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DENNIS D. MUHUMUZA
Lack of senior lecturers at the Ivory Tower has opened way for junior lecturers. These are disarmingly clever ladies and gentlemen who accomplished their university education a few years ago with good grades; a first class honours or probably an upper second degree. Some are hardly 25 years of age.
In the lecture room, students feel free to engage wits with these lecturers. The lady lecturers have been stunned at the bold guys who once or twice have shyly suggested a date.
The lecture room has become a foundry of rib-cracking jokes and an arena in which the art of showmanship is staged. Good or bad, students love it.
A lecturer will ignite his topic with flashes of humorous kabozi [chit-chat] that keep students entertained. It could be about a fat mama who kept farting as she surfed the net. Or when a lecturer asks why 70 percent of the campusers never vote in guild elections, students will quickly answer, “We’re below age” sealed by a chorus of laughter.
Then a cell phone rings. An argument gets really heated when this ‘predator’ rings, “it interrupts the flow knowledge,” a lecturer will fume.
Likewise, a tough professor will be busy boiling down those philosophical concepts when gadget buzzes yet again. This really annoys. “Switch off your brief-case Erickson,” a student will shout from the back.
“Professor,” another will join in, “I think it’s a yellow that yells like a saint in hell!”
Campusers for the ultimate show-off effect use handsets with message alerts and gaming sounds. When those loud humming sounds disrupt a lecture, assistant lecturers especially women feel looked down upon. Revenge is in form of an unexpected assignment where the top student scores 50 percent and the last 10 percent.
But back to our world of fanfare, a lecturer strolls says he wants the class to write a one-page speech about leisure as enjoyed by students.
“Yes, G-strings and mothers unions,” a funny boy will say.
Even politics finds its way in somehow. Pro-third term lecturers say good things about what the movement government has done adding, “Even Gulu is more happening than Kampala.”
“Does it have a traffic jam?” a Makererean will challenge.
Some guys come to the lecture room dressed like wrestlers, other like bafume [traditional medicine men]. A lot more girls expose their huge navels.
Others wait till a lecture is halfway through before they enter accompanied by that click-clack sound emitted by their high-heeled shoes. They love it when heads turn.
--Daily Monitor, Saturday June 5, 2004, page 12
