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Dear Dr. Nyairo
Ten years ago, you telephoned informing me that you were launching a book entitled Kenya@50: Trends, Identities and the Politics of Belonging. The book was interrogating Kenya after 50 years of the state project called independence. You requested me to read the book and be a panelist at the book launch. You were so committed to me participating, that you gave me a photocopy of the entire manuscript pending the arrival of the printed copies. In these days of copyright infringement, that was a great risk you took on me.
I did not deserve it.
I did not deserve it because, one, for a person of your great intellect and wisdom, I am unworthy to even untie your sandals. I should have been the one sitting at your feet, listening to you, but here you were, asking me to comment on such a monumental book that takes stock of Kenya over half a century of independence.
The second reason for which I was undeserving was worse. I did not understand what moment we were in, and worst, what your book was about. I had not even noticed that the book was marking 50 years of independence, because I was so absorbed in my own career struggles to protect from collapse the department I headed, which hosted our language and music programs.
I am now torn between hoping there was a video recording of the book launch and hoping there was none. I tend towards the latter because I am embarrassed to even try to recall what I might have said during the launch event, which, if I remember well, was held at the Louis Leakey Auditorium at the National Museums of Kenya. I remember listening to your talk at the time, and being amazed at how you wove the radio airplay and TV programs of the entire period into your interrogation of what story Kenyans were telling about themselves, either individually or collectively.
The problem is that I did not understand the important part. The story part. I just thought your book was an illustration of how literary studies can be interesting and “relevant to the market” because that’s the mindset I was in at the time. But you were doing something deeper. You were asking Kenyans: do you know yourselves? Do you know what you are saying about yourselves through your songs, your dances, your clothes, your experiences, your relationships, your thinking, your worship? And what truths do your stories reveal about Kenya as a people, rather than as a colonial state masquerading as independent?
I am also embarrassed to say that I did not really pay attention to your book after the launch. I meant to later read it to the end, out of some academic snobbery of being “up to date” with the latest research, but I never got round to it. A few months ago, the first PhD student allowed to be supervised by me began his dissertation on radio airplay in Kenya, and I insisted that he could not authoritatively discuss the subject without reading Kenya@50. And because we could not find copies, I reached out to you.
But even then, I still did not read your book for me, to know for myself, to know myself, until now. Ten years later. I’m embarrassed to even admit it.
However, I have a good defense. Or is it an excuse?
I did not know my own story myself, either.
The only reason I understand your book now, or at least in the way that I do today, is because I was tested by fire and burned through the Competency-Based Curriculum. It is not in the personal way that one would think that I was upset that a curriculum was implemented that goes against every fiber in my bones. The process of my publicly challenging CBC was a bruising wakeup call about the ugliness of Kenya. It’s that story – the story you ask about in your book.
As I narrate in my chapter “Education without consciousness” in an upcoming edited volume entitled The Education Alibi, my experience being a public voice against CBC was baptism by fire. I entered the public arena completely naïve. I intended to simply ask questions about the curriculum for the sake of information, because, of course, I will have to implement it at some point. But more than that, I actually imagined that Kenyan academics, especially those in the education schools that exist in almost every Kenyan university, would be excited to finally participate in such an important discussion about how we educate our children.
How wrong I was.
The Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development basically stalled on the questions. The manager of its Twitter (X) refused to be forthcoming with the information I requested. At every mainstream media discussion I attended, I kept asking: Where is the information? All we had was a curriculum framework of about 40 pages, which was more of an uninformative internal government report than a document announcing commitment to the education of Kenya’s children. Imagine, we changed a whole education system based on that scanty framework.
But I got no answers. In the early days, when the government officials still had the audacity to be on the same panel with me on mainstream media, they accused me of not respecting the expertise of the curriculum drafters and of attacking government officials in their personal capacity.
Dr. Nyairo, I teach academic writing and about fallacies, and here were educators, who I thought would know fallacies better than me, throwing any fallacy that could stick at me. But it still didn’t click.
And it gets worse. There was one discussion on KTN where a government official even said that the reports supporting the system change had not yet gone through the necessary approvals, and that is why they were not available to the public. At that time, we were weeks into the implementation of the new system! How was such a major lack of documentation even possible?
And the media. The media. The media. I am embarrassed to say that I actually believed their hype about informing the public and keeping the government accountable. Yet innocent statements like that – that necessary documents were not available – seemed not to strike them as odd. Now that I’ve read your book, I’m sad to admit that cartoon of Gaddo of May 2013 was quite on point: the anchors had no clue what they were reporting, what they were asking. What they were really doing was performing an interrogation of CBC rather than actually questioning it.
But what was surprising, and still remains surprising, was the silence of the academic community. One unbelievable incident that is etched in my mind, happened in 2019. The previous night, I had been on Citizen TV debating CBC with the CEO of KICD, and a representative of the parents and of the NGO sector, in a conversation hosted by Trevor Ombija. It was a grueling night. I was talking to the wind, past the anchors and the audience and the panelists. The panelists, especially, were shockingly naïve about major historical landmarks and ideologies of the Kenya school system. I went home feeling extremely deflated. How was it that I, with no claims of scholarly expertise in education, could not find an education scholar able to challenge what I was saying? Why was I not being heard?
The very next morning, I bumped into a senior faculty of education. As I greeted him, I braced for a comment on the show and how the debate went. After all, education was his field of study. Do you know, Dr. Nyairo, that the person was not simply unaware of the show, but had no clue there was even a debate on CBC in the first place!
And the colleague proceeded to give me a standing lecture for 10 minutes on how great the new curriculum was! I felt like I was like living in what I hear people call the Twilight Zone.
Dr. Nyairo, to this day, no university forum has ever been held to debate me on the CBE, something which I requested uncountable times. In 2022, soon after the inauguration of the current disastrous government, some lecturers dared to call me for a debate on CBC, since the Kenya Kwanza administration had promised to review it. By now, I had known better. So I smilingly asked: are you sure your colleagues can handle me? I was told yes, in fact, it was the university faculty who had requested we invite you. I said fine, I’ll be there. But I was prepared for any eventuality.
And true to form, I received a call a few days to the event informing me that the event had been cancelled. And the reason would soon be obvious: even though the Kenya Kwanza government had set up a Working Party to query the curriculum, the new, tactless Deputy President announced at the launch of the review that CBC was going nowhere.
You might be wondering where this story is going and what it has to do with your book.
My experience with trying to discuss CBC is the reason why I now understand your book. Your book makes a very interesting point: there are so many gaps in the stories Kenyans tell of themselves, and the gaps are “crippling.” From government commissions to autobiographies of Kenyans defining themselves as liberators or successful entrepreneurs, there is hardly any information to tell us about ourselves, what we do or the world we live in. We carry out no analysis of our lives and literally know nothing about the world. We have an amazing disdain for analytical and philosophical levels of knowledge, even about ourselves. We have such “careless disregard for memory or remembrance” in both our private and public lives. Even more shocking, as you note, is that “we willfully destroy records, purge long-serving employees with all their skills and knowledge, and we wash over experience, all in the name of modernizing and building new.”
And that’s exactly what happened to me. Just when I was at the cusp of using decades of my experience in the school to say that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we think about work, knowledge, and education in Kenya, all what I know was wiped out of the system. Because we have a new “modern” school system, there are no more conversations to have about our school system till today. The implementation of CBC was actually an act of violence. They wiped out decades of independence-era schooling as easily as simply pressing delete.
Now I cannot teach my students anything I know because my knowledge has been declared irrelevant. In fact, now, CBC has now given us a travesty: it has told us that in this brand new system, “learners are self-directed” and we the teachers have to wait for their indication on what to teach. We have gone beyond wiping out memory from our society. We have now attacked adulthood itself. We are not being allowed to pass on the little we have been allowed to know to our own children.
Meanwhile, the colonial schooling philosophy that we are supposedly left behind at independence is still intact in the school system. With CBC, we are not saying what you are saying, which Kenyans do not know enough. We are now saying Kenyans know too much, especially for black people. That is why there is no conversation about the racist, disastrous, vocational training mindset that was invented in the United States in the 1870s and brought to Kenya in 1924 by the Phelps Stokes Commission. And, my dear sister, last year, the Ministry of Education held celebrations of this racist education policy! What kind of country makes this absurdity possible?
That is the point you make in the book. You discuss this stock and barrel success that Kenyans like to publish: stories of village-to-school-to-wealth, or village-to-school-to-liberator, and in between those themes so little information about life emerges. The war on information especially during the Moi government, was followed by a harebrained idea that the government can use the police and laws to fight against the rumors that inevitably arise from the same lack of information. It’s absolute insanity!
I cannot complete this letter without thanking you, profusely, from the bottom of my heart, for your attack on that suffocating narrative of ethnicity. My God. Ethnicity is the other “delete” button of the Kenyan memory. Anything you do, anything you accomplish, disappears into a small card that insists on ensuring that your place of birth corresponds with the geographical region which colonial authorities assigned to your ethnic group. It does not matter who birthed you, where you were birthed, and what languages you speak or don’t. Your whole essence is stuck to a damn card. And you make this powerful declaration that Kenyans constantly miss: the problem with tribalism isn’t the emotions or the discrimination. It’s the problem of fixed identities. Let me quote you directly: “And so, right from that colonial moment, the question of tribe is sealed in stasis. Once a tribe was named and described, there could be no suggestion of deviations, change or revision.”
And thank you for attacking the grammar of return to African cultures for which our recently departed ancestor Ngugi wa Thiong’o became famous. I’m telling you Dr. Nyairo, that thing has been suffocating! It has been used to avoid material realities and guilt-trip people for not being African enough.
Of course, I am not placing the responsibility for that hegemony on Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The academy is largely responsible for insulating that narrative from interrogation and training millions of Kenyans to think that every material problem can be explained by the phrase “we are ashamed of our African roots.” Right now, my comrade in the struggle, Mordecai Ogada, is narrating about communities handing over the land of their children to foreigners for a song and demanding the compliance of their grandchildren in the name African respect for elders. There are Kenyan academic scholars who argued that the racist education philosophy of vocational training is a return to our indigenous knowledges!
All this to say that I understand your book now, ten years after publication, because that is what Kenya does to us. It delays our knowledge. It constantly gaslights us, denies us information, performs violence against us, to ensure that we are unable to process our “deeply personal experiences,” and in the end, we know nothing beyond our identities. The “grammar of the state,” you powerfully say, “was not coined so as to explain or elucidate anything. It was crafted to achieve the very opposite: to obfuscate, to cloud, to hide and sometimes to deceive.” With our range of knowledge so restricted, it is no wonder that you conclude that the state “willfully holds the public hostage and aborts their moments of truth and freedom.”
I burst out laughing when I read these observations about the “ultra-Kenyan form of criticism”:
In the nearly two decades I taught literature at a Kenyan public university, I experienced one rather depressing thing: very many literate Kenyans (even the ones studying literature!) are absolutely averse to reading anything that runs over fifty pages. They prefer to quickly skim through what others have said about the text than to learn firsthand from the text. Anyone who regularly reads the comments section of our online dailies is familiar with this ultra-Kenyan form of criticism – making a comment on preceding comments very often without any reference to the issues raised in the article or the news item under discussion. This elliptical brand of criticism is invariably aided by tons of ad hominem engagement, manifested in vicious attacks on the author based on perceived personal traits. It reduces the debate to a hateful personal attack, shaped by three main assumptions: ethnic identity, political affiliation, and economic status.
Touché!
So, great sister, my apologies that I am here ten years later. But I was not ready for your book. And I was not ready for many others calling to question the stories we tell about ourselves. When Yvonne Owuor writes about our demons and ghosts that need exorcism, or when Rasna Warah questioned the developmentist narrative, or when Bantu Mwaura questioned why developmentalism was hanging around the arts, or when Binyavanga Wainaina railed against the anti-creativity crap, or when Grace Musila wrote about rumors, or when Parselelo Kantai wrote about the “Redykulass Generation,” I did not get it. I was in the heart of the gaslighting machine itself, the school system, and only emerged out of it with the introduction of CBC. Each of you, and a long list of others since, have challenged us to do what Yvonne Owuor calls an autopsy, which is more than a search for the cause of our decaying soul. As she puts it,
Autopsy means to see for oneself. It invites the human being to a humble inhabiting of a situation in order to speak from a place of experience, observation and encounter. Within “autopsy” are notions of a naked, visceral going deep to witness and access unseen perspectives that reveal another facet of the truth about the human condition.
That is the honesty you call for. You challenge the Generations Y and Z (yes, and this was 2015), to “fashion new dreams… their own icons and new heroes.” To do so, you say, they “should walk into this enterprise knowing that the focus should be on ideas and actions, not on the individuals who articulate them. It is time to wake up from idle dreams. In reality, there are no heroes, but there are heroic acts.”
I need to bring this long letter to a close. Let me end by saying that at during the panel session at the book launch, there was one question that an audience member addressed specifically to me. The member asked: “Why do we not have analyses like Dr. Nyairo’s happening in our university classrooms and coming out of the university?” I must have ranted something about neoliberalism and the market ideology destroying the arts. Of course, now I know better. But I hope there’s no recording to verify.
Thank you for your patience, reading this letter 10 years late.
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This article was first published on Wandia Njoya’s blog.
