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.
This happened during the second Kibaki term, when Kenya had gone full throttle into neoliberalism. In universities, this was the time of an arms race in university expansion. Universities grabbed and swallowed TVET colleges by turning them into campuses, in order to avoid the work of building university colleges from scratch. The Commission for University Education sharpened its teeth and subjected universities to regulation on steroids. Faculty jobs were converted into contractual labor (popularly called “part-time teaching” or “moonlighting”), while full time faculty were subjected to the neoliberal surveillance tool of performance management. Universities had become corporations, with ISO certification, marketing departments and VCs as CEOs.
In the midst of these changes, the century-old racist propaganda of “practical subjects” for Africans received a new boost. The Commission for University Education demanded market surveys before allowing universities to roll out programs. In public universities, a perversion began to be inflicted on the humanities. Departments contorted their programs to sound more applicable to donor-funded NGOs and the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate). Anthropology became tourism, philosophy and religion became human rights, and history turned into peace and conflict studies. With the multiplication of private media houses, news anchors had become literal stars, and so language and literature were subjected to sneers and required to bow to the almighty media, film and public relations. Even church-affiliated universities were shutting down their theology programs to pave way for business degrees.
The first two decades of the 21st century were a blood bath for the arts and humanities.
As if things could not get worse, the structural adjustment programs of the 1990s, with fewer public services and employment opportunities, promoted a hysteria of passing exams and choosing “practical degrees” that were “not theoretical.” Students and their parents literally ran away from traditional disciplines for fear of being “too theoretical and not practical enough.” And thus began the curious phenomenon once observed by the writer Yvonne Owuor, of architects who are not artistic, journalists who can’t write, film makers who don’t understand stories, and diplomats with no knowledge of history. The mother of the disciplines, which philosophy, was already limping from the anti-intellectualism of the Moi and Kenyatta eras, now became literally silent. This meant that Kenya was paying professors not to think, to produce graduates who can’t think.
All in the name of being “practical.”
The ideology against theory and adoration for practical became so common sense, that few Kenyans noticed the irony of the super CS of the Uhuru Kenyatta years, Fred Matiang’i, being one of the harshest critics of arts and humanities. Matiang’i is a curious case because his PhD from the University of Nairobi was in Literature. However, when he was nominated to Uhuru’s cabinet, his credentials were described as a PhD in “Communication and ICT.” As the Cabinet Secretary of Education, he regularly complained about universities being out of touch with the country’s development needs, because 80% of students were taking arts degrees, a claim that is not confirmed by the survey conducted by the Commission of University Education. Kenyans did not notice the irony because they agreed with him.
Fast forward to 2024, the damage of that obsession with being “practical” has produced a strange pathology.
The Fear of being Practical
In my classes, students struggle to write. Worse, they struggle to write about themselves and about what they think. For the longest time, I knew that it was hatred of the humanities that made students disrespect learning to write. But the incident that jolted me to the dysfunction we are dealing with happened when I was talking to a Masters student about her writing assignment. I had asked the class to write a reflection, and as usual, I got bland material that was copy pasted from the internet. I asked this student why she had not written a reflection as I had instructed. The reply shook me to the bone: “I thought that universities do not teach anything practical, so I did not know we were supposed to write about real issues.”
Initially, I was livid. But after calming down, I started to notice a strange relationship that students have with reality and with putting down those thoughts. Students expect to be good writers without doing the work of actually learning how to write. What matters to them is not the process of them becoming skilled human beings, but the material output which they produce. In such a scenario, a student cannot imagine that I am interested in them improving their writing. What I want is a material paper, and that’s easy to get from the internet.
Many Kenyans will cynically reply that the students are lazy and do not want to do the work. But seeing strange cases semester after semester persuades me that the problem is deeper than laziness. It’s a pathology. The ideology which the students hear from the government and the media is that universities do not teach practical knowledge. Therefore, when the students are confronted with something they have to practically do, they experience a cognitive dissonance and choose instead to align the class assignment with the external ideology. What they know to be practical is the material result, so they down load a paper and send it as their assignment. The point is the product; not the process.
What I am getting at is that we Kenyans have a very dysfunctional idea of what "practical" is. In reality, “practical” means setting aside time to work on something. It can be anything from knitting, to masonry to playing an instrument to writing a paper. Even thinking is practical work. You have to sit, take time out, read or find out what other people think, and then purpose to either analyze it, respond to it, or create something new.
But that's not what Kenyans mean when they talk of "practical" subjects. What they mean by "practical" is producing something that can be paid for, by an employer or better still, by Euro-Americans. So the president will show off about digital jobs in which Kenyans earn dollars from sitting at a laptop and writing, but if I am the one telling my students to sit at a laptop and write so that they learn to organize their ideas, that's not "practical."
What's the difference? The difference is who takes the initiative to do the work, and for whom we're doing the work. If the idea of online jobs comes from our initiative, or if we're doing work that benefits us, by developing our minds and skills, that work is NOT practical. Rather, the work is practical when we are doing it for somebody else, for an institution or an employer, and most likely, for foreigners. In other words, “practical” is never about the humanity of us Africans.
In Kenya, "practical" means mimicry
This idea of “practical” is really about materialism and capitalism. It so powerful because it is dominated by politicians and NGOs, the people with the money and institutions to produce spectacular material things. I learned this when I was opposing CBC in the mainstream media. One way in which the media effectively blocked my questions was by pointing to the textbooks and teacher training being provided by the government. Even though I was talking about the practical reality of teaching and growing up intellectually, it was not “practical” compared to millions of shillings disbursed, textbooks distributed and teachers workshopped.
The effect of this logic of “practical” is that the emphasis is on the product rather than on the process. That is why politicians see no contradiction between stealing from taxpayers and then distributing money to the same taxpayers. Politicians feel they can shoot us, and defund hospitals and schools, because they are also the ones who have the money (which they stole) to pay the hospital bills and provide bursaries and school feels.
In education, this logic means that students will not set aside the time and energy to learn a skill like writing. That process of reading and putting ideas to paper is “not practical.” What is practical is what is material, and a 10-page paper they downloaded from the internet is material, and therefore practical.
The casualty of this hatred for process is imitation. To imitate, one has to study and understand the model they are seeing in order to identify the principle, and then do their own version of it. Children are very good at imitation because they do not expect to do exactly what the adults do. It does not even occur to them that they need to. They do what they see adults do, but do it in their own way. And we adults interpret that imitation as truth. But that skill of imitation has to be maintained in us, and we do that through the arts. But we do not value the arts, so we do not value that which improve us.
Our disrespect for imitation leads us to beat children for not producing perfect mimicry, which is enforced by examinations. By the time we become adults, we can no longer imitate. We mimic the idealist images of the West and blast Gen Z for daring to think instead of mimicking us, their elders, as we mimic the West.
The second reason why we can't imitate is linked to the linear/bureaucratic idea of education. When people learn through imitation, the work they initially produce appears flawed, but they perfect the work as they do more and more of it, and eventually develop their own style. Developing a new style is what our system is hostile to. The government insists on us reproducing what it says, which is usually what the government discovered during its latest benchmarking tour abroad, or what has been instructed to them by the “international community.”
The worst part about mimicry is that people who mimic eventually lose sense of who they are, and start to confuse themselves with those whom they are mimicking. That is why the government of Kenya will tell us absurdities like needing to replace our IDs to do more like what France does, or needing CBC because that is what is used in Norway. If we interrogate the claims about France and Norway, or ask how the situations there compare to Kenya’s, the media and the gaslighting machine on social media tell us to stop theorizing and provide a practical way forward.
This discussion of mimicry lays the ground for the second part of my series on the mediocrity of Kenya’s political elite and civil service. The politicians and civil servants thrive on mimicry. They can’t produce ideas of their own. They are unable to understand and analyze events, and so they resort to mimicry. In the events leading up to the protests against the Finance bill, the politicians mimicked everyone from comedians to preachers to influencers to CEOs, to the point that they had no clue what the work of politics entails, and they inevitably produced the absurdities we now see in Kenya’s political sphere.
In the midst of these changes, the century-old racist propaganda of “practical subjects” for Africans received a new boost. The Commission for University Education demanded market surveys before allowing universities to roll out programs. In public universities, a perversion began to be inflicted on the humanities. Departments contorted their programs to sound more applicable to donor-funded NGOs and the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate). Anthropology became tourism, philosophy and religion became human rights, and history turned into peace and conflict studies. With the multiplication of private media houses, news anchors had become literal stars, and so language and literature were subjected to sneers and required to bow to the almighty media, film and public relations. Even church-affiliated universities were shutting down their theology programs to pave way for business degrees.
The first two decades of the 21st century were a blood bath for the arts and humanities.
As if things could not get worse, the structural adjustment programs of the 1990s, with fewer public services and employment opportunities, promoted a hysteria of passing exams and choosing “practical degrees” that were “not theoretical.” Students and their parents literally ran away from traditional disciplines for fear of being “too theoretical and not practical enough.” And thus began the curious phenomenon once observed by the writer Yvonne Owuor, of architects who are not artistic, journalists who can’t write, film makers who don’t understand stories, and diplomats with no knowledge of history. The mother of the disciplines, which philosophy, was already limping from the anti-intellectualism of the Moi and Kenyatta eras, now became literally silent. This meant that Kenya was paying professors not to think, to produce graduates who can’t think.
All in the name of being “practical.”
The ideology against theory and adoration for practical became so common sense, that few Kenyans noticed the irony of the super CS of the Uhuru Kenyatta years, Fred Matiang’i, being one of the harshest critics of arts and humanities. Matiang’i is a curious case because his PhD from the University of Nairobi was in Literature. However, when he was nominated to Uhuru’s cabinet, his credentials were described as a PhD in “Communication and ICT.” As the Cabinet Secretary of Education, he regularly complained about universities being out of touch with the country’s development needs, because 80% of students were taking arts degrees, a claim that is not confirmed by the survey conducted by the Commission of University Education. Kenyans did not notice the irony because they agreed with him.
Fast forward to 2024, the damage of that obsession with being “practical” has produced a strange pathology.
The Fear of being Practical
In my classes, students struggle to write. Worse, they struggle to write about themselves and about what they think. For the longest time, I knew that it was hatred of the humanities that made students disrespect learning to write. But the incident that jolted me to the dysfunction we are dealing with happened when I was talking to a Masters student about her writing assignment. I had asked the class to write a reflection, and as usual, I got bland material that was copy pasted from the internet. I asked this student why she had not written a reflection as I had instructed. The reply shook me to the bone: “I thought that universities do not teach anything practical, so I did not know we were supposed to write about real issues.”
Initially, I was livid. But after calming down, I started to notice a strange relationship that students have with reality and with putting down those thoughts. Students expect to be good writers without doing the work of actually learning how to write. What matters to them is not the process of them becoming skilled human beings, but the material output which they produce. In such a scenario, a student cannot imagine that I am interested in them improving their writing. What I want is a material paper, and that’s easy to get from the internet.
Many Kenyans will cynically reply that the students are lazy and do not want to do the work. But seeing strange cases semester after semester persuades me that the problem is deeper than laziness. It’s a pathology. The ideology which the students hear from the government and the media is that universities do not teach practical knowledge. Therefore, when the students are confronted with something they have to practically do, they experience a cognitive dissonance and choose instead to align the class assignment with the external ideology. What they know to be practical is the material result, so they down load a paper and send it as their assignment. The point is the product; not the process.
What I am getting at is that we Kenyans have a very dysfunctional idea of what "practical" is. In reality, “practical” means setting aside time to work on something. It can be anything from knitting, to masonry to playing an instrument to writing a paper. Even thinking is practical work. You have to sit, take time out, read or find out what other people think, and then purpose to either analyze it, respond to it, or create something new.
But that's not what Kenyans mean when they talk of "practical" subjects. What they mean by "practical" is producing something that can be paid for, by an employer or better still, by Euro-Americans. So the president will show off about digital jobs in which Kenyans earn dollars from sitting at a laptop and writing, but if I am the one telling my students to sit at a laptop and write so that they learn to organize their ideas, that's not "practical."
What's the difference? The difference is who takes the initiative to do the work, and for whom we're doing the work. If the idea of online jobs comes from our initiative, or if we're doing work that benefits us, by developing our minds and skills, that work is NOT practical. Rather, the work is practical when we are doing it for somebody else, for an institution or an employer, and most likely, for foreigners. In other words, “practical” is never about the humanity of us Africans.
In Kenya, "practical" means mimicry
This idea of “practical” is really about materialism and capitalism. It so powerful because it is dominated by politicians and NGOs, the people with the money and institutions to produce spectacular material things. I learned this when I was opposing CBC in the mainstream media. One way in which the media effectively blocked my questions was by pointing to the textbooks and teacher training being provided by the government. Even though I was talking about the practical reality of teaching and growing up intellectually, it was not “practical” compared to millions of shillings disbursed, textbooks distributed and teachers workshopped.
The effect of this logic of “practical” is that the emphasis is on the product rather than on the process. That is why politicians see no contradiction between stealing from taxpayers and then distributing money to the same taxpayers. Politicians feel they can shoot us, and defund hospitals and schools, because they are also the ones who have the money (which they stole) to pay the hospital bills and provide bursaries and school feels.
In education, this logic means that students will not set aside the time and energy to learn a skill like writing. That process of reading and putting ideas to paper is “not practical.” What is practical is what is material, and a 10-page paper they downloaded from the internet is material, and therefore practical.
The casualty of this hatred for process is imitation. To imitate, one has to study and understand the model they are seeing in order to identify the principle, and then do their own version of it. Children are very good at imitation because they do not expect to do exactly what the adults do. It does not even occur to them that they need to. They do what they see adults do, but do it in their own way. And we adults interpret that imitation as truth. But that skill of imitation has to be maintained in us, and we do that through the arts. But we do not value the arts, so we do not value that which improve us.
Our disrespect for imitation leads us to beat children for not producing perfect mimicry, which is enforced by examinations. By the time we become adults, we can no longer imitate. We mimic the idealist images of the West and blast Gen Z for daring to think instead of mimicking us, their elders, as we mimic the West.
The second reason why we can't imitate is linked to the linear/bureaucratic idea of education. When people learn through imitation, the work they initially produce appears flawed, but they perfect the work as they do more and more of it, and eventually develop their own style. Developing a new style is what our system is hostile to. The government insists on us reproducing what it says, which is usually what the government discovered during its latest benchmarking tour abroad, or what has been instructed to them by the “international community.”
The worst part about mimicry is that people who mimic eventually lose sense of who they are, and start to confuse themselves with those whom they are mimicking. That is why the government of Kenya will tell us absurdities like needing to replace our IDs to do more like what France does, or needing CBC because that is what is used in Norway. If we interrogate the claims about France and Norway, or ask how the situations there compare to Kenya’s, the media and the gaslighting machine on social media tell us to stop theorizing and provide a practical way forward.
This discussion of mimicry lays the ground for the second part of my series on the mediocrity of Kenya’s political elite and civil service. The politicians and civil servants thrive on mimicry. They can’t produce ideas of their own. They are unable to understand and analyze events, and so they resort to mimicry. In the events leading up to the protests against the Finance bill, the politicians mimicked everyone from comedians to preachers to influencers to CEOs, to the point that they had no clue what the work of politics entails, and they inevitably produced the absurdities we now see in Kenya’s political sphere.
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