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.
Of course, such comments were draining, especially because of the sexism. But until the 2017 election campaign period, I did not notice that these comments were part of a coordinated attack against coherent public discourse. It was with the 2017 elections that we discovered that the high emotional content online partly came from Cambridge Analytica, the company hired by the Jubilee campaign team. The Channel 4 undercover investigation of Cambridge Analytica’s work in Kenya opened my eyes to the weaponization of emotions in political life. These words from one of the officials in the news report, are etched on my mind:
The two fundamental human drivers, when it comes to taking information on board effectively, are hopes and fears, and many of those are unspoken; even unconscious. You did not know that that was a fear until you saw something that just evoked that reaction from you. Our job is to drop the bucket further down the well than anybody else, and to understand what are those really deep-seated underlying fears [and] concerns… It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts, because actually, it’s all about emotion.
State Management of Knowledge
Two concepts are important here. One of course, is the most obvious, which is that facts hardly play a role in political campaigns, and that the focus of political manipulation is on emotions. But the second more important fact is this: the emotions that are manipulated are “unspoken; even unconscious.” What this means is that two important elements are necessary to protect a society from being emotionally manipulated: speech and knowledge. We remove our fears from our unconscious when we know our fears, and when we are speaking about them. A democratic public sphere must therefore have people who are free to speak, and who are knowledgeable, because, as we saw with the 2017 elections, ignorance and lack of informed debate lead to highly toxic politics.
And that is exactly what happened in the 2007 elections, where the rigging of the presidential vote was the matchstick that lit the dry hay of Kenyan politics and led to one of Kenya’s most extensive episodes of violence.
The role of ignorance in the 2007 ethnic violence was wonderfully explained by Dan Ojwang in his 2009 article “Kenyan intellectuals and the political realm: Responsibilities and complicities.” Responding to the question of what role Kenyan intellectuals played in the count down to the crisis, Ojwang argued that the real problem was that Kenya’s public sphere was notoriously narrow, thanks to the state’s control of knowledge. During the campaign period, both sides of the political divide spread rumors and highly polarizing lies about ethnic groups on the other side of the political divide, leading to a public discourse that was shallow and polarizing.
However, this situation of induced ignorance has been centuries in the making. In earlier decades, the persecution of intellectuals who disagreed with the state left Kenyan public life bereft of information and reflection. As Ojwang says, sources of information ranging from the media, the arts and publishing were heavily censored. Government documents and archives were not, and still are not, available to the public. The schooling system treated the arts and humanities as “provocative” subjects that are irrelevant to Kenya’s development needs, and it limited and confined these subjects to specific vocations like teacher training and government administration.
Ethnic identities have remained so rigidly fixed and unquestioningly propagated by Kenya’s academic elite. Academics have treated ethnicity as natural, rather than human made, but there is no space to discuss this intellectual laxity because ethnicity has become so entwined with merit, decolonizing narratives, and squabbles over who should take the credit for Kenya’s independence. It was because of these rigid demarcations of ethnicity that Kenyans still struggle to develop other forms of political solidarity besides ethnicity.
The public intellect of Kenya as described by Ojwang remains roughly the same, despite solid resistance from Kenyans using social media to defy the state limits on knowledge. Political affiliations such as labor or ideology are consistently sabotaged by the state. Through the political and bureaucratic apparatus, the state rigorously blocks political gatherings whose agenda is not ethnicity. In 2017, MPs tried to undermine public support for doctors on strike by suggesting that the strike was ethnically motivated. Similarly, in 2022, the government used compromise and bureaucracy to split the leadership of the Communist Party of Kenya and block the vice-chair, Booker Omole, from appearing on the ballot for the elections of Gem constituency, which essentially was an attack on ideological affiliation. And academics remain silent because, after all, they need to publish their next peer-reviewed journal article on Kenyan elections, in which they calculate the polling and voting based on the ethnic blocks.
In other words, what is called ethnic consciousness by politicians, bureaucrats and academics is really a case of engineering knowledge in a way that ethnic parochialism becomes the only platform where any kind of learning, debate, consciousness or political activity is allowed in Kenya. And once thinking is limited to ethnicity and biology, it can never go to ideas, politics, resources or even God. Kenyan theology is notorious stuck in the missionary logic of building schools and hospitals, and liberation theologies or African spiritual histories are not taught in classes of philosophy, theology or religion.
Besides political affiliations beyond ethnicity, another important requirement for robust debate is memory. As Ojwang says, memory is important for “bearing witness” to human suffering, especially in a country where victimhood has been turned into a tool for elite negotiations for power. Memory in the public sphere also helps the public make connections between different dimensions of public life over time and time. As keepers of public memory, intellectuals should ideally “[weave] together fragments of the past so that the public can develop a more coherent sense of its experience and develop an ability to engage in debate about that experience.”
However, in Kenya, history that provides a meaningful contextualization of Kenyans’ experiences is not taught in the school system. Lack of such history makes Kenyans pathetically ignorant about communities that are not their own, and susceptible to believing lies about other communities. Lack of memory also makes Kenyans cynical and un-empathetic with suffering that is not endured by one’s own ethnic community. With no public memory, Kenyans are compelled to depend on rumors and innuendo for political thinking.
As Ojwang says, the Kenyan state manages information, dissemination, publishing and even education to prevent memory from informing Kenya’s public consciousness. The botched effort to change the constitution under the Building Bridges Initiative contained a proposal to have the National Archives move to the Office of the President and an official historian be appointed under the same office. That historian’s duty was to write an official history of Kenya for the last 1,000 years. Never mind that Kenya did not exist until the 19th century when the British empire invented it. The point was to capture any historical consciousness, even pre-Kenyan, that risked disrupting the story which Uhuru wanted to tell about Kenya as the country founded by and embodied in the Kenyattas.
In every intellectual space, the Kenyan state is obsessed with controlling what Kenyans know, indicating how powerful knowledge is and how threatening a well-informed people are to state power.
In addition to controlling physical access to knowledge, there is a plethora of myths and lies that block Kenyans from pursuing knowledge. The media rants about half-baked graduates and a university system dominated by the arts at the expense of the sciences. The education system, government ministers and even professors find no contradiction in saying that education which teaches students to think is irrelevant to Kenya’s developmental needs, and that such education opens no employment opportunities. There is therefore a rhetoric of shame that is used to smear any benefits Kenyans may derive from education outside the pursuit of mere certification and employment.
And with that intellectual suffocation from the crushing of knowledge, Kenyans are inevitably unable to recognize their fears or name them, which means they cannot contextualize these emotions for the purpose of understanding the context that stimulated those emotions. The absence of such discussions leaves Kenyans vulnerable to companies like Cambridge Analytica.
Political Theatre
Worse, an anaemic Kenyan public sphere makes Kenyan politics become so theatrical and turns politics into an emotional roller coaster. To borrow Ojwang’s expression, Kenyan politics are dominated by “symbols and entertainment genres, so much so that politics now seems to be about who can stage the most impressive drama.”
The events of October 2024, provide a perfect illustration of these emotional swings. Kenyans were subjected to heavy duty changes that left many people on X (formerly Twitter) openly admitting that they were emotionally exhausted. The month began with the disastrous rolling out of SHIF that led people in need of emergency treatment like dialysis and chemotherapy to their own devices, and some have since died. This change in healthcare funding engulfed Kenyans in deep sorrow and desperation as they tried to save the lives of their loved ones. They were also bewildered at the insensitivity and cruelty of the government.
However, the government was keener on impeaching Deputy President Gachagua than on the plight of patients. Again, the impeachment was equivalent to a lynching. It was a highly emotional drama that shocked at many levels, because the state was weaponizing the constitution to get rid of an elected official who contributed to the win of Kenya Kwanza. For one to even coherently understand these political shenanigans, one had to follow the intrigues of opportunism and betrayal between Kenya Kwanza and ODM, which many Kenyans dutifully did by spending hours watching the drama televised live from the houses of Parliament and the Senate. It was an insult that this should have been taking place when people and their families were struggling to get treatment. But not even the anger expressed by Kenyans at the public participation meetings on the impeachment deterred the MPs from proceeding with the theater, even as heartbreaking stories emerged of Kenyans who did not have the luxury of time to wait for the new SHIF system to work.
But that was not enough. Before Kenyans had time to get used to the double drama, Senator Cherargei of Nandi County was driving yet another emotive bill proposing the extension of the terms of politicians from five to seven years. Public opposition to the bill made the Senate email server crash after being inundated with emails.
While I have no doubt that the elected officials want to extend their terms, I think that the greater value of the bill is the excitement and the drama. Extension of term limits is a highly emotive issue, given Kenyans’ long struggle to limit president Moi’s term in 1992 and even after that, wait another 10 years before Moi finally left office. But with such a vacuous political sphere riding on no knowledge, Kenyan politicians have all the room to be hyper-emotional and dramatic to compensate for their stupidity, empty headedness, and insane wealth built on theft and deals. Charargei maintains himself in the headlines saying nothing remotely intelligent, and being abrasive and provocative as he makes threats saying that the Finance Bill will pass, come rain or shine, or that the president should remain in office for life. His political role is to annoy and excite, rather than suggest anything remotely beneficial to anyone.
And the media maintains its click bait when they report the degrading things Cherargei says. Journalists can pretend to engage in intelligent conversation by asking him about servers and citing statistics of 200,000 emails. To which the Senator replies with vocabulary like “the 4th estate” to give an air of credibility to what is essentially nonsense.
As Ojwang argued 15 years ago, this demented, knowledge-deficient and theatre-dominated public discourse has led to a situation where marketing, social media trends, psyops and public relations drive Kenyan political debate, even on hefty matters that have life and death implications for the majority of people. The resulting political alienation has become so spectacular, that elected officials cannot tell the difference between political debate and social media following. One incident illustrating this absurdity occurred during the Senate debate on the impeachment of the Deputy President, when the Speaker Amason Kingi, cautioned Senators against using the opportunity to ask questions “as a moment to get a TikTok clip.”
For a long time, Africans have been baffled at how foolish and grotesque African politics became after independence. At some point, it seemed to confirm the narrative of Africans as incapable of rationally governing themselves. In a speech many years ago, the late revolutionary Walter Rodney attributed the absurdity of African and Caribbean politics to distortions caused by economic policies and Western political institutions in African and Caribbean states. Drawing laughter from his audience, he said:
Two concepts are important here. One of course, is the most obvious, which is that facts hardly play a role in political campaigns, and that the focus of political manipulation is on emotions. But the second more important fact is this: the emotions that are manipulated are “unspoken; even unconscious.” What this means is that two important elements are necessary to protect a society from being emotionally manipulated: speech and knowledge. We remove our fears from our unconscious when we know our fears, and when we are speaking about them. A democratic public sphere must therefore have people who are free to speak, and who are knowledgeable, because, as we saw with the 2017 elections, ignorance and lack of informed debate lead to highly toxic politics.
And that is exactly what happened in the 2007 elections, where the rigging of the presidential vote was the matchstick that lit the dry hay of Kenyan politics and led to one of Kenya’s most extensive episodes of violence.
The role of ignorance in the 2007 ethnic violence was wonderfully explained by Dan Ojwang in his 2009 article “Kenyan intellectuals and the political realm: Responsibilities and complicities.” Responding to the question of what role Kenyan intellectuals played in the count down to the crisis, Ojwang argued that the real problem was that Kenya’s public sphere was notoriously narrow, thanks to the state’s control of knowledge. During the campaign period, both sides of the political divide spread rumors and highly polarizing lies about ethnic groups on the other side of the political divide, leading to a public discourse that was shallow and polarizing.
However, this situation of induced ignorance has been centuries in the making. In earlier decades, the persecution of intellectuals who disagreed with the state left Kenyan public life bereft of information and reflection. As Ojwang says, sources of information ranging from the media, the arts and publishing were heavily censored. Government documents and archives were not, and still are not, available to the public. The schooling system treated the arts and humanities as “provocative” subjects that are irrelevant to Kenya’s development needs, and it limited and confined these subjects to specific vocations like teacher training and government administration.
Ethnic identities have remained so rigidly fixed and unquestioningly propagated by Kenya’s academic elite. Academics have treated ethnicity as natural, rather than human made, but there is no space to discuss this intellectual laxity because ethnicity has become so entwined with merit, decolonizing narratives, and squabbles over who should take the credit for Kenya’s independence. It was because of these rigid demarcations of ethnicity that Kenyans still struggle to develop other forms of political solidarity besides ethnicity.
The public intellect of Kenya as described by Ojwang remains roughly the same, despite solid resistance from Kenyans using social media to defy the state limits on knowledge. Political affiliations such as labor or ideology are consistently sabotaged by the state. Through the political and bureaucratic apparatus, the state rigorously blocks political gatherings whose agenda is not ethnicity. In 2017, MPs tried to undermine public support for doctors on strike by suggesting that the strike was ethnically motivated. Similarly, in 2022, the government used compromise and bureaucracy to split the leadership of the Communist Party of Kenya and block the vice-chair, Booker Omole, from appearing on the ballot for the elections of Gem constituency, which essentially was an attack on ideological affiliation. And academics remain silent because, after all, they need to publish their next peer-reviewed journal article on Kenyan elections, in which they calculate the polling and voting based on the ethnic blocks.
In other words, what is called ethnic consciousness by politicians, bureaucrats and academics is really a case of engineering knowledge in a way that ethnic parochialism becomes the only platform where any kind of learning, debate, consciousness or political activity is allowed in Kenya. And once thinking is limited to ethnicity and biology, it can never go to ideas, politics, resources or even God. Kenyan theology is notorious stuck in the missionary logic of building schools and hospitals, and liberation theologies or African spiritual histories are not taught in classes of philosophy, theology or religion.
Besides political affiliations beyond ethnicity, another important requirement for robust debate is memory. As Ojwang says, memory is important for “bearing witness” to human suffering, especially in a country where victimhood has been turned into a tool for elite negotiations for power. Memory in the public sphere also helps the public make connections between different dimensions of public life over time and time. As keepers of public memory, intellectuals should ideally “[weave] together fragments of the past so that the public can develop a more coherent sense of its experience and develop an ability to engage in debate about that experience.”
However, in Kenya, history that provides a meaningful contextualization of Kenyans’ experiences is not taught in the school system. Lack of such history makes Kenyans pathetically ignorant about communities that are not their own, and susceptible to believing lies about other communities. Lack of memory also makes Kenyans cynical and un-empathetic with suffering that is not endured by one’s own ethnic community. With no public memory, Kenyans are compelled to depend on rumors and innuendo for political thinking.
As Ojwang says, the Kenyan state manages information, dissemination, publishing and even education to prevent memory from informing Kenya’s public consciousness. The botched effort to change the constitution under the Building Bridges Initiative contained a proposal to have the National Archives move to the Office of the President and an official historian be appointed under the same office. That historian’s duty was to write an official history of Kenya for the last 1,000 years. Never mind that Kenya did not exist until the 19th century when the British empire invented it. The point was to capture any historical consciousness, even pre-Kenyan, that risked disrupting the story which Uhuru wanted to tell about Kenya as the country founded by and embodied in the Kenyattas.
In every intellectual space, the Kenyan state is obsessed with controlling what Kenyans know, indicating how powerful knowledge is and how threatening a well-informed people are to state power.
In addition to controlling physical access to knowledge, there is a plethora of myths and lies that block Kenyans from pursuing knowledge. The media rants about half-baked graduates and a university system dominated by the arts at the expense of the sciences. The education system, government ministers and even professors find no contradiction in saying that education which teaches students to think is irrelevant to Kenya’s developmental needs, and that such education opens no employment opportunities. There is therefore a rhetoric of shame that is used to smear any benefits Kenyans may derive from education outside the pursuit of mere certification and employment.
And with that intellectual suffocation from the crushing of knowledge, Kenyans are inevitably unable to recognize their fears or name them, which means they cannot contextualize these emotions for the purpose of understanding the context that stimulated those emotions. The absence of such discussions leaves Kenyans vulnerable to companies like Cambridge Analytica.
Political Theatre
Worse, an anaemic Kenyan public sphere makes Kenyan politics become so theatrical and turns politics into an emotional roller coaster. To borrow Ojwang’s expression, Kenyan politics are dominated by “symbols and entertainment genres, so much so that politics now seems to be about who can stage the most impressive drama.”
The events of October 2024, provide a perfect illustration of these emotional swings. Kenyans were subjected to heavy duty changes that left many people on X (formerly Twitter) openly admitting that they were emotionally exhausted. The month began with the disastrous rolling out of SHIF that led people in need of emergency treatment like dialysis and chemotherapy to their own devices, and some have since died. This change in healthcare funding engulfed Kenyans in deep sorrow and desperation as they tried to save the lives of their loved ones. They were also bewildered at the insensitivity and cruelty of the government.
However, the government was keener on impeaching Deputy President Gachagua than on the plight of patients. Again, the impeachment was equivalent to a lynching. It was a highly emotional drama that shocked at many levels, because the state was weaponizing the constitution to get rid of an elected official who contributed to the win of Kenya Kwanza. For one to even coherently understand these political shenanigans, one had to follow the intrigues of opportunism and betrayal between Kenya Kwanza and ODM, which many Kenyans dutifully did by spending hours watching the drama televised live from the houses of Parliament and the Senate. It was an insult that this should have been taking place when people and their families were struggling to get treatment. But not even the anger expressed by Kenyans at the public participation meetings on the impeachment deterred the MPs from proceeding with the theater, even as heartbreaking stories emerged of Kenyans who did not have the luxury of time to wait for the new SHIF system to work.
But that was not enough. Before Kenyans had time to get used to the double drama, Senator Cherargei of Nandi County was driving yet another emotive bill proposing the extension of the terms of politicians from five to seven years. Public opposition to the bill made the Senate email server crash after being inundated with emails.
While I have no doubt that the elected officials want to extend their terms, I think that the greater value of the bill is the excitement and the drama. Extension of term limits is a highly emotive issue, given Kenyans’ long struggle to limit president Moi’s term in 1992 and even after that, wait another 10 years before Moi finally left office. But with such a vacuous political sphere riding on no knowledge, Kenyan politicians have all the room to be hyper-emotional and dramatic to compensate for their stupidity, empty headedness, and insane wealth built on theft and deals. Charargei maintains himself in the headlines saying nothing remotely intelligent, and being abrasive and provocative as he makes threats saying that the Finance Bill will pass, come rain or shine, or that the president should remain in office for life. His political role is to annoy and excite, rather than suggest anything remotely beneficial to anyone.
And the media maintains its click bait when they report the degrading things Cherargei says. Journalists can pretend to engage in intelligent conversation by asking him about servers and citing statistics of 200,000 emails. To which the Senator replies with vocabulary like “the 4th estate” to give an air of credibility to what is essentially nonsense.
As Ojwang argued 15 years ago, this demented, knowledge-deficient and theatre-dominated public discourse has led to a situation where marketing, social media trends, psyops and public relations drive Kenyan political debate, even on hefty matters that have life and death implications for the majority of people. The resulting political alienation has become so spectacular, that elected officials cannot tell the difference between political debate and social media following. One incident illustrating this absurdity occurred during the Senate debate on the impeachment of the Deputy President, when the Speaker Amason Kingi, cautioned Senators against using the opportunity to ask questions “as a moment to get a TikTok clip.”
For a long time, Africans have been baffled at how foolish and grotesque African politics became after independence. At some point, it seemed to confirm the narrative of Africans as incapable of rationally governing themselves. In a speech many years ago, the late revolutionary Walter Rodney attributed the absurdity of African and Caribbean politics to distortions caused by economic policies and Western political institutions in African and Caribbean states. Drawing laughter from his audience, he said:
Frankly, nowhere in the world do you find a scenario to compare with some African and Caribbean states. One could write a scenario that is a tragedy, and one could write a scenario that is a comedy, and they would both be applicable. The politics is nowhere so comic as far as the ruling classes are concerned, but the consequences are nowhere more tragic as far as the working people are concerned. As you move from one Caribbean state to another, you find these aberrations that sometimes, when you think of certain films, or certain novels, or certain pieces of fiction … you wonder whether in fact you are dealing with fiction or reality: Prime ministers who shuffle around and who resign or threaten to resign more than any others in the world; prime ministers who dress themselves up in different costumes, one day a general, the next day the chief of police; prime ministers in Africa who go to the prisons and haul out prisoners and beat them themselves; a prime minister who makes his wife the chief of the opposition…those are not things taken from novels. Those are descriptions of what actually happens in African and Caribbean states.
Rodney attributes these absurdities to Africa’s position in international capital, where Western economic and democratic models are so untenable that they produce political monsters, after which the West, whose policies produced the monsters, gains propaganda value from pointing to African leaders as proof of their racist myths about the continent.
The same problem which Rodney sees in the context of the international capitalist economy, I now see in the context of knowledge. When the population of Africa knows so little about itself and the world in which they live, there arises a political class of cartoons and buffoons who get away with their stupidity. These political cartoons and buffoons are partly supported by the international community’s interest in them for propaganda value. And sadly, African people lack the knowledge, and therefore theoretical tools with which to correctly isolate and respond to the problem. In Kenya, much of what passes off as political discourse is morality talk about liars and bad people, or is similar to character analysis in a KCSE literature examination.
Kenya, in particular, gets away with such mediocre politics because the Western media protects Kenya’s status as the perfect colony. Reports about Kenya are divorced from systemic issues and reported as interesting idiosyncrasies. During the Reject Finance Bill protests, media like the New York Times, CNN and Reuters persisted in narrowing the protests to the youth and social media, as if there was no political agenda or historical build up to the protests. Even as Kenyan politicians are spectacular in their comedy, Kenya’s international reputation in the foreign press remains squeaky clean and coherent. In media and academic literature, Kenya is depicted as implementing all international agreements to the letter, and the failures are neatly packaged by citing some human rights activist or clueless academics. Few African leaders outside Kenya would admit that historically, Kenya has always been a two-faced, pro-imperialist state that has never taken the side of justice.
Kenyans themselves are insulated from this reckoning by the tyranny of aggressive ignorance. Ironically, Kenyans are so committed to Western schooling, to the extent that they will accept violence and tragedy as long as children are going to school.
For the last 15 years, I have been puzzled about why Kenyans seem so committed to ignorance and yet we worship the education system. I have attributed the problem to the ideology of the market that destroyed thinking in university and, ironically, caused an exponential increase in graduate schools and research publications.
Then came the education drama of the implementation of the Competency Based Curriculum, during which the Ministry of Education remained tight-lipped about what it was doing, gaslighted its critics, and refused to answer any meaningful questions about why the decision was made to replace the school system. It took me around three years to realize that the Ministry of Education had no idea what it was doing and was never going to be open about how they made the decision. However, Kenyans believed in all the lollipops they were promised and celebrated the system. I traced this apparent naivete of Kenyans to the Moi and Jomo Kenyatta years when artists, students and lecturers where killed, tortured and detained for ideas which the regime did not like.
However, my perspective began to switch a few years later, in a collaboration with Elizabeth Cooper and Erdmute Alber in a project called “The Education Alibi.” In my chapter in our forthcoming edited book, I contemplated the Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965, and specifically the preface of Jomo Kenyatta, in which he declared an end to “debates on theories and doubts about the aims of our society.” Years later, famous Kenyan historian ES Atieno Odhiambo would write that that 1965 policy paper marked the end of debate in Kenya. From then on, the state resorted to detentions and assassinations to stifle public debate. It was then clear to me, as I said in an interview this year, that the Western school system is committed to ensuring knowledge does not thrive, despite claims to the contrary.
My perspective shifted even more significantly a few days ago, in a conversation with the writer Mwende Kyalo, when she said that Kenyans suffer from undereducation. Kenyans know so little about the history of things they do and that affect us, or what Yvonne Owuor called “historical intelligence.” We approach life as if nothing has a history, because there is an infrastructure that blocks us from thinking by denying us information and opportunities for conversation.
And the obstruction of information, I would argue, is five centuries old and fundamentally racist. Africa’s loss of her people to slavery was also a suppression of knowledge, because slave traders used trickery, lies and corruption to entice or coerce African leaders into participating in the trade. The Western academy also told lies about Africa, often suggested that knowledge was not accessible to Africans because their brains did not develop enough to think. Since knowledge requires interaction, Africa’s relationship to the outside world could not lead to growth of knowledge, since that relationship was already violent and hostile. Worse, by extracting African labor that was also skilled, a major brain drain was committed with the slave trade. Nanjala’s wonderful book Travelling while black, restriction of travel by Africans is paralleled with ignorance of Africans about each other, both within their own countries and even across the oceans.
The advent of colonialism only worsened this problem. As I’ve already noted, Africans were frozen in rigid ethnicities by European missionaries, colonial administrators or settlers, often acting as amateur anthropologists. Furthermore, the colonial government confined these ethnic groups to reserves and blocked political collaboration between them. Collaborations are an essential element of education, so when travel and collaboration are denied, the contained communities do not grow in knowledge.
The Mau Mau concentration camps are one example of how the British contained and physically tortured people in an effort to contain knowledge. In these camps, the British engaged in horrifying torture and murder in the name of “retraining” the detainees out of their commitment to the Mau Mau. That retraining IS an education issue, because it was about trying to re-engineer the mind and prevent the Mau Mau from gaining solidarity with the rest of Africans in Kenya. And to crown it all, when the British were leaving, they destroyed a good part of the archives of that period under a program dubbed “Operation Legacy,” indicating that their intent was to perpetuate ignorance in Kenya about its own history. To this day, public memory of the Mau Mau resistance restricts the movement to an ethnic narrative devoid of political, social or military analysis, which politicians exploit for maintaining ethnic blocks that polarize elections.
And because Kenyans are not allowed to think beyond identity, some get angry with me and refuse to even consider my argument that these ethnic blocks are not about diversity or cultural decolonization, but about capitalist imperialism. This intellectual inflexibility is cultivated by the school system and the state’s management of knowledge at large. Meanwhile, as Ojwang says, Kenyan academics have failed to fundamentally interrogate ethnic foundations of knowledge, and yet “communities that constitute it are not set in stone, but entities that ought to be subjected to debate.”
The narrative of Kenyan exceptionalism that has been so carefully built in Kenya, the US and the UK, with the help of public relations, academic research, and journalism. But contrary to that narrative, Kenya is not any different from other African countries, as its elites like to believe. Kenya is an African country at war, but not because we are African. There is a specific historical and political context to explain the violence. The Kenyan state has used assassinations, abductions and massacres, covered up the evidence with supplies of body bags from the United States in the name of “election materials,” and largely remained outside of the glare of Western international media that has preferred to shed the light on more theatrical leaders of the continent.
But Kenyan politicians are no less stupid or theatrical than the extraordinary cases in the continent that have been more notorious. Indeed, over the last few months, Kenyans have joked that politicians are competing with artists because politicians’ actions are closer to fiction than a Kenyan artist would have imagined. It is no wonder that the state has fought against arts education and education as a whole. It prefers the crudeness of empty rhetoric and violence to the beauty of imagination, the music of justice, and the dance of revolution. And so the political class, the bureaucrats of the state, and their collaborators in the school system keep Kenyans undereducated and ignorant. But even then, these Kenyan elites are simply foot soldiers in the larger war of ignorance that has been waged by empire on the people of Africa for the last five centuries.
The same problem which Rodney sees in the context of the international capitalist economy, I now see in the context of knowledge. When the population of Africa knows so little about itself and the world in which they live, there arises a political class of cartoons and buffoons who get away with their stupidity. These political cartoons and buffoons are partly supported by the international community’s interest in them for propaganda value. And sadly, African people lack the knowledge, and therefore theoretical tools with which to correctly isolate and respond to the problem. In Kenya, much of what passes off as political discourse is morality talk about liars and bad people, or is similar to character analysis in a KCSE literature examination.
Kenya, in particular, gets away with such mediocre politics because the Western media protects Kenya’s status as the perfect colony. Reports about Kenya are divorced from systemic issues and reported as interesting idiosyncrasies. During the Reject Finance Bill protests, media like the New York Times, CNN and Reuters persisted in narrowing the protests to the youth and social media, as if there was no political agenda or historical build up to the protests. Even as Kenyan politicians are spectacular in their comedy, Kenya’s international reputation in the foreign press remains squeaky clean and coherent. In media and academic literature, Kenya is depicted as implementing all international agreements to the letter, and the failures are neatly packaged by citing some human rights activist or clueless academics. Few African leaders outside Kenya would admit that historically, Kenya has always been a two-faced, pro-imperialist state that has never taken the side of justice.
Kenyans themselves are insulated from this reckoning by the tyranny of aggressive ignorance. Ironically, Kenyans are so committed to Western schooling, to the extent that they will accept violence and tragedy as long as children are going to school.
For the last 15 years, I have been puzzled about why Kenyans seem so committed to ignorance and yet we worship the education system. I have attributed the problem to the ideology of the market that destroyed thinking in university and, ironically, caused an exponential increase in graduate schools and research publications.
Then came the education drama of the implementation of the Competency Based Curriculum, during which the Ministry of Education remained tight-lipped about what it was doing, gaslighted its critics, and refused to answer any meaningful questions about why the decision was made to replace the school system. It took me around three years to realize that the Ministry of Education had no idea what it was doing and was never going to be open about how they made the decision. However, Kenyans believed in all the lollipops they were promised and celebrated the system. I traced this apparent naivete of Kenyans to the Moi and Jomo Kenyatta years when artists, students and lecturers where killed, tortured and detained for ideas which the regime did not like.
However, my perspective began to switch a few years later, in a collaboration with Elizabeth Cooper and Erdmute Alber in a project called “The Education Alibi.” In my chapter in our forthcoming edited book, I contemplated the Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965, and specifically the preface of Jomo Kenyatta, in which he declared an end to “debates on theories and doubts about the aims of our society.” Years later, famous Kenyan historian ES Atieno Odhiambo would write that that 1965 policy paper marked the end of debate in Kenya. From then on, the state resorted to detentions and assassinations to stifle public debate. It was then clear to me, as I said in an interview this year, that the Western school system is committed to ensuring knowledge does not thrive, despite claims to the contrary.
My perspective shifted even more significantly a few days ago, in a conversation with the writer Mwende Kyalo, when she said that Kenyans suffer from undereducation. Kenyans know so little about the history of things they do and that affect us, or what Yvonne Owuor called “historical intelligence.” We approach life as if nothing has a history, because there is an infrastructure that blocks us from thinking by denying us information and opportunities for conversation.
And the obstruction of information, I would argue, is five centuries old and fundamentally racist. Africa’s loss of her people to slavery was also a suppression of knowledge, because slave traders used trickery, lies and corruption to entice or coerce African leaders into participating in the trade. The Western academy also told lies about Africa, often suggested that knowledge was not accessible to Africans because their brains did not develop enough to think. Since knowledge requires interaction, Africa’s relationship to the outside world could not lead to growth of knowledge, since that relationship was already violent and hostile. Worse, by extracting African labor that was also skilled, a major brain drain was committed with the slave trade. Nanjala’s wonderful book Travelling while black, restriction of travel by Africans is paralleled with ignorance of Africans about each other, both within their own countries and even across the oceans.
The advent of colonialism only worsened this problem. As I’ve already noted, Africans were frozen in rigid ethnicities by European missionaries, colonial administrators or settlers, often acting as amateur anthropologists. Furthermore, the colonial government confined these ethnic groups to reserves and blocked political collaboration between them. Collaborations are an essential element of education, so when travel and collaboration are denied, the contained communities do not grow in knowledge.
The Mau Mau concentration camps are one example of how the British contained and physically tortured people in an effort to contain knowledge. In these camps, the British engaged in horrifying torture and murder in the name of “retraining” the detainees out of their commitment to the Mau Mau. That retraining IS an education issue, because it was about trying to re-engineer the mind and prevent the Mau Mau from gaining solidarity with the rest of Africans in Kenya. And to crown it all, when the British were leaving, they destroyed a good part of the archives of that period under a program dubbed “Operation Legacy,” indicating that their intent was to perpetuate ignorance in Kenya about its own history. To this day, public memory of the Mau Mau resistance restricts the movement to an ethnic narrative devoid of political, social or military analysis, which politicians exploit for maintaining ethnic blocks that polarize elections.
And because Kenyans are not allowed to think beyond identity, some get angry with me and refuse to even consider my argument that these ethnic blocks are not about diversity or cultural decolonization, but about capitalist imperialism. This intellectual inflexibility is cultivated by the school system and the state’s management of knowledge at large. Meanwhile, as Ojwang says, Kenyan academics have failed to fundamentally interrogate ethnic foundations of knowledge, and yet “communities that constitute it are not set in stone, but entities that ought to be subjected to debate.”
The narrative of Kenyan exceptionalism that has been so carefully built in Kenya, the US and the UK, with the help of public relations, academic research, and journalism. But contrary to that narrative, Kenya is not any different from other African countries, as its elites like to believe. Kenya is an African country at war, but not because we are African. There is a specific historical and political context to explain the violence. The Kenyan state has used assassinations, abductions and massacres, covered up the evidence with supplies of body bags from the United States in the name of “election materials,” and largely remained outside of the glare of Western international media that has preferred to shed the light on more theatrical leaders of the continent.
But Kenyan politicians are no less stupid or theatrical than the extraordinary cases in the continent that have been more notorious. Indeed, over the last few months, Kenyans have joked that politicians are competing with artists because politicians’ actions are closer to fiction than a Kenyan artist would have imagined. It is no wonder that the state has fought against arts education and education as a whole. It prefers the crudeness of empty rhetoric and violence to the beauty of imagination, the music of justice, and the dance of revolution. And so the political class, the bureaucrats of the state, and their collaborators in the school system keep Kenyans undereducated and ignorant. But even then, these Kenyan elites are simply foot soldiers in the larger war of ignorance that has been waged by empire on the people of Africa for the last five centuries.
RSS Feed
