The Kampala lawyer Andrew Kasirye was the guest on Capital FM's Sunday evening programme, Desert Island Discs programme yesterday, Feb. 7, 2010. It is hosted by Alan Kasujja of the Capital FM breakfast show.

The programme invites people from the public to narrate their life experiences and play their favourite music.

Kasirye narrated his life, going back to the lakeside town of Entebbe, attending Lake Victoria School, formerly known as the European School, and which was in the 1960s and for many years later the leading primary school in Entebbe and one of the most prominent primary schools --- and even schools of any kind --- in post-independence Uganda.

Many "prominent" Ugandans attended Lake Victoria School.

Kasirye then went on to Kitante Primary School in Kampala, and for his O'Levels to Kings College Budo, and finally to Makerere University.

Lake Victoria School, Kitante Primary School, Kings College Budo, and Makerere University had one thing in common: they were part of that string of educational institutions in Uganda set up to educate and train the future work force and middle class of post-independence Uganda.

Many former pupils and students of these institutions feel deep pride and nostalgia for these, their former schools.

The question is: were these schools as "good" as they are made out to be and what purpose, anyway, did they serve Uganda and students from other countries who attended them?

The one thing they successfully did was to instill in their students a sense of service and duty. One was to live primarily by service and respect for social norms. Products of these schools are often apolitical, like their parents, avoid controversy, are largely conformist in their attitude, usually take a "missionary position" on issues of the day, think, usually in conventional terms, and view themselves as working best in a job that requires them to sit at a desk.

This is why it has been easy for military and civilian dictators to dominate the continent. The educated middle class in Africa is the easiest to bully and rule, because it largely does not question things. The primary concern in life is dressing, living, working, and socialising like everyone else and the middle class is terrified of being too different from the mainstream of society.

Although they were officially academic institutions, they were really more like a cross between social clubs, youth camps, and finishing schools. Besides comparatively good English (or French for the former French colonies), western mannerisms and tastes, the products of these schools are, by and large, middle-of-the road, neither illiterate and "unsophisticated" nor fully accomplished at a world-class level.

Most of the old students of these schools went on to have what is, by Ugandan standards, "successful" lives and careers. Many bought cars, land, built houses, obtained scholarships to universities abroad, permanent resident status in the United States, Australia, Canada and Britain, and many occupy the upper and middle ranks of Uganda's civil service, military, corporate world, and business.

Behind the nostalgia for the bygone era of Uganda's government-owned "good schools" lies an unstated truth: these institutions, created for children of senior civil servants after independence, became an extension of social vanity and a sense of privilege.

There is a tone of smugness and self-congratulation among this Ugandan "middle class". However, as they went on into their careers and post-secondary school future, they left behind schools that would start to seriously fall apart in the late 1980s.

Almost all of these historic Ugandan schools lie in a state of near-ruin today, and the decay started long before the introduction of Universal Primary Education.

A major disadvantage with these sorts of schools not only in Uganda, but in other African capitals like Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Lome, and Lusaka, is that overall their effect has been to impart a false sense of elite and achievement among their alumni, but without the serious side of real achievement.

Family brand name, the idea of exclusivity, social prominence, "I was in school with so-and-so" name-dropping and a westernization of their personality and aspirations can be said to be the net result of these African "elite schools".

In his 1979 book, Inside the Third World, Paul Harrison focused on this problem that resulted when European- and American-based curricula were introduced into Africa.

In chapter three titled "The westernization of the world", Harrison observed that "The influence of western lifestyles spread even to those nations who escaped the colonial yoke…" (page 50)

Harrison added: "The fixation with the west did not end at independence…Those who assumed office in Africa…were scions of the western-educated class who had turned sour on their rulers: indeed, their demands for independence were often backed up with quotes from the western political writers they had pored over in their student garrets in Oxbridge, London or Paris…Today westernization has spread into every nook and cranny in the Third World, and because of the discrimination against the non-westernized, it is proceeding with an accelerating pace…The schools have been potent instruments of westernization among the young: they often impose western uniforms on pupils, and teach syllabuses emphasizing modern, urban activities and values. Young people emerge dazed and uprooted…" (Inside the Third World, Paul Harrison, 1979, page 54)

This "dazed and uprooted" persona explains so much of the dysfunction that is Africa. The continent has thousands of people with university degrees and higher institution diplomas and certificates, but on the other hand they seem helpless to solve their national problems.

Most of these products of Africa's "good" schools end up working for European and North American NGOs, companies, embassies, media and news companies, universities, government institutions, and with that comes the western lifestyle they were raised to aspire for.

As Susan Kakuhikire, a product of these "good schools", who now works at State House in Kampala and whose late father was one of Uganda's first Sandhurst-trained army officers observed in 2006 when asked what puzzles her about Africans: "We are crazy. First of all, we are a puzzle in ourselves: we are foreigners here in our own lands and [yet] we are [also] foreigners when we are in Europe and America. We are crazy!"

To this day, the standard early reading texts of these "good schools" in urban Africa are the Ladybird series. Children whose parents live and work and will retire in Africa are sent by their parents to international schools, following the British or American curriculum, their proud parents unable to sense the absurdity of African children being educated along Anglo-American texts, when their destiny will always be or should be Africa, 50 years after independence.

It is a life of humiliation, only that most urbanised Africans cannot see the irony of their lives. Fifty years after independence, we still exchange Christmas, birthday, New Year, Easter, and success cards designed and printed in England or the United States.

Our basic toiletry first thing in the morning --- colognes, shampoo, perfumes, bras, underwear, aftershave lotion, eye shadow, underarm deodorant sticks, lip gloss, body lotion --- still carry the basic, unchanged label London-Paris-New York of luxury fashion and cosmetics houses in America, France, Britain, Italy, and Switzerland.

50 to 100 years of "good" schools and Africans have still failed to design or manufacture the most basic bodily and intimate accessories with which they start the day.

The radio show on which Kasirye appeared, itself reveals this basic confusion. The name, Desert Island Discs, was copied by Capital FM from the BBC's programme of the same name. The station also has a show called Capital Gang, copied from the CNN show of the 1990s.

KFM, another Ugandan radio station, calls its Saturday morning talk show Hard Talk, copied from the BBC. The New Vision newspaper of Kampala copied the section "Talk of the Town" from a New York newspaper.

It is a life of forever imitating, with little originality, that this education system left Africa.

The girls and women in this urbanized, educated African class often contemplate having their babies delivered in American or European hospitals and often fly there.

It is with great pride that many Africans state that they hold British, French, Canadian, Italian, or American passports and there has often been a push by these Africans in the "Diaspora" for their parliaments back at home to legalise duo-citizenship.

They easily get bored or frustrated with conditions in their countries and want to migrate to the West; but in the West they discover that they are really, after all, Africans.

And so they develop a raging hatred for the West's political double standards, racism and something else --- the second-class status they are reduced to in the West, yet in their countries of origin, they often came from "prominent" families and school..

But somehow they don't want to return home because they can never quite fit back into the chaos and inefficiency that is home.

Neither fully African nor fully European-Western, the African children who attended the schools that Andrew Kasirye described in his radio appearance are lost forever in a world of contradictions and a confused identity.

END