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“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Antonio Gramsci
In 1994, I was a fresh, naïve, graduate of a Bachelor’s of Education degree, believing that I would help build Kenya through the work I did as a teacher. I was posted by the Teachers Service Commission to teach in Kwale County, and there I came to terms with how inequality affects education.
In the midst of this coming to consciousness about the reality of education in Kenya, one of my colleagues, a mathematics and physics teacher, attended a workshop sponsored by one of the highest-profile women’s NGOs promoting girls’ education. My colleague returned from the workshop sharing insights I had never heard of, insights into the prejudices that lower girls’ achievement. One example that she gave, that I never forgot, was that in mixed schools, the male students spent class time conducting the experiments while the female students spent class time washing up the lab equipment after their classmates.
I was blown away. I had never heard that kind of analysis, which we later knew to be called gender studies. I wanted to be part of it, but I was a teacher of the arts, not the sciences. That did not dampen my determination to be part of this groundbreaking initiative to promote girls’ education. However, this was the mid-90s. The concept of donor-funded NGOs was fairly new, so I did not understand that this was an NGO driving an agenda, not looking for collaboration from volunteer teachers.
It so happened also that I knew that the founding Executive Director of the said NGO attended the same church as my parents. So during one of the school holidays when I was back in Nairobi, I spotted her at church and saw my chance to be part of her revolutionary movement. I approached her, explained what I do, and told her that I’d like to be part of promoting girls’ education.
To my surprise, she was not impressed. She informed me that her organization was not for teachers like me but for policy-makers and African ministers of education across the continent. Indeed, at the time, the chair of the board was one of the first female prime ministers in Africa, and the board counted several top-ranking African women politicians and top education bureaucrats. I retreated from that conversation believing that the problem was me, that I had not understood the more important things happening in girls’ education, and that I had been presumptive and overambitious, meddling in high-level matters that did not need my input. But even then, that conversation never added up until just recently, over 30 years later.
Focus on the girl-child
In a sense, I’m glad that the director blew me off because after that time, I pursued further education without thinking of my gender. After all, I had been shown that gender was a boutique topic of education for the elite – policy-makers and government officials, not ordinary teachers like me. Therefore, throughout my pursuit of further education in university, I was never conscious of myself as a female student.
The problem was that some Kenyans would often assume the opposite. They would say that I was continuing with school because I did not want to get married, and later, they would say that I was deliberately single in my early 40s because I felt that men would interfere with my schooling. I found that reasoning so absurd, but nothing would dissuade them. One time, when I was still a master’s student, I was at a Sunday afternoon fellowship where I handed over a cup of tea to a male friend who had just walked in. I had arrived at the venue half an hour earlier, I knew where the tea was, so I was simply acting as a person who was more familiar with the logistics of the space. I had no idea that my gesture would soon be a point of conversation.
First, people remarked how wonderful it is that Wandia actually knows how to make tea, and then two, that Wandia can serve tea. And just when I thought the conversation could not get worse, I was asked whether, should I get married, I would serve my husband tea. At that point I got irritated by the stupidity of the conversation, especially because I knew the facilitator of the conversation came from a household that employed at least one domestic worker. The painful conversation eventually ended when I asked him if the same question comes up for his mother.
Some Kenyans were so sure that I did not want to get married because I preferred education, even when I said that my being single then was simply because I had not met the right person to settle down with. When I was already a lecturer, a female student walked up to me and, with pity in her eyes, asked me point-blank: “Did you decide not to get married so that you can pursue a PhD?”
All these questions, assumptions and innuendos were annoying because I was just continuing with school because I loved learning. My womanhood was never a consideration in my pursuit of education. I continued with school because I was committed to an Africa where stupidity and ignorance are not the badge of honour that they now are. And I still fight for the life of the African mind because human beings need education, not because women need to go to school. And that point – the life of the mind – becomes the central focus to the next part of my story.
The first SAPs
Having pursued education out of love for intellectual pursuit, not to become an educated woman or to avoid marriage, I began my academic career enthusiastic about the potential to raise African consciousness through education. After all, by the time I was completing my doctoral studies, I had seen the huge gap in my own education. I had never read Pan-African theorists or leaders like Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Thomas Sankara in a Kenyan classroom. I read them on my own, and occasionally during my studies abroad, but most of what I knew, I discovered outside of the classroom. I had vowed that I would be that teacher through whom students would know about these texts in an actual classroom.
Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. The first ten years of my post-student life were spent on justifying why the humanities exist in the first place. I had no students to teach about Cabral because the media and the government were telling Kenyans that the arts and humanities were useless. Therefore, instead of teaching about Sankara to Kenyan students, I was spending my time trying to explain why the humanities and performing arts are essential to the human being and to a society’s economy.
And again, my faulty education had not taught me about neoliberalism and its war on the soul. So I also had to catch up on reading about neoliberalism, and the ideology of destruction that had been unleashed on African education after the fall of the USSR. Were it not for the fact that I could access reading materials through the university library, I would likely have remained quite ignorant about why the Kenyan school system hated knowledge so much. But it was also a lonely journey because few Kenyan academics were conducting geopolitically contextualized studies. They had no time to reflect on the state of education, because they were being promoted to academic administrators and writing grants for donor funding.
Yet this context, of the neoliberal assault on the African mind, was extremely crucial to understanding why an executive director would tell me that it was not in my place to have conversations on girls’ education. With the SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programmes) waging a full-scale war on higher education, it was now time to integrate gender into elite politics to polarize the conversation and distract Africans from the larger war on education and African societies as a whole.
So, instead of protecting education for all Kenyans, we were now focused on the cultural issues that were obstacles to high achievement for girls. The descent into gender particularism has since been gradual: it began with the larger issue of enrolment and completion rates, moved to attitudes towards girls in the class, then to images of girls in textbooks. Now the focus has gone to menstrual cycles, to the extent that provision of sanitary towels was written into the Basic Education Act.
These days, the Kenyan media reports examination results in terms of the high scores by girls, for the express purpose, in my view, of keeping Kenyans drowning in the toxic conversation about high-achieving girls vs. the neglected boy child. That conversation distracts the public from the fact that average scores for the majority of girls are still lower, and that results where only 11 per cent of candidates pass KCSE indicate either deliberate failing of students by the state, or the failure of the state to offer meaningful education.
The NGO which steered the education conversation around identity was about a bigger network of an emerging beast that we would know to be “civil society”. Fortunately, I was introduced to the essay “The Silences of NGO discourse”, which became my anchor for navigating the strange gender dynamics I was observing. In the essay, Issa Shivji explained that the donor community was using bureaucracy and the idea of “solutions” to wage war against Africans being actors in their own destiny. And now that I’m adding two and two together, that was the point of the elite politics of promoting education for girls: it was to distract us from the political economy of the school to the gender of who was going to school.
Meanwhile, capitalism had also realized that the one group of people that had been excluded from its orbit was poor African women. The majority of African women had remained outside the capitalist financial and ideological framework through collaborative networks where they informally raised money, farmed and shared food. Capitalism set out to capture that demographic by introducing microfinance bank products in the name of “empowering” women. In reality, microcredit was about offering women entrepreneurship, rather than political resistance, as a way for women to escape economies collapsing under neoliberal policies imposed by global financial institutions. Worse, it tied households to debt because poor women would use the money to meet family needs rather than invest in their small enterprises. Meanwhile, bankers boasted that African women were better at debt repayment than African men. They meant it as a compliment to women when, in reality, they were saying that exploiting women was a better return on investment.
The West had basically continued its war on African societies by attacking the resilience of African women with education for the African women elite, and credit for the African women poor.
But before I drew this connection, which was only recently, a whole new generation of young people had grown up and was leaving the school system. They were trying to join the economy after the SAPs had suppressed innovation and production in Kenya. At the same time, the political ideology promised that joining donor-funded NGOs was a substitute to the political action we needed to convert our economy from a settler colony which is based on raw materials, into an economy based on production and expertise. It did not help that universities had also supported this shift by herding young people into philanthropy instead of the political economy. The universities now offered applied social sciences in the place of knowledge, for example “peace and security studies” in the place of political science or history, “human rights” instead of philosophy, communication and media in the place of language and the arts.
For this millennial generation growing up under neoliberalism, their historical consciousness would be even more handicapped than that of my generation. As a child growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, it was at least possible to hear about Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, or Nelson Mandela, because we would come across their names when we were learning the independence dates of African countries. We grew up aware that South Africa, Azania, was in the midst of a liberation struggle. We were at least conscious that our political economy was influenced by factors beyond our borders. For the generation born in the ’90s, this was not the case. History had now ended, as Francis Fukuyama is said to have declared after the fall of the USSR. For millennials, our economic problem was internal identity favouritism disconnected from global geopolitics.
It is only in the last few years that I started to sense that absence of a transnational historical consciousness was combining with the focus on women to produce the monsters of gender relations that the millennials now grapple with.
African girl magic
As I’ve already said, my pursuit of education was something I did for knowledge, not accolades. I wanted to understand why Kenya was dysfunctional, and the only place where I could pursue these questions was in school. It therefore appeared strange to me, in the 2010s, to see a trend where African women lauded education, showed off about their scholarships, grants and degrees, with seeming limited consciousness that they were part of an elite. The women were fabulous: expensively dressed, globetrotting to talk about the rights of African women, and highly educated – some were even professors.
Their profile was striking because when I was young, African writers, for example, represented the people who articulated the difficult dilemmas of the African experience. By contrast, we now have a writer like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who is also celebrated as a fashion icon, invited to political spaces like Chatham House and the Champs Elysées, and her words on feminism are quoted in a song by Beyoncé. Beyoncé is yet another female icon performing radical politics while embracing something totally different, for example performing at the ultra-corporate event of the Super Bowl Halftime Show in costumes inspired by the Black Panther Party. Politics is no longer about on-the-ground organizing for specific outcomes for the people. It is about the aesthetics.
These are the aesthetics that I attribute to the agenda of promoting education for girls. In the neoliberal age of social media, the promotion of girls’ education has produced an aesthetic in which black women can have it all: wealth, high levels of education achieved at the world’s elite schools, a string of academic publications, radical politics (?), an expensive wardrobe and a spouse and children. On social media, African women professionals share their boarding pass at the airport on their way to make a 15-minute presentation at conferences abroad, or themselves on another continent sipping martinis. I once saw a Facebook group for “doctors in heels”, essentially aiming to prove that being professional and highly educated does not mean looking drab.
That said, the point is not whether women can and should have it all. The point is why it should be important. Yet, it is as if to be educated as an African woman, nothing can be ordinary any more. Everything, including our periods and menopause, must be announced, analysed and celebrated as an achievement.
The second problem with the agenda of girls’ education is that it is silent on the elephant in the room: the fact that the school system to which African women’s success is attributed is invariably Eurocentric, racist and capitalist. Therefore, educating African women in Western schools does not necessarily translate into radical African politics, as we were promised in those NGO soundbites about educating an African woman means educating a nation. The racist, mind-numbing implications of schooling do not listen to gender. In fact, Sanyu Mojola writes in her groundbreaking study that girls’ education ends up increasing consumerism among female students, rendering them even more vulnerable to sexual exploitation in the very system that was supposed to make the girls defy the same exploitation.
My third concern is about the emotional and relationship health of educated Kenyans. As other pieces in this series on millennials demonstrate, there seems to be an equation of emotional relationships with weakness. It is as if when a woman falls in love, she is necessarily being exploited by her partner, and she must do all she can to protect her progression in education and her career. If her male partner remains unemployed or does not rise up the corporate ranks, it is because he is not ambitious. And if he tries to question these interpretations, it is because he cannot tolerate “successful African women”. Meanwhile, the men are offered pacifiers like the red pill movement as a substitute to understanding that entering the elite, no matter the gender, is limited to the 5 per cent and is a function of the political economy, not of identity.
And those who take this hardline position cite cases of women battered and slaughtered by men after a woman, for example, danced to a Soukous beat. It is not that there is no “gender-based” violence problem. The issue is that it has a complicated relationship to the political economy, and it does not reflect the entirety of gender and relationships in Kenya. And yes, Kenyan institutions are biased against pursuing justice for the victims. As they are for victims of other crimes, especially if the victims are poor. That said, the prominence of gender-based violence in the national media, as the banner under which all relationships are interpreted, is driven by, you guessed it, donor-funded NGOs.
Those of us who say that relationships are about humanity, not consumerism, are criticized as African patriarchy princesses who are offering ourselves as examples to emulate when all we are is failed women because we got married to men.
Yet the truth is, at the end of the day, the warmth of human relationships and political solidarity cannot be replaced by anything capitalism offers, in terms of schooling or career progression. Learning to be human, to relate intimately and socially with others, without giving up one’s dignity, is a skill that one must learn. But one cannot learn the skill without a historical consciousness. Yet in Kenya, neoliberalism has successfully planted a deep distrust in intimate relations by making Kenyans hostile to global historical knowledge and political consciousness. And every time the point is made about the political economic system that depresses African growth, the point is belittled and dismissed with some reply about intersectionality.
Again, the point isn’t whether one can be a fashion savvy, highly educated, married African woman. The point which that conversation is distracting us from, is that African political economies are rigged by the West, and through a political ideology that relies on division and gaslighting on the basis of identity. We should be having a conversation about regional and national sovereignty in the continent, the human dignity of Africans, and best of all, the need for love and solidarity across boundaries and identities. We should be aiming for the dream of Mary Masombuka in the film Sarafina: for the war to be over, for the hate to end, for quiet days and loving nights, to sleep with our loved ones in our arms, and to come home to kindness.
But we cannot have that conversation if we have no historical consciousness about the neoliberal weaponization of gender to attack the African soul and distract Africans from the Western sabotage of African political economies. Or if we have no consciousness about the role of media, academia and NGOs in promoting that distraction. Those were monsters I could not see in the 1990s, and which, sadly, Kenyan millennials are now grappling with in this age of US imperial decline.
