My Grandfather's Syllabus
My grandfather, for whom I am named, was born in 1910, ten years before part of the territory known as British East Africa would be named Kenya in 1920; twenty five years after the disastrous Berlin Conference that mapped Africa as a white supremacist wet dream; four years before Europeans forced Africans to fight in European wars.
The 1906 Census had recorded 579 Europeans, 3,071 Asiatics, and 9,291 Africans. The 1909 Census recorded 799 Europeans, 3,171 Asiatics, and 9,524 Africans. The 1911 Census recorded 968 Europeans, 2,645 Indians (the term “Asiatics” has been dropped), 10,349 Native Africans, and 1,013 Foreign Africans. The 1911 Census is the first I’ve found that distinguishes by gender, recording men and women. Children are not counted.
My grandfather enters Kenyan history as one of the uncounted.
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A note from a District Commissioner’s Office in 1920:
There are 4 specimens of Kikuyu diet as given to me . . . The average cost of daily living . . . works out to 50 cents [per family]. As this is evidently far too high they have probably overestimated their appetites and the amounts given may be divided by two.
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Per my archival notes, the 1901 riika (age-group, named for those initiated, transitioning them from children to young adults) was named Gatego. It was named for a venereal disease (let me use this language), perhaps syphilis. It is a gendering term. It comes from the word for trap, and referred to sex workers who “trapped” men and infected them. My mother offered this explanation. The next riika I have in my records is from 1916 and is Ngweka Ngoige, ostensibly a threat by initiated girls: “If you have intercourse with me I will tell.”
These notes were taken by a white man. Who knows how reliable they are?
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My grandfather enters Kikuyu history between Gatego and Ngweka Ngoige, between a sexual disease and a sexual threat.
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There is family lore.
My great grandfather’s family had been invited for a feast. My great grandfather—and, I believe, one sister—were unable to attend. My great grandfather’s entire family who attended the feast died. Were they poisoned? Some versions of the story claim so.
My grandfather enters family history as a child of a man who had lost most of his family in mysterious circumstances. A man whose bones were sorrow, whose blood was tears, whose skin was mourning.
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A colonial history. An ethnic history. A family history. Other histories and fantasies interweave. I do not know them.
My mother adored her father.
My aunt adored her father.
My aunt loved bread. As a child she loved bread. Every time my father left the house to travel to town, a journey that involved wearing the humiliating kipande pass that authorized Africans to travel, he would return with bread for my aunt. She was young. Perhaps 4 or 5. She remembers this kindness. This love.
A kind man.
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My grandfather was a teacher. He taught primary school. He was, maybe, not the first generation of Kenyans educated by colonizers, though generation is a difficult term to use. He would have been among the first. And he was a teacher.
Kenyan history textbooks tell us there were two kinds of schools: missionary-run schools and independent schools, run by Africans. Forgive me if this information is inaccurate—I am moving across memory and imagination.
Those first people to be taught by missionaries had grasped that they needed to transmit a different kind of knowledge to their people, a knowledge driven by the pursuit of freedom, grounded in non-hierarchical practices of collectivity. At least, this is what I imagine.
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“I am, because we are; and because we are, I am.”–John Mbiti
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I have been imagining my grandfather’s syllabus, not as a collection of books or assignments, but as practices of living collectively and nurturing freedom dreams that would feed resistance, and, beyond resistance build lives.
It was a syllabus of songs and stories. Voices raised to proclaim this is who we are. Voices blended to say we are through and across and because of our differences.
I imagine it was a syllabus of gestures, how to make hospitality, how to repair harm, how to cherish play, how to enjoy the ephemeral, how to share space, how to make space, how to honor relation.
I imagine it was a syllabus that refused the dishonor and unhumaning brought by white supremacy. It was a syllabus that refused the shame of the kipande pass. It was a syllabus that refused the extraction of colonial taxes. It was a syllabus that refused the hierarchy of the color bar. It was a syllabus that made life possible.
Between each alphabet letter and each number, there was care. Each word made from alphabet letters spelled love. Each calculation made from numbers spelled possibility. Each child who moved through my grandfather’s hands felt affirmed, felt they belonged, and in Dionne Brand’s words, felt “held and held.”
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In the banal ways we tell these things, Kenya’s independent schools were shut down and children were forced to attend missionary-run and government-run schools. Those who had been privileged to attend independent schools brought with them freedom dreams, minds formed to revere and pursue relation across difference, visions of bountiful futures, the determination to survive colonialism, and to live and thrive beyond colonialism’s harm.
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Family history meets colonial history: my grandfather was arrested in 1952, his stone house was bulldozed by the colonial government, and he was imprisoned until 1960.
Here, I lose track of the story.
I do not know if he returned to teaching. I do not know what happened to him during his imprisonment. The few narratives available about such imprisonment do not say much about quotidian conditions. They were written by survivors to feed freedom dreams, not to dwell on quotidian harm.
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Here is what I know.
Many of my grandfather’s children became teachers. Some of his grandchildren are teachers—I am proud to count myself among them. And it might be that future generations will include teachers.
Here is what I know.
The history of teaching in Kenya is woven with the history of freedom. We teach how to dream freedom, how to make relation across difference, how to build futures grounded in care.
Between each letter of any and all alphabets, love. Across each and any number, care.
I claim this as my grandfather’s syllabus.