When you see greatness, fan it (Part 1)

When you see greatness, fan it (Part 1)

Per Daniel R. Ruhweza

Leaders, like cream, always rise to the top. I have often seen it in the classroom. They look it, they act it and often it happens without a lot of hussle.  It is not always as easy as i make it seem here but one does notice it when a group of people come together. There is that one person sometimes two who naturally begin to lead the conversation or usher others into action. They seek to harness their colleagues into vessels of change or into cheeky action or mischief

So, anybody passionate about leadership should always be on the lookout for such leaders and harness them. Fan that flame. Be it in the class room, or out of it, one notices it. The anointing of leadership is like honey. Bees need not be preached to about honey. They will come. So it can be argued that to an extent,  that leadership is  gifting for some – it is inherent in them -  although I must quickly add that it needs to be harnessed and fanned into the powerful flame that is needed to make this world a better place.

So it was with me at the Great Busoga College Mwiri. I was a tiny lad right from Primary School, experiencing boarding school for the first time in life. I was hardly a week there when two of the School Prefects (they all were in A level as opposed to what is there today) approached me at different times.   One appointed me to become the Compound Special Boy while the other appointed me to become the Library Special Boy. I had no idea what these responsibilities were about and had no choice to buck out anyway.

Trouble was that they were not relenting on their choice and it was left to me to figure out how I was going to attend to these duties.  Remember, I was quite tiny and my voice had not even broken out yet.  How was I going to deal with boys much bigger and more threatening that I?  I found out quickly that I was required to distribute slashers and other compound cleaning equipment to the boys on Tuesday and Thursday late afternoon so that they would clean the compounds allocated to their respective classes. This was called ‘Class Parts.’  


I was also required to wait for the boys to be done with their work and take stock of the tools that had been taken out.  There was a register and I had to tick off each boy’s name that returned a tool.  So while the rest of the boys, having hastily slashed their portion of the compound would rush off to prepare for dinner and then go for night preps shortly thereafter, I was left to wait and register all the slashers and hoes before I could leave. Oftentimes, I missed my dinner and sometimes would arrive late for the night preps.

Night preps would then be the time for my next assignment. I rarely had my preps with the rest of my classmates save for my friend Alex Jakana, with whom we served as Library Special Boys in the Main Library (we caĺled it Damascus).  Our duty was simple – ensure that no books were taken out of the “Main Section” of the Library without being signed for.  That was the easy part – the most difficult part was when we had to wait for the boys (and the men of Senior Five and Six (sic) to bring them back before would leave.  


Officially preps ended at 8.30pm or sometime thereafter. However, we often had to wait till much later in the night when the mainly senior class students, who were desirous of reading further into the night, stayed on.  We would then lock up and walk back to our dormitories.  I literally would rush back to my dormitory especially on those nights when I had missed my dinner, so that I could prepare something to eat (normally millet porridge which we called Kyuugyi) before falling asleep. It would be tougher in case I had run out of sugar or millet flour or in case I failed to find a water heating gadget.[1]

TO BE CONTINUED ....

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[1] Our water heating gadgets were clearly not safe for use. Often times the building circuit because of the “suicidal” overloading of the sockets