Rodney's Story
This is a very personal story involving many friends but above all my parents. Mother was a literate, international thinking person. She worked as a cartographer until marriage in 1938. She corresponded with me by air mail from ’66 to ’71 and kept every letter I sent from E Africa over those five years. Father was described by colleagues as the best NHS dentist of his generation perhaps only matched by his older brother, Uncle Peter.
Pa was a veteran of the Dunkirk evacuation and served in the Royal Army Dental Corps for 6 years. Despite his wartime experience he, like Mother, taught us three boys to have no prejudice against foreigners. He was highly practical, loved up-to-date inventions and explained them brilliantly. People called him the best teacher who never joined the profession, the one both his parents belonged to. Under his dental surgery after we had moved to S Somerset was “Massachusetts”, the laboratory where his technician, John, made the false teeth and where my life-long interest in chemistry started. You don’t easily forget watching molten gold being cast.
Queens College
Mother and father paid for us three boys at boarding school and two of us at Oxbridge colleges, and I attended Queens College in Cambridge where I got my first degree. I could not get away fast enough. I did not even attend my degree ceremony. Makerere University, Kampala restored my self-esteem. I qualified as a teacher with a Dip Ed East Africa, (recognised back in UK) and thrived at Ihungo Boys’, Bukoba, NW Tanzania on the shores of Lake Victoria. I ran the department jointly with a dear late friend Pius Lugangira after my job was officially Africanised. Pius’ widow Drosella now alternates between UK and Tz and their four children, schooled here in UK, are now part of the E African diaspora in the West.
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Home in 1972, I worked for a higher degree, an MEd by research and thesis at Univ of Bath on a part of 6th form energetics inspired by a reaction tried in the lab at Ihungo. In Bath I met paediatric nurse Janet Hunt on the tennis court near her ward at the RUH, We wed next year and Naomi was born two years later. For thirty years I taught science in secondary schools, did a lot of external exam marking, visited factories with the Royal Society of Chemistry and rarely gave Africa a thought. In 2005 my parents died within six months of each other aged 90. They had been wed 66 years but an ”item” for 76 having been childhood sweet hearts at school. I retired from full-time teaching the year before they died.
Back in the early ‘70s my tennis partner at the Bukoba Social Club was fellow Englishman Brian Clark, a Nescafé senior engineer and researcher into freeze-drying at their world-class labs in Switzerland. He was sent from there to be the first manager of the instant coffee factory working under contract to the owners, the Tanzanian government. Today this factory still uses its original Danish-built percolators and freeze-drying plant. As a private firm, Tanica Africafe runs it, it is owned by Africans , makes a profit and produces the only soluble coffee in East Africa. My “A”-level students enjoyed a visit to the factory and we realised its processes illustrated vital concepts –solubility, viscosity, volatility, relative humidity, thermal decomposition, molecular size etc – which they needed to understand for their exams. Back in the UK, I worked these ideas up into experiments and tried out at Dauntseys and Lavington schools with superb encouragement from colleagues, technicians and students. These intellectual resources are still helpful for post-retirement tutoring and workshops in East Africa.
Tanica Africafe Factory
Earthquake damaged Ihungo School
From ’04 to ’15 I spent far too long doing worthy voluntary jobs like churchwarden, choir chairman etc. A life-time dream was slipping away. It was not until Jan and I went on safari to Tz - her first trip to Africa – that I realised I was as much in love with that part of the globe and its people as ever. It is in my blood and will be all my life. In 2015 I had started a 3-year EdD course at UWE, Frenchay site, Bristol, believing that only solid academic credentials would give me entry into British schools to test my ideas. When I was told there were no secondary school science teachers in training there with whom I was hoping to try out these ideas, I quit and saved another two years at £3000 p.a. and had money to devote to “my” old school, Ihungo. By a freak of nature, it was destroyed by an earthquake in Sept 2016 but has since been rebuilt magnificently by the Tz government with aid money from Britain and Japan.
The new Ihungo secondary school
