“It was small and more rural” Prof. Rowell’s Recollection of Makerere in 1960s 

“I was interested in African Music, and I knew that Uganda was rich in that,” he said in an interview in January 2022. 

Although he can still find his way around Makerere hill in 2022, Prof. Charles H. Rowell says, in the 1960s, when he taught at the Makerere University Department of Zoology, the institution was like “a small and rural community.”

Rowell joined the University of East Africa, Makerere College in September 1961 as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Zoology from the University of Cambridge, where he attained his PhD and worked as a senior research fellow between 1959-1961. 

Prof. Rowell says two main reasons aroused his interest in Uganda at the time, that is: African music and the reputation of Makerere’s Department of Zoology across the continent. The Department Head Prof. Barel was a well-known scientist who had done fundamental work on Lake Victoria and its biology. 

“I was interested in African Music, and I knew that Uganda was rich in that,” he said in an interview in January 2022. 

Living in Uganda changed Prof. Rowell’s life because it incentivised him to take a career path in tropical biology. Even when he left Makerere to join the University of California, Berkeley, in 1970 where he was a full professor in the Department of Integrative Biology up to 1980, the African tropics knowledge acquired from Makerere helped to guide his research in Central and Latin America.

Daughters born in Uganda, visiting villages

Prof. Rowell’s two daughters were born at Mulago Hospital. “If they took residence here, they would be entitled to citizenship,” he said. He became friends with students whom he would go with to their villages during the holiday breaks. “I used to stay with them in their villages for some days. I got to know their parents and societies which were very rural,” he added.

“I spent a week with the Kakwa people, and spent time with the Tepeth people (of Karamoja),” he added. He also visited parts of Acholi and many areas of Buganda. 

Museum of Zoology

Prof. Rowell was instrumental in setting up the Museum at the Department of Zoology, Entomology and Fisheries Sciences, which opened in 1963. “I think they still have the aquarium, which is one of those things I helped set up. And the museum of zoology,” he said.

Dr. Perpetra Akite, a Lecturer in the Department of Zoology, and a former student of Prof. Rowell says that he (Rowell) has the biggest collection of grasshoppers in almost all of the Afrotropical Region. The treasured collection is being turned into guidebooks that will inform future research and innovation.

“What is interesting about Prof. Rowell’s collection is that it is the biggest collection of grasshoppers in almost all of the Afrotropical Region,” she said. “In the last eight years or so, Rowell and some of his colleagues have been turning this into field guide books, and so far five volumes are ready, and the sixth is under editorial review.”

Dr. Akite added that Prof. Rowell was also one of the pioneers of the desert locust control organization in East Africa, “and every entomologist who studies grasshoppers in the region has been his student.” 

Prof. Rowell in January 2022 donated his priceless harpsichord, a classic musical instrument first built in Italy in the 16th century, to the University. 

Read about the harpsichord donation.