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The much-vaunted “National” schools in Kenya are distinguished by the fact that they weren’t created to educate. For us to fully understand this, we need to closely examine our history as a society, which necessarily includes our colonial background. These were institutions that were conceived as foundations for the social strata and cadres that form the skeleton of any imperialist society. This was an absolute necessity as the British Empire expanded, due to the sheer scale of its administrative and martial demands. This is in contrast to the demands of the pre-imperial era, where a relatively small and inbred nobility could manage the demands of governing a small territory through force or threats of violence enforced by a network of compliant members of the proletariat.
Nobility all over the world is notorious for navel-gazing, so it wasn’t a complete surprise that in the British monarchy’s desire (and need) to expand its horizons and greed to far-flung lands, the realities of the imperial structures that they would require initially escaped them. The rapid expansion of the empire, coupled with this initial oversight, resulted in a litany of errors, wars, and crimes against humanity that lasted through two centuries. This is wonderfully chronicled in Piers Brendon’s book The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (published 2007). The thematic and human resource gap had to be filled by an “imperial secretariat” that grew (thematically) from the cadre of compliant commoners that were so useful to the kingdom at home. In spite of their tardiness, this cadre eventually grew into a formidable civil service that comprised the colonial office and functionaries all over the world. This was the veritable “army” of people who created the structures that were so essential to the growth and maintenance of Empire.
This massive structure included segregated residential areas, members’ clubs, segregated burial grounds (including “war cemeteries”), and carefully curated pomp and pageantry. Not least among these was a stratified school system to churn out generations of graded personnel. This mirrored the school strata that already existed in Britain, wherein the state leadership and those who occupy its various echelons would be determined at the school level. The creation of an elite was an essential part of the stratification imperative, but it shouldn’t be seen as the whole, because Empire required an entire spectrum of servants, from highly professional regents and stewards of political processes to the knaves and charlatans at the bottom who weren’t above robbery, rape, murder, or torture in the service of King and Country.
The top echelons of public service in the UK today are still incubated at obsessively elitist educational institutions that are still strangely referred to as “public schools” to this day, including Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Winchester College, among others. The over 200-year lifespan of the British Empire is more a testament to the resilience of the service structure than to the capabilities of a self-indulgent monarchy that has been little more than an anachronism for the better part of a century. The oft-used description of Kenya today as an imperial outpost, therefore, isn’t a casual reference but an acknowledgement that this is the place where imperialism “worked” in the sense that it successfully positioned itself as excellence and made a society aspire to it, even decades after the advent of independence. This perspective equips us to cast a knowledgeable eye on our “national schools”, which are analogous to the much-vaunted British “public schools”.
The 200-year lifespan of the British Empire is especially quite remarkable in that it eclipses the typical lifespan of contrived human social epochs, which stands at an average of 75–80 years, as typified by the Russian Revolution, communism in China, and the egalitarian myth of the United Nations. This was largely down to their mastery of imagery and pomp and circumstance as a tool for projecting exceptionalism. Even without considering the vast number of other British colonies around the world, ruling over India, a country of 3,287,263 square kilometres with a (then) population of approximately 240 million people, was no small feat. The fact that they accomplished it with about 20,000 colonial officers underscores the importance of imagery and optics in this endeavour. Some of the most enduring symbols of this are the magnificent official and residential buildings they erected to create “New Delhi” as the seat of imperial rule, away from the pre-existing structures built by Indian nobles.
The use of buildings to project power in this manner extended to Kenya through government buildings and, crucially, our elite “national schools”. There was an extraordinary amount of attention devoted to the creation of hierarchies in an imperial “jewel” like Kenya, and these national schools still provide an accurate snapshot, even nearly a century since their establishment. In this echelon were two schools established to cater for white people, namely, The Prince of Wales School and Duke of York School. The former was originally created as the European Nairobi School in 1916, adjacent to Government House (now State House, Kenya’s official presidential residence). In 1927, the architect Sir Herbert Baker was commissioned to design the school at its present site, modelled on the venerated Winchester College, the oldest of elite schools in England, specifically to educate the children of the white elite.
Baker was something of a specialist at “imperial power projection” buildings, including churches, schools, and houses. His portfolio is a veritable picture of the British Empire in the 20th century. Among these are: (In South Africa) The Union Buildings in Pretoria; St. Andrew’s College, Grahamstown; St. John’s College, Johannesburg; Wynberg Boys’ High School and Groote Schuur, both in Cape Town. Together with Sir Edwin Lutyens, Baker designed Parliament House and the North and South Blocks of the Central Secretariat, all in New Delhi, which in 1931 became the capital of the British Raj, and later the independent Republic of India.
In Kenya, Baker designed the European School, Nairobi (present-day Nairobi Primary School), and the Prince of Wales School (present-day Nairobi School). His other prominent works include the East African Railways Headquarters and Government House (present-day State House). Duke of York School (present-day Lenana School) was established over a decade later, in 1949, with the objective of providing training to the “hard white” custodians of the colony. This was an urgent requirement because there was growing resistance to white rule among the natives, and the Second World War had severely depleted Britain’s martial resources. Schooling at Duke of York included military cadet-level drills and firearms training. At the next level was the Government Indian School (established in 1906), conveniently located near the mid-level (read, Indian) railway staff quarters in Ngara. Its purpose was to train mid-level functionaries to cover positions for which there weren’t enough whites, and that were too senior to be entrusted to natives. They also played a crucial (and harsh) “overseer” role vis-à-vis native staff, which wasn’t much of a departure from the (loosely) complexion-based caste system they were accustomed to.
Ultimately, there was Alliance, itself quite an old school, currently in its centenary year. It was an institution expressly created in 1926 to develop a cadre of useful, compliant, and competent natives to uphold the ethos of empire and maintain the structures of imperialism – basically, the perfect civil servant. The name “Alliance” came from the fact that it was established by an alliance of the six major Protestant churches in Kenya, yet it wasn’t a faith-based institution by design. The logic of church involvement here wasn’t necessarily an aspect of faith, but service to the state, which was de rigueur at the time because missionaries were active participants in colonization.
It is vital to note that in imperial Kenya, the “suitability” of natives for education, employment, business, and other contacts with the state was gauged by wealth, land ownership, and church membership. In the case of school-age youngsters, only the latter was really applicable. The effort and resources put in by the missionaries resulted in success and rapid expansion, culminating in the establishment of a “sister” school – Alliance Girls’ High School – in 1948. Likewise, this was the pioneer secondary school for African girls, since the Kenya High School (established 1910) was then reserved for European girls graduating from the co-educational European Nairobi School (present-day Nairobi Primary School).
Apart from the standard subjects, the early curriculum had a strong component of religious and vocational teaching, not necessarily because they were training clergy or tradesmen, but because these infused obedience and compliance. Alliance was the pioneer African school and remained the standard of excellence – even after the formation of other “Government African” schools like those in Kakamega (1932) and Kisii (1934) – and a consistent high performer in national exams.
With their establishment in the early 20th century, these pioneer schools (including mission schools like Maseno, established in 1906) became pillars of the colonial project that was Kenya. They were “filters” through which the colonial project could credibly select the competent and compliant while rejecting those who were too creative, questioning, or otherwise radical. One of the unintended consequences of establishing academic standards is that more often than not, these “problematic” thinkers from native families would find their way into these hallowed schools due to their academic abilities. In such cases, the child had to be beaten into shape (often physically) to fit the mould. To anyone steeped in literature, this “panel beating” took the shape of something from the works of Charles Dickens. It required the presence of strong white male imperialists (charitably) described as “disciplinarians” backed by a powerful and cruel cabal of prefects. These were students empowered to visit cruelty upon their peers in order to maintain the cycle of violence and stratification within the student body. This explains why an institution like Maseno School (albeit a missionary institution) was created expressly to cater for the sons of African chiefs who were selected (or otherwise vetted) by the colonial administration and missionaries. This institution was the first Kenyan base for the strangely revered imperialist educationist Edward Carey Francis, who, for some reason, became something of an authority on the “intelligence” (read: usefulness to Empire) of young African boys during his tenures at Maseno, Duke of York, Alliance, and Pumwani High School between the years 1928 and 1966.
Given the sheer size of the British Empire in the 1920s, it is difficult to fathom Carey Francis’s path from the prestigious Trinity College at Cambridge to a village school in “Kenia” colony as a coincidence as opposed to an assignment. He was just one of many people tasked to create the human resource architecture necessary to maintain imperialism’s most important foothold in Africa.
In order for us to grow as a nation, we cannot ignore the influence (positive or otherwise) of the founders, structures, and alumni of these schools on Kenya. Immediately following independence, the cachet attached to those who successfully navigated the imperial school “mould” came into its own. Droves of young native men in their 20s and 30s were recruited into senior positions in the newly “Africanized” civil service, an image quite remarkable to those familiar with the average age of Kenyan civil servants.
Private sector corporations also took advantage of the pool of skilled and (relatively) cheap native labour to replace expatriates. They also had the requisite level of whiteness, ready to declare “I went to Alliance” or “I am an Old Cambrian” at the drop of a hat to prove that they “belonged”. The imperialist cult grew from strength to strength from the 1950s to the turn of the century, peaking in the late 1990s, bolstered by the very visible power and success of its adherents. The imperial cult began to struggle under the weight of its own fat. Many of the erstwhile “young Turks” had risen up the corporate ladder and were now CEOs and chairmen of corporate boards.
Why is this a problem? Because the leadership now comprises a coterie of polished yes-men whose (considerable) success has been built on decades of unquestioning subservience to a system that was in turn built upon imperial exploitation. They were now leaders, yet their climb up the ladder had depended upon not producing any new ideas on the way. Anything other than repetition or replication would have invited instant opprobrium and arrested their professional progress, just as it would have done to their academic progress in school before.
The reason why this has become a national governance issue is because professional success in Kenya is more often than not parlayed into political careers, and this singularly uncreative lot brought their imperial schoolboy compliance into politics. As a result, Kenya’s national governance and policies (if we are charitable enough to refer to them as such) are geared towards complying with or fulfilling other people’s goals. Our agriculture introduces foreign seeds to meet foreign needs, our health is a testing ground for foreign drugs, our tourism is to cater to foreign “arrivals”, our labour ministry is tasked with preparing and exporting people to foreign markets, etc. Kenya functions in word and deed as an imperial outpost, but the real source of concern is that even those of us who can perceive it treat it as dysfunction – it isn’t. The truth about Kenya is that our schools, systems, and government were designed that way, and are fully functioning as empire intended 63 years after “independence”. The old “schoolboys” are holding on to the offices they first occupied two generations ago and blithely selling the youth drivel like “You should create employment, not look for employment” or “You are the leaders of tomorrow” or “You should invest”…accompanied by the princely sum of 500 Kenya shillings (4 US dollars) in state funding to start their entrepreneurial journey.
Those of us who can perceive that the imperial schoolboy influence has now peaked and is in decline should prepare ourselves for the change that is coming, because it will be a revolution of sorts. Structural failure is never deliberate, structured, or gradual like construction. Unlike the careful building of the imperial schoolboy cadre, it will be precipitous. We have already seen glimpses of it in the protests that rocked Kenya in 2024 and 2025. Our ageing erstwhile imperial schoolboys thought the protests were a structure coming up, and they sought to curtail it by buying off those they thought were the architects. The protests were actually the sounds of an old, decrepit structure collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions – it cannot be arrested by compromising personalities.
My perspective on this generation comes from the inside, having attended both European Nairobi School (as Nairobi Primary School) and Prince of Wales School (as Nairobi School). Our greatest weakness is thinking that we are independently successful and not part of a matrix. We think that Carey Francis and others in the days before us were random white men who loved African boys and wanted to educate us. Just like we think it was a coincidence that 9 out of the 15 members of “independent” Kenya’s first cabinet were former students of Edward Carey Francis. It would require an entire thesis to document the proportion of Alliance alumni in Kenya’s cabinets and upper civil service, because it is absolutely massive. It would also require an amazing level of denial and intellectual myopia to think that it is a coincidence.
Imperialism without ever having had an empire manifests as foolishness, so let’s be wise and recognize our old imperial school ties as anachronisms that add no value to who we actually are. Our school ties only differ from the British ones in that they originate not in any principles of our own, but in someone else’s expired objectives. Today, it only matters what you will be in post-imperial Kenya, not where you went to high school. For those who “went to Alliance”, however, congratulations on your school’s centenary.
Let us live for the day when we will be judged on the substance of what we are today, rather than by the lingering smell of the violence we survived (or perpetrated on others) in our past lives.
