Thread by @wmnjoya

A story is told of a person who stops by a woman's house to ask for food. The woman refuses. So the man pulls out a stone and says all he wants is water to boil the stone in. She agrees. Then he tastes the water, tells her that maybe if she added some salt it would taste better.

She adds. Then he tastes again and says maybe some onions might work. She adds. Then some spices, some meat, and she keeps adding, until finally there's a nice bowl of stew cooked with a single, magical stone.

I've adapted this story from Swedish anthropologist Alf Hornborg, who explains how technology mesmerizes us and cheats us that we have made stone stew, when in fact, we have used our own fuel and ingredients to make the stew.

When neoliberal conmen tell us that medicine, education and other social services will be made better by tech, and that because tech is there, doctors and teachers should work part-time since they're made unnecessary by technology, they're giving credit to the stone for the stew.

But the doctors, even with the stone, still have to put in the hours and skill, all at more cost to themselves and with no job security. You would know it if one day, all the workers of the hospital staged a walkout and told the government to tell the computers to treat people.

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But here's the other aspect of the stone. We're told that it's magic and cannot be criticized. Now imagine a neighbor hears the woman and the man quarelling and comes to find out what the fuss is.

Then the woman says: "This man wants to eat the stew all by himself, yet his stone did nothing. The ingredients I provided and my cooking made the stew."

What do you Kenyans, the neighbor, say?

"Why are you opposed to technology?"

"You are just scared of change."

"The problem isn't the stone; you need a workshop to be taught how to use the stone."

And if the woman says: "no, but it is this conman who is distracting us with the stone so that he can get free stew without paying," what do you Kenyans, the neighbor, say?

"Stop personalizing issues. Stop judging. Do you never have anything positive to say? This man Bill Gates was so kind to provide a stone for free. Appreciate his kindness and hand over the stew. Stop attacking him."

To understand how the woman is being conned, you must not minimize the conversation to whether the stone was effective or whether Bill Gates was wrong. You have to look at the whole relation - the whole story of the process until the production of the stew.

But the role of Kenyan education is to ensure that your mind cannot accommodate that whole story. The Kenyan minds are allowed to tolerate only single questions about the man, the woman, the stone and the stew seperately on their own. Not the story as a whole.

So telling me to forget the terrible curriculum because digital learning is a good idea is essentially telling me that you can make stew by boiling a stone.

Good luck with that.

#WajingaNyinyi