One of the founding pupils at The Banda I had been due to go to boarding school in England when my parents learnt of a new Prep School opening in the former Hotel Banda with the added advantage it was on my father’s way to work. So equipped with new school uniform: “blue airtex shirt, maroon blazer and cap, khaki shorts” we set off early one morning on my dad’s motorbike (no helmets in those days!). In those early months most classes were still held in the former hotel buildings. It was all very novel and exciting for an 8 year old boy.
I have many fond memories of my time at The Banda - of the regular class closures when baboons or giraffes escaped over the game park fence and had to be chased back by the rangers, of rugby and hockey on the hard soil of the playing fields, of playground “battles" around and with the termite hills. Great memories too of our teachers who gave me such a solid grounding that it took 2 years for my classmates in UK to catch up to where I was in French and Latin. It served me well later too as my wife is French.
Life in England was something of a culture shock, so it is perhaps no surprise that within 6 years I was off to explore the world; first Paris and the Sorbonne and then a 38 year career in the British Diplomatic Service, which has taken me from the deserts of the Sahara and the Amazonian jungles, to the mountains of Albania and Kosovo and from the far South Atlantic through the Caribbean to the Arctic Circle.
In the UN I had the great pleasure to work with Kenyan Diplomats as we drove through the new Arms Trade Treaty and as Governor in the British Virgin Islands I organised an annual Africa Dinner where our toast was “Who’s like us!” The answer nobody. Growing up under those wide-open skies, that peculiar smell of sun baked earth and how it changes with the coming rains, the wind in the whistling thorns, walking through the dew filled grass in the morning. Africa becomes part of your soul and never leaves you.
I deliberately chose not to serve in Nairobi but I visited with my family in 2010 and was pleased to see that despite all the changes many of the old places were much the same including the tree under which we used to have 45 minutes reading on our blankets after lunch! I am very pleased to see The Banda has gone from strength to strength. Long may it continue.
JOHN DUNCAN
1966-69
Receiving the Form Prize from Lord Soper, 1967.