Random Blues: School uniforms are a blinding clash of colours

It is a Sunday, and for some reason, the city jam seems worse than usual. The neurotically expatriate part of your brain suspects that Al-Shabaab might have bombed the CBD, while another part of you says, ‘The President must be on the move.’

Neither is true. Instead, it is opening day in boarding and day schools across the country. Rich kids are being dropped in their parents’ cars by drivers, or perhaps they’re even driving themselves. Others are packing into matatus, their sad faces pressed up against the windows like puppies going to be shot.

Opening day might bring jams and the misery of asthma and lung cancer from traffic fumes, but it also brings ‘colour.’ Or, more to the point, ‘colour clashing.’ For, there is no society in the world less able to coordinate children’s clothing colours than the Kenyan society.

 I am occasionally tempted to believe that various school pupils conspire to swap items of their clothing with each other on the way to school, for there’s no way on God’s fine Earth, that a sane school administration could have really sat down and decided that a lime green shirt goes with blue short trousers, orange sweater, pink socks and yellow shoes! And yet, my dear expatriate colleague, this is precisely what you will notice as you sit in the jam on a school opening day.

If Al-Shabaab bombed anything, it looks like they bombed a paint shop, and the city got covered.

It is a little known fact that the popularity in Kenya of tinted windows in vehicles stems from a particularly nasty opening day in 2005, when a group of Loreto High School girls in their bright red uniforms got onto the same matatu as a group of Starehe Boys in their, well, indescribable uniform, creating in their fusion a starburst supernova of colour that illuminated the Nairobi nights for weeks afterwards.

But it’s not just the fascinating array of insanely clashing colours that might interest the expatriate. The British expatriate, especially, will be intrigued by the fact that senior boys (frankly, young men) wear long trousers while junior boys (Forms 1 and 2) wear short trousers.

 This is a remnant of British classism and Kenyan colonialism, and a sign of utterly offensive snobbery and social stratification. It is also the reason that you, as an expatriate, will be laughed at when you wear those silly shorts you always wear; because it implies that you’re about 13 years old. Also, because you have terrible legs. Kenyan men do not wear short trousers.

But soon, the school traffic eases and drives off, and you move away, too, removing your sunglasses and thanking your lucky stars that these uniforms will be locked away in Kenya’s many boarding schools for the next three months, behind the grey school gates and grey school walls in grey-painted classrooms. You reflect that the designers of these uniforms should similarly be locked away in institutions, of a slightly different type.

 

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