Writing like Rasna

Rasna Warah’s life was intimately woven with the crisis of knowledge in Kenya. She was the voice that remained unsilent in a country that wages war against knowledge and imagination. Rasnah was punished financially and rhetorically for being broad in her knowledge, vulnerable in her questions, honest in her articulation of issues, and yet so down to earth in her stories. 

Whistleblowing

It was Rasna who saved me from throwing myself on a sword on my engagement on education, especially on the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC). She did this through one of my early memorable encounters with her, which was a panel on whistleblowing that took place at one of the editions of the Storymoja Festival. I used to think that whistleblowers were heroes, like in the action movies, smashing corrupt structures and emerging victorious. Rasna cured me of that ignorance as she spoke about her book UNsilenced. She said that contrary to expectations, whistleblowers do not set out to expose the problems they see. They stumble onto the problems, but they are committed to the institutions they are in, and they have faith in the institutions to address those problems. Whistleblowers think they are doing the right thing for the institution and for the people.

When I started to publicly raise questions about the CBC, my interest in the new system was largely driven by the language of recognising children’s individual abilities, including in the arts. Since I had struggled with the public vilification of the arts, I found the government’s new language of valuing the arts to be at odds with the speeches which only recently had called arts education irrelevant to the country’s needs. I had many questions. Why competency? Where is the arts education? Why are we having vocational training for children? 

To my shock, I discovered that most Kenyans – including the policy-makers themselves – would not engage my questions. Instead of giving answers, they questioned my motives. They said that I behave like I know everything, I do not listen to anybody, and I do not appreciate the work of the officials of the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD). To prove that my questions were genuine, I delved further into the research to clarify my questions. But the deeper I delved, the more my motives were questioned. Government sympathisers would write Facebook posts calling me arrogant, or KICD officials would say that opponents of CBC were attacking KICD officials in their personal capacity. 

It was because of Rasna that I recognised that I had, in essence, become a whistleblower. A whistleblower begins by asking innocent questions, and the system reacts by stalling and blaming the whistleblower for the problems she is addressing, which makes the whistleblower double down and provide more evidence to prove her case. By the time the whistleblower discovers that there’s a whole conspiracy to maintain the status quo, she is being subjected to all sorts of psychological abuse and isolation that eventually compel her to quit the organisation. 

Naming contradictions

Part of whistleblowing comes from naming contradictions. In Kenya, we struggle with contradiction. At the height of the propaganda against arts education in Kenya, a certain CEO was quoted saying that Kenyan universities are not training graduates for the market because 80 per cent of students were in the arts. In the first meeting of one of my classes one semester, I played the video of that speech and then asked the students: “Do you agree that studying for a university degree is a waste of time?”

They all said yes.

Then I asked them: so why are you here?

I was not prepared for what happened next. I thought the students would immediately spot the irony, but they did not. So they could not understand my question. The students struggled, giving me irrelevant answers, while I kept rephrasing my question. I slowly broke down what I was asking, which was that they were in the university, studying for a degree that was not mining or engineering, and many of them were not studying the sciences. So if they were in university, were they not wasting their time?

After a few minutes of this back and forth, it finally clicked for one student who blurted out: “We are here because our parents insisted that we must come.” Her answer was like the child pointing out that the emperor was naked, because it broke the dam of answers for the rest of the class. The students admitted that they were getting mixed messages, hearing on one hand that universities are not worth the time, and on the other, being told they must attend. Now that we were honest, we could have a discussion about the lies which are told in the public about university education, and the unpromising prospects of the economy.

When one looks at Rasna’s intellectual contribution, her greatest asset was her ability to name contradictions. But this Kenya is a country that suppresses contradiction. When contradictions appear, we look for “the positive side”, we ask for a consensus, and if that is not possible, we resort to gaslighting and eventually physical violence. Some of the evasive strategies we use to avoid systemic contradictions include pointing to people’s ethnicity and hypocrisy. Anything to avoid reality. And so we remain intellectually childish.

Rasna was often at the receiving end of such childishness when she pointed out contradictions. But she was not afraid of the inevitable backlash because she spoke with honesty and she was not afraid to be vulnerable. And Rasna’s boldness is largely due to the fact that she understood and travelled the world. She was a Kenyan of Asian origin, married to a Taveta, counted by the government as a Taita in a funny but absurd story which she recounts. She visited different countries and wrote on Somalia, India, even the United States embassy and the UN itself. The geographical spread of Rasna’s intellectual work is simply amazing. But from personal experience, I know that many Kenyans are hostile to any learning beyond their ethnic village. They then baptise that parochialism as “pride in African cultures” or worse, “decolonising the mind”.

Rasna saw the contradictions of injustice, ethnicity, bureaucracy in the capitalist system all the way to the UN itself, and she was not shy to name them, even in this Kenya that fears contradictions. And she wrote powerfully because she felt so strongly about these contradictions. Rasna sometimes called me in the late hours of the night, wondering about the latest injustice she saw, and many times, she would break down in tears. She wept for the children of Malindi who could not afford 500 bob to go to school. She wondered how we allowed ethnicity to make us stupid, a question that Kenyans still find hard to examine for what it is. And so she irritated many Kenyans with her questions, for example, on the white supremacist threads in Kikuyu ethnic consciousness. 

Rasna also couldn’t understand why Kenya was wallowing in political mediocrity. She was this puzzled by Kenya because her faith in the ability of Kenya to be better was unassailable. 

I often thought that Rasna was a little naive. But I think her disbelief came from the fact that she could not grasp the depth of the distortion of the Kenyan mind. I can’t blame her. It’s difficult to accept that this country wages war on knowledge in a way that few people appreciate, especially academics who would have us believe that their careers are based on knowledge. 

Another brilliant aspect of Rasna’s writing was her ability to weave everyday life into every story, and then use it to talk about global issues. One of my favourite essays, which I used in my writing class, was on her struggle to get a visa from the US embassy. In it, she was able to talk of global imperialism even in African studies.

Writing like Rasna

All these aspects of Rasna’s character – her faith in Kenyans, her honesty, her courage, her vulnerability, and her knowledge that allowed her to connect everyday life to global issues – made Rasna’s writing so powerful.

I have tried to get my students to write like her, to write about social problems starting from the reality they see, but it’s almost futile. Not because they don’t want to. It’s because they can’t understand this type of writing, because this writing requires honesty, vulnerability, and the ability to accept one’s own implication without drowning in individual guilt. In Kenya, the academic culture is annoyingly detached from what they study. This detachment is so unAfrican, because as many philosophers say, African ways of knowing do not isolate the individual thinker from what they are studying. In African epistemology, seeking knowledge means being part of the phenomenon one is observing, as opposed to Eurocentric epistemology where the knower is a distant, supposedly “objective”, observer. 

Rasna did not isolate herself in such a way. And in that sense, she was truly an African thinker. And she was not alone. Rasna was part of a movement that sought to end Kenya’s culture of bland mimicry masquerading as thinking and imagination. She was in Kwani? with people like Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and Binyavanga Wainaina who repeatedly refuse to accept that to be knowledgeable is to be silent about what we can see, but who are loud in shouting formulaic slogans that will earn us praise from imperialism.

By contrast, Kenyan academics fear and avoid contradiction. Kenyan academics like to write everything in linear stories which finish with a conclusion about the greatness of African cultures or about the solutions that the government should implement. Academics avoid contradictions like the plague, yet contradictions are how we see the truth. As WEB Dubois said in his famous essay, “The study of Negro problems”, we learn from contradiction, which is the contrast between what we aspire for and the social reality in which we live.

Rasna exemplified Dubois’s observations. She was not afraid of contradiction. That’s why her writing is so powerful. Rasna strongly held onto ideals of justice for the downtrodden and the responsibility of those in authority and in institutions, and she kept exposing how those ideals were contradicted by the realities of corruption, imperialism, sexism and injustice. She did not relent even when these ills were committed by a supposedly global, neutral organisation like the United Nations.

Kenyans fear contradiction because of our narrow view of the world justified as cultural authenticity. We protect this ignorance with the Euro-Christian ideal of being pure and blameless, which we enforce through a stubborn attachment to moral blackmail. Within this logic, a nurse cannot critique the healthcare system because she or he is part of it, and criticising the healthcare system makes the nurse a hypocrite and therefore immoral. Larry Madowo is often told by politicians and their mouthpieces that because he is Kenyan, shedding light on contradictions in Kenya makes him unpatriotic and therefore immoral. 

In other words, the hegemonic philosophy of Kenya is “either fix it or shut up about it”. According to this formula, only politicians and foreign donors are allowed to comment on Kenyan society, since only they have access to money and institutions to address social problems. The rest of us have to “talk positive” or “propose solutions” which, of course, will never be implemented since our voice does not count in the first place. 

Rasna defied this consensus. She knew that to study contradiction, one has to accept their implication in the system they oppose, without sinking into individual guilt and shame. Here’s an example. In her contribution to her edited book Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits, she tells a story of interviewing someone on behalf of a development research report. Rasna was asking intimate details from this respondent, including where the respondent lived, and where the respondent went to the loo. Rasna writes self-consciously about this experience, acknowledging her own position in the humiliating development industry she was working for. She writes: 

“I was sub-consciously doing what many people in the so-called development industry do: I was objectifying her, seeing her as part of a problem that needed to be solved so that she could be compartmentalized into a ‘target group’ category. This allowed me to perceive her as being ‘different’ from me and bestowed on her an ’otherness that clearly placed her as my inferior, worthy of my sympathy. Like other professionals working in the development industry, I failed to see that my work and the structures within which I operated were self-serving.”

This kind of honest self-reflection is lacking in Kenyan scholarship, because we equate implication to blame. I have found that the one thing that we do not do in Kenyan academia is name our position. That silence allows us to take consultancies and government appointments where we launder injustice and social sabotage, like the Competency Based Curriculum. If someone raises the issue, we reply “let’s not blame anyone” or “let’s appreciate the good work that has been put into this project…” 

It is therefore not surprising that Kenyan academic work has not treated Rasna seriously on what she actually said. I’ve seen fascination with her identity as an Asian in Kenya, her character as articulate and fiercely honest, and her writing style. But little is said on her actual ideas or arguments. Yet she spoke about injustice all the time. In the few times I get to interact with postgraduate work, I insist that students writing on the UN, refugees and development must quote her work. I will still insist. But I’m not optimistic, not in the short term. Kenya failed Rasna. It still fails her and so many like her who know that knowledge is an essential key to us doing better.

Apart from praising this great writer, thinker and colleague, I want to say to the Kenyan academy: it’s time for us to grow up, face the contradictions of our society like Rasna did, learn about the world, and stop this obsession with the small space of our ethnicities, and start doing research that is honest and vulnerable. 

And we must incorporate Rasna’s work in our research. Rasna has also shown us that we must stop worshipping the UN and the World Bank, quoting their bland and dishonest reports as if those reports are the scriptures of a religion called development. Part of our education problem is that the scholars of education are stuck in the policy rabbit hole, taking cues and directions from the global organisations which, as Rasna has shown us, are hardly interested in a better Africa. And we must make this intellectual shift for Rasna and many other great Kenyan thinkers like her whose work is not being allowed to inform research and ideas for the next generation.

Aluta continua, Rasna. Rest well, my sister.