Dr Sarah Ntiro
Women’s rights activist hailed as ‘a Ugandan Rosa Parks’
DR SARAH NTIRO, who has died aged 92, was the first woman from East and Central Africa to take a university degree and she subsequently became a champion of women’s rights in Uganda; one website described her as “a Ugandan Rosa Parks”.
She was born Sarah Nyendwoha to Anglican parents on March 21 1926 in Hoima, in the oil-rich western part of Uganda, then a British protectorate. Her father was the son of a chief of the Bakwonga clan – hereditary administrators of the Bunyoro Kitara kingdom, one of the most powerful forces in Central and East Africa from the 13th to the 19th century; her mother was a princess of the Babiito clan. Both were teachers.
A bright child, she was educated at King’s College Budo which had only started admitting girls a few years before she arrived. In 1945 she joined Makerere Union College to train as a teacher.
She originally hoped to train in mathematics, but the story goes that when she entered the mathematics class, the only woman among 31 male students, the teacher asked if she thought she was visiting “a maternity ward”, then walked out swearing that he would never teach maths again unless she withdrew. It is said that for the sake of her fellow students she submitted and studied history, geography and English instead.
While she was doing teaching practice at her old school, one of her teachers suggested that she should go to university and she decided to apply to read History at St Anne’s College, Oxford, soliciting the help of a Roman Catholic priest to teach her Latin – a requirement for entry.
During her time at Oxford she learnt to ride a bicycle and when she graduated in 1954, she became East Africa’s first female graduate, an achievement celebrated on her return (with bicycle) to Hoima with a festival lasting a week.
She began teaching at Gayaza School, Uganda’s oldest girls’ secondary school, but discovered that the authorities intended to pay her less than male counterparts with the same qualifications, so she rejected the salary and decided to teach without pay. Her protest came to the ears of the wife of the British governor who intervened and she started to receive a salary equal to that of men, setting a precedent for other women.
In 1958 she was appointed to Uganda’s legislative council where she introduced a private members’ Bill on equal pay for men and women and encouraged women to participate in the democratic process by holding civic education sessions.
Also in 1958 she marred Sam Ntiro, a Tanzanian academic, with whom she spent four years in London when he was serving as his country’s High Commissioner to Britain.
When she returned to Uganda, she worked in the Ministry of Education from 1965 to 1967, setting up a Teaching Service Commission. In 1967 she was appointed a deputy head of King’s College Budo.
From 1970 to 1978 she worked as an assistant registrar at Makerere University, where she intervened to protect students critical of the regime of Idi Amin. She was also a lay canon of the Anglican church in Uganda, and the author of a report which persuaded the church to streamline the salaries of the clergy.
In 1978 she fled into exile in Kenya where she started an education consultancy and did much work for refugees with the All Africa Conference of Churches. But she later returned to Uganda, where she founded many organisations to support women and continued to work for women’s rights and girls’ education. There is now an annual Sarah Ntiro Lecture and Award event in honour of Uganda’s women achievers.
Her husband died in 1993 and she is survived by their two sons.
Dr Sarah Ntiro, born March 21 1926, died October 22 2018