In our staff room at Ntare High School following examinations, British teaching masters pulled long, dissatisfied faces. The O level English examination results never reached a desired level. It never failed, no matter how many passes students achieved in other subjects or even how well scores rose in Language, they never reached  the sought after desired level of their student counterparts in England. Therefore, the teachers of English and writing thought scores were abysmal in English and writing. In African schools, according to their voiced complaints, scores had always fallen low in language usage and writing.

      As usual a lot of discussion was generated on how to raise these scores during the following exams a year away. One morning, the conversation centered on how students had not understood the English classic, Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes.  Members of staff read aloud, with picky laughs of derision, how students had responded to the behavior of Tom and the school bully Flashman.   the teachers .  used language and the responses themselves that students had written criticizing Tom and the bully, FlashmanIn writing samples which w, saying they would not be tolerated in an African school. the Prefect would “shut them down”. the student did not take into consideration cultural differences or class background, elements they misunderstood in the language nuance of the English author.

     Although teachers had provided students with cultural information about English public schools and detailed the physical surroundings of those schools, the students evidenced no clear understanding of that information or how to use it accurately in written critical commentary about that classic novel. They clearly were not English boys who had imbibed this knowledge in row-house front parlors or by breathing English air. They were not English boys who had listened daily, from birth, to the conversations of parents and neighbors across backyard fences. They had not read English prose in unison with other British boys in schools from primary levels upward.  

      Still, the masters, for the most part, were unsympathetic. They did not take into consideration what was before them: boys who came from villages where there was not centuries of knowledge about the evolution of the English, boys who had scant knowledge of the history of those people or of their language. In front of them were African boys from villages who had never set foot on English soil. They  had rarely heard the language accurately spoken and had never listened to their parents and neighbors speak English. “They nor their parents," one master noted, "are allowed at our clubs, here where they’d see our crude attempts at rugby and who among us, even have witnessed, out here, anyone bowl a perfect score at cricket?”

      I listened to all of this with interest until old Robson, one of the elder lecturers,  stated the whole thing more clearly.  “These chaps are rather good, actually. I doubt that either of us, in their stead, could do any better.”

      “How do you say that?” other masters quickly challenged him.

      “These blokes are actually expected to do the impossible,” he went on. “They are asked to be born in African villages where only Bantu languages are spoken, not written, to live there, listening to uneducated vernacular all their formative lives, and then, to become English boys by the time they are thirteen, speaking and writing polished English as if they were in a Rugby school, with the background of a Tom Brown and a Flashman.”

      “Hear, hear! We know that. It’s been said often enough before, but what’s the answer, Robby?” they queried him.

     “It’s plain enough what’s needed, but how to supply it is a major drawback.”

     “Well, well, a solution to our annual worries is imminent. Tell us, Robby, tell us what’s needed"

     By now, Robson was laughing that everyone was turning his attempt at levity into a referendum on his ability to solve their insolvable problems of low O level English scores.  “Well, I don’t think it bloody fair for you chaps to mark me as the Oracle at Delphi because I point to what is commonly known by all of us.”

            “Just tell it. What is the creaking bloody answer? I warrant you we all stand to be indebted to you for it.”

     “Well, now I need to shorten this.”  He looked all around at them. “So I think what is needed is an examination set on a book written about them and their environment. I am sure that would go a long way toward improving English and writing scores.”

     “The catch is there is no such book in existence.”

     “Well said; then someone should write one.”

     “Who, by all means?” Eyes darted around the staff room. "Who knows the intimate relations of the lives of these chaps? You would have to sleep in their huts, eat cassava, ntulas, cabbages, their plantain and groundnut soup. You’d have to see them born, see them married, go to funerals. None of us have done this.”

     Someone else looking around seized on a lecturer who to this point had been uninvolved. “The nearest description to that is Bottram." All eyes fell on the geography master who taught bare-chested in class and wore colored togas and behaved much as if he was Lawrence of Arabia in town and on safari.

     Bottram declined and said with emphasis, “I write factual geography books. I have long been of the opinion that exams should be written on scholarly investigations and information of non-fiction rather than on fabricated tracts. What I write can be shown, measured and verified. Half of Tom Brown’s Schooldays is sentimental haberdashery—propaganda, preachments on manners and morals, written to influence rather than to educate and inform.”

     While the whole staff looked at him, smiling, he added, “That’s your field, fiction,” he pointed an open geography book at Robson and  waved it at the other English masters. “That’s your department. If Jim Hilton were here, you could possibly get him to write a Goodbye, Mr. Mulumu instead of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and you would have your local novel. But, frankly, it will have to be someone closer, someone among them someone who lives in an African village.

      “How about Ngugi’s Weep Not Child?”

     “I am afraid not; it’s too cerebral and psychological for the purpose. It has to be simple, everyday, down-to earth,”  Old Robson put in. He was a respected old don from Oxford who had himself been prepped at Eton and knew English schools.

     Then, Robin Dawes, who was always kidding me about how I spent every moment in the village, even spending nights with friends and student families there, now  spoke up. “Moses should be the one for that task. He knows the village better than any of us.”

     “Can’t you deliver us from this dilemma, Moses?” they shouted with laughter.

     I thought it was a great joke and said so since I taught chemistry and biology. The other English masters thought so too,

     “But that would be even worse.” They pursued that old American joke. “He’s an American, and you know they don’t speak English over there, not even as well as any of the other colonies.”  There was quiet in the staff room with all of the English masters looking at me and the three other American teachers to see if we regarded the comment an insult. After a pause, we all laughed and the subject was dropped.

     While the staff room conversation had taken an unusual turn, it had been an ordinary day.  I went back to preparing chemistry lessons and going to sports in the evening with the boys. I was helping them learn basketball which had been recently introduced to Uganda , and they tolerated me in their soccer games. Every free moment, as was my habit, I escaped to a nearby village called, Ruti, another name for trees. A family had adopted me on my first visit. They had made me welcome, and I joined the family of four boys and five girls two of whom were already primary schoolteachers. I worked on their farm cutting pineapples, gathering papaya, digging drainage ditches in the banana plantations and milking goats.

     Time with the family was always enjoyable.  However, the father, a Gombola chief, was experiencing a  problem with his son at secondary school who was having difficulty deciding between being a British boy or an African one. He had adopted the habits of his British masters, copying their speech and trying to be a dandy at home in the village, neglecting to care for the goats or to pick coffee berries. It was a problem similar to one experienced by my brother back in America with his teenaged son who neglected his studies, trying for a career in music instead of keeping up his grades.

     Back in the staff room at school, they kept up their ribbing, not letting go threads of the conversation about my writing a book, suitable for evaluating African students in English.  “Moses," they would say, "how is the African school-days book progressing?” They often asked that question instead of greeting me or engaging in an exchange about the chemistry and biology classes I was teaching. I knew I was not a writer with skills approaching those of  Thomas Hughes, and I knew didn’t know enough about Africa to write such a book, even if I had possessed the skills, but they kept asking as if they intended to goad me into doing it. I had told myself that couldn’t do it, but I was offended by their constant inference that I could.

     So one evening instead of going to Ruti, I began a narrative about the place. I wrote about what I knew.  I based my story on what was happening there, knowing I could never reach a level anywhere near the almost perfect scenes and themes in Tom Brown’s School Days. Nevertheless, I went on.

     Over the holidays, I wrote every chance I got, and produced a text of more than a hundred pages and thirty thousand words. It was a story about a boy in an African village who wanted to be British. He mimicked his school masters and lost his father’s confidence and his father’s goats to marauding dingoes, to wild dogs roaming the countryside. The boy feared the vicious dogs and thus feared becoming a man. I called the story Dogs of Fear.  In Ruti, the people called me Musa for Moses, and because I was always on the go, they called me, Nagenda, which means going. So I put a fly leaf on my book entitled Dogs of Fear by Musa Nagenda. I dumped the manuscript on Old Robson’s desk when he was at prep one evening.

     Two days later, with his usual good humor, he said, “It doesn’t measure up, old chap. It’s not anywhere near Tom Hughes's Tom Brown, but it has a quest.”  It was two days before school holidays, and so nothing else was said until we came back six weeks later. During that time, I had come down with a swollen toe, so painful I couldn’t walk to class. I called the headmaster and said I would be absent. That evening Denis Wills, one of the English master, came to see me and diagnosed my condition as gout. He brought me medicine from the apothecary and a list of foods to avoid. Among those forbidden were beef and liver, two of my favorites.

     As Denis was leaving, he called me Musa Nagenda and said an editor from Heinemann’s educational books, James Currey, had been looking for me the previous day. The chap had a manuscript that he wanted to publish, but no one seemed to know the author. The book was Dogs of Fear. Robson had been away, and no one else besides Denis knew that I was the author. Denis, in fact, was a writer himself. I had discussed writing with him a few times in the midst of writing the book. He knew I was the author but didn’t know if he should tell that to Currey. When Robson returned, he confessed to sending the manuscript to Heinemann without my knowledge.

     Anyway, the book was published in a new junior series by Heinemann, and Gene Ashby brought the first copies to me where I was living in the holidays with my Tutsi wife and two children on my shamba in Ankole. That book was followed by two more: one, The Ostrich Chase; the other,The Human Mandolin. Heinemann showed these books at a book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, where an American publisher, Holt, Rinehart and Winston saw them and brought out American published copies.

     Perhaps needless to say, Dogs of Fear was never up to a standard where it could be set as a book for a national examination, but it was sold over the world, was translated into the Norwegian and garnered the author fan mail from young readers in Australia and New Zealand. It was used as practice books for local exams, and in America one was selected for a section in a sixth grade reader called, Bright and Beautiful. That was in the 1970s. The first two books are out of print now, but anyone still interested can Goggle them.  They are in libraries and knocking around on Amazon.com.