The style of English teaching and textbooks were largely based on the models of language teaching courses found in the British schools in the fifties. It is hard to generalise about the predominant teaching style of the pre-independence period. (For one thing, I wasn't there). But the style most commonly adopted by some of the existing teachers tended to the didactic and tended not to involve the students. As at the time there was not yet a large market, specialised textbooks for the English as a Second Language market were not being produced by publishers. Only as the schools increased in numbers sufficiently to provide a mass market did the books appear. What books could be found were usually rather dull and were versions of those used by British schools. Consequently they contained features intended for native speakers rather than second language learners. Probably they were rather difficult for the students. In short, this was a period near to the beginning of the ESL boom.
The teachers recruited for the expansion were either experienced only in British schools (there were also Peace Corps and teachers from other European countries, mainly Scandinavia) or were new graduates straight from university, sometimes with a teacher training course at Makerere University in Uganda.

Within East Africa the largest influence on teaching methods, especially in English language, came from the Makerere University College Department of Education and the English department presided over, in the first half of the 1960s, by John Bright and his successors. For a short period this was the main source of secondary teachers for all three East African territories, until Tanzania and Kenya developed their own universities and secondary teacher training colleges. The Makerere department, although not directly involved in the devising of the English Block, advocated approaches to English teaching which were not at all incompatible. Although the term "communicative" was not used, many of the methods advocated, especially in reading and writing were communicative in practice. Thus teachers, like myself, who had been through the Makerere course, did not find the English Block a complete new departure from what was being advocated by what we might call the Bright school of language teaching. It did however take those principles quite a bit further.

The English Block was devised independently of Makerere in a large school in Kampala by a British expatriate teacher - R G Gregory