Nabumali alumni reward their ‘meanest and most miserly ever’ cook

SPECIAL FEATURE | Alfred Geresom Musamali | School cooks usually only prepare and serve food but during Uganda’s Nabumali High School Alumni Annual Dinner held at Hotel Africana in Kampala on Friday, 24^th November, 2023, long-serving school cook Anthony Mang’ara was treated among the Very Important Persons (VIPs).

The Secret is in the Names and Catch Phrases

Although Mang’ara is the cook’s clan name, in broad Lumasaaba it means a person who regularly eats food (usually carbohydrate or starch) without chicken, fish, beef, beans, peas and other types of relish. By extended implication, the name applies to any person (usually a man!) who also denies his family, relatives and friends the joys of any type of such relish. At the Hotel Africana cafeteria style alumni dinner, though, Mang’ara, who by his own admission was visiting Kampala for the first time, was spoilt for choice between all those – not to mention the dissert of ripe banana, oranges, apples and several tribes of cake.

At the school, Mang’ara also went by various other names and catch phrases. Alumni President Rose Apondi remembers Mang’ara being referred to as America. Apondi says one of Mang’ara’s responsibilities was to ring the dining hall bell inviting the students into the queue. She says at that point the students would shout in unison “America” then add “Shapile” meaning that the bell summoning them to America (the land of endless opportunity) had rung. Then the students would pour into the dining (and “dinning”, given the amount of noise generated!) hall.

Mang’ara Queued with Chief Justice Owiny Dollo at the Dinner

Other VIPs ahead of Mang’ara in the annual dinner cafeteria queue included former students (now Chief Justice) Alfonse Owiny Dollo, Justice Geoffrey Kiryabwire, Margaret Nabudde (now first ever female school headteacher) and Sam Wasikye Mweru now one of the school’s retired headteachers. Mang’ara has been providing labour around the school since 1980, when former school head prefect Owiny Dollo was in Advanced (A) Level Secondary School and Wasikye, initially a student at the school in the early 1960s, had just been posted back there as a headteacher. Nabudde was to enter the school as a student between 1985 and 1991.

Alumni Commend the School Drop-out Cook for being Most Mean and Miserly Ever Cook

Mang’ara attended neighbouring Nyondo (Boys) Demonstration School up to Primary 4 in 1980 before dropping out and getting hired to tend the gardens of chemistry and biology teacher Edward Washimwamu. The gardens produced “liboshi”, “litooto” and other vegetables which, contrary to the meaning of his name, Mang’ara in turn delivered to the kitchen for sale. However, the kitchen process further required detaching the vegetable leaves from the stocks (khurora tsinyanyi) and Mang’ara was handy to support the school in doing so at a fee and a meal. In due course, the volunteer worker was formally contracted by the Parents’ Techers Association (PTA) and is now one of the longest serving school employees. The alumni association offered Mang’ara an all-expenses-paid trip from the school in Mbale, 230 kms east of Kampala, to come and be fêted for what one of the alumnus of the 1990s whispered to The Independent Online during the dinner as , “having been the meanest and most miserly cook ever to serve future judges, ministers and other dignitaries”.They wanted him too to come and experience “America’ “shapile” in an exotic environment.

“He served us during times when every foodstuff was in extremely short supply and prices were skyrocketing,” said the alumnus.

“Without his uniform meanness and miserliness, some of us would have missed meals and died of total hunger. We considered the man illiterate but he was very arithmetically accurate with every gramme of food dispensed. If he was serving posho (maize bread), his difficult duty was to ensure that each of us received a very tiny slice. And if he was serving beans, he distributed only a countable few weeviled seeds on each of our plates,” the alumnus added

According to the alumnus, Mang’ara was out of necessity tough-looking and mechanical while on duty but if a student, however, bent down the hatchet to glance at the cook and bargain for more, a human face would exhibit itself, deeping the serving shovel in his right hand into the posho at a 70 degree of so angle, suddenly turning the shovel disadvantageous my to retrieve a morsel of food then adding it on the student’s plate. If by accident the shovel in the right hand had scooped more stuff than necessary, then the dangerous substitute in form of the knife or plate in the left hand would be deployed to chop away the volume and leave even less than would have remained if the shovel had been accurate enough. Then he would retort as he waved them away, “America. Shapile”.

No Room for Discriminative Service

“We provide for 840 students and 75 staff,” said Andrew Musamali (no relative of this blogger!), the school caterer.

“If we do not measure portions accurately, either some of our clients could miss meals or too much food could remain and go to waste. Nutritionists recommend that every ten persons should consume a kilogramme of beans per meal and that a kilogramme of posho ought to serve six persons. But accurately estimating that amount while 800 hungry children are waiting in the queue is no mean achievement. And that is why I trust Mang’ara to do his job accurately,” added Musamali, who was born in 1992 when Mang’ara was already a cook in Nabumali.  Although born around Nabumali, Musamali attended schools away from home so he has neither first-hand experience in life as a Nabumali student nor long experience as the school’s employee so he says he has to rely on Mang’ara for those delicate aspects of institutional memory.

For instance, Mang’ara says, cooks ought to have no business looking at the faces of the persons they are serving. Instead, he says, they concentrate their eyes on the food and the plates on which it is being served. But he admitted that sometimes the plates are so unique that cooks will associate a certain size, colour of shape of the plate with a particular student so, yes, they are sometimes aware of who they are serving although the awareness still need not affect the quality of service.

Nabudde Does Not Remember Who Was Called America and Why

After Nabumali, Nabudde went to National Teachers’ College, (NTC) Nagongera where she trained as a teacher of English Language and Literature before proceeding to the Islamic University in Uganda (IUIU) for the degree and a Master’s of Education from Makerere University. She says while at Nabumali, she used to hear the boys talking about America but was not keen on knowing to who exactly they were referring.

“Most of the girls never interacted with any cooks. We just saw the arms of the persons serving but never bent under to look into their faces,” says Nabudde.

A current Nabumali student, whose parents both attended the school in the early 1990s, however, told The Independent Online that the variety , quality and quantity of food has greatly improved and cooks need not be so mean and miserly to students who wish to get some more.

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The author is Founding Director of Vicnam International Communications Ltd, a private firm of communications, public relations and information management consultants. He specialises in the Proofreading and General Editing (PAGE) of documents and can be contacted by Tel: (+256)752-649519 and by Email: agmusamali@hotmail.com.