The year was 1985. The leader of Uganda was General Tito Okello Lutwa.
Upon assuming control over Government from the Obote II system, Lutwa named a bureau. By October, he found he hasn’t filled two ecclesiastical vacancies.
He sent a strange man to a reverberating essayist and academic.
“If his Excellency designated you to a service, would you say OK?” the man asked Timothy Wangusa, the sprouting writer.
“I couldn’t say no on the grounds that it would be very unsafe to express no to a tactical government,” Wangusa replied.
A week after the fact in Mbale, Wangusa heard a declaration on radio at 6am.
“Wangusa you should answer to Parliament today at 2PM… come what may,” the declaration went.
He had been selected pastor of Education.
Bits of ME
With a youth I had, in some cases forlorn, books sooner or later turned into my partner.
I rested into them, awakening and turning on the perusing gas once more. I can’t comprehend what life would have been without books.
It was exclusively in my adulthood later that a portion of my #1 books got from the one who drove frantically to parliament with an ‘undetectable weapon’ on his head to serve his nation, Prof. Timothy Wangusa.
A granddad of numerous an essayist, I consider myself as a real part of his mentees. While I might not have been essential for his talks, I was educated by his compositions, for example, 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 frequently to such an extent that you meet one whose conventional discourse enlightens’ ones need to transform their words into a book yet Wangusa’s typical discussion represents the energy for a language learned, refined, supported and accentuated.
Through his works, ages have been sustained, yet how was his own nurturing?
Bits of YOU
“Every day you awaken, there it was-Mountain Elgon. Periodically across the essence of Mt Elgon you would see three concentric rings of the rainbow… ,” Wangusa depicted the climate and encompassing in which he was brought up.
At 80 today, Wangusa was first individual to be granted a doctorate of reasoning in the Faculty of Arts at Makerere University in 1975.
The story of the enchanted three words
Wangusa’s most memorable retribution of the enchanted words came at 10 years old, dazzled by the evangelist’s reference to St. John the Apostle.
“Baana banange mwagalanenga‘ (My youngsters generally love each other),” the evangelist said.
His origination of how the three words could convey an abundance of data was seeded.
Four years after the fact one more three words appeared in 1957 when Wangusa was in Primary six and was preparing to be analyzed for his oral meetings to join junior secondary.
It was coming down vigorously and he was soaked.
He placed the workplace and his eyes came into contact with those of a Mzungu, the dean and two of his African staff.
“I anticipated that the meeting should require 5-10 minutes. They asked me, ‘how are you?’ I said, ‘I’m freezing!'”.
Three words. The Mzungu and the other staff burst into diverting chuckling. They said, “you have passed the interview.”
It was then that he was conceded at Nabumali High School between 1958-1961 preceding joining Kings College, Buddo for his HSC in 1962-63.
Upon winning an understanding rivalry, he was valued with a little book of poems.
“It was pocket-size and I conveyed it until it fell into pieces. They were sonnets of a young fellow called John Keats. I retained them and I was molded into strolling the method of verse,” Wangusa said.
In 1999 while in Moscow, Russia Wangusa went to a Sunday Orthodox mass. He could fathom three words out of the message that was in Russian; Iisus Alliluyya Aminʹ meaning Jesus Hallelujah Amen.
He pondered: “So you can sum up the entire help in just three words!”
The writer and writer in Wangusa dominated, “the minimization” of the lesson of three word pushes you toward composing verse.
“My first novel – Upon this Mountain is just 116 pages and might have been quite a bit longer assuming that I had been an expansionist however I am a ‘compactionist’,” he says.
Wangusa stresses generally people use words to express yet when those words are filtered, you show up at composition and when you filter exposition further, they become poetry.
He says we pick words accessible from customary discourse yet on occasion we even go further to coin words for our purpose.
“For the most recent 50 years I have begat a word to fill my need, for example, Africanology, Corruptionology Banyamulengocracy for a portion of the sonnets I have composed,” he says.
He considers on experiencing childhood in Masaba land with its mountains, Kamalewa (Bambos), the circumcision cuts yet additionally noticed the social change in retention of the European culture as it affected on Africa.
“My composing is about that progress of things self-destruct of a Mugisu kid growing up to turn into another African, the what you lose, what you split the difference, what you really want to take on and the agony that accompanies all that. It is a subject of my three books,” he says.
The writer, writer and speaker in Wangusa are interwoven.
A disclosure happened during one of his understudy addresses at Makerere University as he showed about the natural structure in scholarly theory.
“I made sense of for them that various show-stoppers should entwine together with the end goal that you can’t destroy them. It resembles the many pieces of a tree. The roots, the stem, the branches, the leaves and natural products are undeniably kept intact by the sup in the ‘treeness’ of the tree,” he says.
The clarification motivated the sonnet, ‘The Organic Form’.
Wangusa’s most memorable sonnet took him thirty years to compose; while showing what he called the most troublesome tenet in Christianity,The Trinity, he’d endeavored to characterize God to his students.
Discontented by his conveyance to completely persuade his mentees, Wangusa says, ‘it took me thirty years to lessen it into a little bundle 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 portrays that Makerere University presented its initial two doctorates in 1975. Him, with a level of reasoning from the Faculty of Arts and a one John Haggard with a level of Sports Science from the Faculty of Education granted by then President Idi Amin who was the chancellor of the institution.
He accomplished the residency in 1981. He reviews, there were not many teachers at Makerere before him, “around 2 or 3.”
By 1985, Wangusa was filling in as Dean of Faculty of Arts, Head of Department of Literature. He was the organizer leader of International PEN Uganda Center and the executive of Uganda Writers Association.
A previous Minister in an administration that was ousted in 90 days, Wangusa compared his experience to a
“nice break” since he had detected that the system of the Okellos wouldn’t last.
“I had been in Nairobi with Tito Okello and Bazilio Okello to meet with Museveni in what was prominently known as Peace Jokes yet they should be harmony talks however the nation excused them as harmony jokes,” he says.
Not numerous days after the fact, the public authority self-destructed, a portion of its hard men broken up into oblivion.
For Wangusa, his works and motivation have remained alive, and as it celebrates 100 years Makerere University recognizes him and this rich legacy.
Source: nilepost.co.ug
