Gayaza at 130: the girls' school that taught a nation

Gayaza High School celebrated 130 years in 2025 with a programme so understated that even some of its old girls almost missed the dates. The school does not chase a national audience, it never has.

And yet the alumni roll, if you compile it honestly, reads like a list of the women who quietly built modern Uganda: ministers, surgeons, judges, novelists, broadcasters, vice chancellors. Several of them sat with us in the school's chapel, built 1924, still in daily use, to talk about what the place gave them and what it asked of them in return.