REFLECTIONS : Good old Ntare School in Rwanda?

Saturday the other week, May 29th 2010, was time for the old boys of Ntare School to get together. They included some of us who are truly old horses, in Ntare School as early as the 1950s and 1960s, and others who are sprightly colts, there as late as last year. All of us had converged on Rebero hill, in Bugesera, some twenty-five kilometres south of Kigali on the road to the eastern side of the Rwanda-Burundi border. This will be the site for a model school in the fashion of Ntare School of Uganda, which was probably the strongest academic performer in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The Rwandan old boys were joined by a number of their Ugandan counterparts in umuganda, to prepare the ground for a planned similar institution. Which would be a unique chance for the boys of Rwanda because that school was the envy of every Ugandan boy, and of Rwandan refugee boys. I remember having feared to apply for a place in the school, convinced that the school was not for the likes of a refugee boy, even if I could attain the required mark. Luckily, Mr. Rushanda, my headmaster, good soul, convinced me that I was more than capable and so I applied. However, when the results came most of us, supposedly the cleverest in our primary school, had failed! It was said that there was a beast called the computer which had ‘eaten’ the exam papers instead of marking them! Teachers had to re-mark them and they found that we had passed with flying colours. When my late brother and I finally carried our few belongings in one shared suitcase and went to Ntare School, it was better than going to Heaven. Better because we went in the knowledge that it was not on a one-way ticket, as we’d be coming back regularly for holidays. And, indeed, when we reached there we were not disappointed. Apart from giving each of us four square meals a day, unheard of in our refugee camp, the school furnished us with a pair of uniforms, a bed, mattress, bathing and washing soap. The cleanliness and order in the school at the time could have compared with the streets of today’s Kigali. Can the Rwandan chapter of Ntare School be the Ugandan Ntare School of the years before 1980? As it is, I was disappointed at the sight of the school when I last re-visited it in 2004. What made me grieve was the sight of our dormitories. Sparklingly clean at all times then, now they had become like the sleeping quarters of internally displaced persons. Where only twelve of us used to sleep in a room, with only two ‘double-decker’ beds at one end of the room and all the others single, now the rooms were crammed with ‘double-deckers’ with suitcases strewn all over the place, and close to forty students sleeping in one room. With gaping holes in most of the ceilings, you wondered how any house could win the highest points for cleanliness on week-ends as used to happen during our time. The close-cropped lawn on the whole hill was no more, and in its place were paths and gullies, as you would find in any over-grazed part of Umutara, northern Rwanda.It is the sight of one of these deep gullies that made one of us visitors muse ruefully, that they would have made a good hiding place. Alfred recounted the story to us, of how one evening in the late 1960s the founding Headmaster, the late Mr. William Crichton (RIP), had caught the three of them completely off-guard. They had received their ‘boom’, scholarship money, that morning. In the afternoon after lessons, they decided to take a walk to town to do some window-shopping.They were preparing for a shopping weekend, confident that they would be back at school in time for ‘prep studies’ at eight in the evening, which was the only compulsory activity of the evening in the school. One thing led to another and when they staggered back to school after ten in the evening, their blurred vision discerned a figure in the darkness that turned out to be Mr. Crichton. They had nowhere to hide and had to face, and give an explanation to, their Headmaster, so they explained that they had gone shopping, to which he countered: “Boysh, boysh, what elsh can you shop at thish time exshept alcohol?” His heavy Scottish accent made ‘s’ sound like ‘sh’. And the nearest that Mr. Crichton could get to punishing the boys was to chide them, in their end-of-term report forms, about observing prep study time at night, instead of going shopping! Indeed, that was the core of Mr. Crichton’s approach to education. His system of education developed the boys intellectually, physically and spiritually; it was corrective, not punitive. Mr. Crichton inculcated the policeman of the mind, giving a holistic education. Can such a school be replicated here in Rwanda? ingina2@yahoo.co.uk