President explains focus on science
Oct 13, 2007
THE Government has emphasised the teaching of natural sciences to enable Ugandans become self-reliant, President Yoweri Museveni has said. According to the President, colonialists deliberately taught humanities in order to build a society which depended on the outside for its basic supplies.
By Milton Olupot
THE Government has emphasised the teaching of natural sciences to enable Ugandans become self-reliant, President Yoweri Museveni has said. According to the President, colonialists deliberately taught humanities in order to build a society which depended on the outside for its basic supplies.
This ‘colonial distortion’, he said, created a society which does not produce its own food, build own houses, provide own mode of transport or make its own weapons, which “the most primitive communities do.â€
“You go to the Congo the pygmies do all these four things, the Karimojong do them. It is only you, the elite, who don’t do those. The colonial products, the new Africans who have no stable position in human history.
He said colonial education produced historians, story tellers and many priests at the expense of inventors. “But we are not saying we don’t need the historians or singers,†he said.
Museveni was speaking at the memorial lecture of Prof. Samwiri Karugire, a former Head of Makerere University’s History Department. The academic, who died in 1992 at 52, was once the deputy minister for foreign affairs and a director at the Uganda Revenue Authority.
“I am very glad that you remembered my friend Karugire. He was a very brilliant person, who contributed to scholarship in Makerere University,†Museveni said.
The lecture was organised by the history department and Fountain Publishers. The Karugire family, government ministers, army officers and lecturers and students attended.
THE Government has emphasised the teaching of natural sciences to enable Ugandans become self-reliant, President Yoweri Museveni has said. According to the President, colonialists deliberately taught humanities in order to build a society which depended on the outside for its basic supplies.
This ‘colonial distortion’, he said, created a society which does not produce its own food, build own houses, provide own mode of transport or make its own weapons, which “the most primitive communities do.â€
“You go to the Congo the pygmies do all these four things, the Karimojong do them. It is only you, the elite, who don’t do those. The colonial products, the new Africans who have no stable position in human history.
He said colonial education produced historians, story tellers and many priests at the expense of inventors. “But we are not saying we don’t need the historians or singers,†he said.
Museveni was speaking at the memorial lecture of Prof. Samwiri Karugire, a former Head of Makerere University’s History Department. The academic, who died in 1992 at 52, was once the deputy minister for foreign affairs and a director at the Uganda Revenue Authority.
“I am very glad that you remembered my friend Karugire. He was a very brilliant person, who contributed to scholarship in Makerere University,†Museveni said.
The lecture was organised by the history department and Fountain Publishers. The Karugire family, government ministers, army officers and lecturers and students attended.