Colonialism, math teachers to blame for Kenyans’ fickle mood

Mau Mau screening point in Thika Railway station March 1954.

Today we undertake to notionally unearth why our national DNA is so prone to vehemence. We identify some historical culprits that include vestiges of brutal colonialism, the nature of colonial education offered to Africans, and maybe, dour mathematics teachers and the questionable ways in which they have been teaching their core discipline to generations of young Kenyans.

Our motivation is the ongoing kerfuffle between President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto, only the newest entry in a grotesque ledger of perpetual conflicts which have defined Kenya’s political landscape, and which show failure at our cohesion efforts.

In a quintessentially Kenyan way, people are always herded into ideological camps in which ordinary disagreements blow up into existential situations. Indeed, hardly has a Kenyan election been peaceful; there are always accompanying blood-curdling threats, emboldened defiance, insults and brutal violence during our polls. And, ouch! 2022 is just around the corner!

To begin with, colonial education was unapologetically unsympathetic to African feelings. The sum effect of the heavy utilitarian emphasis in schools was the inculcation of the ‘stiff upper lip’ British brutality upon the African thought.

In his Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad mercilessly unmasks European mental and physical exploitation inflicted upon Africans by colonial administrators and teachers.

During this era, learning for natives was restricted to reading and arithmetic. They were not expected to aspire to more ambitious academic disciplines.

As part of a larger colonial project to marginalise and place Africans in a lower category of condemned races, a widespread falsehood was perpetrated that Africans lacked ‘intelligible sense of numeracy’ before the Europeans’ arrival.

Additionally, the western concept of numeration systems and number symbolism deliberately sought to intellectually tease, ridicule and torture Africans. Hegel was forthright, once saying that Africans are incapable of application of philosophical and numerical thoughts. 

It did not help matters that Africans themselves had symbolic taboos on counting - some communities still do not countenance numbering their children - and this hindered the acceptance of this subject during the early colonial rule.

The legendary propensity for brutality by the early native educators was definitely one aspect which flowed over from the colonialist era. Achille Mbembe in his seminal work On the Postcolony attempts to show the consequences of such leftovers – exploring the questions of power and subjectivity in post-colonial Africa.

He argues that colonial rule reproduced ideas (including colonial mathematics) that were replicated during the post-colonial era, and that today Africans are largely trapped into these Western tropes and fantasies.

Therefore, soon after independence, haughty native teachers, freshly relieved from repression themselves, seemed to derive cathartic relief from dishing inhuman and degrading corporal punishment on their charges.

A whole post-independence generation of Kenyans grew under the thumb of veritable terrorist teachers, who like a fierce swarm escaped from a beehive, thrived upon crushing the little self-esteem left among their fellow countrymen.

One UNHCR document succinctly captures the carnage that long persisted in schools: “The infliction of corporal punishment is routine, arbitrary, and often brutal. Bruises and cuts are regular by-products of school punishments. At times, beatings by teachers leave children permanently disfigured, disabled or dead.” Punishment also included uprooting tree stumps, cultivating the teacher’s farm and digging latrines.

Our argument is that this cycle of the oppressed becoming oppressor somehow rubbed on our national psyche, right to the present day politics.

The respected Carey Francis, the de facto philosophical ancestor of all future Kenyan math teachers, left a glowing career at Pembroke College Cambridge in 1928 to teach this peculiar discipline to budding African students in, among several outposts, a junior secondary school called The Alliance High School.

In most narratives, his halo as a master administrator and teacher generally eclipses his infamous temper, racism and poor opinion of Africans. So iconic was Francis that in Jomo Kenyatta’s first Cabinet, nine out of the 15 members had studied under him at Alliance.

Now, the following section is largely tongue-in-cheek: But how are math teachers to blame for our unrefined national character? Whether because of Carey Francis or not, for the longest time, most mathematics teachers in Kenya – and whose discipline is generally compulsory - have continued to distinguish themselves by rough mannerisms, foul moods and an absent-minded disregard for anything humorous, including the way they dress. In order to help infuse positive energy into our dulling national mood, universities should assist aspiring math teachers to brighten up by offering them a core subject called Humour 101.