Nick Twinamatsiko

Books. Buildings.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

@liamdahgoat Why guess when I can @grok?

[Gong @JGongSoft]

@Machando04 @unclemarnold @ntare_league @NLLNews @Official_NSOBA @kisyangafc @nshera_fc @kachanchali https://t.co/HEWHsyMXFa

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

I miss the era when having enormous wealth was seen as profoundly embarrassing and potentially cause for damnation, to the extent that robber barons would attempt to rid themselves of their massive fortunes by building libraries, museums, concert halls, research universities.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Someone asked me to recommend a good book on parenting. I would guess that most books about parenting are tedious. So my recommendation is to read autobiographies, the early parts of which are usually implicitly about parenting.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

@SkySportsNews *taking

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

What Uganda needs now are schools that do the exact things that the Mzungu founders of the "traditional schools" tried to do and which were undone by the African adminstrators that replaced them.

The "traditional schools" are so far removed from their foundations that it's no use trying to fix them.

We need new schools, and they should be the exact sort of the schools that the Mzungu set out to build. Such schools cannot be built by the government. They must be built by the private sector.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

Your understanding of the world shifts a little when you realise that all the literary geniuses (Brontës, Austen, Dickens, Orwell, Steinbeck, etc) whose books were lionised and quoted at school would have probably been average students (positions 10 to 30) had they been members of your class. All of them would have probably flunked maths, physics, and chemistry, which would have pushed them to average averages.

I guess that explains why the school administrators who really got it -- the likes of Crichton -- refused to narrow their focus to academic grades and instead encouraged their students to pursue their talents and other special gifts, whatever these happened to be.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

Copies of the Uganda Journal should be available at the national library and at the Makerere University library. This is Mr. Crichton talking about the projects on September 28, 1965. If you get the 1965 or the 1966 edition of the Journal, you will find the paper by Ntare School students. The president of the History Society in 1965/6 was Eriya Kategaya.

If you want a copy of the 1965/6 school magazine, from which I have taken this screenshot, send a request to [email protected].

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

The research projects of the History Society were Nkore-centric. In class, they would study European history, but their research was localised.

It was the same with the Geography Society. They studied the Tennessee Valley in class, but their research projects were on local Ankore geography.

The school had a choir, and that choir specialised in Runyankore songs. When they participated in national concerts, it's Runyankore songs they presented, and for which they won awards.

That's the education that we are told to dismiss as colonial education.

When African teachers took over, those localised research projects ended. When I attended the same school, we still studied the Tennessee Valley but didn’t do any Mbarara-centric geography projects. As for the choir, it was no more, and the singing of Runyankore songs was considered a thing of uneducated people.

That's the education we are supposed to praise as Africanised! If we don't praise it as such, we have a colonial hangover and an inferiority complex!

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

I thought Soda was a luxury. Now I know it's poison.

[𝗠𝘂𝗵𝗲𝗲 ♛ @muheediva01]

FOR THOSE WHO DIDN'T GROW UP PRIVILEGED, NAME SOMETHING YOU THOUGHT WAS A LUXURY WHEN YOU WERE A KID

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

Museveni has made almost a score of cabinet reshuffles in his 40 years in power. Like Amin, he began with "intellectuals" and gradually moved towards "fishermen". And, honestly, the "intellectuals" didn’t fare significantly better than the "fishermen" have done. One could say that even the current cabinet, while dubbed "fishermen", has its intellectuals, but there is clearly no real difference between the performance of these few intellectuals and those of the fishermen proper. The moral cowardice and general ineptitude cut across.

[Alis @jptorach]

@NickTTaria That's what happened when we lost educators and replaced them with regurgitators of information from teaching colleges.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

I am not an African. I am an alien. I was sent to tell you, Africans, some uncomfortable truths about yourselves.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

Mr. Gerald Sullivan, the teacher of Economics, would arrange visits for his students to places like British American Tobacco, so they could interact with industry and see the connection between the lessons he gave in class and the things that happened in Industry.

How often have similar visits been organised ever since African teachers replaced Mzungu teachers?

But, yeah, only someone with a colonial hangover or inferiority complex can ask such a question.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

@ArchibaldAgaba What you read in what I write is YOUR responsibility, and you have to deal with it.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

The fact that Ugandans who received high quality education from Mzungu teachers and administrators in the 1960s ended up presiding over shambolic education systems goes to show that, however well you educate an African, they remain an African. Those Mzungu teachers, the Crichtons, really wasted their time.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

@the_book_land David Copperfield.

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

@DavidPattt None of the above. Where is Dolly Parton?

[Kimuzi @Kimuzi_]

https://t.co/f9uDXFMghL

[Nick Twinamatsiko @NickTTaria]

I guess when they said that "kuri oza kwitwa amaizi, okaitwa agaijwiire," what they meant was that if you're to lose ministerial appointment over dual citizenship, the other citizenship should be of a country like the US or Canada.

[Timothy Kalyegira @TimKalyegira]

AFRICA
- Most of Africa's intelligentsia has still never grasped just how radically transformative the Internet is.

In their minds, social media, for example, is one more platform to hold governments to account rather than a vehicle to bypass governments altogether.