Namilyango College @122: A toast to that strict Catholic work ethic

When you spend six years in one school, it becomes home and, try as you might, you never really leave; even after 30 or so years. That was the feeling early morning, Monday this week, when I drove into Namilyango College, near Kampala.

I found three students at the administration block, looking all doom and gloom, like somebody had eaten their breakfast. They told me they had been suspended. And it was clear that unlike in our days when a two-weeks suspension meant you packed a novel and walked to Seeta to board a taxi to Kampala, and then home, Namilyango now does it gung-ho style: get all your belongings and go!

Their crime: “we were found with ‘illegals’ [prohibited items]”. I was sympathetic and told them to ‘swallow the medicine like men’, behave respectfully to their teachers, serve their suspension, then come back and read like crazy. 

Anyone who joins a Catholic school should know what they are up against: military-style discipline. Leave your ego at the gate. Catholics will clip your wings, pluck your peacock plume, and trim you to size so you can fit in the school.

I climbed the stairs to head teacher Constantine Mpuuga Ssajjabi’s office to wait for him. Presently, a teacher invited me to the staffroom to enjoy break tea and a snack with the staff, as we enjoyed pleasant banter.

Over tea in the staffroom, two female staff began passing chocolate around: Mr Mpuuga (a quiet, highly-principled, hard-to-read, soft-spoken affair, who smiles all the time, even when delivering hard news) had just returned from Europe or America, or someplace thereabouts. And in tandem with tradition, the HM had bought chocolate for everyone. 

I laughed at myself; recalling how a staffroom visit back then, as a kid, was like entering a lion’s lair, with big cats, male and female, growling – you didn’t think you’d come out alive! Looking back, I think the strict environment did us good: when you handle kids with kid gloves, you lose them. The kids that is.

Namilyango has, since its inception in 1902, by the Mill Hill Fathers, encapsulated the quintessential Catholic work ethic – strict and disciplinarian, pressing kids to work hard; but at the same time, offering kids the freedom to think, discover and improvise. 

The college had no fence, but the children knew the boundaries and respected them, knowing well that expulsion was on the cards for those foolhardy enough to escape.

But you could take a walk within a kilometre’s radius outside class hours and, even if any teacher met you, no problem, because you were deemed to be within school. And we had all Wednesday afternoon till 5:30pm and all day on the last Saturday of the month, to go to Kampala or wherever we wanted.

Over the years, so much has stayed the same: the uncompromising commitment to quality, the unrelenting pursuit of excellence and the undeterred focus on grooming godly, upright young people.

Truth is that Uganda now has very many good schools - if getting a first grade or scoring A’s is your criterion of ‘good’. But the more you look around, the more you realise that success in life is not only about getting top grades; it is more to do with impartation of the right software that equips, enables and empowers a child to face whatever life throws at them. 

And that speaks to grooming a child, enabling them to discover who they are and what God made them for, and creating a strict environment that shapes them and makes all this possible. 

That is why you find parents lining up to get their children into Namilyango College and others of its kind – like our ‘noisy neighbours’, “The Weevils” of St Mary’s College Kisubi (who, since 1906, somehow manage to forget to comb their hair, wear socks or tuck in). And then there’s St Henry’s College, Kitovu, Mt St Mary’s College, Namagunga, Trinity College Nabbingo, and many more Catholic establishments.

For the first in a long time, Namilyango Day falls on a Saturday; so on March 23, we shall be going back to school to celebrate our 122nd birthday and toast to that strict Catholic work ethic. We’ll be joined by President Museveni’s top ‘Fisherman’…who just happens to be a woman.  Yes, that one!

Mr Gawaya Tegulle is an advocate of the High Court of Uganda, [email protected]