The year was 1985. The president of Uganda was General Tito Okello Lutwa.
Upon taking over Government from the Obote II regime, Lutwa appointed a cabinet. By October, he discovered he hasn’t filled two ministerial vacancies.
He sent a mysterious man to a resounding writer and academic.
“If his Excellency appointed you to a ministry, would you say yes?” the man asked Timothy Wangusa, the budding writer.
“I couldn’t say no because it would be quite risky to say no to a military government,” Wangusa replied.
A week later in Mbale, Wangusa heard an announcement on radio at 6am.
“Wangusa you must report to Parliament today at 2PM…without fail,” the announcement went.
He had been appointed minister of Education.
Bits of ME
With a childhood I had, sometimes lonely, books at some point became my partner.
I recall dozing into them, waking up and turning on the reading gas again. I can’t fathom what life would have been without books.
It was only in my adulthood later that some of my favourite books derived from the man who drove madly to parliament with an ‘invisible gun’ on his head to serve his country, Prof. Timothy Wangusa.
A grandfather of many a writer, I count myself among his mentees. While I may not have been part of his lectures, I was schooled by his writings such as: Upon this Mountain, I Love You, You Beast, Patterns of Dust, Anthem for Africa, Bilomelele, The State is My Shepherd Part II, Lost in Wonder (Autobiography) among others.
It’s not so often that you meet one whose ordinary speech illuminates’ ones need to turn their words into a book but Wangusa’s normal conversation symbolises the passion for a language learned, cultured, nurtured and accentuated.
Through his works, generations have been nurtured, but how was his own nurturing?
Bits of YOU
“Every day you wake up, there it was- Mountain Elgon. Occasionally across the face of Mt Elgon you would see three concentric rings of the rainbow…,” Wangusa described the environment and surrounding in which he was brought up.
At 80 today, Wangusa was first person to be awarded a doctorate of philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at Makerere University in 1975.
The tale of the magic three words
Wangusa’s first reckoning of the magic words came at the age of 10, captivated by the preacher’s allusion to St. John the Apostle.
“Baana banange mwagalanenga’ (My children always love one another),” the preacher said.
His conception of how the three words could carry a wealth of information was seeded.
Four years later another three words manifested in 1957 when Wangusa was in Primary six and was getting ready to be examined for his oral interviews to join junior secondary.
It was raining heavily and he was soaked.
He entered the office and his eyes came into contact with those of a Mzungu, the headmaster and two of his African staff.
“I expected the interview to take 5-10 minutes. They asked me, ‘how are you?’ I said, ‘I am freezing!’”.
Three words. The Mzungu and the other staff burst into hilarious laughter. They said, “you have passed the interview.”
It was then that he was admitted at Nabumali High School between 1958-1961 before joining Kings College, Buddo for his HSC in 1962-63.
Upon winning a reading competition, he was prized with a small book of poems.
“It was pocket-size and I carried it until it fell into pieces. They were poems of a young man called John Keats. I memorized them and I was conditioned into walking the way of poetry,” Wangusa said.
In 1999 while in Moscow, Russia Wangusa attended a Sunday Orthodox mass. He could only comprehend three words out of the sermon that was in Russian; Iisus Alliluyya Aminʹ meaning Jesus Hallelujah Amen.
He wondered: “So you can summarise the whole service in only three words!”
The poet and novelist in Wangusa mastered, “the compactness” of the sermon of three word pushes you in the direction of writing verse.
“My first novel –Upon this Mountain is only 116 pages and could have been four times longer if I had been an expansionist but I am a ‘compactionist’,” he says.
Wangusa emphasizes all human beings use words to speak but when those words are sifted, you arrive at prose and when you sift prose further, they become poetry.
He says we choose words available from ordinary speech but at times we even go further to coin words for our purpose.
“For the last 50 years I have coined a word to serve my purpose such as Africanology, Corruptionology Banyamulengocracy for some of the poems I have written,” he says.
He ponders on growing up in Masaba land with its mountains, Kamalewa (Bambos), the circumcision knives but also notes the cultural shift in absorption of the European culture as it impacted on Africa.
“My writing is about that transition of things fall apart of a Mugisu child growing up to become a new African, the what you lose, what you compromise, what you need to take on and the pain that comes with all that. It is a subject of my three novels,” he says.
The poet, novelist and lecturer in Wangusa are interwoven.
A revelation occurred during one of his student lectures at Makerere University as he taught about the organic form in literary theory.
“I explained to them that different works of art must interweave together such that you can’t tear them apart. It’s like the many parts of a tree. The roots, the stem, the branches, the leaves and fruits are all held together by the sup in the ‘treeness’ of the tree,” he says.
The explanation inspired the poem, ‘The Organic Form’.
Wangusa’s first poem took him thirty years to write; while teaching what he called the most difficult doctrine in Christianity,The Trinity, he’d attempted to define God to his students.
Discontented by his delivery to fully convince his mentees, Wangusa says, ‘it took me thirty years to reduce it into a small package of fifteen words with a heading ‘the trinity tree’; The Father in the root, the Son in the shoot, the Spirit in the fruit’.
He narrates that Makerere University conferred its first two doctorates in 1975. Him, with a degree of philosophy from the Faculty of Arts and a one John Haggard with a degree of Sports Science from the Faculty of Education awarded by then President Idi Amin who was the chancellor of the institution.
He attained the professorship in 1981. He recalls, there were few professors at Makerere before him, “about 2 or 3.”
By 1985, Wangusa was serving as Dean of Faculty of Arts, Head of Department of Literature. He was the founder president of International PEN Uganda Centre and the chairman of Uganda Writers Association.
A former Minister in a government that was overthrown in three months, Wangusa likened his experience to a
“nice interlude” since he had sensed that the regime of the Okellos wouldn’t last.
“I had been in Nairobi with Tito Okello and Bazilio Okello to meet with Museveni in what was popularly known as Peace Jokes yet they were supposed to be peace talks but the country dismissed them as peace jokes,” he says.
Not many days later, the government fell apart, some of its hard men dissolved into oblivion.
For Wangusa, his works and inspiration have stayed alive, and as it celebrates 100 years Makerere University acknowledges him and this rich legacy.
