Shaka Ssali: The Kabaare Kid who made good very good (Part 2)

Photo: University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) campus

Once he had slept off the jetlag after arriving in New York City on July 4, 1976, Mike Ssali found people who were willing to believe in him. Besides Dr. Ezra Suruma, an early contact was Frederick W. Kakumba, a Ugandan professor of economics at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York. A 1962 A-Level graduate of Lubiri Secondary School, Kakumba had arrived in the United States in 1964 to pursue higher education. He had read banking, finance and international relations at Miami University, graduating in 1968, and had earned a master’s degree in economics at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany in 1970.

Whereas Kakumba accepted a professorship at Hudson Valley Community College in 1970, his plan had been to return to Uganda. This plan had been upended by the political and military turmoil that the military coup d’état by Maj. Gen. Idi Amin Dada had unleashed on Uganda. Professor Kakumba had accepted life in America, and had become very familiar with that country, complete with personal experiences with racism. He understood newly arrived people’s challenges, and gladly paid Ssali’s first rent. “Kakumba, who did not know me, taught me what brotherhood and friendship was about,” Ssali told me many years later.

Many other people, including Dr. Andrew Lutaakome Kayiira, helped Ssali during those challenging years. Kayiira, a graduate of the University of Illinois, with a PhD in criminology from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, guided him onto the right track towards academic success in America. Kayiira would later play a major role in Uganda’s politico-military struggles for power, until his violent death in Kampala on March 7, 1987.

America was tough, even for a former soldier. Ssali’s only academic qualification, a Junior Secondary School Leaving Certificate (equivalent to today’s Primary School Leaving Certificate), was insufficient to secure a well-paying job. To make ends meet, Ssali, the son of wealthy parents in Kabaare, did various labour jobs, including cleaning dishes in restaurants and waiting on tables. He also constructed swimming pools for middle class Americans in Albany, New York.

Notwithstanding the challenges, Ssali kept his focus on becoming a journalist. He took a remedial course that enabled him to join the prestigious State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, from where he graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts (Magna Cum Laude, “with great distinction”) in African Studies and Political Science. Ssali then obtained a Master of Arts in African Studies from the same university, which was accompanied by the Best Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Scholarship.

Like a recovering child with Kwashiorkor (protein-calorie malnutrition) who eats with an insatiable appetite, Ssali proceeded to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). There he received a Master of Philosophy in Media Studies in 1984.

When I visited him in Los Angeles at the end of March 1984, I discovered a drastically transformed man, far different from the fun-loving, risk-taking younger person I had known in Uganda. He was a man with immense knowledge, an encyclopedic memory, a brilliantly analytical mind and a great teacher’s ability to ask questions that challenged me to rethink my assumptions.

We laughed at ourselves and reminisced about our early years in Kabaare. We laughed at the irony of me being a guest in the home of the boy I had been entreated to avoid, who had now become a fully subscribed member of the high achiever’s club.

We were watching television in his living room when the shocking news of Marvin Gaye’s death was reported just after 1 pm local time on April 1, 1984. The great African American singer, felled by a bullet fired by his father, became a recurring talking point for us in the decades that followed. Marvin Gaye was an example of the clash of generations and cultures that had caused grief to the senior Mushakambas, my parents and other elders because they had not understood Ssali, the apparently rebellious kid that had preferred the arts to the sciences, sports and extracurricular explorations to classroom studiousness that was demanded of all students.

In time, the second stanza of Marvin Gaye’s song, “What’s Going On,” gained practical meaning for me, and became part of my inspiration, a personal anthem that remains central to my worldview, and my attitude to politics in my homeland. “Father, father/We don't need to escalate/You see, war is not the answer/For only love can conquer hate/You know we've got to find a way/To bring some lovin' here today.” I never asked Ssali, but I now wonder whether this song inspired his sign-off message, “get better, not bitter,” that he shared with millions of viewers of Straight Talk Africa, his weekly television program on the Voice of America that began two decades later.

With his second master’s degree in the bag, Ssali immediately embarked on field research on film and other media in the United Kingdom, West Germany and Tanzania. This work, supported by scholarships from the Ford Foundation, and Canada’s International Development Research Centre, formed part of his thesis for a Doctor of Philosophy in cross-cultural communication and history that he received from UCLA in 1988. He ditched his European (slave) name "Mike" and adopted the name Shaka, derived from his father Omugurusi Mushakamba's name.

Twelve years after arriving in America, the former high-school and army dropout, for whom Lucas Korvin, his teacher at Kigezi College, Butobere, had prophesied a life of failure, was now Dr. Shaka Ssali, BA, MA, MPhil, PhD. He attributed his success to his brief and disappointing military career. The army had taught him the merits of discipline, setting clear goals and objectives, and intentional strategies for accomplishing them. It had also helped him to develop his desire to set his sights high and had given his life a positive direction.

Armed with his excellent paper qualifications, Shaka Ssali repaired to Chicago, Illinois, contemplated his path, ruled out an academic career, and followed his heart towards the world that Israel Wamala, his role model at the BBC in London, had inhabited until his early retirement in 1988. Ssali accepted a job as Film and Television Producer for the New York State Public Broadcasting Program in the state’s capital at Albany. Less than four years later, Dr. Shaka Ssali accepted the job of his life at the Voice of America in Washington DC. He now had Israel Wamala’s baton in his hand.

To be continued…………Part 3 next week