The third term of my teacher training at Makerere was a posting in a school. Along with four other young men I was posted to Kako Senior Secondary School in the Teso district of Uganda. The five of us were accomodated in the house originally built by and for pioneer Anglican missionary Bishop Kitching. It had seven bedrooms and a large communal dining rooms. With a high ceilings and a wide veranda all round the house it was wonderfully cool.
Bishop Kitchen’s house was approached by a long avenue, more than 100 metres in length with mature mango trees along either side. There was no toilet inside the house. The throne room was a large hut in the middle of a patch of grass visible, but not too close to, the veranda.
So we had five male students, with student appetites and student cooking skills.
We had unlimited ripe mangos.
We had yet to develop any resistance to the myriad stomach bugs and other ailments of tropical Africa.
We had this wonderful throne room.
The throne was absolutely central in this large room: as big as any living room in modern day Britain. And it was by far the deepest long drop I have ever encountered. We students agreed it was approaching two seconds from release till the echoing boom of impact.
Part of the mystery of the throne room was its attractiveness to monkeys. Shortly after any one of us was enthroned half a dozen monkeys would clatter onto the tin roof and peer down over the edge of the roof and through the air gap at the top of the wall. Every movement was observed closely by half a dozen monkeys. The monkeys dispersed across the grass to the nearby trees before the door could be opened.
Combustion started after five weeks of student use. After dark a luminous blue glow of burning methane could be seen below and sometimes a flickering flame.
In our last few days at Kako the flame somtimes went out. My fellow students would drop burning matches or waxed paper down to relight. As the only one trained in chemistry I desisted. The anticipated explosion did not happen.