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. 
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I did not deserve it.

​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.

​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.

Over a decade ago, I was a fresh graduate, still aflame with post-colonial critiques of empire and eager to implement this consciousness in my new station back home in Kenya. In one of my first assignments as a naïve and enthusiastic administrator, I attended a workshop on implementing the Bologna Process in higher education. 

​For me, the workshop was odd. We were implementing an openly European framework in Kenya, a country which gained fame for challenging cultural colonialism, thanks to people like Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s and his classic Decolonising the mind. It was surprising to me that this workshop would happen in a country where it has now become standard practice in Kenyan literature to present the great art of our ancestors as a evidence disproving the claims of colonialism. Our students cannot read an African work of art without lamenting the colonial experience. Surely, implementing a European education agenda in 21st century Kenya should raise some hullabaloo. But this Europeanization of our education seemed to raise no eyebrows.

​In my public engagements on CBC, I was constantly surprised that the arguments promoting the new education system were fundamentally racist and socially hierarchical. Some of the justifications of CBC which were unmistakably colonial were:

1. We must reform education in line with what employers want, which was similar to colonial times when schools were for training Africans who would work in the colonial government
2. Academic learning is beyond the “talent” of many Kenyans, which aligns with the view of imperial administrators like Lord Lugard that literary education ruins the African mind.
3. Technical learning is more suitable for most Kenyans, a proposition which colonialists justified with claims that the African brain stops growing at teenage and could therefore not grasp complex ideas. 
4. Kenyan children are doing badly in the education system because Kenyan adults do not subscribe to nuclear family values. This rhetoric was similar to the racist attitudes of the 1970s of black American families and absentee fathers, and colonial attitudes about African families. 

On the afternoon of Friday, 12 November, Martha Omollo, a teacher in Nairobi County, was called to her school and served with a letter from the Teachers Service Commission, the government employer of teachers in public schools. The letter, which was dated that day, informed her that she had been transferred to a school in Trans Nzoia County, 400 kilometers away, and that she was to report ready to teach the following Monday, 15th November. 

Earlier in the week, Omollo had been the spokesperson of the Teachers’ Pressure Group, which had called into question the loyalty of the union leaders to its members, and the opaque health insurance scheme for which teachers pay through involuntary salary deductions. Shortly after the press conference, Omollo received a call from the TSC Nairobi County office, warning her not to publicly discuss issues facing teachers. 

​I vividly remember this incident that occurred when I was a graduate student in the US. We were having this conversation with an American on campus, when I animatedly said, “I’m so loving this!” The American then deigned himself fit to correct my English, and promptly told me: “In English, we don’t say ‘I am so loving.’ We say ‘I love.’”

This ignorant American, in his own country, seemed unaware that “I’m lovin it” was a phrase that had been popularized by the Justin Timberlake song “I’m loving it” and in a classic manipulation of culture by corporations, had become the tagline for McDonalds commercials. I said “I’m so loving” very aware of that dynamic. I was also teaching undergraduate American students. They said this all the time and I was simply borrowing a phrase from them.