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Discouraging the arts in schools is a political agenda

7/1/2015

12 Comments

 
Muoki Mbuga has posted an excellent piece about the irony that while the political elite are funding their children's education in the arts, on political platforms they discourage wananchi from taking "unmarketable" subjects like history, languages and performing arts.

It made me remember being struck by the fact that I would go to work, where I'd be told that the arts have "no market," then when I leave work I'd see adverts and bill boards for private schools which did not show kids in labs but kids doing performance and having fun. At GEMS Cambridge school on Magadi road, there's a huge wall with pictures of students in acting costume and make-up. So why would there be no market for the arts, if parents who can afford good schools are choosing where to take their kids by the presence of the arts and sports? 
That's when I understood that the problem of Kenyan universities is lack of class consciousness, the one Muoki talks about in another excellent piece he penned just after the March 2013 elections. Our universities are simply trying to protect the status quo. We who work there have not became conscious as a class, so we have the mentality that if we can get that degree and teach part-time, or if we become an accountant or a journalist, we can earn enough money to buy a shamba, get enough school fees and earn the prestige of having a degree or two. Building institutions, changing social values, training leaders, understanding oppression and freedom, inventing things, finding cures to disease, are things we don't really feel are worth thinking about. A number of us who may think about it say we don't care, because why work at building a legacy from which people other than our children will benefit? (Which is how peasants see their only valuable asset: land is for inheritance by wives and family, not for initiatives that benefit their community). So expanding education beyond classrooms and exams to performances and discussions with guests becomes such an arduous journey because, like one person told me, Kinyanjui Kombani would be better off doing an MBA and teaching part-time than writing novels, because part-timers earn alot of money. To buy the plot and the car. And the cycle continues.

Meanwhile, the wealthy like the Kenyattas, Rutos and Nyong'o's do the arts, become national and international celebrities. They know that the arts is key to social consciousness and power. That's why, as they celebrate their own children doing the arts, they discourage the arts so much among the wananchi, telling them to do "useful" subjects like sciences and management to manage the bodies, machines, money and public image of those with the dreams.  It's about power and control. It's the classic Dubois and Booker T debate about whether blacks needed intellectual training beyond practical subjects. And Booker T's position was the one that got more support from the American mainstream. Even during colonial times, the government did not want Africans to do the arts and A levels, because they wanted Africans as clerks and carpenters to implement the colonial system. It's the missionaries who realized that they could not convert Africans if Africans did not do A levels and the arts, so they insisted on teaching them in the Alliances, which were for the African elites and their wives (colonial governments educated African women to provide Western-style African housewives). But the public schools that put most emphasis on the arts are still the ones originally built for settlers' kids: Duke of York (Lenana), Duke of Gloucester (Nairobi School), Kenya High School, etc. A few decades after independence, the World Bank withdrew funding for higher education because it said higher education was not a priority for Africans, that what Africans needed most was basic education.

So there's a concerted war against the arts and sophisticated (theoretical) thinking for people of color. The political decision makers don't care because their kids are in private schools, starting fashion labels and winning Oscars. And then through their art, they get to perpetuate the culture and values of the aristocracy. The universities don't get it because they've been told education management is about the balance sheet, but most of all, because they have no class consciousness. They have no class consciousness because they've been told that Ngugi wa Thiong'o, ES Atieno Adhiambo and other thinkers were Marxist, and Marx was bad because he was communist. And detention, exile and stints in Nyayo house torture chambers put the fear of God into lecturers' hearts. We don't teach Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Nyerere, Sankara, Mandela - or even Obama - in Kenyan universities. We're told there's no "market" for that. No-one gets a promotion for knowing what pan-Africanism is, or who Dubois, Harriet Tubman or Dedan Kimathi are.

Which is true. You don't get promoted for knowing that stuff. But not because that stuff is useless; it's because history and the arts make you a leader. They make you see and fight injustice. They make you yearn for revolution. Promotions, on the other hand, are for the employed, the clerks who want to want to earn enough to become farmers and plot owners with rental houses, and maybe become clueless politicians like Sonko who will be worshiping the aristocrat families who pass down power along family lines. So of course to them, the arts have "no market." And politicians, and their World Bank godfathers, are only too happy to keep feeding that mentality, because keeping broad historical knowledge and artistic prowess out of the Kenyan public classrooms means less challenge to their power.
12 Comments
James Chikonamombe
7/1/2015 12:50:20 am

As a neutral observer from Zimbabwe I'd say the problems (and solutions) are much more nuanced than how you put them. Africa has a non-technical, non-scientific political-elite who mostly read Arts subjects at Univ (pol-sci, history, int-relations, english etc). It's that non-scientific world-view of our political elite that is holding back Africa's economic take-off. We need more engineers and statisticians at the helm.

Reply
atijals
7/1/2015 02:28:35 am

In my opinion we already have a good number in existence but who for some reason do not seem to 'take off' to achieve the perceive economic takeoff. Science alone does not make you visionary... it is the grater understanding and appreciation of your context propelling you to dream... and the arts are a boon in this preserve. So not just sciences, we need the arts too.

Reply
Wandia
8/1/2015 12:25:18 am

Mr Chikonamombe, those views blaming underdevelopment in Africa by limited number of graduates in science are not supported by facts, but taken almost as gospel truth in the continent.

Kamuzu Banda was a doctor. That didn't make Malawi the most developed African nation.

If stats are the key to our salvation, do we know how many scientists have governed the Western world, Japan or other countries with developed scientific knowledge? I bet they are a minority. In the US, most presidents have been lawyers, including yours truly.

I don't know about Zimbabwe, but in Kenya polisci, history and English programs (Including where I teach) are some of the smallest. The vitriol against the arts has absolutely worked. Our government announced that it didn't need history teachers, so people stopped studying history. Now Kenyans don't know their history and we killed each other in 2007 for our ignorance, and there's a deficit of history teachers.

The Western governments and World Bank have convinced Africans that development depends on science because that is how the West developed, which simply isn't true. The West developed because it had slave labor and cheap resources from the colonies, not simply because it encouraged the sciences.

And despite all the promises of miracles and prosperity of taking science, it hasn't quite worked that way. In Kenya, many engineers don't practice when they leave school. Probably that's why "Engineer" has become a title like "Doctor" and "Professor." Many scientists don't get jobs and end up selling clothes or in business that has little to do with their training. Many doctors with valuable skills become buffoons in politics.

Science isn't paying off the miracles dividends we've been promised because our problem isn't inadequate science: it's that we lack political imagination. Our leaders don't reward the sciences, despite singing about them. No money is invested in research, that's why we're begging for a cure for Ebola from the West even though the disease affects mostly us. Our leaders don't want us to industrialize because

a) most of them are making money from farming and tourism, not manufacturing, industries which Fanon rightly said are turning Africa into the brothel of Europe

b) industrializing would mean greater political consciousness and monetary resources in the hands of the common people, which makes them harder to control

Our leaders don't care robust public health services because they get treated abroad anyway. That means our doctors are poorly treated and poorly paid.

We do not recognize scientists for heroism until they take to the streets like Wangari Maathai. Yet the West celebrates their Benjamin Franklin, Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie. How many African scientists are celebrated as heroes?

And how do we know about Western scientists? Through HISTORY. That's why Ivan Sertima published a book on black scientists, so that we stop thinking that a) development is only scientific, and b) Africa had no science. Besides, what is the store of science in Africa? The arts. The pyramids, the Timbuktou libraries, the dyes, the medicinal herbs, the bronze sculptures are all evidence of Africa's scientific heritage, and many of those artefacts are in Western museums.

In Kenya, high school students perform poorly in science because they perform worse in English. We need to develop a scientific language in our African languages, but how can we when we're saying studying language is useless?

There's no point of statistics if one can't relate them to how they affect human beings. One needs both sciences (for the physical) and arts (for the social). Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara were doctors who became revolutionaries and social theorists because they realized that treating in the hospitals was a waste of time when the diseases were caused and perpetuated by social forces.

That connection - between arts, science, freedom and development, comes from POLITICAL EDUCATION. Political education makes us understand who benefits from resources, how they benefit. And political education uses statistics to give us the reality, but it also uses history to give us perspectives and uses the arts to make us understand how our decisions relate to humanity.

So the science-arts dichotomy is a lie that has no basis in history and that is a chain around the continent's neck.

Reply
Bagaka
19/1/2015 07:53:42 am

Unfortunately, there are few facts to prove this point. I'll talk of Kenya, where the of the engineers and doctors we produce, the cream are all getting sucked up by multinationals and flying out, the remaining ones serve under international(read white) engineers as supervisors and craftsmen. All this is perpetuated by poor political philosophy that is skewed against the development of the African. The current crop of politicians(the elite) benefit from these cracks in the system as they share the table with the Western capitalists. Who will streamline the system then?

Reply
Bob Andrew Agevi Mulusa
8/1/2015 02:34:22 am

I have made small observation in the children in the village that take part in the church drama at Christmas and i see they are more able (in intelligence) than those who concentrate on a narrow path to a science career by sitting sitting in class and reading. When i myself was forced to take the arts as electives (Thank You Howard University) and i met Ali Mazrui and other historians Frank Fannon, Henry Louise Gates Junior, i went back to look for Lumumba ... it changed the way i open my eyes, and what i choose to read. I re-met Tupac and Mohamed Ali and was able to see even more that freedom can never ever truly be achieved say to 100% but must always have people fighting for it. Then as a software engineer i look at job posting (in Kenya) for computer scientists and they could as well be adverts for sweeping around the computer room and dusting the screens, cleaning the key boards ... We have a long way to go.

Reply
Wambui
8/1/2015 06:13:14 am

What you don't notice is that arts are not discouraged in elite schools, not because the rich have discovered something new, but because as a poor country, we can't afford to encourage arts. To build this country, young people need skills that will contribute to technological advancement in all sectors, homegrown solutions. I think we can have both, if a student is good in arts, let them do it, but still encourage them to study technical subjects. They can use that knowledge to advance something new in the arts field.

Reply
James Chikonamombe
9/1/2015 12:32:06 am

BTW, this debate is going on in Western academia too. Like I said, solutions to this issue are nuanced and we must not look at it in binary terms...The Arts or The Sciences. We actually need both, but this brings me back to my original point: our political-elite are (in the main) from a non-technical, non-scientific background. We need political input to solve economic problems re: agricultural productivity; internet connectivity; basic infrastructure (bridges, roads, railways, sewage-systems); enhancing intra-African trade etc, etc. I'm sorry to say but African leaders who studied Medieval French History or Spanish in College are not mentally equipped to tackle our various economic problems.

Reply
Wandia
9/1/2015 04:02:36 am

Neither are African leaders who've studied medicine.

Fidel Castro was a lawyer, and Cuba has one of the best medical systems in the world.

Name one Western or other industrial country whose leadership has been dominated by scientists. After all, if we value facts, let's see the data.

Reply
James Chikonamombe
9/1/2015 04:44:59 am

Wandia:

Let's look to the East and not to Western countries (for a change). The elite Chinese bureaucrats who have lifted 400mil Chinese out of poverty in 30yrs are mostly engineers by training (hydraulic engineers, railway engineers, structural engineers). The South Korean leadership under Gen Park that took "The Hermit Kingdom" to scientific leadership and prosperity in one generation were also mostly trained as engineers (and agronomists/agrucultural scientists). Ditto Taiwan & Vietnam....all their top political lesdership/elite bureaucrats are trained in the sciences. As you can see, having a political elite that is trained in the sciences and is focused on industrial developnent is crucial to rapid economic/industrial/scientific advancement.

Reply
Nelson Muturi
9/1/2015 12:06:03 pm

Chikonamombe: Why can't we look to ourselves for solutions? In Kenya, our politicians are already busy following your "look-east" formula. The result? Our coal deposits and other minerals are being mined/exploited by Asians. Our biggest infrastructural projects are being undertaken by Asians and other foreigners. Is this what we want? What really is our "problem"?

Reply
Wandia
10/1/2015 02:48:23 am

Let's have names please. Engineers worked on the ground, but who made the political decisions to provide the resources for building the structures and setting up the systems? Was it them? As far as I know, Mao was not a scientist, but he's the one who led the revolution.

There is no country in the world where development has been exclusively led by scientists. Even the enlightenment that made strides in scientific ideas went hand in hand with development in philosophy and the arts by people like Rousseau and Voltaire. Benjamin was both an inventor and social theorist.

I'm sorry, but what you're saying is a myth fed to us by the World Bank that doesn't want Africans connecting their development to the global economic realities, so they tell us that Africa's problem is exclusively scientific. And we believe it because we don't know our own history, supposedly because history doesn't build bridges of provide medicine. And worse, we don't know the history of the countries which are telling us these lies, yet those countries invest in teaching their history and in museums and culture. A country can't develop exclusively on science without a vision for what the science is supposed to do, and whom the science is supposed to help. And we can't have a vision if we don't know our history as Africans, and the history of the world.

Food for thought:
http://www.ted.com/talks/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together?language=en

Reply
Fred Musyimi
22/11/2017 05:11:35 pm

Hi Wandia,
Thank you for the bringing out the truth in totally.
Kindly correct Duke of Gluocester to Jamhuri High School.
Prince of Wales - Nairobi School


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