Sometimes you go to a place and, without being told, you immediately know who the boss is. If it’s a home, you can tell exactly who wears the trousers… (ahem, just clearing my throat!) When we entered Namilyango College as little boys in Senior One, 1984, it was easy to tell who the headmaster was. Mr Alfred Mugoda, a good-natured man who always spotted a ‘Kaunda Suit,’ spoke softly and said little, but he had a regal, commanding presence about him. One look at him and you knew. Highly respected, but never feared.
The one we feared was his deputy, Mr Jalango, a tough, cool customer, who was a fascinating study in human psychology. While Mr Mugoda was clean-shaven and no doubt spent the early hours of each morning attacking every little hair that showed up on his face, the light-skinned Mr Jalango let his grow with intentionality, thick but never long, all over his face. He had a fair amount of hair (for a man), and loved to scratch his beard as he listened intently to your lies, making it clear he was bored and didn’t believe a word of what you were saying.
Occasionally, he’d raise an eyebrow, which, in his case, was the equivalent of throwing a tantrum. He liked to work in silence, speaking only if he couldn’t avoid it. Looking back, I wager he missed his true vocation: he could have been an excellent judge of the court-martial in North Korea, the Soviet Union, or some other such communist country.
He spoke in a slow, boring drawl that reminded me of Gletkin in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Mr Jalango believed that on admission to Namilyango, you had read and understood every one of the school rules and that you knew exactly what you were doing when you violated them. And as the head of discipline in a school with an elaborate hierarchy, Mr Jalango was of the view that no small problems came to his desk. If you were reported to him, you were an impossible case, so he wasted no time in preliminaries and preambles.
When he spoke, his vocabulary was limited to ‘You’re suspended’ or ‘You’re indefinitely suspended’, or ‘You’re expelled’. I used to think that if that is how he approached marital problems, then he probably married every year.
When he moved around the compound, boys would whisper ‘Jalango, Jalango!’ And within seconds, the school would rearrange itself; chaos and commotion giving way to silence and orderliness.
One morning, he suspended Nagisi, the head of the College chapter of the National Union of Students of Uganda (NUSU), for two weeks. NUSU was directly supervised by president Milton Obote himself. Mr Jalango didn’t care. Later that afternoon, moving about, he found Nagisi still around. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He uttered just two words: ‘You’re expelled.’ We never saw Nagisi again. I always wonder what happened to him and how his life turned out.
Uganda’s oldest secondary school celebrates 125 years next March, and we’re already thinking up something special. We are rich in experience. We have far more anniversaries than Uganda itself, and perhaps government should turn up and learn how things are done in serious places.
But it’s a good time to ponder the legend of Mr Jalango, for schools to reflect on being unduly strict, and the need to give kids a second chance: heck, you are dealing with kids, and half the time, they don’t really know what they’re doing!
When you expel a student, you’re in essence uprooting a tree in its entirety; there’s no guarantee it will still grow if replanted in another kind of soil elsewhere. Many kids never recover from expulsions. Those expulsions are often as good as a death sentence because their lives have effectively ended, and from then on, they are a case of the walking dead.
One morning at assembly, Father John Sweeney, bless his soul, as usual, began with a word of prayer. And midway, he said, ‘And Lord, we also pray for Mr Jalango, who is leaving Namilyango…’
Everything ended there! Whichever one of God’s angels plans to sound the First Trumpet had better be good, because he’ll have to be at his best to beat the shout of joy, the sound of victory, the sheer uproar that rang out! Heaven must have come to a standstill! The boys ran mad.