​Keynote address to the 2025 Comic Arts Festival, 14 March 2025
Kenya National Library, Nairobi

​Thank you for this invitation. I was not sure whether I am the appropriate person to address the theme of using comics for learning. The reason is simple: I am a great critic of the new school system, and especially of its treatment of the arts. And from my struggle to articulate the issues with the school system, I learned that the philosophy of education and knowledge in Kenya is deeply, deeply flawed. That said, I understand my role here to be to explain how the visual arts, and specifically comics, can intervene in the school system by introducing fun to teaching and learning. 

​For the last decade or so, I’ve been puzzled about how the global academy has proved impotent in helping societies clarify social problems. In Kenya, for example, academics whine about the “loss” of African cultures at the hands of “the white man,” and yet they fail to articulate the imperial and material roots of many of our problems. With all the condemnation they express for “the white man”, and sermons they preach on “decolonizing the mind,” you would think that Kenyan academics would be bothered by the “capacity training” to which we are subjected and in which we are treated like idiots as we are trained on foreign agendas. But I rudely discovered that we see no contradiction, because the few times I’ve raised this issue, I’ve been politely scolded for not appreciating the work of others. 

​During the first term of the Uhuru presidency, when the Kenya government was preoccupied with swaying public opinion as opposed to being political, it was not unusual for citizen criticism of the government to be met with cynical comments on social media that one is always complaining and never satisfied by anything. If the speaking citizen was a woman, she would be told to stop being emotional. Another common pushback was that we were keyboard warriors, who were all words and no action.

After finishing a long journey of studies in language and literature, the first shock I got on returning home to start my academic career was from the concept of “practical subjects” that are “relevant to the market.” The naïve, freshly-minted PhD graduate that I was, with dreams of changing the world through the classroom, was now forced to suffer empty classes because students had been told that language and literature were not “practical” and were irrelevant to the market.

A few weeks into the protests that were sparked off by the Kenya government’s belligerent persistence in passing the Finance Bill, the government spokesman, Isaac Maura, held a presser in which he offered a strange apology to Kenyans. As he announced the president’s concessions to the protestors’ demands, he talked off the script and said: “On behalf of any public official who has been seen to be opulent, proud and arrogant, I wish to issue an unreserved apology to the people of Kenya. Going forward, public officials shall demonstrate responsibility and humility, as has been instructed by our appointing authority, our president.” He repeated, “I wish to offer an unreserved apology for that opulence and arrogance of matters that could be seen to be contemptuous of the sufferings of Kenyans.”
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I wanted to wait to write about Mwalimu Micere Mugo until the rites to honor her life were completed, because I wanted to respect those who knew her intimately. I didn't. I met Mwalimu only three times, once at Riara University, another time at University of Nairobi, the other time at the memorial of her daughter Njeri Kui. All were public events, so I'm almost sure she barely remembered shaking my hand, or me re-introducing myself or being re-introduced to her, especially when she was grieving her daughter. 

So I do not grieve Micere Mugo as I would a close friend. Instead, I grieve her as my mile stone. Since the day I heard her speak in person, almost ten years ago at the University of Nairobi, she has been my intellectual north star. My guiding light. When I heard her weave her ideas with her poetry, and engage the audience in her performance, I knew that that is what I wanted to be; not necessarily an oraturist like her, but an intellectual who weaves humanity into her thought, relations and politics. And then being in literature, many of my colleagues were taught by her and were friends with her. So her influence on me is probably what she aspired for, which is to influence humanity through humanity. 

​A child who went to school beginning in the 1970s, like I did, was fed on a steady dose of “the white man stole our African cultures” as a slogan that explained all Kenya’s socio-economic problems. And if one pursued literature as a subject, that slogan was repeated to the point of becoming shrill.

At least that’s how I see it today. Back then, as I child, I treated it as the gospel truth that I carried with me through all my student life, up to my doctoral studies. After all, many of the gurus of decolonial thought are Kenyan, with the classic text on decolonizing the mind being written by a Kenyan. There is no way one could get away – especially not in literature – with not quoting them, without it being thought that we were ungrateful to our elders.