BUKENYA: Two-in-one Busia delivers a VC and a dictionary entry

The epic battle for the Makerere University Chancellor’s throne is over. My friend and former VC, Prof Venansius Baryamureeba, also a former Presidential candidate, was denied a second shot at the job. The ICT-whiz kid professor was gracefully sent back to his own-founded Uganda Technical and Management University (UTAMU).

Also returned to his post was my Principal at CHUSS, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Prof Edward Kasujja Kirumira. I had thought that Kirumira would make a good VC, not only because he is a fine scholar and a good friend, but also because he was a very helpful Local Council One (nyumba kumi) chairman in our Makerere West Road neighbourhood in the early 2000s.

Prof Barnabas Nawangwe, a Ukraine-trained architect, was the winner of the VC grand race. He has, for several years, been the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (DVC) in charge of Finance and Administration at the ‘Hill.’ I can hardly claim any close personal acquaintance with this gentleman, who has been at Makerere for over 30 years. One of the reasons for my ignorance is that Architecture, which Nawangwe set up in 1987, is a relatively new discipline at Makerere.

In the University of East Africa establishment, Architecture was the preserve of Nairobi and East African practitioners of the discipline were almost exclusively associated with UoN. When I joined KU, which was then a college of UoN, I would sometimes receive bills for my namesake, Architect Simon Bukenya, then based at UoN’s Faculty of Technology. I never found out if he sometimes received my cheques.

Anyway, since it always helps to be connected to the seats of power, especially in Uganda, I thought I should seek a viable link to the new VC. Well, Prof Nawangwe originally comes from Busia, and that was it for me. We obviously share a ‘home’ city, and a truly famous one at that.

I simply cannot count the times I have been to, in and through Busia. That would be enough to make it one of ‘my’ many East African cities. But there is more to it than that. When expert accent guessers try to place me in Kenya and call me a ‘Westerner,’ I find it conveniently amusing to ‘own up’ to coming from the Bumala neighbourhood.

After all, Kampala is out west, and more in the neighbourhood of Bumala and Busia than is Nakuru or Nairobi! But what makes Busia more concretely my city is the friends and acquaintances and the stories or experiences that I associate with the Busia (U) and Busia (K) twin cities. I will save for another day the stories and adventures with my friends, like the Swahili don and novelist John Habwe,  poet and retired Chief Judge James Ogolla of Uganda, Senator Amos Wako of Busia County and Makerere’s Patrick Mangeni (from whom I stole a book on the semiotics of theatre). There is also another Mangeni, who was my guide on a sentimental journey across Tanzania’s Southern Highlands back in the 1960s.

My mind today is on the dynamic city and its legendary pluralism that is now finding its way into international parlance. Busia is, in fact, not two cities but just one city with two different administrations, and two official nationalities.

For, unlike the two Malabas further north, which are separated by a valley and a river, The Busias have no geographical boundary between them. The so-called border is purely imaginary, a classic case of the artificial divisions which the greed of the colonial marauders inflicted upon us in their boardrooms when they were scrambling for Africa.

Indeed, as I discovered way back in the 1970s when I was doing my oral literature research, further south of the urban area, there are roads where one side is Kenya and the other Uganda. Out in the neighbourhood of the home of the boxing Olympian and my fellow Namilyango College alumnus, Maj Gen Francis Nyangweso, I was told of families that have homesteads either side of those ‘transnational’ or ‘intrastate’ roads.

Do you remember the time when the redoubtable Horace Awori was vying for the Ugandan Presidency while his brother, Mzee Moody Awori, was Vice-President of Kenya? All this bears testimony to the fluidity of the Busia border and many other such borders around the continent. As I keep saying, and showing in the way I live my carefree, ‘border-free’ life, we are really one people, inseparable by those artificial borders. Busia (U) and Busia (K) concretise this for me.

Curiously, it is the famous Busia ‘border’ that has given us one of the latest additions to the English lexis, according to the Oxford English Dictionaries. ‘Boda-boda’ is defined by the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary as a  “type of motorcycle or bicycle with a space for a passenger or for carrying goods, often used as a taxi.” That sounds familiar, does it not?

Those of us who have been using boda-bodas, and the term, for decades now are humbled by the realisation that we are part of the industry that has now given international English its new term. The boda-boda first came into action in Busia when the East African Community temporarily collapsed in 1977 and strict border barriers were imposed.

For those of us who were already travelling the Uganda-Kenya route, the Kampala leg of our journey ended at the bus and taxi terminal at Busia (U), about a mile away from the border. It was no easy task negotiating that distance, with luggage, in the hot Busia sun, and that is where the enterprising young men of Busia came in with their bicycles. It was mainly those pedal-powered vehicles that dominated the boda-boda operations, and for me, the energy and strength of those strapping lads, in their pink-shirted uniforms, remain emblematic of the promise of our countries’ youth.

I expect the new Makerere VC to reflect some of ‘our’ Busia international dynamism at the ‘Mother’ University as it heads towards its centenary in 2022.

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and Literature in East Africa. [email protected]