria from where he crossed to Uganda and worked with missionaries in Kitgum and Gulu as a teacher.

In the late-1950s, Dumba settled in Namutumba and taught English and Mathematics at Kisiki College. Then he moved to Magamaga as head teacher of Wandago Primary School in 1963 before his Nyenga Secondary School escapade.

Being the only secondary school in Kakira Town Council at the time, Kakira Secondary School was overwhelmed by students’ numbers. The students studied in shifts; with some reporting for morning lessons, others in the afternoon. Then Kakira locked its doors to ‘outsiders’ and started to only admit children of employees.

Dumba could not just look on as many students were without school. Together with a one Katerega, he started Kalungami Parents School in Nakabango, Namulesa Parish. The new school was a godsend to even children of Kakira employees who would fail the cut-off points at Kakira Secondary School.

Dumba was pedalling his Phoenix bicycle between Kakira and Kalungami where he was the deputy head teacher when Mother Kevin SS in Walukuba offered him the founding head teacher’s job.

“He was riding to all those schools and was still teaching Mathematics at Kakira SS and would not miss his lessons,” says Yeka.

Endearing lessons
Mathematics teachers are different. They put things on the blackboard and solve them with the participation of their students. Once in a while when it failed completely, he would leaf through his textbooks. But most times he would persist with asking questions that guided his students to the answer.

“Ah? Are you sure?” he would blurt out whenever a student made a suggestion. Whether he meant huh or ah is for the other world to discern now.

“Oh-keyi!” he would exclaim when he finally solved the equation.
Once, when Dumba failed to get his way through a stubborn equation—one that even the mathematics worms among the students could not get their heads to—he conceded.

“I’ll get back on this one tomorrow,” he told his class in 2000.

And get back, he did, the following day, with much excitement. He explored the equation to its conclusion and turned to the class smiling triumphantly.

In 1998, Mr Dumba told his class he had to stop teaching English after losing his front teeth in an accident. He said this had left him struggling with pronunciation and phonetics.

On January 29, a group of former students called on Mr Dumba at his home in Nairo village in Kakira Town Council. He was having an early evening nap in the living room.

It had been 20 years since and at his advanced age, he could not recall any of the faces. But he could jog his memory to incidents based on the characters of his students.

There, he caught onto one. Paul Mwesigwa. The old teacher summoned his energy from the 90s as he ordered Mwesigwa to sit next to him.

“Come and sit here, I’ll slap you!” he said, sending the room into rib-cracking laughter because he had said it exactly how he used to when he still had it in him.

Dr Ojambo, also the chairperson of Kakira Secondary School Old Students Association, described Mr Dumba as a strict disciplinarian but one every student proudly called their “academic grandfather.”

The late Dumba had 15 children and is survived by five—and millions of others he taught—and a wife, Abba.

Dumba was not only a teacher but also an agriculturalist and tutor of agriculture. He also had a stomach for politics, and was closely associated with the Amin and Obote governments. He was a Kakwa from the Somba clan of Abegi community in Kagulu near the  forest reserve in Yeyi close to the DR Congo-Uganda border road from Nyarju village where he will be laid to rest.