High school excitement of learning 

Ah, what fun it was to learn! It was learning, and playing, and praying, and doing cleaning work around dorms and classrooms, and growing, and dreaming our futures. 
From the geography that we learnt we gave names to some of our classmates. To the girls we boys gave the names of islands around the globe: Madagascar, Mauritius, Colombo, New Zealand, and so on. The biologically best endowed girl we nick-named Australia, the largest island; and the least endowed we nick-named Tasmania. And we described this name-giving exercise of ours as Applied Geography.
But there was also Applied Literature, whereby some of us boys gained new popular nicknames from the imaginative books that we read: Umufundisi and Titihoya from Cry, the Beloved Country; Poo Lon the Elephant (for our heavy-set head prefect) from a tale set in the Far East; Orsino and Macbeth from Shakespeare’s plays; Long John Silver the one-legged from Treasure Island by Louis Stephenson; and Twala the one-eyed from King Solomon’s Mines by Rider Haggard. 

And from Applied History, the only William in our class was aristocratically re-named William of Pembroke, from our study of Britain’s Early Modern Age. Altogether, perhaps the greatest learning delight came from the history books. In that last decade of pre-independence Uganda, however, there was no African history taught at high school, and no known textbooks of African history. My generation was, therefore, subjected to the history of England and Britain. In the circumstances, our formative minds went along with every well told story regardless of racial or colonial content.
The high drama of ‘The Sinking of the Spanish Armada’ by the English in the English Channel in the year 1588 was absolutely enthralling to our teenage minds. The Spanish Armada of 130 ships carrying 2,500 guns, 8,000 seamen, and 20,000 soldiers was decisively routed after the English sent eight burning ships into the Armada! 
The Battle of Sheriffmuir, for another instance, was pure and memorable fantasy. It was a battle in the night of November 13, 1715, in Scotland, in which neither of the two opposing armies conclusively beat the other: the right wing of one side overpowered the left wing of the other; while the left wing of the other army prevailed against the right wing of its enemy. 

By morning either side was claiming victory! We found this to be absolutely entertaining and thoroughly enjoyed one of the several versions of the poetry that the versifiers came up with in commemoration of the inconclusive battle:  ‘Some say we won,/Some say they won,/Some say no man won at a man!’
Of similar fascination were many passages in The British Empire and Commonwealth by James Alexander Williamson (1886-1964), popularly and reverently known simply as Williamson. His voluminous rich pink hard-cover book was also just known as Williamson. In following the battles for the Americas by British and other colonising countries from continental Europe, our teenage intellects particularly enjoyed Clive’s dramatic ‘Three-point Attack’ in a confrontation of French and British armies in Canada in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763); and further south the thrilling ‘Boston Tea Party’ of December 16, 1773, which marked the beginning of the American Revolution and the subsequent end of British supremacy over the United States.

And in the Far East, in India, we were gripped and appalled by ‘The Black Hole of Calcutta’ of 1756, in which 146 prisoners of the local Mogul reportedly died in Calcutta overnight in a cramped room of 24 x 18 feet, Calcutta being at the time ‘a possession’ of the East India Company on behalf of the British Empire.
And, remaining in the Far East, we were unforgettably impressed by the description of the diplomatic adventurer, Joseph Francois Dupleix, who was an 18th Century pioneer French empire-builder to India, as ‘a man of the world who could converse with kings nor lose the common touch’. Wow, how he fired our imaginations!

Prof Wangusa is a poet and novelist.                  

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