She has had the
privilege of teaching the presidents’ children, but most remarkable
about the life of Mary Mulumba is how she rose from being a nursery
teacher to owning one of the most prominent urban primary schools in
Uganda- Kampala Junior Academy (KJA).
Her big brother, Samuel
Baddokwaya, believes his sister’s success has much to do with God’s
favour and hard work. He still remembers a prayer she said at a
Chr
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| Mary and her husband |
istian gathering when they were still very little: “‘Me Mary, please
God help me, Amen!’ And sincerely God has helped her ever since, because
no one in our family has achieved as much as she has.”
Mulumba
was born in Mengo Hospital, on Christmas day in 1941, the second of Rev.
Canon Yakobo Gabunga Baddokwaya and Ruth Baddokwaya’s eight children.
Her father was a teacher and schools inspector before he became a
full-time minister serving in the Church of Uganda.
She remembers
that their home in Busega was always full of born-again Christians and
members of Mothers Union who often came for prayer and fellowship. She
says they taught her to pray and sharpened her interpersonal relations
and communication skills.
“I also learnt a lot from my father
who often took me along with him to visit his friends, inspect schools
and supervise some church projects. It was his way of teaching me
hard-work and protecting me from bad influences by keeping an eye on
me,” she says.
Attaining an education
Mulumba
grew up at a time when the education of girls was not prioritised.
Luckily, her father had a different perspective and educated all his
children regardless of their sex. His mantra to his children was: “Get
educated, work hard and look forward to a better future.”
When
she joined Primary One at Buloba Primary School, she vowed never to
disappoint her father. By the time Mulumba completed Primary Eight, she
knew what she wanted to be. In 1957, she joined Ndejje Teacher
Training College. She was impressed by how the college Principal, an
English lady named Drakely, combined motherliness with toughness. This
is the woman she aspired to be like when she left college in 1960 as
certified primary school teacher.
Mulumba immediately got her first
job at Mengo Girls School. Then something exciting quickly happened –
she met the man of her dreams.
The love of her life
Daniel
Mulumba had just returned from UK with a degree in Accounting. He was a
tall, handsome man. At 25 then, he was suave, collected and a proud
owner of a white VW car to complete his stature as the most eligible
bachelor then.
At the time, it was prestigious for a young man of
Daniel’s age to own a car. So when his mother asked him to drive her to
Lweza on Entebbe Road to attend a meeting for born-again Christians, he
agreed out of the love and respect for his mother, but also to show off
his prized car! This turned out to be one of his best decisions because
it is at that meeting that he met Mary, a dazzling 19-year-old beauty
fresh from college.
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| Mary weds Dan in December 1960 |
A leaf from her journal of the time reads:
“In 1960, I met a wonderful, educated, simple and quiet man called Dan
Mulumba. We fell in love straight away!” They were married the same
year, on December 17, 1960, at Namirembe Cathedral.
After the
wedding, the couple moved to Mugongo, near Kyengera on Masaka Road. Four
months after their wedding, Dan was offered a job in the Ministry of
Finance and moved to Entebbe. Mary had to move back to her parents’ home
at Busega in order to keep her job at Mengo Girls School. Later, she
joined Daniel in Entebbe and got a job there at Namate Primary School
where she taught for three years.
A great opportunity
In 1964,
Mulumba was offered a scholarship by the Uganda government to pursue
further studies at Stranmillis College in Northern Ireland. She
was a young wife of 24 with a husband and three little children, but at
the urging of her husband, she accepted the scholarship, and for three
years, specialised in Infant Methods.
“Children found me so
strange because they were not used to seeing black people,” she recalls.
“One child wetted her finger and rubbed it on my arm to see if my skin
was made of soil.”
When she returned in 1967, she got a job at Lake
Victoria Primary School in Entebbe, as the head of its nursery section.
This was a prominent school of mostly expatriate children. Mulumba
became its first and only African teacher.
After three years, she
was posted to Nakasero Primary School, where she stayed for a year
before being appointed the first African Headmistress of Kampala
Kindergarten in 1970. This was a school for diplomats and upper class
families of the time. The school was located near State House. In the 23
years Mulumba worked there, she taught the presidents’ children from
Obote, Amin to Museveni.
She managed to go through the volatile
1970s unscathed, considering many professionals fled the terror and
dictatorship of Amin. Mulumba avoided politics. This and prayers, she
believes, is what saved her and kept the school operating throughout
those perilous times. She had learnt from her father that in life, if
one is to make a difference, they must be willing to take risks and make
tough sacrifices.
Life begins at 52
Mulumba’s
success at Kampala Kindergarten attracted criticism from individuals
who started making slighting remarks about her age and how it was time
she moved on. She pondered the situation, and in 1993 decided to resign.
She was 52 years with no idea that her life would never be the same
again.
After combining her savings with her husband’s, Mulumba
hired an old building on Clement Hill Road from which she started
Kampala Junior Academy. Mulumba believes in the success formula of
‘Think Big, Start Small and Grow Big’ which enabled her to avoid loans
and move forward patiently. She started with only nine children, but before a year elapsed, the number had risen to 200, thanks to her credibility.
Herbert
Kijjagulwe who has been the Principal of KJA since 1997, says the
current location of the school at Yusuf Lule Road was bushy with no
clear road. Whenever it rained, muddy puddles would form and cause cars
to get stuck. But this did not discourage the parents; they kept
bringing their children. Today the road to the school is tarmac, the
school has modern storeyed structures,more than 1,000 pupils and employs
more than 150 staff. It has grown so that a kindergarten branch has
been opened in Ntinda to absorb children from the age of one to four.
Mulumba
says: “Three quarters of the pupils in my school are the children of
the children I taught in school way back. I’m teaching ‘my’ grand
children.”
By 7am, she is already at school, shaking the hand of each of
her pupils, greeting each by name and speaking words of affirmation to
them. At break-time, they gather around her like bees around nectar,
freely playing on her laps, asking questions and telling stories. The
warmth on Mulumba’s face says this is a company she would not exchange
for anything.
“She is a mother to us teachers too,” Robert Kimuli
Kaweesa, a teacher at KJA says of Mulumba’s heart of gold. “On top of
ensuring that we get our salaries on time, she is helping us with school
fees. We have our children in this school and we pay subsidized fees in
small installments. Ms Mulumba is really an angel to us.”
As an
educationist of excellence, Mary has won several awards from reputable
organisations like Rotary Clubs, Nile Breweries and the Nabaggeka Trust
among others. Her biography titled;
Woman of Action was launched on
December 14, 2013, by
Her Royal Highness Sylvia Nagginda, the
Nnabagereka of Buganda.
--
Saturday Monitor, December 14, 2013