One More Note on Kenyan Education

I have been following, sporadically, the events unfolding in Kenyan secondary schools. I have been following with more interest the various theories attempting to explain “student unrest.” Today’s students, I have learned, lack discipline; have inattentive parents; are overly privileged; lack toughness.

Whether commentators are sympathetic or not, an ongoing refrain is that “we” who have already been through the system “made it.” It is this claim that concerns me. In praising our “toughness,” our “tenacity,” our “fortitude,” we efface, or at the very least obscure, what might be more useful questions.

Under what conditions do students succeed? How can we achieve those conditions? How can we maximize those conditions?

Approaching secondary school as an obstacle course to be completed under harsh conditions is counter-productive. We should not be proud of succeeding “against the odds,” nor should that be what we expect of students today.

Students have a right to complain that they must study four years worth of education to be competitive in a two-hour exam consisting of, at most, 50 random questions. Those of us who have taken national exams know they are rarely cumulative, often comprise less than a year’s worth of knowledge, and test memory, not native intelligence.

Students should complain about over-crowded classes, poorly constructed dormitories, harsh prefects and teachers, restricted access to their parents and guardians, and poor nutrition.

Students should have smaller class sizes. They should have no cause to imagine that their work is gratuitous. They should be able to forge relationships between what they study and how they live. If this means that at least two terms, if not a year, of secondary school is spent pursuing some kind of internship or externship—and I think this is a great idea—then so be it.

We should not be proud if we ate weevil-flavored beans and undercooked ugali, if we lived on poorly cooked githeri and unpalatable porridge, if we learned to love stale bread and dirty water we called tea. We should not think well of ourselves for “doing well” despite overcrowded classrooms and overly strained teachers. We should not believe that education is about overcoming adversity and beating the odds.

Under what conditions can students succeed—and I have a generous definition of success that goes beyond merely achieving good grades—and what can be done to maximize those chances?

Racism: Not Just by Racists

We need to question the belief that only “racists” perform racist acts. It is a belief that continues to be used to excuse racist acts. Indeed, the cry that x person is not a racist, is simply “ignorant” or just “misspoke” attempts to mitigate the injury of the racist act.

How do we begin to parse this?

In part, the idea of “the racist” seems to defy history—and this is where we must begin. If race is socially constructed, then racism must also be socially constructed. Now, to be sure, the idea of social construction needs more elaboration than I can give. In its glib, irresponsible version, social construction seems to suggest that “things” don’t exist: there’s no “truth” to race or sex or gender or even class. In this irresponsible version, deprivation and oppression can often be attributed to perception (it takes a special type of student to argue that poverty is socially constructed, as one of my special students once did).

In the version I prefer, and use, social construction directs us to history and historical change. It tells us that racism under slavery is not quite the same as racism after slavery or racism after civil rights. It suggests that the causes of racial animus and antagonism change along with history. But to accept this version also requires that we attend more carefully to how racist acts manifest, and to that slippery place between act and identity.

We might twist this argument around to this: if a racist act can only be performed by a racist (which is taken as a substantial identity), then act is predicated on identity and thus non-racist individuals (those whose identity is not defined by racism) cannot perform racist acts. This line of reasoning has been used over the past few years to excuse racist acts: “x individual is not a racist (by character) and thus the statement made was not racist.”

We can state two objections. First, we can return agency to the site of injury by stating that the person against whom the racist act is performed has the authority to term the act racist. We have ceded this position too often, too quickly, been shamed into silence. And it is a position we must reclaim.

Second objection, and this is where I depart from King: we cannot trust that a person’s character guarantees one’s actions. As an aside, one might note that King’s seeming opposition between color and character, while rhetorically powerful, is theoretically sloppy and historically irresponsible, especially given the complex intertwining between color and character in racial histories.

“Racist” is not an identity that precedes an act but a temporally unstable designation, one whose temporality is uneven, contingent, sometimes lasting, sometimes fleeting. Some people display racist acts longer than others, for entire lifetimes, others for minutes or seconds. There is a complex algebra (perhaps alchemy) to racism that deserves even more attention than we have dared.

Understanding the designation “racist” as historically and temporally contingent offers a more flexible, more usable concept than does using it as a kind of ahistorical identity. Simultaneously, returning agency to the bearer of injury, and taking seriously the injured party, offers a more historically responsible mode of identifying racist acts and their effects.

Notes on Bullies

The figure of the bully in Kenyan schools is both loathed and respected. Those of us who lived under bullies—the under being quite literal as one strategy required younger, weaker students to lie under a bully’s bed—speak with admiration of the more inventive bullies, those who went beyond simply making one wash socks and performed pseudo-scientific experiments. We knew how electricity moved through bodies because we were attached to live wires.

We learned to enjoy our calluses, to boast of having endured the worst. Those of us who were less bullied were deemed less worthy. In retrospect, the notion that one’s worth relied on one’s ability to endure pain and humiliation should give us pause. We were learning how to relate to power and authority, with submission and resentment, praise and even grace. We were learning that normal social relations consisted of repeated exposure to violence.

We learned to attach respect to violence, to understand violence as ordinary, not needing comment, essential for daily life. It was a lesson that was reinforced by fevered imaginations of Nyayo House, a place that linked the ruling philosophy to torture, suggesting that the ruling philosophy consisted of torture. In our minds, the elite military General Service Unit (GSU) was the arm of government dedicated to taming recalcitrant university students and political dissidents. Those of us whose primary schools abutted the main universities witnessed university students fleeing through our corridors as the government tried, once again, to beat them into submission.

There is a complex multi-layered narrative to be told about how the figure of the bully became inextricably bound to education. Bullying became normative and normalizing, creating us as students and citizens.

It should come as no surprise that one of the first proverbs we learned was “asiyefunza na wazazi hufunzwa na ulimwengu.” Pedagogy and discipline, discipline and violence, discipline as violence, and a world eagerly awaiting to teach.

The relationship between pedagogy and discipline, pedagogy and violence, extends into all areas of Kenyan thought and action. Even outside of strictly pedagogical settings, we continue to understand living as a mode of pedagogy. The claim, “I learned so much,” uttered after church services, business meetings, and conferences speaks, I think, to the hold that pedagogy as a mode of living has on our collective identity.

Yet, if the scene of pedagogy is inextricably bound to discipline and violence, and if pedagogy defines, in some substantial way, what it means to be Kenyan, then we have to contend with the centrality of the bully within our national imagination, for this figure mediates, in an important way, how we approach the national everyday.

Theorizing the centrality of the bully to our self-imagining as a nation requires that we contend with the difficult task of recognizing we rely on and desire this figure. In some perverse way, we need the bully. Our continued encounters with this figure confirm that we belong, that we learn, that we survive, that we are. This is why a gathering of those who were bullied invariably returns to those scenes of humiliation and pedagogy: groups of “old boys” confirm their shared sense of belonging by discussing monsters-turned-teachers and friends.

If we are to confront the specter of the bully that lies at the heart of who we imagine ourselves to be, memories need to be recalibrated, turned into opportunities for self-critique. We might begin to ask the difficult question of how we learn to love, or at least revere, our submission. Confronting the revered bully means re-thinking how we have become who we claim to be. It means changing the nature of our anecdotes, refusing the uneasy laughter of those who learn to laugh through pain.

Reported

A: One of my students is from Africa. He speaks African.

Thoughtful pause

A: Maybe he speaks South African?

Thoughtful pause

A: No, he definitely speaks African, not South African.

iStop, iLook, iLive

This past academic year the buses here started flashing this sign—in addition to their usual “Smile, It’s Sunny!”

When I move, I will miss buses telling me to smile and live.