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Dear reader, Hajjat Aisha Nambooze, the famed educationist and mother at one of Uganda’s most respected primary schools, Luqman primary school, passed on last week.
Many may never have heard of her – which is true to character – but I should tell you, dear reader, to paraphrase, William Shakespeare “a woman kinder never walked this earth.”
This inspiring Muslim woman was the absolute embodiment of selflessness, generosity, hard work, humility and generosity. It is unusual for hundreds of people to have many personal stories and encounters with a single soul.
I have had to ask myself how she found the time to make these many beautiful memories amidst her busy schedules! But I remembered that even in a single encounter, Hajjat Aisha registered a presence of mind and soul, which gave the encounter the breadth of a lifetime: brilliant, honest, calm, cosmopolitan and well-spoken, Hajjat Aisha was friends with the world.
That she was stunningly, calmly beautiful made her even more admirable because such folks have been associated with a strange coldness and distance. Even without consistent interaction, I was lucky to make many memories with Hajjat Nambooze over a period of over 17 years from our first encounter.
I write about her in these pages specifically because a part of me believes she discovered this column before I ever started writing it. I would have written about her anyways, but that she did impact this column makes it even more urgent, more special. Let me tell this story from the beginning.
There used to be a platform called the Open Forum. It happened every Saturday at the Makerere University mosque. You came to talk or to listen. It was mostly politics and, sometimes, society.
After Nkoba za Mbogo in the middle of the week, the next place used to be the mosque. I recall one memorable rainy weekend, with the loquacious Kyadondo East MP Nkunyingi Muwadda, with whom we had been regulars, only Muwada and I had turned up early enough.
It seemed no one else was joining, and not to kill the tradition, Muwada and I decided to debate the topic of the day between each other, taking turns to the podium and sitting down to listen to the other. We doubled as timekeeper, and chair while we listened to the other.
Six other people joined us later but they found the conversation going on. It was here one weekend when one of the directors of Luqman primary school thought of me as articulate and with a fairly good command of the English language. Well, I was doing a BA in English Language, Literature and Drama – yes, I’m a dramatist and filmmaker.
He had said to me that if I ever wanted to teach English after graduating, he had an offer for me. A year later, he sent me to Luqman to engage the headmistress for the job. Hajjat Aisha Nambooze was the headmistress, a job for 18 years before retiring in 2022.
After about an hour of talking, as she gently prodded and inquired about my dreams and ambitions and why I had wanted to teach at a primary school, she gently said to me: “Go back and the director; I will not give you the job.”
She then sat me down for another thirty minutes. I recall her concluding, “You’ll do well. Go and see explore the world, and wherever you reach, please come back and tell me about it.”
I don’t recall my side of the conversation, but I remember her making remarks about my impatience with the world, a bold loudness, aggressiveness, argumentativeness, and hunger with the world. Coming from the debating world right from high school, I must have argued with her the whole time.
She didn’t see these as negative attributes. She simply challenged me to harness them. She was right: Yes, you need all these to write this column, and looking back now, she must have seen this column writing itself as we spoke.
Two years later, she would escort me to get my first wife – the late, Princess Ramlah Ssimbwa Nkinzi. About that time – about two years after our first meeting – I was editor at Fountain Publishers Ltd and had already done a year at The Independent magazine (with Andrew Mwenda and Charles Bichachi) and taught a term at Taibah College (with Oscar Ssemweya-Musoke).
Oh, Hajjat Aisha was right about my impatience – and had sent me out to the world. But every time I met her and told her about my hop-skip-and-jump, she would only say, keep going – before adding, cheekily, “I told you!”
I have heard from one parent that she even found time to visit her students who had graduated from her primary school to high schools. Just to follow up on their progress. But that the day she would be visiting, her students waited for her more anxiously than they did their parents. She was their heroine.
They were her champions. Sometime in 2022, I visited Luqman to check on my son. Hajjat Aisha was still the headmistress, and as soon as I stepped into her office, she called in the director of Studies and asked him to assemble the Primary Six and Seven classes for me to talk to them.
In her eyes, I had also become a star. (Well, I write in a most outstanding weekly, and I’m often talking loud in several places). I asked her what she thought I would connect with these kids because I’m so obsessed with the big guns. She looked at me with that face which speaks without voice: “Well, you wanted to become their teacher, remember?!”
I read her face. She then said loudly, “I’m sure you’ll find something to tell them.” I smiled and rushed to the venue they had been assembled. If I was her star, then this star was a product of her vision. May Allah be pleased with her work, and may He grant her Jannatul Firdaus, Allahuma Ameen.
yusufkajura@gmail.com
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University
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