Makerere main building: Three weddings, a lecture

While at Makerere University, I bypassed the Main Building countless times. I can probably count on my hands and toes, the number of times I ventured inside. But every occasion I went in, it was memorable. 
I first entered the university’s Main Building as a little girl in primary school, years before I went to Makerere as a student. The first time, it was for a wedding at which I was a bridesmaid. Although many years have passed, I can still see where I sat at the high table, in my shiny green and yellow satin dress. That was Take One. 
Take Two at the Main Building was for another relative’s wedding. By then, I had grown up beyond primary school but not enough to join the campus. I have photos from that wedding, taken outside the entrance to the building. Although I have the photos in my album, the images are imprinted in my mind as well, for particular reasons. 
Last Sunday, when I saw images of the Main Building on fire, I was traumatised. The images haunted me, but not just for academic reasons. I remembered the countless trips I made between Senate Building and certain finance offices in the section of the building most affected by the fire. Like getting an academic transcript, verifying receipts for various student payments at the Ivory Tower, was not a task for the faint-hearted.
Unlike some students who spent a great deal of time in the university’s Main Building, I think I only attended one or two lectures in the Main Hall. I did, however, spend some good hours going through stacks of documents in one of those basement stores next to the printery at the base of the Main Building. 
In this particular episode, I felt that the lecturer in question had thrown us to the wolves, leaving us to fend for ourselves when a fellow student’s marks went missing. 
I was gobsmacked when we were directed to the basement to look up the missing scripts. Until this point, I had never imagined that this would be part of my student experience. 
But we needed to pass and graduate and it looked like this was the only way, so into the pit of documents we descended. 
Thus when the Main Building was burning and people were discussing burnt documents on Twitter, these were my particular memories. 
Looking back, therefore, I have a fairly good idea of what some of those burnt rooms contained, given the hours I spent staring around idly as I waited outside the cash office and the hours we spent digging through piles of paper in search of my friend’s missing exam papers. 
Of course, over the years, more paper would have been added, or some of it taken away and digitised. But in the wake of the fire, even some of the respective department heads could not say for sure that they had digitised everything.
Still, however much suffering we might have endured on Makerere’s paper trail, the images that finally got me were of the back of the Main Building, cast in a red glow from the blazing fire, probably at its fiercest, in the dead of night. 
There were just a few solitary figures and a fire truck, at that moment still powerless against the flames. 
As I watched that video, I said a prayer that some of my memories would be allowed to see the light of another day. 
In that moment, I was picturing a wedding party with guests from Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe, dancing in a circle on the lawn behind the Main Building.

Ms Nampewo is a writer, editor and communications consultant     
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