EMMANUEL KATO SSEMAKULA

Makerere economics professor who taught three generations to ask one question: why?

On the first day of every course he taught at Makerere University, Professor Emmanuel Kato Ssemakula wrote a single word on the blackboard: 'Why?' Then he sat down, folded his arms and waited, sometimes for ten full minutes, until somebody was brave enough to answer. Three generations of Ugandan economists, civil servants and at least two ministers learned the same lesson from him: the answer matters less than the courage to begin.

He was born in 1941 at Kalisizo in Rakai, the son of a catechist father and a mother who grew matooke and expected each of her seven children to read before the age of six. A scholarship took him to King's College Budo, then to Makerere, at that time the intellectual capital of East Africa, where he took a first-class degree in Economics in 1964, and finally to the London School of Economics for a doctorate. He returned in 1972 and stayed through the hardest years that followed, teaching in lecture halls where the lights failed and the chalk ran out, because, he said, 'a university that closes teaches the wrong lesson.' He became a Professor in 1985, led the Faculty of Economics and Management for nine years, and wrote the textbook on African agricultural economics that half the region still uses.

At home in Ntinda he played omweso every Sunday with anyone who dared, and lost only on purpose. He cooked an excellent luwombo of smoked fish in banana leaves, and was a lay reader at Namirembe Cathedral for more than forty years. He married Rose Nakato, a vendor at Nakasero Market, in 1970, and admitted freely that she understood prices better than he did.

He died peacefully at home in October 2021, aged eighty. He leaves Rose, three children, eight grandchildren and a long line of former students who still hear the question: why?

“The answer matters less than the courage to begin.”