Confessions Of The Budonian Dumb Ass.


By Arthur Mwenkanya Katabalwa
 


Kings College Budo Upper Classes. Photo by Yosamu Semugoma

There comes a seminal moment in one’s life where they start questioning a certain trait about themselves or actually confirm that there are somethings in life that they can or cannot do. I knew that age was catching up with me when I stopped somersaulting on the spot. But with academics, it was a hot Monday morning in 1981 at Budo Junior School when I was excluded from both P3 West (Eyabagezi) and P3 East (eyabasilu). I spent the rest of the morning sat behind the school kitchen not knowing what next. How low can that get?!?Then there was the time when Ms Kigozi wrote the heading; The Mole Concept on the blackboard. We were in the chemistry laboratory at Kings College Budo (1987). That was the time I stopped understanding Chemistry.

At Budo , I knew that whenever results were displayed on the noticeboard, I started off by looking at the bottom of the list for my name. Even then, I never thought of myself as a dunce because regardless of my position in class, I still held my position socially with clever people like the Songas, Paul Yawe and Peter Sengeri.

As a student, the fright of report signing was almost debilitating. In many cases I would have been given a dressing down before by my own father the late Rev Bombo who was a teacher. The embarrassment he would have felt I can only imagine as he sat in the staffroom marking other scripts well in the knowledge that Miss Muddu across the table was rolling her eyes after marking yet a hopeless biology answer booklet from me. I never had a comeback for my failures because he knew why. And then at report signing, some form of corporal punishment was given not because I was a random student but because oli mwaana waffe.

My first encounter with Mr Busulwa at the end of the first term in 1989 will never get out of my head. I was in S4. He took one look at my report card, and before he even suggested it, I was waiting for my five kibokos.  I thought he would stop there….No. He demoted me back to S3!!! The walk of shame back into S3A after a whole term was sheer torture. The other students had already settled in their own places so I had to find someone kind enough to share their desk with this “repeater”.

It was a while later that one teacher Miss Margaret Kusasila realised that I may have had a condition called dyslexia. When I heard of it I nearly jumped out of my skin. What did that mean? I never read much about it but looking back I now understand why the rest of my family are mathematicians and I can hardly solve a quadratic equation.

The Late Mr Bawuba Center back row.

My disinterest in the finer points of the Periodic Table or the different layers of the skin was also studied by the Late Mr Bawuba and his wife Christine Bawuba. By 1990, other teachers were also agreeing to the emerging wisdom that I was probably better at something. I was spending a lot of time reading with Godfrey and  Andrew Songa, both very intelligent in class yet their intelligence never rubbed off me.

When I joined journalism school everythingl fell into place. For the first time I sat in a class and whatever was being taught to me seemed like common sense. It was only then that I learned to enjoy what the rest of my friends had been enjoying since we started school. Here I was sixteen years later actually enjoying school because I was studying something that I actually understood. If only this had been discovered earlier maybe I wouldn’t have rebounded so many times.